By Terra Morrison, age 13
Censorship in U.S. classrooms has been on the rise since President Donald Trump began his second term. Students, educators, and families are being negatively affected by his new policies.
Trump’s February 2025 executive order, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” works to stop funding that goes toward teaching about racism and supporting trans youth in schools, according to EdSource. It even goes so far as possibly prohibiting education about slavery and other racism. This would result in an extreme deficit in students’ true, unfiltered, historical knowledge.
The order would also bar support from reaching trans students, and stop educators from providing that support. As Dan Guttman, an Iowa elementary school teacher, told the National Education Association, “The message has been loud and clear to queer families, students, and educators, we’re not so welcome in our schools.”
Conservatives have accused teachers of indoctrinating students with a negative perception of American history. However, according to a study by the American Historical Association (AHA), teachers are not aiming to indoctrinate students, but to give them a true perspective on global and national issues. Thousands of teachers across all 50 states were also interviewed and surveyed as a part of the AHA’s research. This survey concluded that some teachers fear that they will be “accused of bias,” according to Education Week.
In 2024, 35 educational “gag orders,” which PEN America defines as “direct restrictions on educational speech in the classroom,” were filed for K-12 schools. Five of these became law. In addition to this, recently a platform called PragerU is on the rise, reports Vox. It is a right-wing program that makes short videos about topics including U.S. history. In August, PragerU partnered with the White House for its new Founders Museum exhibit featuring AI videos of the Founding Fathers. Their content is controversial, for example, in the way they choose to portray slavery. Their goal is to show slavery only from the angle of abolition and that America pushed for freedom, rather than teaching about slavery itself and that half the country was fighting for it during the Civil War. PragerU’s creators say that children should be taught to be proud of their country, but they are leaving out important details of history.
PragerU has formed partnerships with several states in the past year, notably Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana, Arizona, South Carolina, and Idaho, influencing their education systems. According to the Associated Press, one of Oklahoma’s public school superintendents, Ryan Walters, said, “As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York.” Walters also wants to use PragerU to create a screening process for teachers coming from blue states. This test has been widely criticized, being called a “MAGA loyalty test,” according to the Associated Press.
On top of the growing attempts to censor what is taught in schools, millions of dollars in funding for important public broadcasting companies are being rolled back by Congress. These funding cuts will put programs like NPR and PBS in jeopardy, while millions of people still rely on them for their news and information.
Yet there is pushback. Some of President Trump’s attempts to censor education have faced legal backlash, and action has been taken to protect academic freedom. Despite the upswing of censorship in schools, there are many people actively working to fight against it. The future of America’s students and school systems depend on it.
