Trump’s Agenda 47, Like Project 2025, Wants to Dismantle Public Education

From the Bucks County Beacon

Everyone is talking about Project 2025 and what it tells us about possible plans for education (and everything else) under a Trump administration. The GOP has also whittled out a platform.

We need to talk about Agenda 47.

Agenda 47 is the Trump manifesto. It’s not an actual document, but a series of videos in which Trump addresses the camera. So rather than the hopes and dreams of hangers-on, or an easily ignored party platform, this is Trump talking about what he has in mind for the country. There’s overlap with Project 2025, but still worth examining on its own.

Agenda 47 addresses several education-adjacent issues, but let’s start by looking at the main event—President Trump’s Ten Principles For Great Schools Leading To Great Jobs.

The title is its own statement about what education is for—just to train children for work. But let’s look at the 10 principles. In this agenda item, Trump actually delivers the basic outline; it’s the explanation accompanying the video that gives the details (in what is often unTrumpian language).

Restoring Parental Rights

Well, some parental rights for certain parents.

Trump will “turn back the tide of left-wing indoctrination” and throw his weight behind the “fundamental right of parents to control the education, healthcare, and moral formation” of their children.

Most of this item is about anti-trans policies. Any hospital or school that supports a trans student will face penalties and a loss of federal funding. Trump will ask Congress to pass a law establishing “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female—and they are determined at birth.” So, no “parental rights” for trans parents or parents of trans children.

Great Principals and Great Teachers

Remember Trump’s great idea of electing school principals. Here it is. If the principal is doing a lousy job, parents should get to fire them and hire someone else. 

Of course, that would be cumbersome—maybe if the parents elected representatives to make hiring and firing decisions. They could be an elected board that ran the school. Of course, in Trump’s America, taxpaying non-parents don’t have any say in any of this.

Read the rest of the article here for more about what Trump says he plans.