Former President Donald Trump did not make education or K-12 schools a priority in an on-stage conversation at the national summit of the Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ rights organization.
Trump answered questions from Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, during the organization’s annual Joyful Warriors Summit here on Aug. 30. The conversation—which lasted more than an hour—included little discussion of education policy and focused more on Trump’s personal history as a star of reality television and immigration, an issue central to his campaign but not one that Moms for Liberty has focused on.
However, Trump affirmed his commitment to conservative parents’ rights policies and said that some school boards operate like “dictatorships.”
“I’m for parental rights all the way,” Trump said. “The parents truly love the kids. Some of these people on the boards, I think they don’t like the kids very much with what they’re doing.”
In one of his few direct mentions of education, Trump said students who are in the country illegally are “overrunning” classrooms and making them less safe.
“Your schools and your children are suffering like crazy,” Trump said. “They’re going into classrooms and they’re taking seats and they don’t even speak English.”
In June, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives similarly blamed President Joe Biden’s policies on the U.S.-Mexico border for causing “chaos” in schools. While some schools are experiencing strain due to an influx of migrant students, claims that they are taking resources away from students who are U.S. citizens are largely unfounded.
Trump suggests children go to school and come home with a different gender
Trump also criticized schools for allowing transgender students to play sports that align with their gender identity and suggested that schools are facilitating students’ gender transitions.
“Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
There is no evidence that schools are involved with providing students with gender-affirming medical care, though some schools do have policies allowing educators to not disclose to parents when their child requests to go by another name or pronoun. (Earlier this summer, California became the first state to pass a law prohibiting schools from requiring educators to inform parents of students’ gender transitions.)
Trump has focused much of his 2024 campaign on immigration, foreign policy, and the economy, but he has dedicated some of his campaign messaging to K-12 schools. He has proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, expanding universal private school choice to every state, cutting federal funding for any school teaching critical race theory, and allowing schools to elect principals.
Speech follows resurfacing of JD Vance’s comments about childless teachers
Earlier this week, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, came under fire for remarks he made during a 2021 forum at the Centre for Christian Virtue, criticizing American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten for not having children. The three-year-old remarks were resurfaced by a liberal news site, Heartland Signal, then shared on social media by Harris’ campaign, NBC News reported.
“Randi Weingarten, who is the head of the most powerful teachers union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child,” Vance said. “If she wants to brainwash the minds of our children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
After Vance’s comments resurfaced, Weingarten tweeted a response and released a statement saying that Vance “lacks an empathy gene.”
“That is exactly what educators, and children and their parents, don’t want,” Weingarten said. “They don’t want political attacks in our classrooms. They want us to be engaging and nurturing students, creating a safe and welcoming environment, particularly as the new school year begins.”
Moms for Liberty works to expand political influence
Moms for Liberty,a conservative parents’ rights organization borne out of the COVID-19 pandemic, has worked to expand its political influence since it was founded in 2021. It has endorsed, funded, and campaigned for conservative school board candidates across the country; contested schools’ pandemic precautions; accused teachers of what it calls “woke” indoctrination in public schools; and advocated for the removal of books and learning materials from school libraries and classrooms, many about people of color and LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
In her speech opening the summit Friday, Justice accused Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, of allowing schools to teach students “woke ideology” and called on the group’s members to “fight! fight! fight!”
“A Walz-Harris presidency would make 2020 school shutdowns and parents being thrown out of school board meetings look like the warm-up act,” Justice said. “We are on the verge of a full-on federal assault on parental rights. This is not a drill.”
Justice touted the organization’s involvement in one of several lawsuits against the Biden administration’s Title IX rewrite, which expanded protections against sex discrimination to include LGBTQ+ students and staff. A judge temporarily blocked the revised Title IX rule from taking effect in any school attended by students of Moms for Liberty chapter members, amounting to at least one chapter in nearly every state.
But while the organization has seen some success in its efforts to elect more conservative school board candidates—around half of the 270 Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates won their elections in 2022—its political efforts have also mobilized more liberal candidates to challengeMoms for Liberty-backed candidates in hotly contested elections.
Last week, several Florida school board candidates aligned with Moms for Liberty and Gov. Ron DeSantis lost in many of the races the organization endorsed, according to the Associated Press and Politico.
When Justice asked Trump to offer advice to parents who might be considering running for public office— a key goal of Moms for Liberty—the former president said: “Don’t do it.”
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