Written by: Asia Matthews with SGJC Student News Network
The Society of Future Educators (SOFE) held a panel discussion titled TeacHER on March 4, 2025, at Morgan State University.
One panel discussion focused on one of Trump’s recent executive orders that would affect K-12 teaching in U.S. schools. The executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” requires schools change the way they teach race, gender identity, and certain aspects of American history.
“Parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight,” wrote the Trump administration in the executive order. “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children…usurps basic parental authority.”
Raizel Stebbeins, a fourth-grade teacher at Westowne Elementary School, said she worried Trump’s executive order would diminish cultural awareness in K-12 Schools.
“It’s very disheartening to try to throw away history and not just of African Americans, but also of all colors, cultures and all heritages,” Stebbins said, “As teachers, we need to educate and be worldly so we can help our kids be worldly too.”
The executive order pushes schools to prioritize a more “patriotic” education, fully embrace “biological sex” and abstain from treating members of one race, sex, or national origin as being preferred over another among other things. The order criticizes some teaching methods of being “anti-American,” and specifically targets including race or gender.
"[It] eliminates federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including those based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology,” wrote the Trump administration.
The order seeks to prevent schools from teaching anything related to gender identity, transitioning from one gender to another and other things related to race, sexuality and gender identity.
It equates these teachings with promoting “gender ideology” or “discriminatory equity ideology,” and threatens to cut federal funding if schools fail to follow this directive.
To Stebbins, removing DEI and incorporating “patriotic” curriculum in K-12 schools will harm students, especially those who lack exposure to diverse backgrounds, “they’ll hear this stereotype by hearing the word patriotic, rather than knowing the real background of history and the history of all cultures.”
Stebbins worries that an unbalanced education system, which removes diverse and inclusive subjects and histories, will limit students’ understanding of culture.
“As teachers, our number one rule is to educate our students as much as possible, because they deserve to know about their history and culture,” Symone Gaskins, a senior in elementary education said, “As African Americans and just people of color, we’ve fought so hard to have our history brought to the light and for [Trump] to be taking that away from us is just sad.”
This article was written by a Morgan State student journalist.
