It took a man like President Donald Trump to finally tell the truth about America’s teachers.
During a press conference Thursday highlighting a new executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, and in a series of comments largely ignored by the establishment media, Trump spoke with earnestness about the need to support those who educate America’s young people, and he did so without the slightest contradiction.
Indeed, nothing could benefit teachers more than taking a proverbial sledgehammer to the entire education superstructure.
“I want to just make one little personal statement,” Trump said in a clip posted to the social media platform X.
“Teachers, to me, are among the most important people in this country. And we’re gonna take care of our teachers,” he continued.
Applause ensued, but the president kept talking.
“And I don’t care if they’re in the union or not in the union. That doesn’t matter,” he added amid louder applause.
That, of course, echoes like heavenly music in the ears of every true conservative who distrusts unions in general. And few unions have ever deserved public distrust more than teachers’ unions.
Trump, however, preferred to focus on the individuals who actually care about education.
Do you agree with Trump that teachers are “among the most important people in this country”?
Yes: 94% (33 Votes)
No: 6% (2 Votes)
“But we’re gonna take care of our teachers,” the president said. “And I believe — I believe the states will take actually better care of them than they are taken care of right now. They’ll work all sorts of systems and even merit systems. Those great teachers are gonna be maybe a little bit better rewarded, and maybe that’s the way it should be, but the states are gonna make that decision.”
Good teachers, of course, do deserve higher pay. And one hopes that they will get that pay, now that Trump has ordered resources diverted away from education bureaucrats.
In the meantime, the president made it clear that education should involve teachers, students, and parents.
“But we’re gonna love and cherish our teachers along with our children, and they’re gonna work with the parents, and they’re gonna work with everybody else, and it’s gonna be an amazing thing to watch, and it’s really gonna be something special,” Trump said.
.@POTUS: “I want to just make one little personal statement: Teachers, to me, are among the most important people in this country — and we’re going to take care of our teachers.” pic.twitter.com/6KUtGk02X5
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 20, 2025
At this point, I hope the reader will forgive a personal anecdote from my years as a history professor. Much as I loathe writing about myself, any value in my commentary hereafter depends on firsthand experience.
Not until I entered graduate school in 1998 did I begin to understand the low regard that academics in general felt for education programs on their campuses. They objected not to those programs’ politics, but to their embarrassing lack of rigor.
For instance, early in 1999, I had a conversation with a history professor for whom I served as a teaching assistant. One might best characterize this professor as a genial liberal, albeit one who nursed a mild contempt for his students, which both his pedantic exam questions and C-minus class average reflected.
Still a novice in those days, I learned from him that one of my duties as an MA student and teaching assistant would involve grading some of his undergraduate students’ exams. So I posed what I inexplicably regarded as a reasonable question.
“I’m not going to grade your PhD students’ exams, right?” the lowly MA-level student asked.
“NO WAY!” he exclaimed, horrified at the thought. Then came the ultimate rebuke for my shamefully thickheaded question.
“What do you think this is, the College of Education?” he asked.
That moment has stayed with me for more than 25 years, not least because I seldom heard a different opinion.
In fact, only once in my career did I hear an outside professor extol the virtues of an education college. It happened during a committee meeting. I remember it vividly, because I never heard anything else like it, before or since.
In short, good teachers become good in spite of the process by which we train them. That process — the education curriculum, certification, etc. — primarily serves the interests not of the teachers, but of the ghastly mediocrities who, unable to teach effectively themselves, but unwilling to surrender their summer vacations, leave the classroom to acquire “advanced” degrees in education.
Then, those newly credentialed nonentities go into school administration. When that happens, the lousy-teachers-turned-bureaucrats get to tell the good teachers what and how to teach.
Of course, exceptions do exist. Not all administrators fled careers as lousy teachers.
The system as a whole, however, promotes and perpetuates mediocrity. Nearly every academic liberal I ever met knew this. But they never complained about it, in part because they shared the education establishment’s allegiance to Democrats.
In short, one could hardly overstate the importance of Trump’s effort to separate teachers from that establishment. His war on the credentialed bureaucracy is long overdue.
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