LANSING – The Michigan Education Association and the state’s superintendent of public instruction have concerns about President Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

The order is “meant to divide parents and educators at a time when we all need to come together in support of our kids and schools to strengthen them, not tear them down,” said Thomas Morgan, the press secretary of the MEA, the state’s largest union of teachers and other school personnel.

The order, signed on Jan. 29, said its purpose is to ensure that recipients of federal education funds follow laws prohibiting discrimination and protecting parental rights.

The order says that schools are indoctrinating children “in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.” It says those factors force students to accept the ideologies without critical examination.

Morgan described such claims as political attacks against educators and part of a coordinated strategy to divide parents and teachers.

“Playing divide and conquer might be effective politics, but it does harm our children,” he said.

The order has also come under fire from state Superintendent Michael Rice who has criticized it as targeting LGBTQ+ students.

The executive order defines “discriminatory equity ideology” as treating individuals “as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals.” The order lists “White Privilege” and “unconscious bias” as examples of discriminatory ideologies.

The order will restrict federal funding for schools that teach ideologies that reason “members of one race, color, sex or national origin are morally or inherently superior to others.”

It includes “ideologies” claiming that “an individual, by virtue of their race, color, sex or national origin, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”; or that “an individual’s moral character or status as privileged, oppressing or oppressed is primarily determined by their race, color, sex or national origin.”

In addition, the order calls for “patriotic education” to present American history “grounded in an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.”

The MEA’s Morgan said, “Students deserve to know they have the freedom to learn all the facts of history. We can’t allow politicians to ban books about Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement or the Holocaust.”

The order also addresses “social transition,” which it defines as “the process of adopting a ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender marker’ that differs from a person’s sex.”

In a memo from the state Department of Education to local and intermediate school district superintendents and charter school directors, Rice said, “LGBTQ+ students do not disappear just because websites are scrubbed of LGBTQ+ content” and that they deserve to be supported.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, Education and Defense to develop an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” with a plan to eliminate federal funding “for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and ‘discriminatory equity ideology.”

Morgan said taking away federal funds would be “robbing kids in low-income communities of the education they need to compete in the global workforce.”