trump | Peter Gates Politics

Recently the UK conservative based “researchED” organisation, run and owned by Tom Bennet, has embarked on a conference tour of the US where it has teamed up with an organisation somewhat innocuously called “Freedom in Education”.[1] One of the aims of the conference is to “Connect with like-minded educators” a somewhat chilling phrase, implicitly suggesting, if you are not one of us, you are not welcome. For the sake of transparency – I am not “one of them” having been blocked by Bennett, along with a number of researchED sites. So, who are these “like-minded educators” and what do they have in mind? Just what is this Freedom in Education organisation and what does it stand for. A search of the internet with some support from ChatGPT, shows us quite a lot.

I would warn you though – what you are about to read is particulary chilling and a worrying sign of just how deeply embedded the far right has become in many US institutions.

The so-called USAmerican “Freedom in Education” organization is part of the American conservative “parental rights” movement, opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion, also opposing anti-gender-ideology. In short it is a school-choice, patriotic/civic-education network that now overlaps very strongly with Trump/MAGA education politics. It is a tax-exempt organisation [2] and a “501(c)(3) education nonprofit” organisation, and such organisations are barred from directly intervening in candidate campaigns – but ideologically it sits very comfortably inside the Trump-era education project.

Its own language is revealing – its mission is to promote “high-quality standards and curriculum”, “transparency” and “parental rights”, and its vision is of parents raising “virtuous children” with “core knowledge” and “America’s founding principles”. One of its stated values is “Providence”:

“We believe God has providence and our founding principles reflect His Will.”

That is not neutral civic language – it is a recognisably American conservative, religious-national civic framing. [3]

The strongest evidence of alignment is not one single smoking gun but its network map of those organisations with which it aligns. Freedom in Education is listed as a partner in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which says it works in partnership with Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the U.S. Department of Education. The same coalition includes:

America First Legal;
Heritage Foundation;
Hillsdale K-12;
Moms for Liberty;
PragerU;
Patriot Academy;
Tea Party Patriots;
Faith and Freedom Coalition;
and other organisations of the American conservative/MAGA education ecosystem.[4]

Its stated agenda and the issues it pursues also track Trump’s 2025 education agenda closely: opposition to DEI and “gender ideology”, promotion of “patriotic education”, parental rights, school choice, and returning power to states/local communities.

Trump’s own executive order on “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” targets “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology”, promotes parental rights, and re-establishes the 1776 Commission for patriotic education.[5] The White House’s education fact sheet also frames Trump’s reforms as dismantling bureaucracy, ending DEI/gender ideology in federally funded programmes, closing or weakening the Department of Education, and expanding school choice.

Freedom in Education’s own website echoes this terrain. It has webpages and resources on “The Dangers of Communism”, “Virtues Education (SEL Alternative)”, “Library Book Tracking”, “Educational Freedom”, “Franklin Science Standards”, “Critical Race Theory”, “Gender Theory”, comprehensive sex education, Title IX, and book appeals. Its parent resources link to:

Moms for Liberty material;
PragerU;
Christopher Rufo;
Parents Defending Education;
Courage Is a Habit;
and other conservative activist sources.

There is also a direct organisational overlap with the wider “parents’ rights” movement.[6]

Freedom in Education signed a coalition letter opposing Biden-era Title IX rules alongside:

Moms for Liberty;
Parents Defending Education;
Ohio Values Voters;
Moms for America;
Task Force Freedom;
and many similar groups.[7]

In the US, “Title Nine” – is a US federal civil-rights law from the Education Amendments of 1972 (see US DoJ entry and US DoE entry) which says that schools, colleges and universities receiving federal money must not discriminate “on the basis of sex”. So, when a group such as Freedom in Education says it opposes “Title IX rules”, it is usually objecting to newer interpretations of Title IX around gender identity, sexual orientation, school bathrooms/changing rooms, pronouns, trans pupils, and women’s/girls’ sport. In US culture-war terms, “Title IX” has become one of the key US conservative battleground phrases.

Associated Press has described Moms for Liberty as having moved toward fully embracing Trump’s political messaging by 2024, and in 2026 reported that it had become a voice inside the Trump White House education policy world.[8]

The slightly complicating point is that Freedom in Education is not only a culture-war pressure group. It also borrows from the traditionalist/knowledge-rich/direct-instruction education world. Its advisory board includes figures such as Sir Nick Gibb, Doug Lemov, and Robert Pondiscio of AEI/Core Knowledge/charter-school circles. Its teacher material recommends Paul Kirschner, Daisy Christodoulou, E. D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Lemov, Tom Bennett, and “traditional math”. So, it sits at the point where “knowledge-rich curriculum” meets American Christian-conservative parental-rights politics.[9]

In short then, Freedom in Education is best understood as a conservative education-advocacy organisation, culturally and politically aligned with the Trump/MAGA education agenda. It wraps itself in the language of standards, curriculum quality, parental engagement and civic virtue, but its surrounding networks, resources, policy emphases and religious-national framing place it firmly on the American right – particularly the post-2020 school-board/parental-rights right.

In British terms, this would be understood as a fusion of:

knowledge-rich/traditionalist curriculum reform;
anti-progressive culture-war politics;
parental-rights activism;
Christian-inflected patriotism;
school-choice/anti-state-school bureaucracy thinking.

Freedom in Education is now partnered up with the UK conservative researchED organisation run by and owned by Tom Bennett. A recent convert to researchED, somewhat unsurprisingly, is Nick Gibb, former Conservative Minister for Schools in the UK. Somewhat straight out of 1984 we are told by researchED:

Sir Nick Gibb led major national education reforms focused on knowledge-rich curriculum and evidence-based teaching, helping drive significant improvements in student outcomes across England.

Few in the UK world of education would see Gibb in that light, apart possibly from “like-minded individuals“.

This is now the terrain inhabited by researchEd. Blatantly and proudly embracing a right-wing conservative landscape. This is, of course not new. It recently tried to organise a conference in Israel during the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, until widespread international outrage forced it to cancel. Regularly speakers to its conferences sit within a conservative landscape and very many educational researchers have been blocked on X by Bennett, and various researchED accounts, casting doubt on its claims to be interested in research. Rather than having an interest in research, the organisation is interested in “evidence-informed”, “what works”, and “common sense” – three known totems for the conservative right.

I do not often quote from the bible but here it seems aposite to quote from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15) – if you find youself drawn to researchED: