Kari Lake Wants a ‘Trump-Inspired’ Curriculum Crafted at a Private Christian College Taught in Arizona’s Public Schools
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Trump-backed GOP candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake, wants to use the Hillsdale College curriculum in Arizona’s public schools should she be elected governor in November.
“We want a curriculum that makes sense. We want a curriculum that sets our kids up for success,” Lake, a former longtime Phoenix-area news anchor said at an event last May, reports NBC 12’s Brahm Resnik and Dylan Dulberg.
“I believe in the Hillsdale College curriculum,” she added.
NBC 12 News took a deep dive over the weekend into the implications of Lake’s support for the curriculum, which is founded on Trump’s 1776 Commission.
The 1776 Commission was a Trump-led response to try and combat what the right claimed was left-wing indoctrination in schools tied to critical race theory.
“Kari looked through the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum and discussed it with educators before selecting it as an alternative to the biased, CRT-based indoctrination permeating current textbooks and lesson plans,” a Lake campaign spokesperson told 12News.
The Hillsdale 1776 curriculum is a history and civics curriculum created at Hillsdale College, which the article’s authors describe as a “private Christian school in Michigan that’s influential in right-wing circles.”
The article notes that “Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn was the chairman of former President Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission, created to support what Trump called ‘patriotic education.’” The creation of the curriculum was a response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which critics claim warped American history to demonize the country’s founding and place blame on contemporary groups in society for historic wrongs.
The Hillsdale curriculum blames “progressives” for “the greatest deviations from the original Constitution,” notes the article, adding:
Teachers are instructed that … young American citizens must understand why and how the government of the country they now live in was changed from what their country’s founders originally intended.
Arnn has already been involved in reshaping public education in Florida and Tennessee.
In Arizona, the governor has considerable influence over public school curriculum and Lake would be able to appoint 10 of the 11 members of the State Board of Education.
Lake’s campaign website notes she would work to “ban diversity, equity, and inclusion training in schools.”
