Project 2025 and Education
Project 2025’s education agenda proposes a drastic overhaul of federal education policy, from early childhood through higher education.
A Time Magazine analysis summed all this up well: “Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead…
Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education.”
Indeed it is.
Trump has tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s 2025, but many observers believe it will help form the blueprint of his administration if he wins. Several people involved in Project 2025 also helped write the party platform, which Trump explicitly endorses.
- Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED)
- Project 2025 also calls for the end of Head Start, the long-standing federally supported preschool program.
- Project 2025 would phase out Title I, which provides more than $18 billion a year in support for schools serving students from low-income backgrounds.
- Project 2025 states that racial disparities — such as more Black students being suspended or identified as having serious emotional disabilities — should never be considered the basis for a civil rights violation. It would undercut federal capacity to enforce civil rights law
- Rescind federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
- Reduce federal funding for students with disabilities and remove guardrails designed to ensure these children are adequately served by schools
- Promote universal private school choice
- Project 2025 also calls for ending most federal grant programs
- Project 2025 would privatize student loans and eliminate loan forgiveness, including for teachers and other public employees.
- In a separate memo, the Heritage Foundation also links education to its immigration enforcement priorities by proposing to deny a free education to undocumented students.
Some of the proposals would require congressional action, but many can be achieved through executive action.
Here are a few of the Project 2025 proposals that the Trump administration could enact with the authority of the executive branch alone:
- Roll back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students
- Roll back Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination
- Dismantle the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus
- Eliminate current income-driven repayment plans and require higher monthly payments for low-income borrowers
- Remove protections from predatory colleges that leave students with excessive debt
In many ways, Project 2025’s proposals really don’t look conservative at all.
- A large-scale, tax-credit scholarship program would substantially increase the federal government’s role in K-12 education.
- A Parents’ Bill of Rights would require the construction of a massive federal oversight and enforcement function that does not currently exist.
- A proposal that “states should require schools to post classroom materials online to provide maximum transparency to parents” would impose an enormous compliance burden on schools, districts, and teachers.
Much of Project 2025 is more easily interpretable through the lens of white Christian nationalism than traditional political conservatism.
A more detailed look at Project 2025’s deconstruction of education in America:
Eliminate the Department of Education
- Transfer federal funding to the states to spend as they see fit.
- Title 1, which helps school districts in low income areas, would be would be turned into block grants before being phased out. If Title I ends, some states might create their own programs to supply schools with extra resources for vulnerable students, while others might not.
- IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) would be transformed into state issued vouchers to be spent as states and families wish.
- All federal funding would end within ten years.
As Forbes’ analysis explains, the funding thrust is: “Vouchers, vouchers, vouchers. Eliminate the federal Department of Education and turn the money for Title I and IDEA into block grants that states can use for anything education-adjacent (but Heritage is hoping it will be for vouchers), with Title I ending within a decade.”
Project 2025’s adoption and repeated praise of state-level policies such as universal vouchers and Education Savings Accounts glosses over the consistent pattern that these approaches have resulted in colossal failure in state after state, including:
- a huge diversion of public school dollars to private schools;
- the disproportionate use of these funds by well-off families who were already attending private schools; and,
- consistent and dramatic decline in the test scores of students who use a voucher to switch from a public to a private school.
- In many states, there is also little to no transparency on how these public funds are being spent.
Universal School Choice
- In the Foreword to Project 2025, Kevin Roberts writes that the long-term goal of Project 2025 is “universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue.”
- Roberts then declares that “[s]tates, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree [with the principle of parents’ rights] should be immediately cut off from federal funds.” (page 5)
- The RNC Platform uses the same language, as posted on Trump’s website: “We support Universal School Choice in every State in America.”
- In the Education section, Project 2025 spells out how they would accomplish this:
- “Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.” (Page 319)
(Several Southern states established school voucher programs to evade integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that deemed race-based segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman helped popularize the idea of using government funding to provide vouchers for private schooling in a landmark essay in 1955, the same year the Court issued the Brown II ruling ordering integration. He suggested vouchers would foster competition and offer parents improved school choice.
Milton acknowledged the implications for desegregation efforts in the footnotes of his piece, writing that although he personally “deplored” segregation, the strength of the voucher system was that “there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to.”
Virginia took the lead in implementing a voucher program in 1956, with enrollment in whites-only private schools accelerating as others followed suit.)
- In calling for a federal voucher law, Project 2025 promises to “model” the ESA voucher program that took hold Arizona. This would be catastrophic. Arizona’s is one the largest voucher programs in the nation and one of the most unaccountable. Far from serving lower income families, Arizona’s vouchers benefit predominantly private school families, siphon valuable funds from public schools, and have destabilized the state’s budget.
Federalize censorship
- In Project 2025’s Foreword, Roberts writes that “the noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country (page 5) The Department of Education, the Foreword states, “inject[s] racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”
- The censorship then comes fast and furious:
- “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” (Pages 4-5).
- Furthermore, the Introduction defines “[p]ornography” to include the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” which has “no claim to First Amendment protection. …. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
- State efforts to censor books and materials pursuant to this same ideology have targeted books such as these:
- “Michelle Obama: Political Icon,” by Heather E. Schwartz
- “New Kid,” by Jerry Craft
- “Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood
- “Anne Frank”
Cutback on Free School Meals
- Project 2025 characterizes school lunch programs as “some of the most wasteful federal programs in Washington.”
- End universal free school meals that provide food security to millions of children.
It could cost families up to $100/month per child.
Discipline/ civil rights protections
Project 2025 supports “[g]etting the federal government out of the business of dictating school discipline” and takes aim at a federal goal of pursuing “racial parity in school discipline indicators.” (page 334). The plan says the federal government should no longer investigate cases when school discipline practices have a disparate impact on Black students. (page 335)
Eliminate Head Start, which served 833,000 children in 2022.
- To date, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children.
- Head Start plays a critical role in supporting the healthy development of children living in poverty and in helping parents seek employment and educational opportunities that afford them a better shot at gaining a foothold in America’s middle class.
- Strong evidence shows that the program has helped boost educational attainment and fight intergenerational poverty.
Gut Title IV (Higher Education Act)
End the “negotiated rulemaking” (“neg-reg”) process that ED follows when developing regulations related to programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (HEA). (Title IV status ensures that a school meets high educational standards and is regularly reviewed by the Department of Education. This status allows the school to offer federal financial aid, making education more accessible to students who need financial assistance.)
Project 2025 includes detailed plans to dismantle the federal role in public education and deny our most vulnerable students the resources they need to succeed. Many of the proposals are part of the republican platform and things Trump himself has promised repeatedly.
Sources
American Progress: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-eliminate-head-start-severely-restricting-access-to-child-care-in-rural-america/
Brookings Institute: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/project-2025-and-education-a-lot-of-bad-ideas-some-more-actionable-than-others/
Chalkbeat: https://tinyurl.com/ywfenhm7
Education Week: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/project-2025-would-dramatically-cut-federal-funds-for-schools-then-what/2024/07
Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/07/11/how-project-2025-could-radically-reshape-higher-ed
National Education Association: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/project-2025-and-higher-education
Pepperspectives by David Pepper: https://substack.com/home/post/p-147496639