Project 2025 Wants to Take a Sledgehammer to Public Education
Most of us take public education for granted. We pay school taxes, pack lunch for our kids each day, and attend teacher-parent conferences that focus on their learning. But just for a moment, imagine:
Your dyslexic child stripped of her IEP as the laws guaranteeing special education programs are rolled back.
Being issued a voucher for your child’s education that doesn’t cover the cost of private school tuition and having to make up the rest of the cost.
Not being able to send your child to a private school while the schools in your neighborhood wither.
Library shelves purged of books that folks like Moms for Liberty deem upsetting or pornographic.
Intrusive inquiries into your family structure for “data gathering purposes.”
Your child deadnamed by teachers and administrators who only recognize the sex they were assigned at birth.
History teachers barred from mentioning systemic racism.
Kids trying to learn multiplication on empty stomachs.
If the proposals in Project 2025 are enacted, that’s the future of public education.
What is Project 2025?
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project was launched in 2022 by The Heritage Foundation. Its ultraconservative, white Christian nationalist 900-page document, A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, known as Project 2025, documents what it hopes Trump or other conservative President can achieve when elected.
Anti-worker, anti-government, and anti-diversity, it seeks to undo the progress of the civil rights movement and peel away protections for women, communities of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans.
It also wants to eradicate the Department of Education.
An informed and educated populace: The cornerstone of a functioning society.
Project 2025 targets everything from Head Start to post-secondary education. They want universal school choice, more religious influence in schools, the abolition of what they call “woke” language, the elimination of LGBTQ+ protections, and a ban on of any discussion of systemic racism. They also think our education system should follow free market principles.
When Project 2025 author Lindsey M. Burke writes in her opening that, “Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955,” she’s looking to an economist, not an educator. And any elementary school teacher worth their safety scissors can tell you that when it comes to education it’s not Milton Friedman but Horace Mann who is the man. Because it wasn’t until he championed public education in the 19th century that the United States had it at all.
Known as “The Father of American Education,” Mann argued that universal public education and an educated citizenry were the foundation of a functioning society. In The Common School Journal, he outlined six core principles to follow:
The public should no longer remain ignorant.
Education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public.
Education is best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds.
Education must be non-sectarian.
Education must be taught using the tenets of a free society.
Education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.
These principles have guided public education ever since.
So why smash it to bits?
Perhaps Project 2025’s authors don’t quite understand what public education is for. Perhaps they believe an educated electorate with reading and math skills, critical thinking abilities, and access to an affordable college education is too threatening. Or perhaps they are using education to wage their culture war.
As early as page 3, Project 2025 contributor Kevin Roberts says that we need to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” then on page 5, he writes:
“In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around …. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.”
And there it is.
Here are just a few ways Project 2025 wants to crush public education:
Eliminate the Department of Education and remove federal oversight of K-12 education.
Roll back laws guaranteeing special education under the Individual with Disabilities Act (IDEA) and turn funds earmarked for special education into block grants for states to spend as they please.
Turn Title I funds for lower income school districts into no-strings-attached block grants to fund school vouchers, with overall funding to be eliminated in ten years.
Expand school choice options through vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESA) funded by state and local taxpayers, diverting funds from public schools.
Enact a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that would transfer a significant degree of control over curriculum away from experts.
Move the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, weakening enforcement of crucial protections for students; rescind guidance on school discipline that addresses racial disparities; and ban conversations about systemic racism and gender identity issues in schools.
Privatize all college loans and end all student loan forgiveness programs.
Eliminate the Head Start program, free school lunches, summer meal programs, and enact stricter eligibility requirements for emergency food assistance.
Require all students in schools that receive federal funding to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to improve recruiter access.
Woke cultural warriors, look out!
This is only the second article in this series, and I’m already running out of ways to express just how much Project 2025’s contributors hate gay people. Not only do they hate them, they also want to out, bully, erase, and criminalize them. Again, let’s hear from Kevin Roberts:
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. 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.” (page 4)
How will they do that? Gut Title IX and LGBTQ+ student protections.
Title IX is a landmark U.S. federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal dollars. Its goal is to ensure that no person is denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under, any education program or activity based on their sex. It also protects against sexual harassment and violence.
Here are the proposed changes to Title IX and LGBTQ+ student protections in Project 2025:
Define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth and reject the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation.
Rescind Biden Administration regulations that expand protections for LGBT+ students.
Prohibit public education employees from using names or pronouns for students that differ from their biological sex without written parental permission.
Allow teachers and administrators to refuse to use pronouns that don’t match a person’s biological sex if it conflicts with their religious or moral convictions.
We’ve been warned.
As parents, educators, and human beings who care about the public education system, we’ve been warned. The Heritage Foundation has told us what they hope to do.
It’s not enough to make dark jokes about this dystopian future. We must do everything we can to ensure that Donald Trump and his allies at The Heritage Foundation never get anywhere near the seat of power again.
This is one in a series of posts about Project 2025. Read about Project 2025 and pornography here.
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