The Project 2025 authors are seeking to fundamentally undermine and dismantle public schools as the centerpiece of American democracy. Their blueprint for right-wing authoritarianism contains sweeping reforms for K-12 education across the United States, stripping protections for LGBTQ+ students, attacking civil rights, and implementing universal private and religious school vouchers across the United States.
They also want to end free school lunches, infuse public education with conservative Christian beliefs, student loans to be privatized and federal legislation on parental rights to be pushed under the conservative right-wingers' dystopian plan.
The education portion of the sweeping platform would fundamentally change how K-12 and higher education funding and curriculum work. The conservative extremists would more than likely create a "Parental Bill of Rights", which will allow parents to opt their children out of learning anything that goes against their religious views, opening the floodgates for cult-like child isolation and religious abuse.
Here's how they plan to remake the executive branch and its powers relating to K-12 education:
1. Eliminate Title I funding for low-income students: Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade. Instead, the Project says states "should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families" and would send funding in unregulated "block grants" (aka, vouchers) to be used for public or private purposes — furthering their ideal of elite private education for a select privileged few and under-resourced schools for the rest.
2. Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education: Donald Trump has stated he wants to shut down the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), saying at rallies that it should be disbanded to "move everything back to the states where it belongs." Project 2025 lays out how dismantling the USDOE would work, leaving behind a husk focused solely as a "statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states" — and evaporating the federal government's ability to prevent discrimination by overseeing schools nationwide.
3. Scale back civil rights protections: The Project would end the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights within the USDOE. The federal government's ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back "based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory." Instead, Project 2025 would perpetuate a framework of people unwilling to acknowledge our country's racist history and its impacts today, hanging vulnerable marginalized children out to dry.
4. Privatize public education: Federal education funds would be converted to vouchers for parents to use on private schools and other education expenses — regardless of whether these schools discriminate or segregate. Project 2025 enacts vouchers for all "federal" children, meaning military children and members of sovereign tribes, and seeks to convert federal IDEA funding for students with special needs to unregulated voucher programs. It also seeks to universalize the federal DC voucher program, which would make all students eligible, and allow private schools "to control their admissions" (or reject any students they don't want).
5. End federal protections for LGBTQ+ students: Project 2025 would direct a future Secretary of Education to rescind the Biden administration's expanded Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students. It proposes ridding education programs of any "gender ideology and critical race theory", such as a "non-binary" category in data collection or the ability of trans youth to participate in sports aligned with their gender. It also calls for parental approval for the use of names or pronouns other than those on birth certificates (even though the school will still deadname and misgender students regardless). It even wants to gut programs that offer diversity and abolish current protections against discrimination based on students' sexual orientation and gender identity. Lastly, it wants to install old-school religious teachings of how start a traditional family, by making girls believe that they're only destined in life to be loyal, submissive wives to their husbands and give them babies, and for boys to believe that they should only find themselves a woman to have a relationship with. This will make kids believe that they're only supposed to be straight and that being in love with someone of their own gender is a 'mental illness' and should not be accepted.
Given the rhetoric Trump and his enablers have unleashed about public schools, none of this comes as a surprise. At a June 2024 "Faith & Freedom Conference" in Washington, DC, Trump vowed to sign an executive order on the first day of his 2025 administration that would cut federal funding for "any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children." This broad brush flings open the door to vast inequities and discrimination, rolling back hard-fought decades of progress on the civil and social protections that actually make America great.
It is likely that Project 2025 only represents the beginning of this concerted attack on American values. On the campaign trail, Trump has also said that parents should elect school principals, called for merit pay for teachers and the abolition of teacher tenure, promised to cut federal funding to schools (allegedly) pushing progressive social ideas, and pledged to establish universal school choice.
The Heritage Foundation's Dangerous Efforts to Destroy Public Education
Project 2025 would develop massive expansions of voucher programs that would siphon dollars to unregulated private schools across the entire country. Trump has said that he supports universal "school choice," or the ability of any student to use taxpayer funds to attend whatever school they want. The Project cites Arizona's expansion of vouchers to all students as a model, despite the fact that our state's program has been the subject of much controversy— including driving a massive budget debt crisis, leading to public school closures, and funneling taxpayer dollars to extras like ski trips, $1800 collectible Lego sets, kayaks, and Sea World admissions.
Project 2025's education chapter was written by Lindsey Burke, chief of the Koch- and DeVos-funded Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy. Burke unloads the heart of Heritage's plan for education in the second paragraph: "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." Burke cites Friedman's 1955 essay "The Role of Government in Education"— a response to Brown V. Board of Education desegregation orders — which laid out Friedman's racist ideas for vouchers for all and in which he argued that "Privately conducted schools... can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools."
Under the Heritage Foundation's plan, federal dollars for public education would be fully privatized. Project 2025 calls for federal spending on education to be turned to "block grants" (aka, vouchers) and given to states without "strings" (aka, regulations). Its demand for more "education freedom" means vouchers and a privatized system, including tax credit scholarships, a type of voucher that allows the wealthy to fund private schools in lieu of paying taxes.
The Heritage Foundation has spent millions of dollars to block voting rights in battleground states, to push election denialism, and to force school vouchers under the disingenuous guise of "school choice." They have worked to push critical race theory bans and praised Florida's dismantling of public education. They even once tried to argue that school vouchers would increase the birth rate.
Allowing elitist dark-money special interests like the Heritage Foundation to dictate the future of our public schools (and our democracy) is a horrifyingly dangerous plan that should not be followed by any future president.
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Exposing Project 2025
Non-FictionNot a lot of people on this platform are talking about this and why it's urgent that we must fight back against it like our lives depend on it, because it literally does! This book is to reveal the conservative movement blueprint called Project 2025...
