Project 2025, an authoritarian guidebook authored by the Heritage Foundation and essentially Donald Trump’s bible in a would-be second term, is cause for alarm. Elements of this goody bag of democratic destruction take aim at everything from health care and education to the civil service and establishing a unitary executive.
But for all of the red flags waving around Project 2025 should Trump win the presidential election in November, far fewer conversations are being held about how Project 2025 is already in place in conservative-led states across America. This is most evident in the field of education.
For starters, Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Department of Education in addition to relocating funds that protect civil rights to privatization efforts like voucher systems. Public money for private schools should be a non-starter. Our nation’s public schools serve the highest portion of minority students, students with disabilities, and low-income students.
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But though Project 2025 is a clear and present danger to shuddering public schools, the backbone of the American education system, much of this work is being done currently and isn’t contingent on Trump’s fate in the upcoming election.
Public school closures are on the rise, with more to be expected in the coming years and as you can probably expect, Black, brown and low-income communities will bear the brunt of this disaster. Under the veil of “school choice” the expansion of charter schools, voucher systems that promise greater educational outcomes for students, particularly low-income students, but always fall short.
To fully understand how vouchers are destroying public schools look only to how they work in process. In December 2022, Arizona enacted the nation’s first universal school voucher program, titled the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA). The ESA was taxpayer-funded providing around $7,000 per child to cover education expenses (for private school attendance, homeschooling).
Seventy thousand students and under two years later the nation’s first statewide voucher experiment fell flat on its face after an audit found that the dollars supposedly used for education were being used for things like kayaks, trampolines, and vacation tickets to Seaworld. Lax accountability related to ESA vouchers is an ongoing problem.
But a bigger one is that the very populations the vouchers were supposed to help they leave behind. Students with disabilities often take the biggest hit. The Center for Public Integrity finds families using the money for an alternative to public school often must waive their rights to the free disability services provided in public schools. And they might not be able to find private schools that serve students with disabilities at all.
Meanwhile, traditional public schools are being stripped of funds and facing closure. Project 2025 overwhelmingly supports a complete overhaul of the public education system, promotes a national voucher model, and privatization.
In some states, we are swiftly on track to get there anyway. As of June 2024, Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri have approved or expanded voucher-type programs. In addition, seven states passed new voucher programs in 2023, and 12 states expanded existing programs.
This all falls amid a backdrop of significant declines in math and reading among middle school students following the pandemic school closures. Without adequate public school funding the nation’s public schools (which still serve the majority of students of color) are left high and dry.
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024.
Alyssa Pointer/File Photo/ReutersThe Republican plan of stripping students of access to public education got a boost from savvy conservatives post-pandemic. They fast-tracked bills promoting vouchers. They argued for closure of schools due to fewer students/enrollment decreases (an element drawn out by the failed voucher system) and cited budget crunches.
In the last school year nearly 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced closures that ravaged communities of color. In a sick way, that is the ultimate goal of Project 2025 and the Republican agenda.
Project 2025 also proposes erasure of DEI initiatives in in favor of what conservatives deem “merit-based hiring.” No surprise that anti-DEI policies are already in place across America as well. In fact, at least 23 states have banned or rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education. The reverse racism ideology promoted by the far right that led to the downfall of affirmative action in admissions, the anti-CRT movement and now anti-DEI policies, didn’t need Project 2025 to take flight. They are soaring without it and little has been done to quell the spread of the harmful new normal.
Project 2025 also takes aim at student debt relief and college affordability. The policy playbook phases out the income driven repayment plan (IDR) and the Savings on Valuable Education Plan (SAVE). To date, the SAVE Plan which makes student loan payments more affordable and for some low-income borrowers cut payments down to 0, was used by over 8 million borrowers.
Like the other target areas of a would-be new Trump Administration, we are already there. The SAVE plan was targeted by conservative judges the minute the Biden-Harris administration announced it. A federal appeals court bent to the will of the conservative voices and halted the SAVE plan just a few days ago.
Education is a primary target for culture war conservatives because an uneducated populace is the goal. That’s not hyperbole, Donald Trump and the GOP’s surge among uneducated voters is palpable. To increase the vote get, they’d like to decrease the value of educational attainment and destroy the systems that provide for free education for all.
Our nation’s strength, competitiveness and success depends on an educated and diverse workforce—yet Project 2025 and these GOP-led policies in certain states are hard at work dismantling democracy and putting our nation at risk. The question on people’s minds this election cycle shouldn’t only be on how to stop Project 2025 from being enacted, but rather how to reduce, reverse and reset the impacts of the state policies currently in place that Project 2025 was built on.
