Project 2025 - Education

Project 2025 is the conservative playbook for what to do if/when Donald Trump is elected President made by the Heritage Foundation. For context, during both Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump's first years as president, the both enacted about 60% of the proposals made. Due to this, no matter what anyone says, these recommendations are massively influential. Yet few actually know what they are. Let's take a look.

Ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. -p 319

Right away in Project 2025's education mission statement, it lists a couple big changes.

1. Getting rid of the federal Department of Education
   

2. Getting rid of all public schools in the country, replacing them with private schools that the government would cover tuition for.
   

3. Federal funding would be given to states, not schools/districts directly, and would have no strings attached
   

4. End public student loans
   

5. Invest more in trades
   

In the mission and overview sections, it often talks about how consolidating the many education programs we had pre-Jimmy Carter into the Department of education ballooned spending. Yet quite often in this document it suggests consolidating things done by the Department of Education into other departments (primarily Health/Services and Defence. I agree with consolidation as it helps with economies of scale, but there is never an explanation why we shouldn't move programs from there into department of education

In the policy section, we can see some more specific proposals:

• Title 1 funding (extra money for low income schools)

  • Becomes a block grant, meaning all 50 states will get equal funding regardless of population.

  • Within 10 years, make funding this a state responsibility
    

• Private & Charter Schools ("School Choice")

  • Expand Scholarship program from DC to nationwide

    • Eliminate income requirements

    • Double funding from $10k to 20k/year

      • Interesting as we are currently spending an average of $14,500 per student per year according to the US Census. This would raise costs by $5.5k/student/year. With 54.2 million students currently in k-12 education, that would mean an additional $300 billion in spending per year.
        

• Student Loans

  • Create a new corporation owned by the government to deal with current student loans

  • Remove all loan forgiveness programs

  • All student loans would be Income Based repayment with payment being 10% of all income earned above the poverty line (about $15,000 for a single person)

    • Example: Someone making $40k/year would pay about $200/month

  • Eliminate graduate student loans

  • Create rules preventing future administrations from modifying this system in any way

• Title IX, Privacy, & LGBTQ+

  • Stop collecting data on non-binary students

  • Define "sex" exclusively as assigned at birth for Title IX and other programs

    • Review all investigations done under Biden if "conducted on the understanding that “sex” referred to gender identity and/or sexual orientation"

  • Drop all ongoing investigations

  • Requirement to only use the name listed on a birth certificate and no other name

  • Enact the "Parents' Bill of Rights"

  • Require parents to be informed of their child's pronoun usage and gender identity

  • Make it easier for lawsuits to be made against school districts

• Racial Equity

  • Stop penalizing schools for disproportionate discipline rates

    • In practice, this will mean the government cannot address racism in discipline outside of lawsuits brought up by parents.

  • Review and close all investigations about disproportionate discipline

• Data Collection

  • Start collecting data on household structure

• National Education Association

  • Conduct hearings about NEA promoting a single national party

  • Repeal national charter

  • Make implementing Critical Race Theory policies illegal

• Other Things

  • Allow states to opt out of any/all federal education requirements and keep their share of federal money for those programs.
    

• Higher Education

  • Allow explicitly faith based colleges that teach traditional religious messages to get accredited

  • Require institutions disclose donations from outside the USA

  • Remove "area studies" programs from colleges for running counter to "American interests"

  • Dedicate 40% of funding to business programs that teach "free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests"

• Executive Orders

  • Make many educational grants conditional on upholding the first amendment

  • Federal jobs should not require a college degree unless necessary

  • Remove all school accreditation programs

  • document and publish how government programs spread "radical" ideology

  • Eliminate competitive grants

  • Eliminate the Gear Up program

Conclusion

I will be going over these sections in more detail in the future with ramifications. However, this is quite a far reaching set of policies. While not all of them will, or even can, be implemented right away, historically about 60% of them have been. That means likely most of the smaller things like changes to data collection and executive orders will be changed.

All in all, these changes would result in a massive privatization of education resulting in some thriving and some facing additional struggles. Low income families wouldn't have the choice that is being touted by these ideas as the biggest struggle will be location and transportation. Already we see big disparities of funding and opportunity within schools in lower and higher income areas. This would likely exacerbate that.

Likely the biggest change is one that wont draw as much attention on first glance. However, allowing states to not follow program rules but keep that program's money means that those programs instead become shells for handing out money that only look like programs. While the beginning of the document starts by saying the federal government is creating work for states by forcing them to follow these rules, without any of them, it would force the states to do all that work themselves. This could potentially be more efficient in some cases, but loses the economy of scale we have federally. In truth, this is so that states that don't agree with policies like "no using someone's deadname" can be ignored if they aren't liked. This is one of those changes that will result in a noticeably lower quality of life for our students across the country in both red and blue states.

Some of these changes actually could have some potential to be good, but likely won't be due to their intent. For instance, in the school I work in, many families are learning about the education systems and about their rights. Making lawsuits easier to make and reimbursing families for winning is a massive step in the right direction if done right. However, that is unlikely.