If something is failing miserably, why would you ever double down on that failure?
The answer may be….that you want it to fail.
And that’s exactly what’s happening when it comes to Donald Trump and Project 2025’s plans for public education. They propose to elevate to the federal level the very anti-education policies that are already kneecapping public schools and lowering outcomes in states like Arizona, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere. Policies such as universal vouchers, censorship, and deep cuts to programs that help kids with disabilities and high-poverty districts. All while eliminating the Department of Education and reducing access to free school lunches.
It’s a nightmare spelled out as plainly as can be in Project 2025, and articulated by Trump directly.
And we know exactly what will happen—because the results are coming in from all the states already undertaking these disastrous policies: wasted billions, a coupon to well-off families and communities who already can afford private schools, deep cuts to public schools, fly-by-night for-profit schools, and worsening test scores.
In EPISODE 8 of our podcast “Trump’s Project 2025: Up Close and Personal,” projecting from what is already happening in too many communities, we spell out how the promised policies will play out on the ground in two Ohio communities: a public school deeply damaged by all these “reforms,” and two families discovering that they have been duped into sending their kids to a for-profit nightmare of a “school.”
We are honored that Ever Carradine (currently starring in the series The Handmaid’s Tale) and Don Cheadle narrate this crucial chapter.
Please listen, and share the episode with those you know—especially those who care about maintaining a strong system of public education in this country.
You can access the episode HERE, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s all on the line!
Author’s Note:
The key elements of Episode 8 come right out of Project 2025, Trump’s own words, as well as the lived experience in states undergoing the disaster of universal vouchers.
Diverting Federal Funds To Expand Private Vouchers
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.” He 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)
The plan approvingly cites states that are pursuing this model, especially Arizona, which is among the states experiencing catastrophic results from the very philosophy Project 2025 embraces. Specifically, the Section goes on to advocate:
“portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly” (p. 322). As a Forbes column explains: “In other words, take the money DC sends to the states and distribute it to families as vouchers.”
“As Washington begins to downsize its intervention in education, existing funding should be sent to states as grants over which they have full control, enabling states to put federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law” (the trend in gerrymandered red states is to push such funds to universal vouchers) (p. 322) Again, as the Forbes analysis writes: this means letting “the states use the funds for ‘any lawful educational purpose,’ regardless of what the original federal intent might have been.”
“Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities” (p. 326)
“Transfer Title I, Part A, which provides federal funding for lower- income school districts, to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Administration for Children and Families. It should be administered as a no-strings-attached formula block grant….Restore revenue responsibility for Title I funding to the states over a 10-year period.” (p. 325)
Later in the Education Section, Project 2025 pushes even more directly for IDEA and Title I funds to be diverted to private purposes via Education Savings Accounts, which are proving to be a disaster in states that have implemented them:
“Officials should…consider revising IDEA to require that a child’s portion of the federal taxpayer spending under the law be made available to families so parents can choose how and where a child learns….
“IDEA already allows families to choose a private school under certain conditions, but federal officials should update the law so that families can use their child’s IDEA spending for textbooks, education therapies, personal tutors, and other learning expenses, similar to the way in which parents use education savings accounts in states such as Arizona and Florida.” (page 349)
“Members of Congress and the White House should consider a similar update to Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).” (page 350)…“Parents should be allowed to use their child’s Title I resources to help pay for private learning options including tutoring services and curricular materials.
Over a 10-year period, the federal spending should be phased out and states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families.”
As the Forbes analysis writes: “[T]hese dollars [would] be turned into block grants that the states should use to fund vouchers. By the end of the decade, the federal program should be eliminated and ‘states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families.’ In other words, Title I would disappear and states would have to figure out how to replace the funding and pick up the slack themselves.”
The Big Picture
Add it all together, and Project 2025’s embrace of a privatizing philosophy already failing in states will spell disaster for public education nationwide.
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.”
Education Week summarized this part of the plan as follows:
“For K-12 schools, the agenda proposes a complete restructure of governance at the federal level and the eventual elimination of a key federal funding source: Title I, which provides grants to schools with large populations of low-income students….”
“Transitioning Title I to a “no-strings-attached” block grant administered by state education departments—which could allow the funds to flow directly to parents in the form of education savings accounts to be used for private school and other educational expenses—before phasing it out over the next decade”
“Distributing special education funds under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to school districts as “no-strings-attached” block grants or directly into education savings accounts for parents to use on private school and other educational expenses.”
Doubling Down on State-Level Voucher Nightmare
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.
I’ve written about these failures extensively. Here’s just one snapshot.
Shifting federal funds to these states to continue to push this reckless universal voucher experiment will only accelerate these already woeful results.
Censorship
Project 2025 would also federalize the censorship efforts that have already wreaked havoc in red states.
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. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.” (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. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime….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 the very types of books mentioned in yesterday’s chapter, including:
"Michelle Obama: Political Icon," by Heather E. Schwartz
"New Kid," by Jerry Craft
“Handmaid’s Tale,” by Margaret Atwood
“Anne Frank”
and others.
Sources: NBC, Readers Digest, MiddleGradeReads
Cutback on Free School Lunches
Project 2025 characterizes school lunch programs as “some of the most wasteful federal programs in Washington.”
The US Department of Agriculture section narrows the communities and families that are eligible for free or reduced cost school lunch—including entirely eliminating the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) which provides a school-wide grant to high poverty school districts (page 302) An analysis found that “[m]ore than 20 million children attend a school that utilizes CEP.”
One Wisconsin superintendent explained that families no longer eligible for metal support will face a major hit to their wallet: “even for middle class families, the cost to eat at school adds up. ‘An average kid is probably $5 a day; so $25 a week per child, $100 per month–if you have three kids, that’s 300 bucks a month–that’s a pretty big hit to the budget.’”
“Pay to Play” Already Happening
The “pay to play” I describe in Chapter 8—where families are billed extra when their kids take part in sports or other activities—is already a reality, especially in underfunded education states. Here’s the brutal summary of what’s happening in Arizona, which is now giving away more than $1 billion for private school vouchers:
“Ranking 49th nationally for education funding, Arizona’s budget for public schools is a controversial issue in the state. Low teacher salaries and elective cutbacks all are impacted. So, too, are extracurricular activities, and with fall sports under way, parents are facing a rude awakening: More and more schools districts are charging steep fees for athletics, more commonly referred to as “pay to play.”
One family described paying $400 for their son to play baseball, and $2,500(!) for their daughter to cheerlead.
In Ohio and Georgia, the “pay to play” fee for a sport can top $1,000 per athlete per season.
The Right-Wing Curriculum in Voucher Schools
For years, newspapers have documented the ideological and anti-science curriculum propagated in schools where vouchers have paid for private school tuition. Yesterday’s chapter drew directly from those stories.
Examples:
Science: “Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”
Slavery: “A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”
The KKK: “[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
For a long list of such problematic curricula, go HERE.
As one Florida newspaper explained, these lessons are often taught all at once: “Some private schools in Florida that rely on public funding teach students that dinosaurs and humans lived together, that God’s intervention prevented Catholics from dominating North America and that slaves who “knew Christ” were better off than free men who did not.””
Discipline
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)
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.
And we will NOT let it happen.
Please help spread the word!
NEW Pod Episode: Nationalizing the Attack on Public Education