What Happens to Education if Trump Wins?

More on Project 2025

Tonight, Donald Trump will become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Joe Biden, a kind, decent man, is at home doing the right thing, quarantining to avoid infecting others with Covid. He tested positive yesterday. The likely narrative we will continue to see is that of the strong Republican nominee who emerged from an assassination attempt with nothing more than a (large, weird) bandaid on his ear versus the man who is hiding in his basement.

Almost everyone I know is questioning how we got here. There are people who believe that the proof of Biden’s competence lies in the results he has delivered during his first three years in office. There are others who believe Joe Biden must be replaced. I’m a Biden supporter. I haven’t made any bones about that. I believe he and Kamala Harris have done a spectacular, if underappreciated, job in difficult times and should be permitted to continue; they should be celebrated, not merely tolerated. But it seems increasingly likely matters are coming to a head and the question of whether Joe Biden will remain on the ticket will be decided soon.

I don’t want to ignore that issue, but we don’t yet know how and when it will be decided. So, putting that marker down, let’s acknowledge it but move on to tend to some of the other important business at hand, continuing to drill down on Project 2025. That matters regardless of who the Democratic nominee is. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, this afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris confirmed that.

The Vice President addressed Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s speech at the convention last night, saying it was important to focus on what he did not talk about, Project 2025. Harris told the crowd, “he did not talk about it because their plan is extreme. And it is divisive.” She told them, “If you stand for unity you need to do more than just use the word … It boils down to a single thing. Who fights for you?” And she returned to Project 2025 and the sharp contrast between Republicans, who claim they will fight for seniors but intend to come for Social Security and Medicare, with Democrats, who will protect them. “Let me be clear,” she said, telling the crowd Biden “has never forgotten where he came from” and that they would always protect those programs.

Kamala Harris can prosecute the case! Let’s take her comments a step further and look at the education chapter of Project 2025, which I began working with in what now feels like another century, the days before the shooting in Pennsylvania. We pick back up tonight.

Public education is important. Well-educated citizens are more employable and prepared to compete in the 21st Century economy. Education reduces crime. It improves public health and health equity. Education produces a more informed population, people able to think for themselves and their communities. As the saying goes, if you’re burning books because they contain some ideas you don’t like, you’re not afraid of books or courses—you’re afraid of ideas. That perfectly encapsulates the Project 2025 approach to education.

The most important takeaway from the education chapter of Project 2025 is that the plan is to shut down the U.S. Department of Education. Donald Trump has been saying at recent rallies that it should be disbanded to “move everything back to the states where it belongs.”

You’ll recall Trump has claimed he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, but there are linkages that suggest he isn’t being truthful about that, as we discussed last week. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation has confirmed it. Audio was released of him privately acknowledging Trump knows about Project 2025. Roberts says in the recording that he doesn’t grudge Trump for trying to separate himself from it because Project 2025 "has become a liability." Apparently, it’s just fine with the folks who wrote Project 2025 for Trump to lie to voters if it helps him get elected.

This isn’t about Trump backing off of supporting Project 2025 because Americans don’t want it. It’s being deceitful about what a Trump win would bring with it. That makes it even more important for us to understand the details of Project 2025.

The Education Chapter is 44 pages long. They are counting on the fact that no one will read it. So we will.

It would take an act of Congress to abolish the Department of Education, but Project 2025 has a workaround for that. The plan involves dismantling the Department so that all that is left is a hollow shell that can only gather statistics to disseminate. That’s the goal for an agency whose current mission is to “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” That seems like a good thing, something to improve upon. Not something to eliminate.

Lindsey Burke, the author of this chapter, is the author of a piece advocating against government funding for early childhood education, in other words, most of the funding for it that isn’t tied to religious entities. She writes, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not government. In our pluralistic society, families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs. Our postsecondary institutions should also reflect such diversity, with room for not only ‘traditional’ liberal arts colleges and research universities but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.”

In the banal language of conservative policy, that spells an end to everything we have sought to do with public education in this country. It spells the establishment of religion, even at the college level, in ways that are inimical to creating a population that is taught to think, not what to think.

Why would conservatives hate on education? Project 2025 answers that question for us. It’s about civil rights:

“For most of our history, the federal government played a minor role in education. Then, over a 14-month period beginning in 1964, Congress planted the seeds for what would become the U.S. Department of Education (ED or the department). In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of black Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response. In the case of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA)2 and the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA),3 Congress sought to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged students by providing additional compensatory funding for low-income children and lower-income college students.”

Now we understand why they want to end the Department of Education. A big part of its work is to guarantee equal access to quality education. Project 2025 calls for increased privatization of education and an end to programs related to diversity of LGBTQ+ youth.

Project 2025 put states in charge of programs that are currently funded and managed by the federal government. It would send money to the states without connecting it to established priorities and programs. This no strings money could be spent on “any lawful education purpose under state law”—we’re already seeing how that plays out in states that are spending money on religiously-oriented education. It would expand so-called school choice, for instance, the voucher programs that let students leave public schools for private ones that in some cases imposes restrictive limits on what they can learn. All of this goes hand in glove with the priorities in state legislatures that are gerrymandered to be and remain Republican.

The Heritage Foundation also wants to eliminate Head Start, a program that funds early childhood education for low-income families, because it is “fraught with scandal and abuse”, according to a chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services. The Center for American Progress says in a new report that eliminating Head Start would reduce access and increase costs for childcare, hurting economic stability. Just as women are being forced to carry pregnancies that they don’t want and sometimes can’t afford to term.

It’s the end of public education as we know it.

Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 authors are afraid of an open marketplace of ideas where kids learn to think for themselves. Kids can learn about—and learn from—the history of slavery in this country. The idea that it must be suppressed because it might make white kids feel bad is ridiculous. The more we know of our history, events like the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, or the treatment of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants as they came to country, the better we can become. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That seems to be the plan here.

There is more detail in the full chapter, but now you have some of the basics.

Before we go, a little bonus info:

Your friends, your family, they may never have heard of Project 2025. They may not care about it. But they might care about this:

• On page 592, there is a proposal that permits employers to avoid paying overtime to employees who work more than a 40 hour work week. They can do that by cutting your hours in subsequent weeks and not paying overtime if they can keep you under 40 hours a week spread across a two or four week period.

That would hurt income for a lot of people who might not see it coming if we don’t warn them.

The more you know about Project 2025, the more you understand the importance of preventing it from becoming the American way of life. That’s why the work we do here to help people understand the nitty-gritty details of what it means matters so much. Thank you for carrying this forward. And many thanks to those of you whose paid subscriptions help me devote sufficient time and resources to this work.

We’re in this together,

Joyce