Project 2025's Disastrous Plans for Education, Part 1

Buckle up!

Image via Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash

It’s been a while since my last substantive post, because I’ve been busy with publicity for Failing Our Future. The book is doing well, and I’m gratified to hear from readers who enjoyed it (and even from those who are still on the fence about the conundrum of grades).

I want to fulfill the promise I made in my previous post, though, to train my sights on Project 2025, which—as you all probably know by now—is a right-wing playbook intended to guide Trump’s transition team if he wins the presidency in November. He has repeatedly disavowed any connections between his team and the group who put together Project 2025, but these attempts at disassociation are weak and transparent at best.

I have lots of opinions on the ideas found within the staggeringly long (more than 900 pages!) report, but I’m going to stick to my sphere of expertise here and reserve my comments for the chapter in Project 2025 on the Department of Education. A lot of excellent commentary has come out analyzing the disastrous effects of the ideas proposed in this chapter on public education in America, including an insightful piece by my University of Mississippi colleague JT Thomas arguing that the plans in this chapter will lead to a resurgence of the “separate but equal” ideology that failed our schools and harmed communities prior to the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board ruling.

I’d like to take a slightly different tack with my next few newsletters. Instead of writing my own op-ed, I’m going to go through the chapter one section at a time and provide some of my own reflections. This will be an ongoing series.

First, some context: the chapter on education was written by Lindsey M. Burke, PhD, Director of the Center for Education Policy and Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation. Burke’s career has focused largely on conservative education policy, with a particular emphasis on “school choice,” which is often right-wing code for school vouchers.

Now, let’s dive in to the first part of the chapter.

Section 1: “Mission”

This introductory section opens with a real banger:

Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. (319)

No beating around the bush with these folks, eh? No burying the lede here! Of course, when Burke says that federal policy should be “limited,” she is really arguing that states should have full control over their own education policies and regulations. This, famously, worked out so well for the country prior to Brown vs. Board, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the establishment of the Department of Education, federal legislation protecting students with disabilities, etc. etc. etc.

Just a few paragraphs later, we are told that “States are eager to lead in K-12 education” (319). I’m not sure how true that is. It might be more accurate to say that a subset of politicians are eager for states to have *control over* K-12 education. Why? So that they can enact their agendas and make students suffer in the process.

Burke appears to be a fan of the economist Milton Friedman, that conservative darling and champion of the idea of the free market. She cites Friedman’s idea that

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, which would empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child's unique needs. (319)

I’ll return to the ideas laid out here in a later post, but suffice to say for now that this is the usual smokescreen advocates of school vouchers use to distract us from all the inequities such a system would inevitably create.

Burke ends the “Mission” section with this gem:

Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke “diversicrats” and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces. (320)

Once you look past the attempts to scare us with eerie terms like “woke” and “cartel,” you find a laundry list of the most utilitarian approaches to education you could ever hope to see. Imagining that the purpose of college is only to find a job is to see education as purely transactional rather than aspirational. I don’t want my students to take my classes *only* because they want a job. I also want them to develop a love of learning, to ask important questions, to become better thinkers and writers, and to think about how their college experiences can contribute to their efforts to build meaningful, joyful lives for themselves. And we should want our schools and colleges to benefit from creative, generative ideas and innovations, not “greater market forces.”

But you won’t find those kinds of lofty goals in Project 2025, because it wants our educational systems to mirror the autocracy it seeks to supplant in all parts of our society.

Next time, I’ll take a look at section 2 of the education chapter: the poetically titled “Overview.”