How Project 2025 would dramatically disrupt public education
As the final stretch of election season gets underway, we’ll be unpacking one of the most prominent storylines from the 2024 presidential race: Project 2025. Despite being supposedly denounced by former President Donald Trump, the Project 2025 manifesto was crafted by a number of allies who were key to his first term.
Over the next three weeks, The Lede will be analyzing how this comprehensive guidebook to a possible Trump presidency will impact key aspects of American life, from reproductive and labor rights to housing and immigration policy.
Today, we’re diving into how Project 2025 plans to access public schooling and the education landscape.
Following Trump’s defeat in 2020, the Republican Party made the supposed “indoctrination” of children in public schools a key plank during the 2022 midterms. Throughout that election season, right-wing pundits, elected officials and candidates fearmongered about inclusive curricula, books with LGBTQ themes and “woke” teachers. While this strategy proved unfruitful on an electoral basis, it mobilized a large and loud portion of the Republican base.
Project 2025 invokes that sentiment but on a much broader scale. Instead of the piecemeal, local attacks that colored earlier Republican assaults on public education, the manifesto proposes a more top-down approach to dismantling public education as we understand it.
For starters, Project 2025 proposes that Trump essentially eliminate the Department of Education — which it calls “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel” — and the billions in funding it provides for local public schools nationwide.
“In order to fully wind down the Department of Education, Congress must pass and the President must sign into law a Department of Education Reorganization Act (or Liquidating Authority Act) to direct the executive branch on how to devolve the agency as a stand-alone Cabinet-level department,” the text reads.
The consequences of this would be apocalyptic for vulnerable students and the laws that were designed to protect them from discrimination and educational deprivation.
For example, Project 2025 suggests removing Title I funding, which allocates key funding to low-income schools and for said schools to incentivize teachers to work in poor districts. According to the Center for American Progress, this would mean some 180,300 teaching positions would be eliminated under such a proposal.
Other consequences would include the removal of civil rights oversight for gay and transgender students and lower federal funding for disabled students — who require specific legal protection to ensure they receive equal educational opportunities.
Most urgently, per the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Project 2025’s suggestions would result in 800,000 toddlers losing access to Head Start, a federally funded program that pledges substantial tax dollars to early childhood education.
All in all, Project 2025’s education agenda would decimate public education as we understand it in favor of faith-based private schools and charter schools.
“These types of proposals don’t come from the traditional conservative playbook for education policy reform,” a Brookings Institution analysis explained. “They come from a white Christian nationalist playbook that has gained prominence in far-right politics in recent years.”