Project 2025: The Death of Public Education
Put thousands or people out of work and leave poor people, Black people, and families with disabled kids to fend for themselves.
Lindsay Burke wants to get rid of the Department of Education.
That means eliminating a good many of the 4,400 jobs at the federal level, and about ten times as many who are contracted at the state level.
Burke, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on education, doesn’t say how we will deal with the people who work at DOE. She notes that some of them might go to other government agencies, but many of them will just lose their jobs.
This is a key underpinning of Project 2025. The writers want to actualize former Iran Contra conspirator and Apartheid activist Grover Norquist’s goal of “drowning [government] in a bathtub” and “inflicting pain” on the American people.
Whether they are using anti-trans and racist ideology to achieve their goal of a non-existent government, or they are using small government ideology as a weapon with which to hurt Queer and Black people, I cannot say. The result will be the same.
If the whole of Project 2025 is enacted, millions of people will be out of work. And without any of the protections or underpinnings that were put in place during the pandemic, the U.S. will dissolve into economic chaos.
A Broken System
Let me start here by saying that I think education is broken in this country. I’ve been covering it on and off for over three decades, in Boston, the Chicago area and in Las Vegas.
The latter has the 5th largest school district in the country, which drives Nevada’s perennial ranking as the worst or second-to-worst state when it comes to education outcomes.
The fact that we compete with Mississippi - a state where the median income is around $50,000 per family, and has no multi-billion dollar anchor industry - should be to the shame of every public official - and casino executive - in our state.
But my view of what caused the breaking of public education is wholly different than Burke’s view.
In my view, Burke’s view IS THE CAUSE of the decline of public education.
Burke’s view comes from the 1980s, when the seed for everything bad we are dealing with today was planted.
That’s when people like Boston University President John Silber started talking about privatization and return on investment of school children - as if they were goods - before he took over a school district in Massachusetts that was still reeling from the racial tensions of the 1970s, and forced them to institute standardized testing.
Silber raised the chorus against teachers, and gave people permission to denigrate them.
Then came the interrelated mapping of the Broad Foundation (essentially the Heritage Foundation of education) which helps train superintendents-to-be, who band together in the group Chiefs for Change, who, in turn, all join the Council of Great City Schools, creating a closed loop of information, money, and services.
They all champion right-wing views about the funding of private and charter schools, and the championing of Education Savings Accounts to use public money to pay for private schools.
Author Diane Ravitch has been railing about this for decades. As Melanie McCabe noted in her Washington Post review of Ravitch’s book, “Slaying Goliath,” this return on investment mentality came from some of “the richest people in America, such as the Walton family, Bill Gates, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers and Mark Zuckerberg.”
McCabe continues:
“Their belief that schools should be operated as businesses, with private ownership and data-driven decision-making, has resulted in dismal standardized test scores, the closure of public schools and the demonizing of teachers. The charter schools they have championed and have been enriched by have not resulted in promised improvements, but instead have drained much-needed funds from struggling public schools. The Disrupters are not supporters of education, Ravitch argues; rather, they pursue the money to be made not only by running charter schools but also through involvement in such lucrative industries as student testing, educational hardware and software, curriculum development, and consulting services.”
Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush advanced this idea of ROI education. For all of their goodwill, they ended up doubling down on exactly what is hurting education.
The problem is, standardized testing limits what kids learn to what is on the test. And it takes the joy out of learning and discovering new things.
We stopped, sometime after I graduated high school in the 1980s, being a society that valued learning, and instead became a society that valued skills. Sellable skills.
In the 40 years since right-wing capitalists started theorizing about education, and the 25 years since presidents have made ROI education their main policy, our education system has gotten worse.
Much like Ravitch, former Clark County School District Trustee Danielle Ford argues forcefully in her “Unravelling Education” podcast that this is by design.
So, this P25 chapter on education infuriates me. People like Burke and her cohorts at Heritage intentionally came in and broke the system. Now they argue that the system is so broken it’s unfixable. So, we just need to get rid of it.
(The clip below is about a minute and a half. But the entire podcast is worth a listen.)
A Cabal
Burke’s chapter is much like the rest of project 2025. She derides an amorphous “cabal of special interests” that must be obliterated, including unions, Black people, poor people (who she seems to think are the same as Black people) and gender queer people.
As in the rest of the document, Burke’s chapter leans hard into the latter group. Project 2025 is obsessed with gender; obsessed with the idea that women should be less so that men could feel better; obsessed with punishing people who don’t conform to gender stereotypes.
I give Burke credit. She waits 14 pages before she mentions trans or queer issues. But I think that’s because much of this chapter is padded with repetition.
Then she mentions gender eight times in two pages.
She also mentions trans issues on page 19, when she chastizes the USDA for threatening to withhold free school meals from school districts “that do not implement Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 so that the term ‘sex’ is replaced with ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’.”
Which is weird, because earlier in the document Burke argues that Title I - which determines eligibility for free meals - should be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and administered by a block grant for 10 years. After that Title I money would be the responsibility of each state. She doesn’t say whether the block grant will equal the current Title I appropriations. And she doesn’t say how states will be able to take that over.
But she sure does want to make sure that, until Title I dies, school districts don’t have to adhere to gender policies that recognize gender identity.
And Title I will die.
Because in the Social Darwinism of the Heritage Foundation, being poor is something you caused. Not something caused by systems that don’t pay people a living wage or offer affordable housing.
These are some of the departments or policies Burke wants to get rid of:
The Department of Education
The Office of Civil Rights (which she would move to the Justice Department, which has no way of communicating with schools)
Data collection on civil rights
Nondiscrimination policies on the basis of sex (Title IX)
Assistance to the states for the education of children with disabilities
Preschool grants for children with disabilities
The Federal Perkins Loan Program
The William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program final regulations
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
Stakeholder input into education policies
Loan forgiveness programs - including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which effects people like teachers and civil servants
Government oversight of student loan programs, leaving big banks to police themselves
What does she WANT in education? She wants to add federal money for charter and private schools.
Race
The section on school discipline - Title VI of the Civil Rights Act - is masterful at showing how Heritage libertarian types try, and fail, to hide their racism.
Burke argues with a straight face that racism doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t linger on in systems that were set up to be racist, that the only definition of racism is treating Black people “better” than white people.
On this, of course, she agrees with Chief Justice John Roberts, who said in his Shelby County v. Holder opinion that racism doesn’t exist anymore.
For Burke, Black children are just unruly. In her view, they act out more than white children, and they should be disciplined more. She thinks that looking at “impact” - i.e. data on how Black children are disciplined more for the same behaviors as white children - is inherently racist toward white people, who might be harmed by those “Black bullies” at school.
Burke also doesn’t want you to know - honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t know - that the private school movement was small before 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that schools should be desegregated.
According to the Southern Education Foundation - which has been tracking and funding education for Black people in some way since Reconstruction - “private schools in the South were established, expanded, and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation in the face of the federal courts’ dismantling of ‘separate but equal.’”
Those white people who couldn’t move to all-white suburbs with racial restrictive covenants sent their kids to private school instead. They constituted what used to informally be called “segregation academies.”
SEF continues:
“By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools. While none of the new laws specifically mentioned “race” or racial segregation, each had the effect of obstructing Black students from attending all-White public schools.”
Transferring public assets and monies to private schools is at the core of P25’s education policy. And, even when they don’t mention race, this is a racist argument.
Throwing Away What Works
What scares me most about this chapter on education is how often Burke waves her hands to dismiss problems that may arise from her policy prescriptions.
When Education Savings Accounts were briefly instituted in Nevada in 2016, data collected showed that almost everyone who got them lived in a wealthy zip code.
In fact, Burke notes that the money made available via ESA’s is not enough to cover private school, but she makes no attempt to argue how people who make less than $100,000 a year will be able to afford it.
At the same time that ESA’s were instituted in Nevada (they were ruled unconstitutional in 2017), Governor Brian Sandoval created Victory and Zoom schools that would put more money into schools with majority low-income or Spanish speaking populations.
And it worked. Sandoval was a Republican. But he was not like these Heritage libertarians. Test scores and teacher retention at Zoom and Victory schools soared.
Sadly, though, Nevada’s Democratic legislature was influenced by the education reform mantra of “the money follows the student,” and programs that worked were sunsetted.
So, I go back to what I said above. Public education is broken. Largely because the reform agenda is so pervasive even Democrats don’t recognize its ultimate aim.
But if Project 2025 is put into place, public education will cease to exist. And state legislators will be left holding the bag.
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Check out the Project 2025 Table of Contents for previous P25 analysis.
"As in the rest of the document, Burke’s chapter leans hard into the latter group. Project 2025 is obsessed with gender; obsessed with the idea that women should be less so that men could feel better; obsessed with punishing people who don’t conform to gender stereotypes."
I think the emphasis on gender, specifically transgender, is strategic. In my opinion it's the weakest part of the progressive program, subject to blinding tribalism and most likely to alienate rural folk. The dweebs at Project 2025 are betting that a robust defense of trans will cement the wavering women that hated Roe's reversal but can't stomach trans ideology.
The huge voucher plan to enact nationwide based off DC’s program would give all students regardless of income >$22K to use as parents’ wish for education. No note of how that would be funded. But did note all school funding reverts to state in 10 years.