Project 2025’s Education policy will kill public schools
26th August 2024 · 0 Comments
The Heritage Foundation’s so-called conservative playbook, Project 2025, is 900 pages of instructions and training on how to turn the clock back on fundamental freedoms and take away Americans’ constitutional rights under the guise of eliminating the “Deep State,” whatever that is.
Project 2025’s objective is “Building for conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training. Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
While Trump continues to distance himself from Project 2025, the people who created the plan, which aims to take over the U.S. federal government and stack it with Trump sycophants, were in the twice-impeached, 34-count felon’s administration.
Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) during the Trump administration, is the director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to the president and associate director of Presidential Personnel, is also an associate director of the project.
The authors’ conservative playbook is based on four goals they think should “decide America’s future:
1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely – what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
Despite the creators’ patriotic-sounding rhetoric, Project 2025 and its “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is no more than a handbook for setting up a dictatorial government undergirded by capitalism and elitism.
The education chapter, written by Lindsey Burke, chief of the Heritage Center’s Center for Education Policy, suggests eliminating the Department of Education.
If you do that, you can eliminate federal restrictions on public education dollars, like the need to enforce equal access to public education and eliminate public education dollars going exclusively to public schools.
Burke uses a common-sense premise that “schools serve parents, not the other way around” to promote the concept of “universal school choice,” which should be interpreted as “universal private school choice.”
In other words, take public school funding and create vouchers that parents can use to send their children to schools of their choice.
Not only does Project 2025 want to bypass federal regulations and give private schools vouchers with public school funding, but it also wants to regulate what is taught. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes in Project 2025’s foreword that the “noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ … poison our children.” and that “conservatives must defeat the “woke warriors.”
An Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting (AZCIR) report states that Project 2025’s education policies are based on Arizona’s education system. According to the AZCIR, an independent, nonprofit news organization, Arizona began its campaign to privatize public education dollars in 1994.
“Today, Arizona has the largest share of charter school students in the country. Its STOs (School Tuition Organizations) rake in hundreds of millions annually, funneling would-be tax revenue to private schools. And its now-universal voucher program enrolls nearly 75,000 students, costing more than $700 million,” AZCIR reported.
To no one’s surprise, the Republican majority in the U.S. Supreme Court overrode a lower court ruling in a Maine education case, which said public school education vouchers had to be used in the public school system.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court disagreed, saying that if the state paid for a secular school option, it must also pay for the religious version. Thanks, Chief Justice John Roberts.
In New Orleans, 99 percent of students attend charter schools. Thanks to a law passed this year in the state legislature, in 2025, parents will be able to use education vouchers at private schools.
It’s just a matter of time before “universal private school choice” takes hold across Louisiana.
The “school choice” policy was used to bamboozle New Orleans parents into thinking school choice was accurate. It isn’t. Will Louisiana end up like Arizona, where 60 percent of vouchers reportedly go to families with children already in private school, as Ali Veshi reported on MSNBC? Also, 80 percent of Arizona’s voucher money went to religious schools. Will that happen here in 2025?
What about families who can’t pay the remaining tuition the voucher won’t cover? Arizona gave families public money for private schools, and then private schools raised tuition. According to The Hechinger Report, critics of Arizona’s universal school choice program worry it’s a subsidy for the affluent.
But what about students with special needs, disabilities, children who can’t pass rigorous tests, who don’t have the grades private and religious schools prefer, who aren’t selected in lottery operated by certain New Orleans schools?
Louisiana ranks 49th in higher education and 40th in K-12 education on U.S. News and World Report’s list of the Best States.
Here’s some advice for Louisiana’s conservative state legislators: stop trying to give public school dollars to families who don’t need them and invest in real public schools.
This article originally published in the August 26, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
