As anxiety skyrockets about the presidential election next November, many are wondering, if Donald Trump were to be elected, whether the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 would drive the agenda for a second Trump term.  A number of top staff people from Trump’s first term have been involved in developing the plan.

Concisely and lucidly, Education Week‘s Libby Stanford examines the 44 pages of the 900-page Project 2025 policy agenda that cover what could be, if Trump is elected, the federal government’s radically reduced role in public education:

“For K-12 schools, the agenda proposes a complete, restructure of governance at the federal level, and the eventual elimination of a key federal funding source: Title I, which provides grants to schools with large populations of low-income students. The central premise of the plan’s education agenda is to scale back the federal government’s role in education policy ‘to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.'”

Sanford outlines the Project 2025 proposal to reduce the federal role in public education:

• eliminate the U.S. Department of Education;
• pass a federal parents’ bill of rights through Congress;
• turn “Title I into a ‘no-strings attached’ block grant administered by state education departments—which could allow the funds to flow directly to parents in the form of education savings accounts to be used for private school and other educational expanses—before phasing it out over the next decade”;
• distribute IDEA special education funds through block grants or into education savings accounts for parents to use for private services;
• scale back the Office of Civil Rights and its capacity to protect students in public schools from the violation of their civil rights;
• end “the Biden administration’s Title IX revision which would explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity”;
• reduce federal regulation of public schools and permit states to opt out of particular federal programs and redirect their share of federal funds for other purposes; and
• create a federally funded universal school choice program.

How likely is it that a second-term President Trump would implement this scary policy agenda?

Stanford explains that, enjoying playing both sides, Candidate Trump has waffled about whether he supports or doesn’t support Project 2025: “Trump… has said that Project 2025 does not reflect his policy agenda and has tried to distance himself from the proposal in recent weeks… However, when it comes to education, Trump’s actual policy proposals reflect much of what is written in Project 2025.  On his website, Trump has promoted a potential federal parents’ bill of rights, criticized the Biden administration for its Title IX revision, and proposed universal school choice programs.”  However, “Some of the proposals, including eliminating the Education Department, enacting a federal parents’ bill of rights, and creating a universal federal school choice program, would require the approval of Congress….”

For Education Week in March, Matthew Stone reported that, if Project 2025 were adopted, some of the programs which are currently part of the Department of Education would be moved to other agencies: “IDEA would become the purview of the administration for community living within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Title I would transfer to the Department of Health and Human Services’ administration for children and families before it’s ultimately phased out. The National Center for Education Statistics… would become part of the U.S. Census Bureau.”

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, “would move to the Justice Department and would only be able to enforce civil rights laws through litigation, ending a common practice of negotiating settlements with school districts to change their practices… The civil rights office would also stop investigating schools for ‘disparate impact’ in school discipline.”  Stone quotes Anita Dunn, of Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization: “Eliminating disparate impact as the basis for civil rights investigations removes the only avenue available for people to challenge school policies whose impact might be racially discriminatory.”

Stone also describes Dunn’s concerns about Project 2025’s plans for Title I and IDEA: “Title I and IDEA are the federal government’s primary mechanisms to ensure that schools that can’t raise revenue from local property taxes have at least a baseline level of resources… So, allowing those funds to flow to parents via savings accounts ‘really does move toward this idea that education is a personal good’ rather than ‘a collective value.”

In a blog post last week, educator Nancy Bailey worries that the Project 2025 proposals for the U.S. Department of Education abrogate our nation’s responsibility to its most vulnerable children—by compromising IDEA which ensures school districts can provide trained staff and services from infancy to age 21 for disabled students, and by reducing and phasing out Title I which provides funding to hire extra staff to support children’s needs in school districts serving concentrations of impoverished students: “The Heritage Foundation wants to… reconfigure funding so it goes to parents instead of schools, putting those programs and public schools at greater risk… With no strings attached, school districts will be free to use the funding for anything, and children will have an even harder time finding affordable schools with credentialed teachers.”