For the last forty-four years, Republican presidents and lawmakers have been trying to dismantle the Department of Education.
This time it feels real.
In 2022, The Heritage Foundation rolled out Project 2025 and a 900-page document known as the “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise” that serves as a manual for overhauling the federal government to serve a conservative agenda. Among their plans for gutting environmental protections and the distribution of power to president-elect Donald Trump’s closest friends and allies lay the details for the dismantlement and reformation of the Department of Education.
The Department of Education was created during the Carter administration in May of 1980, after the launch of the Soviet Union’s satellite Sputnik in 1957 saw the increased need for science education programs and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s saw the call for programs to support education through the postsecondary levels.
Since its formation, Republican lawmakers have been trying to dismantle the Department. Trump has taken it a step further. At a rally in September, he said, “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.” This, coupled with the plans laid out in Project 2025, can mean anything for the future of education: decreased funding, increased censorship, loss of teacher jobs, dismantlement of Title IX protections, and more.
President-elect Trump recently picked World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder and one of the top donors of his 2024 campaign, Linda McMahon, to be the Secretary of Education. McMahon has no education or teaching experience, other than serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, so while the Department of Education may still exist, perhaps it will become a puppet organization for conservative indoctrination.
The chances of the Department of Education ever actually closing are slim, as Patrick Rickert, professor of political science said, “[Trump] would need the permission of Congress to eliminate it altogether. Congress will be controlled by Republicans, who might be deferential to the president (or agree with him entirely). It would also likely require the vote to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, which would mean some Democrats voting in favor which does not seem particularly likely.” The future of education is still at risk due to the proposed cut in funding and positions.
School Funding
An article published by the National Education Association estimates that 180,300 teaching positions would be lost with the elimination of Title I and that close to 800,000 preschoolers, toddlers, and infants would lose early learning services with the elimination of Head Start.
Title I was implemented by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 and provides financial help to high poverty schools and districts. Project 2025 plans on ending that funding. The lack of funding to these areas would mean that the schools would be unable to run as they would not be able to receive aid from their community, leaving students without a place to learn and teachers without a job. A study performed by the Center for American Progress found that the elimination of Title I would worsen the existing teacher shortage and wipe out 6 percent of the workforce.
In the same vein as slashing Title I funding, Trump has lobbied for the concept “of universal school choice” which is described by CNN as the allowance of “parents to use public funding to send their children to K-12 schools other than their assigned neighborhood school—including public, private or religious schools.” In true conservative fashion, these vouchers are primarily only gifted to trust fund babies—who are almost certainly guaranteed a spot anywhere money can get them—rather than those who come from impoverished areas and can use the vouchers to get into a better school district.
These vouchers, and the fact that Project 2025 calls for the creation of so many vouchers, will take funds from traditional public schools, leaving them at risk of losing resources they’re already lacking.
Censorship and Parental Involvement
A cornerstone of the conservative platform is the restoration of parental rights in education, essentially allowing them to dictate what is taught in school curriculum and cutting the teachers—or the ones with the actual experience—out the discussion of what is best for their students.
According to Pen America, if Project 2025 was adopted, it “would ramp up book banning, impose a greater climate of censorship and self-censorship on schools and college campuses, and silence educators and students–all on a national level.” This doesn’t only limit what teachers are allowed to teach but also what students want to learn about in their own time, school related or not.
Across 18 states, 28 bills have been passed to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory and erase entire chunks of U.S. History curriculums that touch upon the history of slavery, racism, and white supremacy—not to mention the bans on any books that mention race, sexuality, or gender. This creates an idealized society where students are prevented and sheltered from learning about the darker but important parts of U.S. History that have helped shape modern society.
Project 2025 plans to make the banning of Critical Race Theory and literary censorship a federal issue, with the potential of slashed funding for schools who refuse to cooperate. There is also work toward wanting to enshrine a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” which would only support the parents who support the conservative ideology of the future Trump administration and gift them the right to sue public schools for including any content in the curriculum that offends them.
The Future of Title IX
At the center of the education debate is Title IX.
The Biden Administration in August revised Title IX, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Project 2025 promotes discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on a national scale, wherever possible.
This includes public schools.
Under the rules implemented by the new administration, it will be illegal for schools to acknowledge students by pronouns other than what is on their birth certificate without parental permission.
Project 2025’s interpretation of Title IX is to return to the regulations under the 2020 administration, defining “sex” as that of birth and strengthening protections for faith based educational institutions and programs.
This is harmful in several ways for students who now must hide who they are, being at risk of harm—whether at school or at home—and for teachers whose greatest priority beyond education is the protection and empowerment of their students.
Teachers are told to protect their students at whatever cost is needed, which asks the question why we are banning books and not guns, but statistically, LGBTQ+ students are at a higher risk for suicide because of discrimination by their peers and the national culture surrounding sexuality that makes them feel unsafe and unwelcome in their communities. If they are unable to feel safe at home, schools and teachers are supposed to be a safe space, and even that is being stripped away.
Higher Education
While Project 2025 seeks to control elementary and secondary schools, postsecondary programs are not spared either.
New regulations might not only end loan forgiveness based on income under the Biden administration but also end the debt forgiveness programs put in place for public service workers, such as teachers, school counselors, firefighters, etc., leaving them with an additional $250 billion in student debt, according to the Student Borrower Protection Center.
Project 2025 also seeks to privatize all loans and eliminate the Parent Plus loans offered by FAFSA that so many students and families depend on for aid.
Beyond the funding, Project 2025’s legislation will change the way colleges and universities are accredited, leaving it up to the states rather than being a nonpartisan effort, so that state governments can reward the universities that support their ideological preferences—see Ron DeSantis for example.
The banning of Critical Race Theory can also have an impact on how funds are distributed as if Congress should pass any laws that will ban federal funds from going toward Critical Race Theory, this would affect the distribution of federal student loans, potentially toward students studying the social sciences.
Congress, according to Project 2025, will also make it a mission to stop “area studies” at universities. These programs focus on specific geographic regions, such as Latin American Studies, African and African American Studies, Asian Studies, and more.
The amendment of Title IX can also affect college campuses as Project 2025 would end all ongoing Title IX investigations and make it harder for LGBTQ+ students and women to receive protections against discrimination and harassment, which is currently protected by the Biden administration.
The election of Donald Trump as the forty-seventh president of the United States is almost guaranteed to change the future of education, and not for the better. While many teachers refuse, understandably so, to speculate about the future of education during the next four years, they are all aware of the policy changes that have come out of the Florida legislation and what may come of the future because there is one thing they are all united on…
No matter what, the academics of the children will always come first, and teachers will do everything in their power to support the growth of their students.
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