Protect Public Education from Project 2025
Project 2025, a disturbingly robust conservative playbook, aims to defund, breakdown, and eliminate the Department of Education and other crucial federal educational services. Their plans would destroy decades of progress and amplify existing inequities under the guise of “education freedom and reform.” (All page references refer to citations in the playbook.)
“If Project 2025 is enacted, taxpayer dollars will be used to subsidize the private, oftentimes religious, education of wealthy students, at the expense of the nearly 90% of U.S. students who attend public schools,” explained Lily Klam, Director of Education Policy at First Focus on Children. “Private schools have no requirements for serving students with disabilities, are exempt from ensuring students meet grade-level academic requirements, and can reject students as they please, including for reasons such as their sexual orientation.” Klam outlined issues with voucher programs, dangers of not enforcing curriculum standards, concerns with reassigning programs to other agencies, and the important role the Department of Education plays in educational trends and research, especially to stay globally competitive.
Though Project 2025 accuses the United States of over-spending on education, we actually don’t meet the internationally established education spending benchmark of 15 percent of total public expenditure (we’re at 12.7 percent, also see state spending breakdowns). It also highlights US decline in reading and math scores (p. 324 and 328, respectively) as evidence of public-school inefficiency, but fails to acknowledge the extreme drop in funding in 2015 that aligns with those academic drops. The playbook would eliminate Title I, which provides additional federal funding to “ensure that all children, regardless of their income status, receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education” and is essential for hiring and retaining qualified teachers. It opposes the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) and other efforts to extend eligibility for free- or reduced-price school meals (p. 302-303). And it rejects moves made to forgive and cancel student loans, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program that “allows teachers, nurses, and others who work in public service jobs to have their loan balances wiped out after ten years of making payments” (p. 354-355).
Project 2025 would eliminate the Head Start program, which provides free early childhood (ages 0-5 years) care to over 778,420 children and pregnant people in centers, family homes, and family child care homes. It cites a Heritage Foundation article on reported incidences of abuse (p. 482) but doesn’t provide evidence for its claim that research has demonstrated that Head Start centers lack positive outcomes. According to the Brookings Institution’s evaluation of multiple studies, Head Start does work “on a variety of outcomes from kindergarten readiness to intergenerational impacts” and “causes better health, educational, and economic outcomes over the long term.” Instead of universal day care, the playbook prioritizes providing funds to parents or familial support to stay home with children, which could be beneficial if it can make up for the loss of income and work experience of those years and also provide sufficient child development resources. However, the playbook only supports married heterosexual households and disparages single parents and LGBTQIA+ caregivers.
In fact, attacks on and erasure of the LGBTQIA+ community are frequent in the playbook. It plans to eliminate Title IX protections from discrimination for LGBTQIA+ faculty and students (including transgender, nonbinary, and intersex student athletes) (p. 331-334), remove any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity from schools (p. 4-5), and even deny teachers the ability to refer to students by a chosen name (or nickname) or pronoun without a caregiver’s written permission (p. 346). It promotes book banning—especially stories with LGBTQIA+ representation—and calls for the criminalization of educators who allow students to access banned materials, classifying them as sex offenders due to deceitful claims that any depiction of LGBTQIA+ people is pornography (p. 4-5). And it provides robust protections for religious employers, endangering LGBTQIA+ rights for students and faculty.
Project 2025’s focus on “God-given” individual rights, criticisms of intersectionality, and divestment in education are very alarming for the ever-growing secular student population. In 2024, Secular Student Alliance received 2,196 scholarship applications filled with students’ financial struggles, family issues, health problems, social challenges, and life dreams. “Nonreligious students often face harassment and animosity simply for standing up for their values and questioning religious privilege,” said SSA Executive Director Kevin Bolling. “Despite these challenges, they continue to make a profound positive impact on their campuses and communities by fostering inclusivity, promoting reason, and defending freedom of thought.” The American Humanist Association was proud to be one of the twenty-five supporting organizations that provided secular activist scholarships to continue this courageous work.
Students’ rights are never mentioned in Project 2025 because it doesn’t care about their well-being. If it did, it would invest in public education and provide safe learning intuitions for all.