Lily Klam of First Focus on Children took a look at Project 2025, and what she saw alarms the orgianztion.
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership offers a step-by-step plan to radically reduce support for public school children by transferring taxpayer dollars to private schools. The authors use a façade that claims to “empower families to choose among a diverse set of education outcomes.”
The education section of the Mandate reads as if it is designed to exacerbate inequities and make high-quality education and opportunity available exclusively to the wealthy. One of the agenda’s most alarming proposals advocates for giving all parents “the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA).” Voucher schemes such as ESAs siphon money from public schools and funnel it to the private education industry. 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.
It’s hard to overstate the destruction that this plan would inflict on the U.S. public education system. Directing each child’s education funding share to an ESA would rob public schools across the country of the funding they need to operate and would force tens of thousands of them to shut down or drastically reduce education services to children. This scenario has already played out in many states that have enacted school voucher and privatization schemes. Executed at the national level, these schemes would radically exacerbate existing inequities, cause extreme teacher shortages and layoffs, and create huge disparities in access to a quality education.
Imposing universal vouchers would also raise serious concerns about accountability. 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.
The lack of enforcement of curriculum standards for private schools and homeschool environments has allowed the existence of groups such as the “Nazi homeschool group,” where nearly 2,500 subscribers were given home school lesson plans and writing assignments based on the teachings of Adolf Hitler. Project 2025 would expand this lack of accountability and drastically reduce oversight of public schools.
In the education section, Project 2025 authors lay out their plan to “model” countrywide school choice initiatives on states like Arizona and Florida, where the expansion of vouchers has gutted accountability and encouraged deep levels of tax fraud. In Arizona, taxpayer-funded school vouchers have been used for ski passes, golf equipment, and lessons on how to drive a luxury car that cost more than $800 per session. In Florida, taxpayer dollars set aside for school vouchers have paid for kayaks and Disney tickets. Accountability has been virtually non-existent in these programs, allowing fraudulent use of vouchers at the expense of public school funding.
