Mercedes Schneider: The Heritage Foundation Wants to Train Your School Board.
Scholar and teacher Mercedes Schneider digs into what the Heritage Foundation (the folks who brought us Project 2025) has in mind for local school boards. Reposted with permission.
The Heritage Foundation is in the news for authoring and promoting Project 2025 as the bluprint for the next conservative president’s “taking back” the government:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.
This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.
The project is the effort of a broad coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.
Thus, Project 2025 and the Trump campaign are inextricably and undeniably intertwined.
As Peter Greene notes in his July 15, 2024, Forbes article,“What Does Project 2025 Actually Plan for Education?”, Project 2025 goals include the now-familiar ultra-right idea of branding library books as pornography:
Some of the broadest promises are laid out by Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation) in the foreword, where the first promise is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” …
Roberts also calls for the criminalization of pornography and the imprisonment of any person who produce and distribute it; “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” No specific definition of pornography is included.
If explicit sexual content = pornography, then the bible also needs to go, and those promoting and sharing the bible (which indeed includes some racy content) should expect to join those “educators and public librarians” as “registered sex offenders.” (Of course, there’s been a lot in the news about bible promoters and sex offenses, but this has nothing to do with hounding librarians.)
Greene continues:
The education chapter was written by Lindsey Burke, chief of the Heritage Center’s Center for Education Policy. She’s also works at EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group formerly named after Milton Friedman, and she was part of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team in 2021.
Burke leads off with some broad goals, including the elimination of the Department of Education and the goal that “families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.” She salutes Friedman’s ideal, with education publicly funded but “education decisions are made by families.” She points to state leadership where the “future of education freedom and reform is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated.”
Federal money comes with federal rules and regulations attached. Burke proposes that federal dollars come to the states as block grants with no rules or regulations attached. …
Burke suggests federal tax credit scholarships, the same voucher program unsuccessfully pushed by Betsy DeVos during her tenure as education secretary. Burke also notes that the federal government could immediately put universal vouchers in place for “federal” children (i.e. military families, DC residents, and members of sovereign tribes.
Turn federal funding into grants to the states “over which they have full control.” Let the states use the funds for “any lawful educational purpose,” regardless of what the original federal intent might have been.
College loans should be handled by private lenders and treated as investments. Students should pay the loans back, and politicians must not be allowed to interfere just to score some political points.
Civil rights must be safeguarded, which in this case means rights “based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.” …
itle I is the program that sends federal dollars to buttress lower-income school districts. Burke recommends that these dollars to be turned into block grants that the states should use to fund vouchers. By the end of the decade, the federal program should be eliminated and “states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families.” In other words, Title I would disappear and states would have to figure out how to replace the funding and pick up the slack themselves.
Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds, like Title I funding, should become a no-strings block grant to states. IDEA is supposed to cover 40% of states’ special education costs. …
The Project also wants to undo the shift in Title VI that looked at school discipline for “disparate impact” (i.e. considering if a school disproportionately punished minority students).
Burke characterizes school meal programs as “some of the most wasteful federal programs in Washington.” But she especially objects to the feds withholding those funds from schools that insist on holding to “gender at birth” rather than “sexual orientation and gender identity” language. …
States should be free to opt out of any federal education program, but still collect the funds as a grant they can use as they please. …
So what do we have here.
There are several major threads when it comes to K-12 education.
Vouchers, vouchers, vouchers. Eliminate the federal Department of Education, and turn the money for Title I and IDEA into block grants that states can use for anything education-adjacent (but Heritage is hoping it will be for vouchers), with Title I ending within a decade.
That is no small potatoes. In 2022, Title I amounted to over $16 billion. IDEA is underfunded according to the targets set by law, but it still accounts for roughly $13 billion.
Project 2025 is also deeply concerned about LGBTQ issues as well as other culture war issues. In discussion of virtually all issues, they make certain to demand an end to so much as mentioning Certain Terms. Project 2025 is deeply committed to reinforcing the traditional nuclear family and a government that treats that family as the only proper way to live. Such policies would have large implications for a public school system that is unavoidably diverse.
So, for those who have not combed through all 900+ pages of the Project 2025 document, when it comes to education, Greene’s article provides a concise understanding of Heritage Foundation goals for American education. This push is not new; on page xiii, “fledgling Heritage” mentions handing a blueprint to Reagan over 40 years ago:
In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. This collective work by conservative thought leaders and former government hands—most of whom were not part of Heritage—set out policy prescriptions, agency by agency for the incoming President. The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists.
The Heritage Foundation has even had its hand in shaping today’s Supreme Court (SCOTUS)– both Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were on Heritage’s 2018 SCOTUS wish list.
Given the Heritage Foundation’s push for outsized, ubiquitous influence in casting America in its own far-right-conservative image, it should come as no surprise that the Heritage Foundation even offers its own “school board training”:
The status quo in your school system wasn’t working. You saw the need for new leadership with a different vision for education. You stepped up to the plate and ran for school board—and you won! Now your role as a school board member brings a new set of challenges and opportunities—and the learning curve can be steep. But you don’t have to navigate this new territory alone.
The Heritage Foundation is pleased to offer training designed especially to help you succeed in your new role as a school board member. Experienced schoolboard leaders and education policy experts from across the country have teamed up to share the knowledge and information you need for immediate effectiveness. Designed for busy board members and parents, this training is available on demand so that you can learn at your convenience and at your own pace.
Okay.
So, who’s instructing these “on-demand” lessons on behalf of the Heritage Foundation?
Not school board members so much as those willing to help shape a school board into what the Heritage Foundation might find useful.
Aside from a number of Heritage Foundation’s own in-house people (like Lindsey Burke, who drafted the Project 2025 education positions), one can find…
Moms for Liberty co-founder, Tiffany Justice:
Justice is the Moms for Liberty co-founder who was not involved in the ménage à trois (though she certainly would want to hold any librarian responsible for helping a patron understand what, exactly, a “ménage à trois” is, even in reference to the history of her own “pronography”-chasing, censorship organization.)
For traning ultra-conservative, school board members, Heritage also features former Tennessee commissioner, Penny Schwinn, who after four stormy years resigned in May 2023 with a “tumultuous” legacy. But she did promote school vouchers, and to the Heritage Foundation, that it good:
In February 2020, I wrote about Schwinn’s no-bid school voucher contract as well as the exodus of career ed department personnel during Schwinn’s first year as Tennessee ed chief.
Schwinn first made an appearance on my blog in November 2019, again in connection with a no-bid contract, this one in Texas and with a freshly-minted company for special education data company, SPEDx. Schwinn was Texas Education Agency (TEA) deputy commissioner of academics at the time. Whistleblower Laurie Kash, then TEA special education director, alleged a personal relationship between Schwinn and SPEDx CEO, Richard Nyankori.
Here’s some Penny Schwinn, in sum, as noted in the May 2023 Tennessee Lookout:
In fall of 2020, Schwinn found herself on the hot seat after lawmakers discovered the Department of Education started a Child Wellbeing Check program through local school districts — monthly visits into the homes of children from birth to age 18 — that lawmakers considered “overreach.”
Schwinn also dealt with some personal situations, including a case in which the state inked a $16 million contract with New York-based TNTP Inc., a company that employed her husband. Schwinn ultimately received approval for a “mitigation” plan from the state to avoid conflicts of interest.
Lee selected Schwinn to run the Department of Education even though a Texas audit found she failed to follow rules for a no-bid $4.4 million contract on special education.
She caught the ire of Tennessee lawmakers for approving a $2.5 million no-bid contract with Florida-based ClassWallet, using Career Ladder funds for teacher salaries, to run the Education Savings Account program.
Thus, for the Heritage Foundation purpose of advising school board members, it appears that Schwinn is best positioned to advise on directing big money to family and friends, particularly via unvetted channels, and getting away with as much for years without facing any formal charges before finally scooting to the exit.
One other Heritage Foundation school board trainer is none other than Louisiana state superintendent Cade Brumley:
When it comes to the Heritage Foundation goals, it seems that these two criteria as listed above are what could make Brumley’s influence over school board members useful:
As for “overhauling” social studies standards, one questionable move that Brumley has made of late is to allow the controversial, right-hammering, fact-altering Prager University (that is not a university at all and goes by the cooler, catchier version, PragerU) as alternative, free (?) curriculum in Louisiana classrooms.
I wrote about PragerU in this July 2024 post. A sampling:
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On June 2, 2024, Nola.com published this staff editorial on Brumley’s decision to allow PragerU’s at best, slanted, at worst, intentionally inaccurate, content into Louisiana schools:
Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley points proudly to the state’s “new, rigorous social studies standards that teach students about American exceptionalism and our quest for a more perfect union.”
We worry, though, that Brumley’s embrace of a controversial producer of educational content, including videos, falls short of supporting those standards. And we share critics’ concerns that some of the ideas promoted in PragerU’s videos not only mislead but sow ideological divisions over how to interpret our nation’s complicated past.
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We share concerns that have been widely raised by education experts about the content of some of PragerU’s offerings. The organization, for example, has produced videos that question whether only a tiny fraction of Muslims support terrorism and raise doubts about the motives of Black Lives Matter protesters, and that sometimes use right-wing firebrands such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as narrators and attack liberal causes such as gender-affirming care for transgender youth, climate change, the Democratic Party and teachers unions.
In one widely quoted PragerU Kids video for students in grades 3-5, an animated Christopher Columbus tells two time-traveling children “being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” Another portrays abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved, defending the Founding Fathers’ actions when they allowed slavery to continue in the new country.
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This all comes as the country is engaged in an immensely important debate over how to teach students the United States’ full history — including its many triumphs but also the times it has fallen short of its lofty ideals, learned from those experiences and set itself on a better course.
We understand that these are nuanced topics to cover.
That’s why we firmly believe they should be framed in our public schools by educators — not ideologues pushing their own agendas.
And there is the Brumley appeal to Heritage Foundation influence on school board members: A willingness to partner with idealogues at the expense of sound, factual content.
And, of course, vouchers, vouchers, vouchers. Brumly wants to expand school vouchers in Louisiana. From the February 4, 2024, Nola.com:
Brumley, who was recently reappointed as state education chief, wants to allow more kids to attend private school at taxpayer expense. …
The state board of education tacitly endorsed Brumley’s agenda when it voted unanimously this month to retain him as state superintendent of education, the role he’s held since 2020. State Republicans, who control the Legislature, share his desire to expand school choice. And Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office this month, has enlisted Brumley to help craft a forthcoming package of education proposals.
“I am very sincere when I say I’m excited about the opportunity right now in our state,” Brumley said in a recent interview. “Because I think if you look at the governor’s office, the legislature, the state board, our agency — there’s a ton of alignment around key areas.”
One of Brumley’s top priorities is to help families choose the schools they want — even if it means opting out of the public system.
“I just have a fundamental belief that anything we can do to further empower the family to make a choice that’s best for them,” he said, “we should do.”
Louisiana’s long-running voucher program gives families state aid to help pay for private school. However, only lower-income parents whose children attend struggling public schools can apply. As a result, just 1% of students participate in one of the state’s existing voucher programs.
Now, like their Republican counterparts in a growing number of states, Louisiana lawmakers are pushing a far more expansive program called education savings accounts, or ESAs. Unlike vouchers, ESAs let eligible families decide whether to spend their state stipend on private school tuition, tutoring, online learning, or homeschool expenses. Some lawmakers want to offer the subsidy to all families — even well-off parents who can afford tuition.
On May 30, 2024, the Louisiana legislature passed LA GATOR universal school voucher program. On June 19, 2024, Landry signed the bill into law.
A universal school voucher program allows even the wealthirst families to receive some money toward having their children attend private schools. This situation presents a real opportunity for private schools to push parents into seeking state money as a prerequisite to seeking any financial support from the school.
Universal school voucher programs also tend to cater most to those already attending private schools, as the January 31, 2024, ProPublica reports:
For decades, Republicans have pushed, with mixed success, for school voucher programs in the name of parental choice and encouraging free-market competition among schools. But in just the past couple of years, vouchers have expanded to become available to most or all children in 10 states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. The expansion has been spurred by growing Republican dominance in many state capitals, U.S. Supreme Court rulings loosening restrictions on taxpayer funding for religious schools, and parental frustration with progressive curricula and with public school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the expanded programs are experiencing high demand, which voucher advocates are taking as affirmation of their argument: that families would greatly prefer to send their children to private schools, if only they could afford them.
But much of the demand for the expanded voucher programs is in fact coming from families, many quite affluent, whose children were already attending private schools. In Arizona, the first state to allow any family to receive public funding for private schools or homeschooling, the majority of families applying for the money, about $7,000 per student, were not recently enrolled in public school. In Florida, only 13% of the 123,000 students added to the state’s expanded school-choice program had switched from public school.
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At Holy Family School near Youngstown (Ohio), the directive arrived a few days later, on Aug. 3 (2023). “As you are aware, ALL students attending Holy Family School will be eligible for the EdChoice Scholarship. We are requesting that all families register their child/ren for this scholarship as soon as possible,” wrote the school’s leadership. And then it added in bold: “It is imperative that you register for EdChoice for each of your students. We are waiting to send invoices until your EdChoice Scholarship has been awarded.”
In an interview at the school, Holy Family principal Laura Parise said the push to apply for EdChoice had succeeded. “One hundred percent of our students are on it,” she said. “We made it that way — we made our families fill out the form, and we’re going from there.”
Then comes the universal school voucher price tag. In the case of Louisiana, the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR) projects an annual cost of $520M for the state’s universal school voucher program.
In a piece with the URL of “budget meltdown,” in July 2024, ProPublica writes of Arizona’s “$1.4B budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending.”
I wonder what Brumley will advise school board members on the damning, universal school voucher fiscal front.
Perhaps he will draw upon his nonexperience as a school board member and simply employ an ideological-and-misleading PragerU video to smooth over such state budget obliterations.
The Heritage Foundation wants to jam America, including its school system, into an ideological mold that it is proud to note has been in the works since Ronald Reagan was president.
To that end, the Heritage Foundation very much realizes the need to embed its ideologues into the most baseic levels of society, local school board members certainly included.
Fortunately, one can judge an organization by the company it keeps.
The Heritage Foundation want school board members to submit to “training” by the likes of Tiffany Justice, Penny Schwinn, and Cade Brumley.
Since this is truly America, with its free flow of reporting and corresponding ability for its citizenry to critically weigh the information presented before them, one can even glean a robust sense of the Heritage Foundation’s smothering aims, if from nothing else than examining the evidence presented by a veteran teacher blogger in a single post composed in her living room on a Sunday afternoon.
