Project 2025 and Education

Watch out!

Project 2025, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and forty-five other pseudo-intellectual terrorist organizations, seeks to prepare the next Republican administration to conduct a dramatic house cleaning of American government and to install a religious, authoritarian regime under the direction of the Heritage Foundation. The tragedy of Project 2025 is to be conducted in four acts. First, Heritage has compiled a policy manual for a new administration to follow. It’s called “Mandate for Leadership.” Second, they’ve created a database for people willing to execute their plan. Heritage calls it a “Conservative Linked In.” It will be to the executive branch of the federal government what the Federalist Society has been to the judiciary, that is, a curator of the most extreme ideologues willing to do Heritage’s bidding. Third, there is a Presidential Administration Academy. Think of this act as a show and tell for inexperienced, wonkless executive branch aspirants who want to learn how to do their jobs online. Finally, the fourth act is a playbook that converts the policy manual to an implementation plan.

Why is all this necessary?

Heritage gives us an answer but it makes no sense. Heritage says Project 2025 is necessary to address the “immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington….” The last I checked; Washington is stalemated by divided rule. Oppression by one party, except by the Supreme Court, doesn’t exist.

Heritage complains that Republican efforts to strangle government by starving it of resources haven’t worked. Heritage now plans to commandeer the resources of government to achieve their goals and in doing so they propose to create a vacuum in the leadership and staffing of federal agencies that only Heritage can fill. If Heritage is successful, expect more leaders who wish to undermine the mission of the agency they lead, like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Also expect the elevation of elected officials who are just plain bonkers, like a Marjorie Taylor Green. Maybe Green becomes Secretary of Commerce or Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in a Heritage-infused Trump administration?

Project 2025’s plan for education.

The plan’s goal is to destroy efforts at the federal level to support and manage public education in the states by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and diverting state and local taxpayer funds from public schools to private academies through extensive reliance on vouchers.

The darlings of conservative culture warriors, “Critical Race Theory” and “fear of transgendered and non-binary children” are cited as justifications to rev up the base. Both are specifically mentioned as justifications. Arizona’s universal voucher system, which is open to families of all income levels, is touted to play to both the religious right and the bougie suburbanites who want everyone else to pay for their kids to go to private schools. Finally, Heritage relies on the clearly debunked justification that “money doesn’t matter” in education to play to the basest instincts of their followers.

Money Doesn’t Matter

The claim that money doesn’t matter strains credulity but those opposing public education continually can raise it because factors outside of school prevent particular children from fully benefitting from more resources and, children living in poverty require higher cost interventions than well-off suburban children. It’s hard to control for these confounding factors without studies that are very sophisticated and without data sets large enough to include children in all circumstances. The Heritage Project 2025 paper on education ignores these sophisticated studies in making their justifications.

The proposition that money doesn’t matter in education, however, is ridiculous on its face. Think of it. Who would believe that giving a child more and better access to a helpful adult makes no difference? That a colorful, illustrated, and newer book would not better hold the interest of a middle schooler than a black and white, out-of-date book that Suzy’s little brother spit up on last year.

As we now know through school funding litigation in the last few years, sub-standard buildings with poor lighting, mold, asbestos, and inadequate heating and cooling systems can cause lifelong problems with hypertension and related illnesses. All of these building problems require resources to fix.

In fact, a comprehensive National Bureau of Economic Research study by Professor C. Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy completely debunked the claim that money doesn’t matter. His team re-analyzed all thirty-one prior studies on the subject and concluded that when properly considered “a policy that increases per-pupil spending for four years will improve test scores and/or educational attainment over 90 percent of the time.” Jackson’s team refuted the 1966 Coleman study that the Heritage paper seeks to bring back from the dead.

“Coleman’s analysis was not only wrong but generated misunderstandings that remain sadly pervasive today,” wrote Stanford economics professor Caroline Hoxby in a 2016 retrospective about Coleman. Hoxby, by the way, was one of the economists called by the state to testify that poor communities have a “lower demand” for education in our Claremont trial.  Coleman’s  “misunderstandings” fed a racist narrative that “slum kids” cannot learn.

Justice Thurgood Marshall confronted the claim that money doesn’t matter in the 1973 San Antonio Schools case that rejected education as a fundamental constitutional right. Marshall pointed out the obvious: “Likewise, it is difficult to believe that, if the children of Texas had a free choice, they would choose to be educated in districts with fewer resources, and hence with more antiquated [physical] plants, less experienced teachers, and a less diversified curriculum.” He noted, “if financing variations are so insignificant to educational quality, it is difficult to understand why a number of our country's wealthiest school districts, which have no legal obligation to argue in support of the constitutionality of the Texas legislation, have nevertheless zealously pursued its cause before this Court.”

Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. and a slim majority of the US Supreme Court, however, bought the argument and the Heritage Foundation is now re-packaging it to justify slaughtering public education in America.

Vouchers

Vouchers (Heritage calls them Education Savings Accounts or ESAs) divert public funds to private schools. The origin story for vouchers is not pretty. They began as a means to reimburse parents who paid private academy tuitions and closed public schools to prevent desegregation as ordered by the US Supreme Court in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board. Prince Edward County  (VA) provides the most well known example of school closings to stymie desegregation.  The County was represented in its legal efforts by Justice Powell’s law firm, Hunton and Williams.

Proponents of school vouchers claim their goal is simply to encourage parental choice. What really happens, however, is that voucher money is used to fund religious education or to reduce the cost of private schools for families with the resources to pay tuition in the first place. Many of the families who take advantage of vouchers already had their kids in private schools before the vouchers helped defray the cost.

The Arizona experience touted by Heritage has been studied by the Brookings Institute who found that there is a straight-line relationship between family wealth and use of vouchers. The 10 percent of families with the highest income in Arizona make the most use of voucher monies to defray the cost of private schools. The 10 percent lowest income families make the least use of vouchers. This is true, according to Brookings, whether you define the highest 10 percent by income, lowest incidence of poverty or educational attainment.

In NH, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut is the loudest proponent of vouchers (called Education Freedom Accounts or EFAs). Despite his vaunted background as an accountant and businessman, he appears to be the least able to predict the cost of vouchers. At the outset, Edelblut predicted vouchers would cost $300,000 a year. The program cost more than $8 million the first year, $15 million the second, and $25 million the third and most of those who utilize vouchers were already in private schools or engaged in homeschooling. Edelblut now claims the voucher program can’t be audited. No effort to reliably understand the educational impacts of vouchers has been undertaken in New Hampshire.

What happens if the US Department of Education is dismantled?

First there are the intangibles. Education loses its seat at the table and its important functions are either removed or spread across so many other agencies as to lose priority.

Second, the agencies to which Project 2025 hopes to send important functions are not fit for purpose. For example, Project 2025 would send the department’s careful supervision and funding of special education and related services to a bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services called the Administration for Community Living. Its mission is the “[a]dvancing independence and inclusion of older adults and people with disabilities. . .around the fundamental principle that older adults and people of all ages with disabilities should be able to live where they choose, with the people they choose, and with the ability to participate fully in their communities.” While this is a noble mission, it has little to do with overseeing the provision of a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment that is the bedrock principle of special education. If you care about special education services and the children who receive them, you should be very concerned about this potential switch.

Other functions of the department would likely go away. The Office of Civil Rights, for example, investigates allegations of gender bias and promulgates rules that require the fair treatment of those children who are non-binary or transgendered that the Project loves to hate.  No one should expect this office to continue.

There’s more of course, but hopefully you get the idea that Project 2025’s plans for the Department of Education are bad. The Project has made similar plans for most other federal agencies. Lots of problems ahead if Trump is elected and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 goes with him to the Whitehouse.