Project 2025 Wants To End Public Education As We Know It

Forn the Bucks County Beacon, I took a dive into the education chapter of Heritage Foundation’s 900 page blueprint for the next conservative President— Project 2025. The chapter was written by Lindsey Burkje, Heritage’s education honcho.

Burke unloads the heart of Heritage’s plan for education in the second paragraph:

Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.

Burke cites Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” one of several places that Friedman laid out his ideas about how education should be delivered. Friedman’s idea was, simply, vouchers. The government would have no role except perhaps to certify a certain minimum level of quality among providers. Friedman was certain that the free market could fix everything (including racial issues—no need for mandated desegregation, because the free market would fix it). The government would hand over a stack of taxpayer dollars to parents who would then spend these at the vendor of their choosing (Friedman did not seem to anticipate the effects on a market in which private schools were picky about who they did or did not admit), be they non-profit, for-profit, religious, or secular.

So in broad introductory terms, Burke calls for federal spending on education to be turned to block-grants given to states without “strings” (aka “regulations”). Meanwhile, she calls for a big crackdown on the Higher Ed establishment “captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.”

Burke opens with her history of the department of education and its growth into “a single captive agency” that would allow so-called “special interest groups like the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the higher education lobby” to expand federal spending as Congress “continued to layer on dozens of new laws and programs” offered as “solutions” (her scare quotes). 

Bolstered by an ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse, the infrastructure that supports America’s costly federal intervention in education from early childhood through graduate school has entrenched itself.

She’s leading to the same idea that Heritage has pushed for decades—the Department of Education should be abolished.

The priorities

Burke calls for the new administration to follow seven core principles.

– More “education freedom,” aka vouchers and a privatized system, including tax credit scholarships, which are a type of voucher that allows the wealthy to fund private schools in lieu of paying taxes.

– Choice for all “federal” children, meaning students in DC, military children, and members of sovereign tribes.

– State and local control, facilitated by turning all federal funds into unregulated block grants.

– Treating taxpayers like investors in federal college student aid. They should get ROI on those loans (and the loans should be repaid).

– Protect the loan portfolio from predatory politicians. Which means, I think, Democrats made us look bad on the whole loan repayment thing, so make sure that doesn’t happen again.

– Safeguard civil rights. Don’t get excited—the rest of the explanation says “based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

– Stop executive overreach. Enough of these. Don’t let agencies set policies, and no more of those executive orders.

Read the full article for more specifics in this vision for the future.