Project 2025: The Far-Right’s Attack on Educational Opportunity for ALL

We here in CB are fortunate to have such outstanding neighborhood schools. The majority of Americans love our public schools, our teachers, and the promise that ALL kids will learn and thrive because back in the day, we set up a system of universal education that now welcomes every single child, no matter your race, gender, zip code, or religion.

Yet the far-right’s Project 2025 education agenda puts this mission at grave risk with proposals that will fundamentally change how (and if) students will receive an education, violating our American democratic promise of equal access and opportunity to education.

Here’s a look at the backward and dangerous ideas of Project 2025:

1. Close the Department of Education

Project 2025 proposes to close the Department of Education (DOE) that provides critical funding and oversight for our public schools:

• Through funding programs like Title 1, the DOE works to ensure, that all students, regardless of their background, the state they live in, or their circumstances, have access to a quality education. But Project 2025 vows to dismantle Title 1 within a decade. This will harm many CB students who depend on Title 1 support services in reading, writing, and math. These services advance learning and improve academic outcome, and just as important, build positive self-esteem in young learners.

• The DOE oversees and implements special education legislation (IDEA) that ensures the inclusion and success of students with special needs. If your child has an IEP, IDEA ensures that your child receives the education they need and deserve. By moving oversight and funding to the states, whether they stand in support of vulnerable kids or solely the bottom line, Project 2025 puts these assurances at risk.

• The DOE ensures that ALL states fulfill their obligation to ALL students, preventing any from cheating kids out of the opportunity to learn and fulfill their potential. Project 2025 shifts responsibility for all educational policy to individual states with no federal oversight or guidance.

• Within the DOE is The Office of Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws and investigating schools accused of engaging in discrimination. Project 2025 proposes to move it under the Department of Justice and add limitations, which would make it harder (or impossible) to protect against discrimination in school.

2. End funding for early childhood education & support

Project 2025 proposes to eradicate Head Start, a federal program that provides early childhood education, health, and nutrition services to low-income children from birth to age 5. Children who attend Head Start programs show significantly better language skills, cognitive development, and social-emotional regulation,  and are more likely to graduate from high school.

 3. Move taxpayer dollars away from public education to pay for private and religious schools, so-called “school choice”

Using taxpayer money to fund private schools will create a stratified education system that the public will pay for but cannot asses, influence, or hold accountable. It will benefit wealthy families who are already affording exorbitant tuition, unregulated religious schools, and profit-seeking corporations. It will harm marginalized kids, rural kids, kids with special needs, poor kids, LGBTQ kids, property values, our sense of community, and all our children.

Nobody wants a system where corporations run schools without any oversight, concealing their financials, according to whatever standards they want to implement, starving our public schools of resources. You’ll get a choice, all right: of low-quality, corporate chicanery.

4. Eliminate protections for LGBTQ kids in school

Last April, the Biden-Harris administration expanded protections against sex discrimination in schools (Title IX) to include sexual orientation and gender identity. These new protections will allow students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. Project 2025 seeks to remove these protections, ban transgender students from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, and require teachers to misgender transgender students, which will make schools and classrooms less safe, less equitable, and less inclusive, likely increasing the risk of bullying and harassment in school.

5. Censor curricula

Project 2025 calls for removing anti-racist and tolerance-teaching content from school curricula, which would limit students' exposure to diverse perspectives and education on social justice. We are a diverse nation and our children have many backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, religions, etc. They ALL need to feel that their experience matters, that America is welcoming nation, a melting pot of the best of the best, where if you have a good idea and work hard, you will rise up and succeed. That’s the American vision, and we support it in our schools. 

Further, Project 2025’s foreword describes pornography as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology” and argues that it “should be outlawed” and people who “distribute it should be imprisoned.” (Center for American Progress) Here the architects of Project 2025 have conflated actual pornography (which does not rest on our library shelves) with any book that speaks about transgender issues. While pornography and schools have nothing to do with one another, instigators have used the allegation of pornography to frighten parents, threaten librarians and teachers, and ban thoughtful, important, appropriate books from schools and libraries. This false and fear-based rhetoric leads inexorably to widespread censorship of books, which is un-democratic, and to the isolation and imposed ignorance of any student who would like to know more about this topic. Kids must find answers to their questions.

6. Cut vital school meals that feed hungry children

Project 2025 “rejects efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program,” effectively banning universal free school meals for students (Center for American Progress). We condemn the overt cruelty that would motivate anyone to force kids to go hungry. Time and again, researchers prove that hungry kids cannot learn—starving them harms them in the present and for the rest of their lives as they fall further and further behind. No child can choose which family to be born into. Hunger is never a child’s fault.

Project 2025 is anti-democratic. It runs contrary to the American promise of each and every individual’s right to equal educational opportunity.

Every proposal here targets poor kids, urban kids, rural kids, special needs kids, LGBTQ kids. But sadly this is nothing new. We’ve seen divisive, greedy power-play plans like this before—ones that advantage and advance one group above all others. We’ve seen the unjust and anti-American harm that extremism can do here, and we rose up and defeated it.

Policies designed to lift one group up while punching down every other group are immoral, backwards, and wrong. Education is not a zero-sum game. We are all better of when we are all better off.

Project 2025 stems from a narrow and exclusionary vision of a country that does not exist, and thus a policy that, through force and division, attempts to create it.

In a pluralistic society, ALL families are welcome in our schools: all faith traditions, all races, all ethnicities, all abilities, and all identities of every kind. Our schools do not choose which kids are more welcome than others; they welcome them all, and they strive to provide equal opportunity to them all.

Yet Project 2025 puts all of that at risk by explicitly enshrining supremacist values into policy. If successful, centuries of public-school progress and nationally held values such as equal opportunity for all, anti-discrimination protections, public accountability, church-state separation, and checks and balances will be wiped out.