Like all American schools, Southwest Florida’s classrooms would feel the impact of Project 2025. (Image: First Focus on Children)
Sept. 3, 2024 by David Silverberg
If it came to pass that Donald Trump won the election and his administration implemented Project 2025’s educational proposals, how would Florida’s parents, teachers, students and school staff be affected?
Project 2025 is the sweeping, 887-page volume of very specific policy recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. It is a continuation of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership program that has been issued every four years since 1980.
This year Project 2025 includes recruitment of personnel, training for those people and a 180-day Playbook for immediate implementation should there be a change of administrations.
Donald Trump has disavowed any knowledge of, or familiarity with, Project 2025, although the Heritage Foundation organizers say that he implemented 67 percent of their recommendations in his first administration. Former Trump staffers have been heavily involved in Project 2025’s formulation, including Sen. James David “JD” Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate.
When it comes to education, the Project 2025 recommendation that has received the most attention is the disestablishment of the US Department of Education (ED).
The very first sentence of Project 2025’s education chapter states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
That proposal has alarmed parents, teachers and education experts. It has energized Trump’s opponents, whether Democrats, independents or traditional Republicans who value learning. It is the first thing that critics cite when they attack Project 2025’s education ideas.
“We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools!” Vice President Kamala Harris declared in her speech to the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 23, to intense and prolonged applause.
Trump, despite his disavowals of Project 2025, has doubled down on ending the department.
During a rambling X interview with Elon Musk on Aug. 13 he pledged to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” As recently as Friday, Aug. 30, he repeated his position at a Washington, DC conference held by Moms for Liberty—who also advocate eliminating the department.
Beyond the agency
Project 2025’s education recommendations go well beyond just ending the department.
They are contained in Chapter 11 (page 319), a sweeping chapter of 44 pages including citations, that covers a wide variety of education-related policies and proposals. It appears under the byline of Lindsey Burke, the Heritage foundation’s director of the Center for Education Policy. She has worked at the Heritage Foundation for over 16 years.
Project 2025 gathers up all the ideas that have been circulating in conservative circles, some of very long standing, and then puts them into tangible, concrete recommendations for action.
Among these ideas are many that are already in force in Florida, including expanding non-public school alternatives like charter schools, providing parents with vouchers to use in non-public schools, lowering accreditation requirements for non-public schools, passing legislation to prevent the teaching of critical race theory, and passing a “Parents Bill of Rights” that has led to practices such as book bans.
All of these would have significant consequences if implemented nationally.
But eliminating the Department of Education is Project 2025’s big idea, its headline and the one getting the most attention.
Looking ahead at the consequences of such an action is necessarily speculative, of course. But some results can be imagined—and the Collier County, Fla., public school district provides a microcosm that can give a sense of the impact at the grassroots level.
A quick history: the Department of Education
Republicans have sought termination of the current Department of Education ever since it came into being in 1980, when it was split off from the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
According to the department’s official history, a Department of Education was first created in 1867 to collect data about the nation’s schools. It had a budget of $15,000 and four employees. This happened in the midst of Reconstruction and the first wave of education for freed people and their children.
The next year the department was demoted to an Office of Education because of concerns that as a Cabinet department it would exert too much control over local schools.
However, starting in the 1950s public interest in education policy began to rise again along with the civil rights movement and the effort to end segregation. Segregated black schools in the South were woefully inadequate, underfunded, and discriminatory and along with the national effort to end segregation the nation made an effort to raise the general level of education for all students regardless of race.
In 1980, backed by the National Education Association, Congress passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed, the Department of Education Organization Act, making it a stand-alone Cabinet department again.
Project 2025 has a less benign view of the department’s creation. In its version, advocates of expanded education funding didn’t like the existing scattershot approach to education because “a single, captive agency would allow them to promote their agenda more effectively across Administrations. Eventually, the National Education Association made a deal and backed the right presidential candidate— Jimmy Carter—who successfully lobbied for and delivered the Cabinet-level agency.”
(Today, Project 2025 recommends rescinding the National Education Association’s congressional charter because it views it as “a demonstrably radical special interest group that overwhelmingly supports left-of-center policies and policymakers.”)
Ever since its establishment, Republicans have made ED a target and pledged to eliminate it. President Ronald Reagan, who took office immediately after Carter, was bent on ending it but the person he tapped to do the deed, Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, instead formed a commission that issued a report, A Nation at Risk, proposing reforms. Reagan liked the report so much he claimed it as his own and the department was saved, changing its focus to raising the quality of public education.
Ever since then abolishing the Department of Education has become part of the Republican mantra, an essential article of faith about which nothing has been done in actuality.
In 2016, during a campaign speech in—of course, Florida—then-candidate Donald Trump said “there is so much waste” at the department that he planned to cut it down to “shreds.”
When he became president he appointed Betsy DeVos to be secretary of the despised agency. Whatever else she did as secretary, she did not abolish the department—and as president, neither did he.
And so it stands today, a target of Project 2025.
Breaking the big bank
The US Department of Education has been described as “a big bank with a small policy shop attached.”
It’s an apt description. For all the rhetoric and misconceptions to the contrary, ED’s primary role is administering grants and financial aid to school systems and students around the country. While it tries to maintain and raise academic standards and eliminate educational inequities in school systems, it largely does this through the finances it administers.
Project 2025 would end the federal role in supporting education financially.
“To the extent that federal taxpayer dollars are used to fund education programs, those funds should be block granted to states without strings, eliminating the need for many federal and state bureaucrats,” it states. “Eventually, policymaking and funding should take place at the state and local level, closest to the affected families.”
Currently, federal funding can be a big boost to the school districts that receive it.
Collier County, Fla., illustrates this. In its tentative 2024-25 budget released on July 31, the Collier County School District estimated it would receive $7,243,150 in direct federal funding. Not all of this will come from ED; other federal agencies like the Department of Agriculture, which administers nutritional programs, also provide funding. However, it is a good indicator of the kind of federal support that primary and secondary school districts receive.
That’s not the only federal money Collier County receives. It also receives federal money passed on through state agencies and that’s much greater: $79,023,516. (Impressive as these figures might be, the vast majority of the district’s funding comes from local taxation: over $842 million.)
The funding goes for everything from salaries, to supplies, to services to furniture and more.
Breakdown of special, non-tax, revenues and expenditures for Collier County Public Schools. (CCPS)
Below, where the money goes: Collier County grant recipients, amounts and officials overseeing the programs for the 2024-25 budget year. This includes grants from non-government, non-profit and philanthropic sources. (CCPS)
(Perhaps surprisingly, the federal Department has no local influence on curricula, which is entirely formulated at the local level.)
So assuming that Project 2025 was implemented as proposed and ED was terminated, the very first thing that would happen in Collier County is the school system would stand to lose up to $86 million in federal funding, whether directly or through the state.
It might make that money back, if the state—which would now have total control over all non-local educational funding—decided to be generous or at least maintain current funding levels.
The omens for this, however, are not favorable because DeSantis, i.e., the state, has a propensity and a preference for cutting appropriations for educational institutions.
A glaring illustration of this occurred in the 2025 state budget when DeSantis vetoed $98 million in higher education funding. Florida Gulf Coast University, the local institution of higher learning, had $16.3 million excised from appropriations the legislature had otherwise approved.
Collier County public schools were not spared either: $2 million in approved appropriations were cut from its pilot education program for pre-kindergarten children.
Collier lost 1,000 seats as a result of the pandemic and needed to ready young children from all backgrounds for kindergarten. The money would have been used for 10 new modular pre-kindergarten classrooms and modification of existing facilities so that 160 more 3 and 4 year olds and their parents could participate in school programs near their homes and elementary schools. Educators hoped it would establish strong bonds between the families and schools and prepare the children to enter the classroom. It would also train parents—from very diverse backgrounds, languages and cultures—to be school-ready, teach their children early literacy and prepare the children for schoolrooms.
The fact that the budget request was made by no less a personage than state Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R-28-Naples), president of the Florida Senate, made no difference to DeSantis at all.
So on a practical level, terminating the Department of Education would at the very least inject great uncertainty into Collier County public schools’ cash flow. At worst it could result in a serious loss of revenue that would affect all aspects of school operations, resulting in a potentially significant reduction of capability and resources that would negatively affect students, teachers and staff. Furthermore, it would do this in a county that is rapidly growing and needs new school facilities and resources to handle the influx.
If Project 2025 were implemented these kinds of losses would apply across the country as all school districts lost federal funding.
Project 2025’s recommendation that money be provided to states “without strings” is also dangerous. The reason there are “strings” on federal money now is to ensure that the funds are used for their intended purpose and not misappropriated or diverted into private pockets. Project 2025 hates the “many federal and state bureaucrats” currently administering and overseeing federal education funds. However, the reason they’re there is to ensure that the money is spent properly. Without them there would be no oversight, regulation or enforcement.
Florida has already seen the fruits of this. The DeSantis “war on woke” in academia has also been a gold rush for favored politicians taking over academic positions for ideological reasons.
Nowhere was this clearer than at the state’s University of Florida, where former senator Ben Sasse, an outspoken conservative Republican, was appointed president in February 2023. Not only was he paid a million dollars in salary but he ballooned his office’s spending on favored consultants and provided high-priced remote positions for former staffers and Republican officials. When all this emerged, Sasse resigned and people he appointed were terminated.
Under Project 2025’s proposals, the removal of “strings” on federal funding would no doubt open the floodgates for a season of unrestrained corruption and turn ivory towers into feeding troughs.
Analysis: Going back?
More broadly than just money, Project 2025’s measures would subvert the entire educational effort of the past 70 years to make American quality education more expansive, equitable and accessible to everyone. After all, it was an educational case, Brown vs. Board of Education that ended legal segregation in the first place.
Eliminating the department “would shutter thousands of public schools, end supports for low-income students, divert taxpayer funds to the private education of wealthy students and, ultimately, destabilize public education altogether,” argues Lily Klam, director of education policy at the First Focus on Children advocacy group.
The reason that the federal government intervened in education in the first place was because the racial and economic disparities among different school systems, especially in the segregated South, were so great that only the federal government was capable of correcting them. Then, starting in the Reagan administration, it sought to improve public education’s quality and outcomes.
These have been the thrust of federal efforts, as embodied in the Department of Education, since its founding. It is premised on the idea that a uniformly educated, literate, thinking population benefits the nation, is essential for democracy, and makes the country stronger.
This is the notion that Project 2025 is challenging. Project 2025—and the whole anti-public education movement—whether consciously or not, would bring back the past disparities in education and make education uneven and uncertain. By undermining public education and putting the states entirely in charge, it would revive past abuses and disparities.
Ultimately, wrecking public education, as Project 2025 seeks, would lead, not just to racial inequalities, but to socio-economic and political ones as well. While the entire movement of American education since independence has been to make Americans more prosperous, educated and equal as citizens, Project 2025 would make them less prosperous, less educated and less equal. It would ultimately create an undemocratic class of literate masters ruling ignorant serfs.
When it comes to education, this is the “again” in the slogan “make America great again.”
And preventing this outcome is the “back” in the slogan “we won’t go back.”
This article is one of a series looking at the impact of Project 2025 on Southwest Florida and the nation. Others are:
Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters
Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg
Jessica Cosden, a teacher and Cape Coral councilmember, teaches a Cape Coral class in 2017. (Photo: Author’s collection)