Jane Cutter is a contributor to Socialist Reconstruction and Revolutionary Education.
This article is part of a Liberation News series exploring the different facets of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan assembled by leading figures of the right wing elite laying out how a future Trump administration would shred the civil and economic rights won in the 1930s and 60s. Read the series’s inaugural article for an overview of the project and its significance.
Is there a crisis in U.S. education today? Even though a majority of parents report they are satisfied with their children’s schools, at the same time, overall perceptions of the education system are not so favorable. Some 60% of students are trying to learn in overcrowded classrooms while about half of all school buildings are in need of major renovations. The Heritage Foundation-sponsored far-right Project 2025 document program would eviscerate important changes made in education dating back to the 1960’s War on Poverty and the Civil Rights movement. Project 2025’s education program is racist and explicitly anti-transgender and would further the process of privatizing public education through charter schools and voucher programs.
Project 2025: Eliminate the Department of Education, give money to states
The top goal of Project 2025 vis-a-vis education is to eliminate the Department of Education. Why does this matter? The mission of the DOE includes protecting equal access to education, allocating federal funds and monitoring their use, and enforcing federal laws prohibiting discrimination in programs that receive federal funds.
As imperfect as it may be, getting rid of the DOE will take away an important resource for students and families to fight discrimination. Project 2025 prioritizes giving federal education monies directly to states or districts as block grants, allowing these bodies to decide how to spend the money. There is a reason why the federal government has oversight of state educational spending: states were upholding Jim Crow segregation of schools. This was so much the case that “states’ rights” is recognized as a racist dog whistle for segregation. Title IX addresses sex discrimination in federally funded programs, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act addresses the right of children with disabilities to access education.
Flowing from this fundamentally racist and discriminatory foundation are literally pages of very specific policy and legislative priorities, ranging from overturning student loan debt forgiveness programs, to defining gender as being that which is listed on a student’s birth certificate and prohibiting the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” and implementation of restorative justice discipline programs.
A huge part of Project 2025’s educational program centers on the privatization of education via “school choice” meaning charter schools and vouchers to offset private school tuition. Charters are ostensibly public schools, some run by for-profit companies, that are not held accountable to the same rules as other public schools. Voucher programs take funding from public schools to subsidize private school families: vouchers generally do not cover the full cost of private school tuition.
Education under capitalism
Education under capitalism is a contested space. In a technologically advanced society, the system needs its workers to be educated. Some workers need college degrees to be able to create profits for the bosses through their labor, but all jobs call for some degree of literacy, math, tech and social skills. Capitalists want the education system to produce the workers that they need at as low a cost to them as possible. The education system also “sorts” the future workers and diverts the ones capitalists consider “surplus” in a racist process called “the school-to-prison pipeline.”
This vision of education as a factory to produce workers to meet the needs of bosses contrasts with the liberatory educational vision of socialists in which education is key to empowerment. There is a reason that the slave-holding class made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to read, and that the creation of schools for the newly freed people of the South was a feature of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Education means you can learn about things outside of your own geographical locale and historical moment. Education transmits generations of scientific investigation, laying the foundation for critical evaluation and further investigation.
If education is in crisis today, socialists say, it’s because this liberatory vision has been shackled by capitalism itself. But right-wing educational reformers argue that education as liberation has gone “too far” and needs to get back to teaching the “basics” while an elite few get advanced training and troublemakers are siphoned off via “no excuses” discipline.
Project 2025 uses standardized testing data to build the case for the existence of this crisis.Testing-based reform has been the vogue among politicians, both Democrat and Republican, notably starting with George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind.” The Obama administration rebranded this “Race to the Top.” Both evaluated schools’ success based on testing results. “Failing” schools were “re-organized,” and non-union charter schools promoted.
However, repression breeds resistance. More than a decade of neoliberal reform led to a resurgence of teacher-labor militancy with a series of statewide general education strikes starting in West Virginia in 2018 and a movement against excessive, high-stakes standardized testing by teachers, parents and students.
The Trump administration’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education put the privatization trend on steroids and also fueled the fightback.
COVID-19 school closures and masking and vaccine controversies were seized on by the extreme right. The nationwide uprising against racism following the police murder of George Floyd led to local adoption of anti-racist education curricula and restorative justice discipline initiatives intended to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. In the aftermath of the virulently anti-transgender Trump administration, the Biden administration interpreted Title IX to protect the rights of trans students from discrimination at school. Again the right used its opposition to these changes as points of bigoted agitation among their base.
This is the context needed to see the Project 2025 education agenda for what it is: a plan to privatize and resegregate schools and close the door on any progressive reforms.
While the Democrats are pushing opposition to Project 2025 to win votes, they have fully backed testing-based, pro-charter “reforms.” Even with a former teacher, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, running for Vice President, the Democrats are not even laying out a comprehensive vision for progressive education reform. Kamala Harris as California Attorney General personally played a key role in facilitating the school-to-prison pipeline. Project 2025 and the far right can’t be effectively fought by the Democrats who have gone along with the core education policies represented in the Project 2025 program.
This reactionary program can only be defeated on the basis of a program that acknowledges the increasing pain of living under this system and calls for fundamental change. This will prevent far-right forces from establishing a monopoly over anti-establishment politics.
What’s a socialist program for education?
Schooling does not exist in a vacuum. A foundational reorganization of the economy, taking over the richest corporations and diverting the massive military budget to meet human needs, will mean that students arrive healthy and well-nourished to school having slept soundly in safe, secure housing. Our teachers and other school staff will no longer need to work a second job just to pay the rent when rents are capped at 10% of income.
Fully funding education will mean that class sizes can be drastically reduced — an intervention that has been proven by research to improve student learning especially for poor and nationally oppressed students. Our crumbling school buildings can be renovated or replaced to become beautiful palaces of learning.
Racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ school curricula and policies would be replaced with a liberatory pedagogy that inculcates self-determination and mutual respect.
Free access to higher education would also be recognized as a right. Student debt must be erased. Likewise all children and families should have access to free, high-quality pre-school and childcare, which has been shown to play a critical role in supporting healthy child development. The basic tenet of current special education legislation — that all children, with and without disabilities, have a right to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment — would become a reality.
Photo: Then-President Donald Trump and then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos visit a school in Florida. Credit: Flickr/Trump White House Archived (public domain)
