I am hoping that by now you've heard of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's "Presidential Transition Project," which not only involves a whole lot of familiar faces from the previous administration, but also has significant overlap with the now-adopted Republican party platform, which, as Kevin Kruse notes, isn't itself much of a platform.
This includes in education as Chalkbeat outlines, where the periodic calls for elimination of the federal Department of Education--Trump, for example, promised it in 2016--are renewed.
That is not new; as I noted in this 2017 post:
President Reagan proposed eliminating the department in 1982, and it went nowhere. Senator Dole promised to do so during the 1996 presidential campaign. There were proposals (most recently) in 2011, 2013 and 2015. In fact, it's happened so often, there's even a GAO report on it.
First, let's note again note that the executive branch only has so much power; anything that requires Congressional action is something that would of course require a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. Thus proposals like reworking Title I, as described by The Hill:
The proposals also aim to reorganize programs including Title I, which supports low-income schools, and have states take over their funding aspects within 10 years. Before states take the reins, the federal government would give them block grants for Title I, but would not make requirements on how the money is spent.
Or IDEA, as Peter Greene outlined in Forbes:
Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds, like Title I funding, should become a no-strings block grant to states. IDEA is supposed to cover 40% of states’ special education costs.
...is not something a second Trump administration could do unilaterally. The language around the "waste" of federal school lunch programs will run headlong into a Congress that knows that program not only is popular; it's a farm bill. That doesn't mean that they couldn't both try, and also significantly depress the work across agencies.
The language is right in line with the culture war declarations we have seen reverberating around the country. Again, from Forbes:
Burke argues that parental rights are treated as “second-tier,” and she would like to see them legislated into a “top-tier” position with rights like free speech and free exercise of religion. Every proposed rule should undergo strict scrutiny to make sure it doesn’t infringe on parental rights. Burke calls for a private right of action, so that parents who think institutions have violated their rights may sue. She recommends a federal law similar to those already passed in some states such as Florida and Oklahoma
Federal law should require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents, and no school staff should be allowed to address a student by anything other than the gender and name on their birth certificate without parental approval. However, if staff member objects, those parents do not have the right to insist their child be addressed by their chosen name or gender.
No mention here of students’ rights.
This is in line with the overall document, as The 19th notes:
Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors...
Project 2025 envisions a federal government that denies the existence of transgender people, undermines the rights of same-sex married couples and dismantles services for LGBTQ+ Americans wherever possible, primarily via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which the Heritage Foundation proposes renaming the Department of Life.
The plan calls for the newly named agency to take the official stance that families are made up of a married father and mother and children and to redirect federal funds to support a “biblically based” definition of family. It calls for replacing policies related to LGBTQ+ equity with those that “support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families” and would protect adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQ+ married couples. It states that children should be raised by their “biological” fathers and mothers because the “male-female dyad is essential to human nature.”
While NBC notes the irony of such a plank being the platform of a party headed by Trump, given his history, they call attention to the call to ban pornography isn't what it seems:
...while recent clashes around LGBTQ rights have revolved around removing books from the shelves or even, in one case, barring children from a public library entirely, the broad wording in the Project 2025 proposal could be read as a call for forcing teachers and librarians to register as sex offenders for merely stocking books that acknowledge that transgender people exist.
The danger here isn't only that this is incorporated into the platform of one of the two major parties of the United States; it is that this thinking and this policy making is being put forward as acceptable.
It isn't.
Be loud about that.
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