Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.
As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.
Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.
Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.
Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education.
As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries.
We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.
The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.
The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”
Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.
What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.
Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.
Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.
Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”
In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.
Indiana was one of those states.
Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.
As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.
In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.
Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes.
In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”
We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.
It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)
Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”
Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…
The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us. They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.
The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”
While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.
Meow…
This past week I had lunch with a former longtime public educator. She quit teaching! Why? She resigned because parents demanded to see all of her educational curriculum so that they might expose her for using “woke” materials. She also has a trans teen which made her vulnerable. The destruction efforts include more than vying for dollars. They also want to intimidate teachers and control the curriculum.
If Trump is elected and cancels the Dept of Ed, the conservative states will be able to destroy public education. Or, at least the Koch and ALEC-controlled states will follow the AZ leader down that rabbit hole. It’s the same rabbit hole that Kansas went down years ago and eventually bankrupted the state. More people will vote with their feet.
The most important evidence was found above when Sheila wrote, “Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes.”
Isn’t that the bottom line?
The thesis was that vouchers and “funding follows the student” would lower the cost of education and improve outcomes—or at least that was the sales pitch.
“Charter schools run by private companies competing in a marketplace would be less expensive and outperform public schools.” That was another sales pitch.
“If education competed in a market versus the non-competitive public realm, educational outcomes would improve overall.”
Politicians have sold all the above theories because donors believed them to be true. Instead, we haven’t witnessed any improvement in educational outcomes, and the costs keep increasing. Imagine that!
The billionaires and their politicians almost always back up their theories by throwing more money at the problem. Sometimes, more than once.
We all know that the real motive is eliminating teacher unions. But the fact is, the teacher unions have already captured the bureaucracies of the oligarchs.
The solution to what ails public schools, healthcare, the military, and banks will be fixed when they all become captured in the public realm so we can remove the profit motive.
Education needs to be completely modeled after Scandinavian or Chinese countries, which always achieve stellar results. Einstein also had a few thoughts about eliminating the industrial model of education. We aren’t manufacturing widgets along an assembly line. 😉
p.s. I hope Sheila writes an article about the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, where Drag Queens performed and then mocked Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Social media is on fire with Christians up in arms.
Well, history doesn’t lie! The same old same old. This happened in Germany, basically the schools were turned into Nazi propaganda hives.
They ended up using the children as spies. Giving information to the teachers about the goings on in their own homes. Keeping their ears to the rail. Finding out who was saying what, and where and when. At the same time turning the kids into fanatics.
And we all know how this turned out, because history doesn’t lie, unless one tends to rewrite history books. Of course this is what one of the goals that has been set for the school voucher program IE school choice or disguised as school choice.
Mission creep, once a certain amount of success has been achieved, certain nefarious activities disguised as public upgrades, More and more actors become involved adding their own flavor of choice to the poisonous concoction.
It really is not just done on the conservative side, it’s done on the liberal side also. All knowledge is not good knowledge. But who gets to decide? There’s always going to be a cavernous split between belief systems. Should both be taught and let the kids decide? Should the bad actors be removed root and branch? Public education has been broken for a long time. There was never enough oversight to make sure every child had access to the same education. Tax money was wasted, and intellectual curriculum was spotty at best.
What better way to overthrow a government? Start in the schools, and the next generation will be exactly what those bad actors need. The so-called liberal Chicago board of education, just signed a budget around 10 billion dollars. And it has everything but simple education included in this particular blood sucking budget. The taxes continue to increase and the education becomes worse.
When a society is in decline, everyone decides to reinvent the wheel. And whenever everybody tries to reinvent the wheel, lunacy ensues, and nothing gets accomplished on the way to collapse. What Phoenix rises from those ashes? Well, you see it all over the world. From Islamic nations, to Judeo-Christian nations, communist nations, nationalistic nations, indu Nations, Buddhist nations, They all tear down the same way. Even revolutions don’t work. Because everyone wants it done their particular way. There is no cohesiveness amongst the citizens of any country. And the refusal of people to get along, or, come to an agreement is non-existent.
The education of the children is just a reflection of the political realm, and for the most part it produces competing realities which just stalls any sort of forward motion. It’s history! We can see it in past history and we can see it in history that we are making today. And until everything collapses, it’ll be the history that they are writing tomorrow. Humanity can’t help themselves.
Dear Shelia Kennedy, Our IPS is the 2nd most privatized district in America: https://tultican.com/2020/04/27/indianapolis-home-of-americas-second-most-privatized-school-system/#:~:text=With%20the%20introduction%20of%20Innovation,for%20disaster%20capitalism%2C%20New%20Orleans. In addition, the following analysis tells who the big money people are who fund this local effort: https://cloakinginequity.com/2023/08/04/vorcreatex-an-open-letter-to-john-harris-about-public-education/.
Trumpism’s 2025 agenda, even though vailed and denied, offers peaks into the deconstruction of our Constutition and the realigning of our social constructs as a modern nation in the world.
There are ultra conservative and far right faction with religious ties than have long sought a direct line of tax dollars from governments into their coffers and bank accounts with no oversight in the name of efficiency and private controls eliminating We The People.
There is no longer a Republican Party based on a political platform, conservative ideas, thought thru strategies for growth and development that lifts all citizens, but a zealot agenda to reward their believers and punish those they see unworthy of any consideration not unlike the feudal systems of the dark ages with class stratus everyone was confined to with no way out.
This is not what our founding father’s envisioned for our nation and its people.
Trump is nothing more that a useful idiot to accomplish the goals of far more diabolical forces in our nation, driven by, greed for themselves , religion and law and order to justify their setting the moral rules for our nations people but excluding themselves.
This is a extremely dangerous time for our nation Vote Wisely.
Let the elitists have their private schools, available to those who can afford them. But my God, don’t continue to eviscerate the public school system at the expense of everyone else who either could never afford those schools or simply don’t agree with that sort of privileged system of education. Why in hell are we taxpayers forced to contribute to those elitist school seekers? It makes no sense to me, in this pluralistic society, to eliminate the best education possible for the majority of folks in America. Historically, “the first state-sponsored programs emerged in the late 1950s in Southern states as a way for white families to avoid racially integrated schools after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. These programs allowed white students of all income levels to attend private, all-white “segregation academies” while still receiving public funding.” And the beat goes on, louder and louder. What a damn shame. We all know who suffers most, but we should all be screaming from the rooftops against this utterly catastrophic, systemic, suicidal movement towards an uneducated, or at the very least an under-educated, society. It makes no sense, and should be reversed at all costs.
I’ve not seen any articles about what’s been happening to literacy rates in the US. One would think that literacy would be a good measure of whether voucher programs work to improve educational outcomes generally, right? If the overall result was “no change” but the distribution was bimodal (improved by vouchers but impaired by staying in the public education system) then that would indicate a policy failure.
My hypothesis is that it began to flatline 20 years ago (No Child Left Behind), dipped in 2020 (COVID) and then came back, only up resume its decline.
When the New Deal was ramping up, I believe “they” said “we’ll try something, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else”. US politics seems to have reached a point where no amount of data can prove that a policy has failed, or at least overcome the objections of those making money from the failed policy.
Without excellent public education there is no public – only tribes driven by money and ideology.
A couple of decades ago I was speaking with a co-worker. She was upset because her children were beyond school age but she and her hubby were still having to pay taxes for schools. It took me aback. I asked her if she didn’t believe in education as a part of civil society?
She never really answered that, so I just said we all pay taxes for things we don’t like. I also said I have paid property taxes for years and never had a child in school. Yes I am a childless cat lady. I’m currently cat less, too.
A side note , my $9,000. house in Center Township, cost me more in taxes than my friend’s nice ranch style home in one of the outer townships.
Gil, did you miss the part where the fascist money men want it ALL?
Republicans kill everything they touch. Why? Because they lack the intellect to understand what consequences are. The rich bastards trying to gut and destroy public education don’t want people who aren’t in their class to have knowledge that makes them people they can’t control absolutely. BTW, Fred Koch, father of the two wretches, was in business with Hitler helping him build oil refineries in the 30s. The acorns are still trying to reestablish that horror show.
Why? Money. Again, Republicans only understand money. To them money = power, and power = more money. That’s it. In my book, “Racing to the Brink – The End Game for Race and Capitalism”, I explain in detail the current situation and how it came about. Oh. I published it in 2015. It is my version of Sinclair Lewis’ fiction, but it’s not fiction.
This process is insidious. The French Revolution (Nice reference, Todd), the Communist Revolution and the Chinese Communist revolution were all the result of power/money-mad groups trying to rule rather than govern. It’s called nihilism in the dictionary, but it really boils down to just greed.
It’s a Republican thing, and exposing the consequences of Project 2025 to EVERY community in the country should shake them out of their “conservative” torpor so that the realize they’ve been had by a group that gives not a single damn about them.
The privatization of public education brings with it a couple of “features” that conservatives will favor:
1) Private schools can practice viewpoint discrimination and restriction of students’ civil rights with no recourse for parents, students, and faculty other than to decamp to other schools.
2) The corporations and other private entities that run private schools can use some of their revenue to lobby and to fund politicians’ election campaigns. (Your tax dollars at work.)
Have you all seen the Indiana DOE’s disastrous new graduation requirements?
Them kids don’t need no fancy larnin’!
For those people who don’t want their tax money to support public schools because they have no school age children or no children, I have these questions. Will you never have a doctor younger than yourself? Will you never have elected officials younger than yourself? Will you never need the professional services of people younger than yourself? Will you never live in a community with people younger than yourself? Would it not benefit you if those people were well-educated from youth onwards, even if they are not your children? I believe it is to my benefit, and in my self-interest to live in a society where we do our best to give a good free public education to all children and to not siphon off these funds in a voucher system.
Over it – yes and let’s not forget
Bring back child labor – another benefit of the new “we require nothing” requirements