Tag Archives: education

More Hair-Raising Proposals From Project 2025

Yesterday, I focused on the theocratic elements of Project 2025. But those elements–horrific as they are–pale in comparison to several of the Project’s less-often-noted aspirations.

A cousin of mine participates in a study group that recently assembled a list of the proposals in Project 2025. He shared that document with me, and I am posting it in its entirety today. It displays a worldview that isn’t simply backward–it’s terrifying and dystopian. Anti-science. Anti-equality. Anti-American.

Allow me to share that (unedited) compendium of crazy with you–and remind you that this is the world we’ll get if the GOP prevails.

PROJECT 2025

•    100+ conservative think tanks involved

•    400+ contributors and writers

•    240 Trump former administrators among authors

•    31/38 chapters written by Trump administrators

•    920+ pages in length

•    Mentions “Trump” 320+ times

•    Trump 2023 — “This is great work, our roadmap”

•    Trump 2024 —  “I don’t know these folks”

•    Trump campaign manager calls it “a pain in the ass”

•    Trump 2024 – Keynotes a Heritage Foundation convention

FROM THE RIGHT

•    Spells out a bright American future

•    Rescues the nation from the grip of the Radical Left

•    A governing agenda, putting the right people in place

•    A definite plan to execute a conservative agenda on Day One lead by a strong executive

FROM THE LEFT

•    Authoritarianism, strips rights, destroys economy

•    Trump has selective amnesia about Project 2025.

•    Heritage President Kevin Roberts acknowledged that Trump’s claims of ignorance are a “politically  tactical decision”  — and then he was forced out of office. (April 2024)

Pillars of Project 2025:

•    Restore family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children.

•    Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

•    Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

•    Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

THE DEFENSE OF AMERICA

The plan “…unshackles America’s military from the long-term rot of misspent budgets, politically driven policies, and a lack of focus on the military threat posed by China.” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission

•    End the Left’s social experimentation in the military

•    Halt the admission of transgender individuals into the military

•     Reduce the number of generals, increase Army by 50,000

•     Move US troops stationed overseas to US borders

•     Grow Navy from 292 to 355 ships

•     Purchase 60/80 more Air Force F-35A’s/year

•     Triple the number of US nuclear weapons worldwide

•     Build an American “Iron Dome”

•     Increase fighting responsibilities for all Allies

•     Continue to provide nuclear protection to Allies

•     Shift war-planning from reaction to one of strength in denial

•     Preposition resources to anticipate threats

•     Reconstitute NATO or withdraw from the NATO alliance

•     Allies must pay for all US weapons provided to them

•     Disavow NATO Article Five

•     All alliances will be bi-lateral

•     Withdraw from arms reduction treaties

Governance Principles

•    Replace 50K civil service “deep state” employees. Most civil service employees to answer to the Chief Executive

•    Eliminate or re-write the First Amendment

•    Change the oath of office from “…protect & defend the constitution”

•    The government should “…operate on Christian Principles

Trade/Foreign Assistance Principles

•    USAID to defund women’s rights foreign aid initiatives

•    Withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements

•    Withdraw financial aid from Ukraine

•    Institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods

•    10% tariffs on all imports worldwide

Principles for Educating Our Kids

•     Eliminate the Department of Education

•     Eliminate Head Start, Title 1, & lunch programs

•     Eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion efforts

•     10 Commandments posted in all classrooms

•     Books pertaining to race/gender be removed

•     Schools requiring vaccinations lose federal funding

•     Vouchers for private/Christian schools to be the law

•     Public high schoolers take a military entrance exam

•     Eliminate federal funds for certain special needs

•     Arm classroom teachers

•     Defund NPR and PBS

Principles To Direct Entitlements & Protections

•    Words “abortion” & “reproductive health” cut from all federal regulations, policies, and any legislation

•    Reinstate student debt (6.8%)

•    Repeal the Affordable Care Act

•    Eliminate Medicaid

•    Privatize Medicare — Advantage the default choice

•    Raise retirement age

•    Eliminate drug price negotiations

•    Limit benefits for veteran disability payments

•    Eliminate/repurpose EPA, OSHA, EEOC, FDIC

•    Privatize TSA

•    Federal elections done in 1-day, on paper, no mail-in, with ID

Principles Dealing With “Minorities”

•    Immediate mass deportation of the undocumented

•    Construct internment camps

•    Limit total immigrants (20K)

•    Limit foreign college education applicants

•    Deport existing “dreamers” & end birth-right citizenship

•    Muslims, Haitians banned from the country

•    Ukrainian refugee status reviewed

•    Roll back gay rights/invalidate homosexual marriage

•    Outlaw transgender rights

•    Outlaw no-fault divorce

Principles Guiding Climate Decisions

•    The climate is not changing and not to be taught

•    Eliminate climate and environmental protections

•    Eliminate greenhouse gas regulation

•    Defund FEMA & EPA. Emergencies are a state responsibility.

•    Dismantle NOAA and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, halt climate research.

•    End Global Change Research Act of 1990. \

•    Withdraw from the Paris Accords.

•    Stop EV research, regulation, and tax initiatives

If this doesn’t motivate you to vote–and vote BLUE–I don’t know what will.

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Public School Successes

I frequently post critiques of privatization–with special emphasis on school privatization, aka educational vouchers. Some twenty or so years ago, privatization enthusiasts had a standard answer for every perceived government malfunction: let the private sector do it! This approach had multiple, significant drawbacks, and as those drawbacks became too obvious and costly to ignore, the early enthusiasm faded–except in education, where the “market can solve all problems” ideologues were joined by rightwing activists pursuing a vendetta against teachers’ unions, and by religious folks who chafed at separation of church and state and wanted a First Amendment “work-around.”

“How do you improve the performance of the nation’s public schools?” was–and remains– a fair question. Urban school districts, in particular, face multiple challenges, and when the question of how to meet those challenges became an everyday topic following publication of A Nation at Risk, political figures offered two wildly competing suggestions: “the market can solve everything” ideologues insisted that competition from private schools would incentivize public school improvement; supporters of public education lobbied for additional resources, to be deployed in line with reforms suggested by new academic research.

As we know, vouchers won the political debate. It was a disarmingly simple fix, championed by people who not-so-coincidentally stood to gain from it. Unfortunately, however, despite the promises, vouchers have failed to improve test scores or educational outcomes. (They have been a financial boon for well-to-do families, however, a fact that will make it much more difficult to end these boondoggles.)

Surprisingly, the news is much better from those much-maligned public school systems. Take, for example, Chicago’s public schools, once one of the worst performing systems in the country. As the American Prospect recently reported, “a system that used to be ridiculed has become a model for schools in other cities.”

In 1987, a visit from Bill Bennett–then Secretary of Education–prompted labeling Chicago’s schools the worst in the country. Half of the district’s high schools ranked in the bottom 1 percent nationwide, nearly half of the students dropped out before graduating, and some schools were physical danger zones. Since then, however, Chicago’s public schools have become markedly better.

Black and Latino third graders from low-income families have been, at least according to 2017 data, outperforming their counterparts elsewhere in the state. Graduation rates rose to 84 percent in 2023, within hailing distance of the national average. In 2022, three-fifths of high school graduates enrolled in college immediately upon graduating high school, an increase from previous years, countering the national trend of declining college attendance during COVID; more of them are earning degrees than in the past. This track record is among the best urban school systems in the nation.

A new book, “How a City Learned to Improve its Schools” explains that structural changes, and the policies and practices that they generated, have emerged from a continuous improvement, ‘tortoise beats hare’ approach. As the book readily admits, Chicago’s improvement hasn’t been a straightforward march-to-success narrative. Struggles and setbacks have included teacher strikes, fights over school closures, administrative churn, and high-profile CEO misconduct.

But through it all, the system has continued to improve.

Graduation rates and other measures of accomplishment have continued their steady rise. Nor has the system lost its penchant for evidence-driven changes. The most significant example is the ongoing expansion of early education, with its demonstrated promise of shifting the arc of children’s lives, auguring well for their success. A commitment to experimentation has prompted the system to partner with the University of Chicago Education Lab in testing promising innovations, such as intensive math tutoring for ninth and tenth graders who were mired amid long division and fractions; and a summer internship program that has given students the soft skills they would need in the world of work.

Chicago isn’t alone. Another book, “Disrupting Disruption: The Steady Work of Transforming Schools” highlights three other successful systems: Union City, New Jersey; Roanoke, Virginia; and Union, Oklahoma–systems with a majority of students who are low-income and disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. In each of these districts, the graduation rate has steadily increased and the opportunity gap has essentially become a thing of the past.

What lesson should we take from all this?

The American journalist H. L. Mencken said it best: “Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible — and wrong.” Fixing thorny problems is almost always an incremental task requiring consistent, evidence-based analysis and constant adjustment. Americans have an unfortunate penchant for simple, “plausible” remedies that don’t require hard work.

Far too often, as with our current costly, divisive and failed voucher programs, those “simple” ideologically-motivated solutions don’t improve anything–they just add new problems to the old ones.

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Why Red States Are In the Red

A recent column by Michael Hicks in the Capitol Chronicle focused on a data-point that is far too often overlooked. It seems that calling Republican-led states “Red” is entirely appropriate, because most of them are in the red.

(Before going into the details of the column, I want to note that the Chronicle is part of an encouraging trend here in my city–a trend that is also showing up elsewhere. As I have repeatedly noted, the dearth of local reporting has had a very negative effect on democracy and the sense of community. In city after city, local newspapers have either disappeared or–as in Indianapolis–turned into “ghost papers” that no longer cover the sorts of things citizens need to know about their local institutions. Recently, however, we’ve seen several new media entrants that propose to fill the gap–including Axios Indianapolis, The Mirror, State Affairs, and the Chronicle.) 

But back to Hicks. He begins this particular column by noting that from the end of World War II up until about 1980, economic differences among the states bore little relationship to the partisanship of those states.

In fact, if you picked just one variable that best measured prosperity — per capita income — the was no correlation with political party. There were rich states led by Republican and Democratic governors and poor states led by both as well.

Over the past 40 years, that changed. Today, 19 of the 20 richest states are solidly Democratic, while 19 of the 20 poorest states are solidly Republican. It is clear that the GOP has become the party of poor states, while the Democrats have become the party of prosperous states.

The question, as usual, is “why?”

One big culprit is that political parties changed, erasing regional differences. Up until the late 90’s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. That is no longer the case, so as states began to align with national politics platforms.

This trend more extreme today. Even races for local government tend to be highly nationalized. State and local issues are often ignored in primary or general elections. This homogeneity of national politics naturally tends to cause parties to have success in places that are more similar – polarizing states between parties.

A second trend is the sorting by politics increasingly effects household location choice. Though much sorting happens at the local level, the nationalization of politics means that state borders now effect household location choice.

The nationalization of politics means that each party has been staking out positions that appeal to majorities in key states. In this way, politicians are choosing their voters. The sorting of households reflects voters choosing political landscapes they prefer, on economic, fiscal and cultural issues. This trend appears to be accelerating.

That last paragraph reminded me of the demographic observations in Bill Bishop’s 2009 book The Big Sort.

Hicks acknowledges that there is never one simple reason for economic performance, but he also hones in on what appears to be the largest cause of the disparity between Red and Blue states: public education.

The cause of the economic divergence is because human capital — education, innovation and invention — replaced manufacturing and movement of goods as the primary source of prosperity. This means that places that grow will necessarily need to develop and attract more human capital. But the educational policies pursued by both parties are vastly different, with very different outcomes.

The GOP has largely tried to adopt broad school choice, and cut funding to both K-12 and higher education. The Democrats have largely eschewed school choice, but amply funded both K-12 and higher education. Seventeen of the 20 best funded states are Democratically controlled and 17 out of the 20 lowest funded states are GOP strongholds. Educational outcomes between these states are stark.

Educational attainment differences alone explain about three quarters of the difference in per capita income between states….

Voucher programs haven’t just failed to generate superior test scores. They’ve impoverished our critically important public school systems –and kept Red states like Indiana poor. As Hicks concludes,

Economists have been saying this for three decades, without any effect in poor states. The prognosis is simply that poor states — like Indiana — are going to get poorer for decades to come. While rich states will grow richer.

Not that Indiana’s terrible legislature will take note….

I recently discussed the abysmal effects of voucher programs on the podcast co-hosted by Morton Marcus and John Guy: Who Gets What? 

If you have some time, tune in.

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The Things We Know That Just Aren’t So…

Michael Hicks is an economist on the faculty of Ball State University. He recently published two columns in the Indianapolis Star that deserve widespread attention.

Hicks documents two inconvenient facts: more people move into high-tax areas than into low-tax precincts, and economic conditions in Blue cities and states are significantly better than conditions in Red parts of the country.

Hicks makes that first assertion in a column discussing the repeated mantra of candidates for Indiana’s legislature--elect me and I’ll cut property taxes! High property taxes are why Indiana keeps losing population! He points out that–despite the popularity of these proposals, property tax cuts would be highly unlikely to grow population, employment, GDP or household incomes. The data shows that population growth tends to cluster in high-tax places.

In Indiana, the 10 counties with the highest effective property tax rates alone accounted for 27,105 new residents since 2020, a whopping 61.3% of the state’s entire population growth. The 10 counties with the lowest effective property tax rates saw only 878 new residents, or less than 2% of the state’s growth.

I know many readers will recoil at this challenge to a long-held notion that lower taxes cause growth. However, it is a cold, hard fact that both population and employment growth is positively correlated with tax rates on income and property.

In Indiana, a 1% increase in the average tax rate leads to a 2% increase in population growth. That is simple mathematics.

Why would that be? As Hicks concedes, no one looks at tax rates and says “Let’s move to where taxes are higher.” What they do look at are indicators of quality of life–public services and amenities that will be available to them.

These are places where families judge themselves better off. If you live in a state where families are moving from low- to high-tax regions, your state is underinvesting in local amenities such as schools, parks, and public safety.

That reality–anathema as it is to those who view all taxation as evil–goes a long way toward explaining another phenomenon Hicks has discussed–the difference between the economic performance of Red and Blue areas of the country.

Nationwide, it is unambiguously clear that the U.S. economy is performing historically well. On every important measure — employment, wages, GDP, or wealth — the overall economy is not just performing at record levels, but also outperforming the rest of the world.

Robust national economic performance has benefits for every county and small town, but that does not mean every place shares equally in economic growth. There are plenty of places that continue to do poorly.

And the gap between them is growing. Rich places are, for the most part, getting richer and poor places poorer–in contrast to what has typically happened before. Moreover,

poor places are increasingly governed by Republicans and rich places by Democrats. The gap between rich and poor places might help explain the partisan differences in perceptions of the economy.

The regional differences are compelling across dimensions of rural and urban places, as well as between cities and rural areas.

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It Seems There IS A “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”

Remember when Hillary Clinton was widely ridiculed for alluding to the existence of a “vast Right-wing conspiracy”? It turns out she wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t even exaggerating.

And it explains a lot of what’s happening now.

A number of articles over the past couple of years have pointed out that Trump didn’t suddenly turn a once-respectable political party into the MAGA cult with which we’re now dealing. As Maureen Dowd recently wrote in the New York Times, in a column about our corrupt Supreme Court, there has long been “a determined group of religious zealots with a long-term master plan to pack the court with religious zealots.”

“These conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian operators believed they were fighting the biggest moral battle of the modern age, and forced America to debate on their terms,” they wrote. “But despite their public appeals, they did not convince broad swaths of Americans of the righteousness of their cause. Instead, they remained a minority, and leveraged the structures of American democracy in their favor, building a framework strong enough to withstand not only the political system but also a society moving rapidly against them. They took power to remake the nation in their image. And they were far more organized than their opponents or the public ever knew.”

Emerging reporting and research confirm the allegations. Talking Points Memo recently described one such organization–a secret, men-only right-wing society with members in influential positions around the country, intent on recruiting a “Christian government.”

More recently, a study by the American Association of University Professors documented the manufacture of the recent backlash against institutions of higher education. It uncovered a network of  Right-wing “think tanks” that has been laying the foundation for those attacks for many years. In a chapter titled “Culture War, Think Tanks, and the Dark Money that Funds Them,” the scholars identified twenty-six national think tanks. Among them were the Center for Renewing America, the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and–of course–the Heritage Foundation.

The report also listed thirty-eight state-Level think tanks, and forty-three organizations it categorized as “Cultural Conservative Think Tanks (including the Claremont Institute, a think tank that figured prominently in efforts to overturn the 2020 election).

Given the purpose of the study, the report focused on eleven of the think tanks that have participated in the culture war by attacking educational institutions.

Many of these think tanks work closely with one another, often sharing personnel and board members, amplifying each other’s work, pushing the same messaging, and supporting shared political objectives. As demonstrated in Appendix 2, this level of coordination is unsurprising given that these think tanks also receive money from the same libertarian and conservative megadonors. Furthermore, as described in the second section, seven of the eleven think tanks are members of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organization that networks national and state-level libertarian think tanks.

Appendix 2 identifies the wealthy individuals funding these organizations.

The report analyzes a number of “model” bills that aim to impose a conservative Christian worldview on public education and promote election denial, and it describes several of the most extreme–and effective–organizations. One of those is the Manhattan Institute, which “houses Christopher Rufo, Ron DeSantis’ favored “educator.”

Rufo–who is largely credited with weaponizing the term “critical race theory”

started his anti-CRT campaign in a City Journal column in July 2020 where he wrote about diversity training offered by Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights. Since then, Rufo has published over one hundred columns in City Journal, many focused on critical race theory, DEI efforts in schools, woke-ness, so-called gender ideology, and “left-wing radicals” in K-12 and higher education. He claims that “critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions.

DeSantis appointed Rufo to the Board of Trustees at the New College of Florida, Rufo where he helped end the college’s gender studies program (which he deemed “ideological activism”).

After his appointment to the board, Rufo tweeted: “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within. Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed.” 

The report–with copious citations–is 148 pages long, and for those with the patience to read it all, revelatory. 

The White Christian Nationalists who emerged from the shadows to support Donald Trump have been working for a very long time to reassert what they believe to be the proper world order: a society dominated by White Christian men, in which Blacks, women, non-Christians and LGBTQ+ citizens are kept in their deservedly “inferior” places.

They are indeed a “vast Right-wing conspiracy.”

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