11. Department of Education

Project 2025 link: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 

WHO WROTE THIS CHAPTER?: Lindsey M. Burke, Director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Burke served on Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition steering committee and landing team for education, and sits on the board of the Educational Freedom Institute, and advisory board of the Independent Women’s Forum Education Freedom Center.

She writes evidence-free commentary on education, such as this piece in the Daily Signal, where she praises Iowa’s new universal voucher system, now referred to as Education Savings Account (ESA), along with a right-wing goodie basket of restrictions on gender issues and school libraries bans.  The Daily Iowan noted that “Public feedback on this bill has revealed that it is massively unpopular to most of the state. Iowa’s News Now reported that a week before Gov. Reynolds signed the bill into law, 73 percent of Iowans were opposed to the bill. The negative effects of this bill are being felt by public school teachers and students alike…”

She doesn’t mention that universal voucher-states are finding that costs are exploding due to the high numbers of families taking advantage of the programs, including families that already had their kids enrolled in private schools and home-schoolers. Parents are using the funding to make extravagant purchases or buy products and services that have dubious educational value, including Florida’s permission slip to buy large screen TVs, amusement park tickets, pingpong tables and skateboards. No word on what happens if parents waste the money and kids get no education, or get tossed back to public school with no funding attached. So, generally, a taxpayer-funded, corporate-directed shitshow.

However, Ms. Burke did note that Iowa’s unpopular new voucher system has won 1st place for The Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Education Freedom Award, and that Florida and Arizona, both experiencing exploding, budget-busting costs, sit at the top two spots on Heritage’s Education Freedom Report Card.

Who are the profiteers? Well, the Heritage Foundation is among them, but that’s just the beginning. Here’s an excellent article from NEAToday

“This week, Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group based in Washington D.C., released a report – a guide essentially – outlining the numerous connections in the “echo chamber” of advocacy front groups, think tanks, and media outlets that see schools and students as “an untapped market.”

We are adding a note to share with the deluded amongst us who believe Trump’s lies that he has nothing to do with Project 2025, despite his assertion that they are laying the groundwork “for exactly what our movement will do,” and that he followed the majority of Heritage’s plan during his former administration.

The GOP is trying their best to backstop his story by folding Project 2025 goals into their current funding bills, so Trump can claim at least partial deniability.

You will see a header like this, with information compiled by the House Committee on Appropriations Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro, when we get to a point that is already in the works.

Follow the money!

The oligarchs behind the Heritage Foundation have found every possible weakness in our education system to monetize, and are using religious zealots to get the votes necessary to propel themselves to power.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/no-accountability-vouchers-wreak-havoc-states
Huh? Arizona’s per-pupil allocation is $900 LESS for high school public school students than for students whose education is funded through an ESA.

EXCELLENT discussion of basic impetus behind vouchers.

Great synopsis from Stop the Coup

  • Charter School Grant Program Priorities:
    • Rescind new requirements and lessen federal restrictions on charter schools. This would increase private, faith-based school choice
  • Civil Rights Data Collection:
    • Eliminate the OCR’s requirements to create and collect data on a new “nonbinary” sex category and end data collection on only male and only female athletic participation
  • Student Assistance General Provisions, Federal Perkins Loan Program, and William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program Final Regulations:
    • Completely reverse the current federal government student loan program and make government only a guarantor, not a direct lender — loans should be treated as investments and provide a market return to lenders
    • Establish a new federal corporation run by presidential-picked loyalists to run the student loan program and task Treasury Department to enforce loan collection
  • Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities ReceivingFederal Financial Assistance (Title IX):
    • Amend Title IX to include due process requirements for those accused of sexual misconduct
    • Define “sex” to mean only biological sex recognized at birth
    • Establish “sex” as a fixed biological fact by passing a new Title IX rule saying so o Abandon Title IX redefining “sex” to mean “sexual orientation and gender”
    • Strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities
    • Assign political appointees to do a full (retroactive) review of all Title IXinvestigations related to gender identity and/or sexual orientation cases
      • Drop all such ongoing or pending investigations
      • Inform affected school districts they can drop such Title IX policy changes
  • On racial disparities/ Civil Rights Act Title VI:
    • Review Title VI policies on school discipline and racial disparities; move away from lenient ‘restorative justice’ practices
    • End DoED and DOJ investigations of Title VI cases based on allegations of disparate impact by issuing a joint DoED-DOJ guidance directive on this
    • Clarify that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act does not include a disparate impact standard
    • Prohibit any federal agency from withholding services from federal or state agencies—that choose not to replace “sex” with “SOGI” in that agency’s administration of Title IX
      • This includes K-12 schools with school lunch programs
  • Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities, Preschool Grants for Children with Disabilities (Equity in IDEA):
    • Rescind regulations that now consider race and ethnicity in the identification, placement, and discipline of students with disabilities
    • This step would curb “raiding special education funding to pay for CRT- inspired ‘equity’ consultants and professional development.”
  • Other reforms include:
    • Shift responsibility for education of “federal” children — students in military families, D.C. residents, Native Americans — to agencies serving these groups and expand education choice
    • Reject gender ideology and critical race theory in civil rights education
    • End both Executive branch and agency overreach of education policies
    • Transfer federal funding for lower-income school districts to the DHHS’s future
      Administration for Children and Families
    • Block-grant and narrow funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities
      (HBCUs) and tribally-controlled colleges
    • Implement “risk adjusted” higher education outcomes data for colleges and schools to
      more carefully isolate the impact of educational quality versus socioeconomic status and
      other factors
    • Reform The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to protect the privacy
      of student education records and boost parental rights and consent about disclosure of topics discussed privately with teachers, including:
      • Use of puberty blockers, hormone treatments and gender-altering surgery
      • Adoption of pronouns different from names /gender noted on birth certificate
    • Do not require federal education employee or contractor to use a pronoun that does not
      match a person’s biological sex if contrary to their religious or moral convictions
  • Cut DoED as a Cabinet-level agency, reorder chain of command, put loyalists in charge
  • Redirect federal dollars to state and local governments, champion alternatives to liberal,
    higher education schools: private charter, trade, technical, and faith-based institutions
  • Reverse Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and crack down on loan enforcement
  • Eliminate equity and diversity regulations in Title IX and VI rules (SOGI, CRT)
  • Set up a Parental Savings Account program to fund parent’s school choice (ESAs); boost parental
    control of classroom discussions and disclosure of school information to parents

Project 2025 is already in 2025 funding bills.

Our own page-by-page deep dive – This is where we teach ourselves about education, and why the Heritage Foundation and their billionaire backers are working so hard to destroy public education.

The Heritage Foundation’s main reason to exist is to advocate for oligarchs. “Billionaires care about one thing: protecting their profits. That’s why they use charter schools to destroy two of the top threats to their fortunes: unions and taxes.

 (Majority) “Gutting unions and cutting taxes are the core motivations behind the vicious cycle of austerity and privatization.” And they cynically use religious zealots and their voting block as a smokescreen to disguise their intents and to get their legislation passed.

Educational profiteering:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/02/26/republicans-cut-public-schools-for-private-kentucky-north-carolina/72670677007/
  • Universal vouchers: Like Medicare-Advantage plans, education vouchers systems hand huge pots of public money to private industry – in this case – for-profit charters, “religious” or online schools – to privatize the profit. Project 2025 will make sure rules are minimal. Here’s an example from Ohio.
  • Defanging traditional accrediting agencies: This already started in the Trump administration – reducing requirements to rubber-stamp lesser-quality institutions and online money machines for education-billionaires. Accreditation is required to tap into federal funding of post-high education, allowing for the creation of dubious online schools like Corinthian, or ITT. Think for-profit education corporations like Corinthian Colleges (Everest College, Heald College and WyoTech) , or ITT Technical Institute.
  • Privatize all student loans: Not a lot of explanation needed here.

Destroying unions: “This is a horrifying attempt to undermine not only public schools but [also] the entire teaching profession.” – Laura Bowman, Roanoke County Council of PTAs

  • “…if they can successfully close public schools, lay off teachers, and divert public funds to non-union charters, they can weaken unions and the public sector as a whole.
    • For those not taking Project 2025 seriously, Heritage Foundation acolyte Ronald Reagan completed 60% of their goals while in office. He then waged successful war against unions:
      • Considered a turning point – he broke a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981 when he issued an order to fire the 11,000 striking federal employees.
      • He replaced career government lawyers on the National Labor Review Board with those representing management, eroding workers’ rights with precedents that are still on the books. Trump will do so again.

Fighting taxes:

  • Billionaires spend millions to buy politicians … and lobby for tax cuts for the rich. These cuts are paid for by cuts to spending on infrastructure and social services, including K-12 schools and public colleges that are now disastrously underfunded.
  • Tax scam – school voucher tax credits: “These reimburse individuals and businesses for “donations” they make to organizations that give out vouchers for free or reduced tuition at private K-12 schools. In effect, these credits allow contributing families to opt out of paying for public education and other public services. Wealthy families’ interest in these programs is being driven partly by a pair of tax shelters that can make “donating” profitable. These shelters hinge on stacking state and federal tax cuts and are being advertised in the states as a way to get a “double tax benefit” and “make money” in the process. This kind of language is a far cry from most nonprofit fundraising pitches and gives some sense of the supersized nature of the tax benefits being offered for private and religious K-12 schooling.”
  • Pro-charter school boards and superintendents manufacture budgetary crises to undermine the viability of public schools: In Los Angeles, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) showed that the school board had hidden a nearly $2 billion surplus. 
  • It’s self-perpetuating: As more funding is drained out of unionized public schools: (in Oakland, charters, drain $57 million dollars annually from the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), the public schools erodes, giving privatizers more ammo to argue that traditional public schools — thanks in part to their expensive union teachers — are “failing” and need to be replaced with charters. 

The “Mudsill Theory”/ making a more compliant worker class:

  • (newrepublic) In 1858, slave plantation owner and South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate that society must have a “foundational” class of people who, like the way a mudsill stabilizes the house that rests atop it, bear the difficult manual labor from which almost all wealth is derived. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties to perform the drudgery of life.” Weaponizing the biblical saying “The poor you will always have with you,” he argued that such a group of people must be locked rigidly into their mudsill class. President Lincoln disagreed, promoting social mobility by creating over 70 land-grant colleges where tuition was free or very affordable until the “Reagan Revolution,” another Heritage Foundation crime against America’s poor and middle classes.
    • First, the Heritage Foundation-controlled administration will eliminate Head Start.
    • Then vouchers will suck resources from schools. “Without the needed resources, students [left in the public school system] will do poorly on state standardized tests [which makes the schools more vulnerable to] takeovers and privatization,” – a “test-and-punish system.”
    • Then they will loosen requirements for private and online schools. Right-wing billionaires are spending millions to support ghettoizing red state public schools (and now ALL public schools). Subsidizing middle- and upper-class children’s tuition leaves poorer students—who can’t afford the costs beyond the vouchers—stuck in defunded and thus failing public schools.
    • What if your public school dies, and you can’t afford a private school? “..voucher advocates who acknowledge the cost differences between tuition at high-quality private schools compared to what a voucher would cover are advocating for so-called “microschools” that “allow” {force) families to pool their voucher money to form a small school with other parents. This assumes there are adults who are able to be at home with the kids and who can, one, effectively teach kids essential ideas and skills and, two, ensure that the content is going to be centered on factual information and will help the student succeed post high school.” – Laura Bowman, Roanoke County Council of PTAs
    • What if there are no private schools in your area? Taxpayer dollars are relocated to the pockets of wealthier people in more populated areas.
    • RELATED – Red states are loosening requirements against child labor, making it easier for kids to get trapped in a cycle of work that often ends their educational progress and consigns them to a lifetime of manual labor. The effects are magnified by “right to work for less” legislation.
    • Make good higher education unaffordable: As California’s governor, Ronald Reagan destroyed the California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. This plan was a bipartisan commitment to educate all students, to facilitate class mobility, and to place public education at the center of American civic life. Reagan used the student movement in 1960’s Berkeley as an excuse to cut state funding for higher education, laying the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model. Rising tuition and lack of space resulted in an advantage for the offspring of the upper classes.
      • “The first “bums” he threw off welfare were California university students. Instead of seeing the education of the state’s youth as a patriotic duty and a vital weapon in the Cold War, he cast universities as a problem in and of themselves—both an expensive welfare program and dangerously close to socialism. He even argued for the importance of tuition-based funding by suggesting that if students had to pay, they’d value their education too much to protest.“
      • “When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.“
    • Remove diversity: Removing DEI and affirmative action from consideration for college application
    • Create a lessor-track of online schools, including “competency-based” schools, that still will get government funding.

Some quick definitions:

“May 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down racial segregation in America’s public schools…“From 1954 to 1965, Southern legislatures enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions attempting to discredit, block, postpone, limit, or evade school desegregation,” Suitts wrote. “A large number of these acts allowed the re-direction of public resources, including school resources, to benefit private schools.”

(Pg. 595) “Hazard-order Regulations” – after decimating public schools, exploiting child labor is the next logical step in expanding the “mudsill” caste.

Project 2025’s coordinated attack on the children of the working and middle-class is NOT covered in this chapter but is inside the chapter on the Department of Labor.

Parents who can’t pay tuition charges over the amount of the vouchers, (vouchers will be the STARTING POINT for tuition) and/or have children that are not accepted by a school (schools get to pick, not parents), or have no access to a school nearby (school buses will no longer be a thing) will have some serious decisions to make. Does one parent, or the only parent, have to give up their job to home-school their children, or does that kid just stay home, not being schooled at all? Even parents who consider themselves middle-class might have problems paying tuition for more than one child.

Hey, and what about all those laborers missing after Trump completes his massive deportations?

Welcome to a world that would careen back to the 1900’s, where the kids of the working and middle-class are sent off to work.

(Pg. 595) DOL should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent. “Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous jobs. With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults [his recommendation is for sub-adults, i.e. teens] should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.”

11 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION 

Our own page-by-page deep dive – where we teach ourselves about bare-knuckle politics of the oligarchy and share what we’ve learned.

Update on Trump’s Agenda 47 – the revenge-flavored version of Project 2025

Mission Statement

There are multiple allusions throughout Project 2025 that right-wing parents will be allowed to run amok, threatening violence consequence-free to teachers, school employees and school boards. 

(Buckscountybeacon.com) “Burke unloads the heart of Heritage’s plan for education in the second paragraph:

“Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.“

Burke cites Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” one of several places that Friedman laid out his ideas about how education should be delivered. Friedman’s idea was, simply, vouchers. The government would have no role except perhaps to certify a certain minimum level of quality among providers. Friedman was certain that the free market could fix everything (including racial issues—no need for mandated desegregation, because the free market would fix it). The government would hand over a stack of taxpayer dollars to parents who would then spend these at the vendor of their choosing (Friedman did not seem to anticipate the effects on a market in which private schools were picky about who they did or did not admit), be they non-profit, for-profit, religious, or secular.

So in broad introductory terms, Burke calls for federal spending on education to be turned to block-grants given to states without “strings” (aka “regulations”). Meanwhile, she calls for a big crackdown on the Higher Ed establishment “captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.” This, of course, includes “special interest groups like the National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the higher education lobby”.

  • (Pg. 322-323) Core principles:
    • Advancing educational freedom. (This will be reserved for the upper and upper-middle classes who could already afford private school fees and whose children have no behavior issues, disabilities or other issues that make enrolling them less profitable.)
    • Providing education choice for “federal” children – more vouchers.
    • Restoring state and local control over education funding.
    • Treating taxpayers like investors in federal student aid. Handling of student loans should be privatized, and treated like any other investment proposition.
    • Protecting the federal student loan portfolio from predatory politicians. Biden is “abusing” us with loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers must repay their loans.
    • Safeguarding civil rights: Unless you are LGBTQ or a minority, because we’re killing off “gender ideology” and critical race theory.
    • Stopping executive overreach: This is interesting…the author knows that Trump will do whatever he wants, but she actually says “Congress should set policy—not Presidents through pen-and-phone executive orders, and not agencies through regulations and guidance.”

NEEDED REFORMS

  • (Pg. 323-330) Delete the Department of Education: Lots of graphs saying kids are not performing well, so the obvious answer for oligarchs and religious zealots is to liquidate the department and relocate all the programs and offices to other federal agencies, where they can be quietly buried. However, this reporter looked at her fraudulently graphed stats more closely…

PROGRAM AND OFFICE PRIORITIZATION WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT

What is a “BLOCK GRANT”?: You will see a lot of references to this throughout her chapter. Talkpoverty.org has a nice explainer here. Conservatives like this system.

  • It prioritizes local control, but lacks accountability – they are often used as slush funds that states use to fill budget gaps or other need, instead of their intended purpose.
  • It loses value over time. The dollar amounts are also CAPPED, with no flexibility to account for inflation or the addition of more people needing a particular service. The most well-known block grant is TANF – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which helps fewer and fewer families over the years due to this funding type.
  • Easy to eliminate later: Conservatives will often support block-granting federally guaranteed programs, thereby making them less accountable, and then support ELIMINATING block granted programs precisely because they are not accountable. “Rinse and repeat.”

(Pg. 326) Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE)

  • Reduce the number of programs managed by OESE and transfer others.
  • Transfer Title 1, Part A – federal funding for low income districts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) as a no-strings attached block grant. (the no-strings is so money can flow to religious and private schools with no regulations.)Title I and IDEA are the federal government’s primary mechanisms to ensure that schools that can’t raise much revenue from local property taxes have at least a baseline level of resources.
  • “Restore revenue responsibility for Title I funding to the states over a 10-year period.“
  • “Eliminate “Impact Aid” not tied to students” and move somewhere else – Impact Aid is funding to school districts to compensate for loss in property tax revenue due to federal property use (military base, tribal lands). So no money for air conditioning, school maintenance, teaching training, etc…
  • “Transfer all Indian education programs to the Bureau of Indian Education.”
  • (Note: first mention!) Reconfigure the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program from their focus on low-income kids into a universal program that would include wealthy families whose children have never set foot in public schools, most likely bankrupting the program. Burke never addresses how universal voucher programs consistently become budget-busting programs that cost huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. Move to HHS.
  • Block-grant or eliminate all other programs.

(Pg. 326) Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education

  • Transfer the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education’s few programs to the Department of Labor, but
  • Move the Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Career and Technical Education Program to the Bureau of Indian Education.

(Pg. 326) Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS)

  • Convert funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) into a no-strings formula block grant distributed directly to local education agencies by Health and Human Service’s Administration for Community Living.
  • Transfer the Vocational Rehabilitation Grants for Native American students to the Bureau of Indian Education.
  • Phase out earmarks for a variety of special institutions, as originally envisioned. (No other explanation.)
  • Transfer OSERS supports of federal laws against discrimination against disabled individuals to the Department of Justice (DOJ) along with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which has no particular expertise in education and schools.

(Pg. 327) Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE)

  • Eliminate this department or move programs to the Dept. of Labor
  • Block grant and narrow funding to Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges.
  • Move programs important to our national security interests to the Dept. of State.

(Pg. 327) Institute of Education Sciences (IES)

  • Move ED’s statistical office, the National Commission for Education Statistics (NCES), to the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau. This, of course, makes no sense – she’s just seeing if we’re still reading at this point.

(Pg. 327) Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA)

  • Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA)
    • The next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management.

(Pg. 330) Office for Civil Rights (OCR)

  • OCR should move to the Department of Justice and let those with no particular expertise in education and schools, handle cases involving those issues.

CURRENT LAWS RELATING TO THE DEPT. OF EDUCATION THAT REQUIRE REPEAL

  • (Pg. 330) Congress should pass and the next President should sign a Department of Education Reorganization Act, which eliminates the Department of Education.

CURRENT REGULATIONS PROMULGATED BY OR RELEVANT TO THE AGENCY THAT SHOULD BE ROLLED BACK OR ELIMINATED

(Pg. 331) Charter School Grant Programs: HUGE PROFIT POTENTIAL FOR THE EDUCATION PRIVATEERS!

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/school-vouchers-public-education
  • “Immediate steps must be taken to loosen restrictions on them!” We can only imagine that the author of this chapter wants our nation to follow in Arizona’s footsteps. Their educational voucher scam that is one of the most highly rated by the Heritage’s Education Freedom Report Card. So we’re going to start with them as an example of what the billionaires want for our kids first.

Let’s start with Arizona‘s conservative/libertarian dream! They will be the model to follow if Trump is re-elected.

  • “While voucher programs have been sold as a way to increase educational achievement, they typically lack academic accountability.  Arizona is the only state in the nation to implement a fully universal voucher program without any form of academic accountability. 
  • Many studies have shown that voucher programs have detrimental impacts on student learning, but in Arizona there is simply no way to assess whether students in the program are more academically successful with a voucher than they were in a public school (if they were even attending public school in the first place).
  • Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, and Florida all require voucher students to either sit for state testing or take a nationally norm-referenced assessment. Utah and West Virginia allow students to submit a portfolio showcasing their academic progress in lieu of an assessment, but crucially still require some form of proof of academic progress. In Arizona, there is zero requirement for voucher students to show they are meeting state standards or even learning at all.
  • Arizona’s lack of academic oversight is compounded by its failure to approve  voucher-funded private schools, unlike Iowa, Florida, Utah, and West Virginia, which require schools participating in their state voucher programs to register with the state and meet certain standards of accreditation. In Utah, private schools with a potential for financial troubles are explicitly prohibited from joining the program. 
  • No such vetting exists in Arizona. Any fly-by-night for-profit private school or microschool can open anywhere (even in unsafe garages, living rooms, or strip mall buildings) and accept ESA voucher student funding without any proof of accreditation or quality. 
  • No Child Safety Measures in Arizona’s Voucher System
    • Perhaps most egregiously, Arizona’s ESA voucher program lacks any semblance of child safety measures. Indiana, Florida, Utah, and West Virginia all require that teachers participating in their state voucher systems pass a background check to ensure they can safely work with children. This is fairly common in states with targeted voucher programs as well; DC, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin all have similar background check requirements. 
  • Arizona’s voucher program even lacks basic health and safety regulations for private schools, tutors, and vendors. Voucher-funded schools are not required to participate in health screenings, conduct standard fire and emergency evacuation drills, or have systems in place to deal with improper possession of firearms, drugs, etc. 
    • All five of the other states with universal voucher programs — Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Florida, Utah, West Virginia — and all but one of the states with targeted programs — D.C., Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin  — require voucher-funded private schools to comply with the same health and safety standards as district public schools.” 

Just saying…Next time Ye opens an unaccredited Christian private school with incredibly odd requirements, Arizona is where it should be!

(See “RESOURCES” below for myths vs. facts on voucher schools in Arizona)

But it’s not just Arizona!

  • (cbpp.org) “In the past few months, state lawmakers have expanded and created a record number of school voucher programswith little to no limits on eligibility. This will deplete available state revenues for public education and other critical services and do little to expand opportunity for students.
  • Regardless of whether school vouchers directly or indirectly divert funding from public schools to private education, state K-12 funding formulas depend on some metric of student count to allocate per-pupil funding. Some school districts can absorb some of the cuts with layoffs and reduced spending on textbooks and supplies. But fixed expenses such as air conditioning, school buses, and building maintenance can lead to funding shortfalls and layoffs.”

Non-accountability is a feature, not a bug at charter schools!

  • While the GOP wants parents to be able to review every public school library book and even make teachers wear body cameras in classrooms, this funding scam funnels public funds into unaccountable and extremist networks. Here are some recent examples:
    • 2012 – Louisiana started handing out vouchers to private and religious schools. While their public school performance was based on the results of mandatory standardized tests, their voucher students weren’t subject to similar testing unless their new schools enroll a certain number of such students. These kids were still promoted to the next grade even if they failed their version of the tests.
    • Thousands of kids in that Louisiana were taught that the Loch Ness monster was real in an attempt to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
    • Indiana’s choice law also prohibits the state from regulating the curriculum of voucher schools, so millions of dollars of the state education budget are subsidizing schools whose curricula teaches creationism and the stories and parables in the Bible as literal truth. 
    • 2014 – the pastor of St. Jude Parish urged his parishioners to apply for the tax funded choice scholarships to “ease the financial burden on the parish,” including fixing the steeple, painting the roof and grow the ministries on the Church side of things.”
    • More recently, Utah lobbyist, Allison Sorensen, executive director of Kaysville-based Education Opportunity for Every Child, who is helping to lead the effort to enact a new ESA program in that state, “was recorded saying she wants to ‘destroy public education,’ according to KUTV. Education historian Diane Ravitch, called the comment an example of voucher proponents saying “the quiet part out loud.”

We’ve done this before!

During the Jim Crow era, state and local laws enforced racial segregation in public school systems differentiated by the race of their students and vastly different funding levels and access to facilities.

After Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka eliminated the official fiction of “separate but equal,” White Supremacists, led by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, pushed his own state’s legislature to revoke funds and close schools and whole districts which participated in integration. The school board of Prince Edward County slashed public school funding to the minimum and ultimately closed all their public schools in 1959.

Then the state adopted a “tuition grant program,” offering vouchers for K-12 that were only good at new, private and segregated schools, known as segregation academies. By 1969, more than 200 private segregation academies were set up in states across the south. Seven of those states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—maintained tuition grant programs that offered vouchers to students in an effort to incentivize white students to leave desegregated public school districts.

(States with universal or near-universal “School Choice” now or active legislation: Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky (in-process), Louisiana (in process), Minnesota (in process), Missouri (in process), New Hampshire (in process), New Jersey (in process), North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island (in process), South Carolina, Tennessee ((in process), Texas (in-process), Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred federal funds from going to segregated schools, made it clear that southern White Supremacists could not continue their practices legally and receive federal funding. To keep its tax-exempt status, Prince Edward Academy, the original segregation academy was forced to admit Black students in 1980, but kept the black student population to a mere 1 percent—or seven out of 640 students. The school would not graduate a black student until the 1989-90 school year, and its black enrollment was still under 5 percent in 2013 with only 17 black students among its enrollment of 362.

“The impacts of the first private school voucher programs in the South still reverberate today in battles for adequate and equitable funding of public education. And when President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos—a longtime Republican donor with a passion for private school vouchers—to become the next secretary of education, he elevated vouchers to the forefront of the national policy conversation. Swiftly thereafter, Trump and DeVos proposed to cut billions in funding for public schools while creating the first nationwide federal private school vouchers program. What’s more, in May 2017, while defending the Trump budget before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, DeVos refused to say that the Department of Education, under her leadership, would protect students against all forms of discrimination in private schools that receive federal taxpayer dollars through vouchers.

Voucher schemes—such as those backed by President Trump and Secretary DeVos—are fundamentally positioned to funnel taxpayers’ dollars into private schools while draining much-needed resources from public schools and the vulnerable students who attend them. Policymakers must consider the origins of vouchers and their impact on segregation and support for public education. No matter how well intentioned, widespread voucher programs risk exacerbating segregation in schools and leaving the most vulnerable students and the public schools they attend behind.“

(Pg. 331-332) Civil Rights Data Collection:

  • Reverse expansion of data collection for high school sports to no longer include “nonbinary” sex category versus binary male/female participation.
    • Basically, Project 2025 is giving this issue to the zealot wing to keep the fascist-adjacent groups like Moms for Liberty engaged.
      • The Biden’s Dept. of Education was complimented by the Education Trust:
        • “We commend the administration’s continued efforts to advance policies focused on equity and improving outcomes for historically underserved students, especially students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, students learning English, students experiencing homelessness, students in the foster care system, students who are incarcerated, undocumented students, Black and Brown students, Native students, Asian students, and students who identify as LGBTQ+. We know these students are also those whose communities have been most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we appreciate ED’s efforts to collect and disseminate information on the multiple needs and educational experiences of these students and shine a light on issues affecting equitable educational resources and outcomes.“

(pg. 332) Rescind federal loan programs forgiveness.

Here they are talking about rescinding a set of regulations: Student Assistance General Provisions, Federal Perkins Loan Program, and William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program Final Regulations

  • The William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program (also called FDLP, FDSLP, and Direct Loan Program) provides “low-interest loans for students and parents to help pay for the cost of a student’s education after high school. The lender is the U.S. Department of Education … rather than a bank or other financial institution.
  • Federal Perkins Loans are low-interest loans made through a school’s financial aid office using federal funds. Undergraduate and graduate students with exceptional financial need are eligible to receive a Federal Perkins Loan.

They are mad that Biden’s administration loan forgiveness to these programs “without clear congressional authorization at a tremendous cost to the taxpayers, with estimates ranging from $85.1 to $120 billion.” Conservatives, dismissive of congressional power, and usually big fans of business, don’t like giving any advantages to the poors. Ms. Burke does not mention how forgiveness will boost the economy, encourage entrepreneurship and small business creation.

(Pg. 332) Rescind Dear Colleague letter undercutting Florida’s SB 7044 allowing more “flexibility” on accreditation.

((Note: first mention!) This issue is mentioned several times in this chapter. ) It’s a BIG DEAL FOR THE GOP, WITH HUGE POTENTIAL FOR PROFITEERING, so we need to pay attention!)

What is ACCREDITATION ANYWAY AND WHY IS IT MENTIONED 5 TIMES IN THIS CHAPTER?!: Higher education accreditation in the United States is a peer review process by which the validity of degrees and credits awarded by higher education institutions is assured. It started in 1952 to be sure that returning GI’s didn’t waste their educational benefits in useless schools, like Trump University. Traditionally, there were two types of accrediting agencies, regional ones that graded public and not-for-profit schools, and national ones, that reviewed mostly for-profit schools and online schools.

Under Trump’s Education Sec. DeVos, the two types were merged and requirements were relaxed. She also cut staff working on the more than 100,000 debt relief claims submitted by defrauded student loan borrowers from schools that should never have been accredited, like Corinthian Colleges and ITT.

  • Why are the billionaires so interested in accreditation? Federal law requires accreditation—by a Department of Education-approved accrediting agency—for students to be eligible to receive federal financial aid. A college or university that fails to meet standards for accreditation risks losing this source of revenue. So future education profiteers are VERY INTERESTED IN LOO$ENING UP REQUIREMENT$.
  • Why are religious zealots so interested? They want accreditors to stop dinging them for being racist, misogynistic, homophobic assholes. Right now, religious schools have to formally opt out.
  • “Accreditation limits political control of faculty and curricula.” In North Carolina, the UNC system’s Board of Governors—a group consisting mainly of white male Republican donors, lobbyists, and party operatives appointed by Republican legislators—has been daunted, if not entirely, by threats of disaccreditation if it continues to violate institutional autonomy and academic freedom. This would be a HUGE financial disaster.    
  • Republicans want more universities to become training programs for business, designed by business – effectively turning public universities into upscale vocational schools offering training certificates and “competency-based” degrees. However, accreditation currently prioritizes faculty control over the curriculum, which emphasizes broad exposure to natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities vs. industry-valued skills” and equip students with knowledge that has “job-market currency.” The current accreditation system doesn’t stop anyone from starting these kinds of schools – it just restricts access to financial aid if a school purporting to offer college-level education doesn’t meet quality standards.
  • “In the end, accreditation impedes the ability of Republicans to help their corporate backers stick the public with the tab for job training. It’s an old story: get control of public institutions and use that control to subsidize centers of private economic power. To fool the public, attack accreditation by claiming it protects liberal professors and keeps students from learning stuff that would, to paraphrase our former governor, put butts in jobs.“

TRUMP TERM 2: “If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he plans to replace college accreditors and impose new standards on the nation’s colleges and universities that include removing diversity, equity and inclusion staff members (and CRT, gender equity, and affirmative action); protecting free speech (except for the stuff we just mentioned); and “defending the American tradition and Western civilization (patriarchy, made-up stuff on slavery, and the joys of rapacious capitalism before FDR.”)

Says our former leader – Donald “I-had-pay-a 25-million-dollar-fine-for-my-Trump-University-scam” Trump…

Well, for our former Scamster-in-Chief – the accreditors didn’t fail TOTALLY. They kept his grift from being accredited, saving millions of tax dollars. We might have forgotten about this whole sordid episode (seriously, no, never) if he and his toxic eldest son hadn’t squealed about Biden forgiving some student debt.

TRUMP TERM 1: Remember former completely-unqualified U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos? She stuffed her Education Department with lawyers and lobbyists from the for-profit education industry and worked hard to weaken the college accreditation system, which was set in place to protect students and taxpayers from predatory colleges (like Trump University!).

Florida accreditor SACSCOC accused the Florida college system of a number of violations and conflicts of interest one expects of that state. So Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7044, which forces colleges to switch accreditors every time their accreditation is up for renewal, a huge expenditure of time, money and labor for the schools. He signed in spite of a letter  from Education Department Undersecretary James Kvaal outlining his concern that the bill could put students and institutions at risk of losing access to federal funding by accrediting lower-quality colleges to give them access to taxpayer funds.

  • Other things DeVos did for the for-profit education industry!
    • killed investigations into widespread abuses by prominent for-profit colleges
    • dismantled a special investigative team at the department that was formed in 2016, after the collapse of Corinthian Colleges, to continue those investigations.
    • suspended the Obama-era rules in a move slammed by groups such as Public Citizen as an effort to “put the profit margins of for-profit colleges ahead of the interests of students and their families”

Now, a slew of repetitive stuff to appeal to evangelical voters…

  • Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance (Title IX):
    • (Pg. 333) Use “first available legislative vehicle” (most probably a Trump executive order) to prohibit the department from funding or enforcing Biden’s final regulations under Title IX. The current rule prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in education programs and activities receiving federal funding. It included a definition of sex-based harassment, off-campus conduct, reporting requirement, grievance procedures, LGBTQ+ protections, pregnancy and parental protections and all sorts of stuff that makes sure that ALL our kids, not just the cisgender ones, can have an abuse-free environment in schools.
      • Obviously this tramples on the rights of homophobes, transphobes, and those who don’t believe in science. The next few points say this over and over.
    • (Pg. 333) Commence a new rulemaking process and rescind current regulations, restore the Title IX rules of the then-Secretary Betsy DeVos’s tenure and define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth.
    • (Pg. 333) Work with Congress to amend Title IX to include due process requirements; define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth; and strengthen protections for faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.
    • (Pg. 333) “…restore the rights of women and girls and restore due process protections for accused individuals.” The Dept. of Education under Betsy DeVos was more interested in the rights of alleged rapists than the women and girls they harmed. Her regulations narrowly defined sexual harassment, and directed schools to conduct live hearings to allow those who were accused of sexual harassment or assault to cross-examine their traumatized accusers. Biden’s allows for remote interviews or interviews in separate rooms.
      (Pg. 334) “abandon this change redefining “sex” to mean “sexual orientation and gender identity” in Title IX immediately across all departments.” This is in line with Project 2025’s overall goal to remove gender issues from all departments.
      (Pg. 334) “restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that “sex” is properly understood as a fixed biological fact. Official notice-and-comment should be posted immediately.” Trump’s administration eliminated transgender individuals’ civil rights in health care and Roger Severino, the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services said that “We’re going back to the plain meaning of those terms [male and female], which is based on biological sex.” However, to simplify as for a child, is to ignore and/or censor emerging science. 
      (Pg. 334) “…political appointees in the Office for Civil Rights should begin a full review of all Title IX investigations that were conducted on the understanding that “sex” referred to gender identity and/or sexual orientation.” Discrimination cases
      (Pg. 334) All such ongoing investigations should be dropped.
      (Pg. 334) The new Secretary of Education should publicly disclaim the humane policies of the Biden Administration as “overreach.”
      (Pg. 334) FERPA allows parents full access to their children’s educational records, so any practice of paperwork obfuscation on this front violates federal law. This will deny social gender transitioning at school without parental consent.

“Protect faith-based educational institutions, programs, and activities.”

We’re pulling this phrase out for a little more study…Obviously, in combination with the proceeding points, it means that not only will our tax dollars will be used by schools that instruct kids on how to be nazis, that teach creationism, astrology, or flat earth theory as a science, or those that worship with AR-15’s, but also those who practice rampant discrimination against any vestige of LGBTQ+ identity occuring amongst staff, students or even parents.

OK, so here’s where Christian Nationalism becomes a thing, because it won’t take too long before SOME religions are prioritized over others.

Does everyone remember, back in 2012, when Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal advocated for this voucher scam for faith-based schools and people were surprised that it wasn’t just for Christians?

“Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, says she had no idea that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s educational system might mean taxpayer support of Muslim schools. “I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,” the District 64 Representative said Monday. “I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,” Hodges said. Hodges mistakenly assumed that “religious” meant “Christian.”

10 years later…So parents with kids in this Muslim school might suddenly lose their vouchers and then what? They go back to public schools and the state pays for them again? Maybe religion SHOULDN’T be involved with taxpayer money…

There is no bottom…

If it weren’t bad enough that schools receiving taxpayer money can teach fake science, there’s always something worse! Not sure if ol’Milton Friedman, who also wrote in that same article “A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values..” saw this one coming…

(networkforpubliceducation.org)”The Network for Public Education (NPE) calls for the immediate cessation of ESA voucher payments to homeschoolers and all other non-school-based “individualized” instruction programs based on the discovery of an online homeschooling network whose primary purpose is to teach young children to be Nazis. According to the report in the Huffington Post, its numbers thus far are in the thousands, but the greater threat is the homeschooling network whose primary purpose is to teach young children to be Nazis. According to the report in the Huffington Post, its numbers thus far are in the thousands, but the greater threat is how its existence exposes the dangers of publicly-subsidized vouchers designed to fund extremist beliefs.  Such programs, including so-called micro-schools, operate with almost no curricular supervision or public fiscal oversight, allowing them to legally indoctrinate children with a distorted hate-filled curriculum directly supported by public funds.“

Ohio lawmakers are considering changing the law to increase LifeWise programs and others similar to it. An Ohio House bill would require school districts to adopt policies allowing students to leave for religious instruction, a change from the current law that permits school districts to pass such policies.

(Pg. 334) Title VI—School Discipline and Disparate Impact:

WHAT IS DISPARATE IMPACT?: Disparate impact refers to practices in employment, housing, education, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral. There is no requirement to show intentional discrimination. Disparate impact can be justified with the normative goal of substantive equality, the equality of outcomes for groups.

“Eliminating disparate impact as the basis for civil rights investigations removes the only avenue available for people to challenge school policies whose impact might be racially discriminatory, said Dunn of the Advancement Project, who was previously a lawyer in the Education Department’s office for civil rights. “You don’t address racism that happens in our schools just through these individual different treatment investigations, although those are critically important as well,” she said, referring to probes into allegations of individual discrimination.“

The GOP does not believe in systemic racism, so they do not accept, nor care that discipline indicators—such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions—are disproportionately used to punish minority students. They do care that the Obama administration would deny federal funding to schools if they treated black and white students equally but had aggregate differences in the rates of school discipline by race (disparate impact). Despite evidence to the contrary, they also have zero respect for “restorative justice.”

  • Cont.
    • (Pg. 335) Ignore Obama’s “disparate impact,” go back to Trump’s version and review all open cases to excuse cases that included allegation of disparate impact.
    • (Pg. 335) Review resolution agreements with schools to conform to this new policy
    • (Pg. 335) Direct the department and DOJ jointly to issue enforcement guidance stating that the agencies will no longer investigate Title VI cases that exclusively rest on allegations of disparate impact.
    • (Pg. 335) Rescind the guidance and commence rulemaking to rescind regulation about disparate impact.
    • (Pg. 335) Coordinate with the next Attorney General on a regulation that would clarify that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act no longer includes a disparate impact standard.
    • (Pg. 336) Frame this attack on civil rights by saying that the Civil Rights Act does not allow for “endless federal meddling” with such as disparate impact standards.

Assistance to States for the Education of Children with Disabilities; Preschool Grants for Children with Disabilities (Equity in IDEA)

What is EQUITY IN IDEA?: This translates to “Equity in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.” The program was designed to ensure that all children with disabilities are able to access the services to which they have a civil right. Disproportionality is one measure of educational equity. It occurs when students from a racial group are identified for special education, placed in more restrictive settings, or disciplined (suspended/expelled) at markedly higher rates than their peers. The federal government considers disproportionality “significant” when the overrepresentation exceeds a threshold defined by each state.

However, Ms. Burke agreed with an article positing UNDER-representation.

We’ve read articles where school districts found they had an overrepresentation of Black students with intellectual disabilities, for which educators and community members worked diligently to find solutions to.

We also read the same article by Paul Morgan (also here) that Ms. Burke refers to. The paper is interesting, not just in itself, but as being so unsupportive of her conclusions, that we’ve included a lot of it here, for you to judge for yourself.

“Although well intentioned, the Equity in IDEA regulations are misdirected. This is because they do not address the true inequity: Federal legislation and policy should be monitoring for under-identification, not over-identification.

Minority children are less likely to be identified as having disabilities than otherwise similar white or English-speaking children while attending U.S. schools. This has been reported across many peer-reviewed studies.

The Equity in IDEA regulations use risk ratios and thresholds to monitor for whether schools are racially discriminatory in how they identify children as having disabilities. Yet risk ratios do not tell policymakers whether schools are being racially discriminatory in their disability identification practices. This is because risk ratios do not adjust for variability in children’s clinical needs for services. Using such flawed indicators will misdirect federal civil rights efforts and may unintentionally limit access by minority children with disabilities to beneficial special education services.The right way to monitor for whether U.S. schools are racially discriminatory in their disability identification practices is to examine whether schools are treating similarly situated children differently. For instance, policymakers might investigate whether, among similarly achieving children attending the same schools, those who are black are more or less likely to be identified than those who are white. Both the National Research Council and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights use this “differential treatment” standard to examine for racial discrimination.

Using similarly situated contrasts would help address the many problems resulting from Equity in IDEA’s use of risk ratios, which may instead reflect differences in underlying prevalence rates.

There is good reason to think that disability prevalence rates differ between minority and white children in the U.S. Minority children are disproportionately exposed to lead, are more likely to be born with low birthweight and to have higher blood pressure, and experience other gestational and environmental risks for disability as a result of their greater likelihood of growing up in poverty.

Yet, and despite their greater risk factor exposure, there is also good reason to believe that minority children are instead under-identified by U.S. schools as having disabilities. In fact, in ten peer-reviewed studies analyzing over forty nationally representative samples of children attending U.S. schools, we find that under-identification is both widespread and longstanding.

The under-identification of minority children’s disability occurs both generally and across many specific conditions. Under-identification is evident before as well as after school entry. Minority children are less likely than similarly situated white children to be identified as having autism, learning disabilities, speech or language impairments, intellectual disabilities, ADHD, behavioral disabilities, other health impairments, or even very low prevalence disabilities like visual or hearing impairments.

That is, we repeatedly find that children who are white and English-speaking are far more likely to be identified as having disabilities and so of receiving special education services than similarly situated minority children. This includes those displaying the same clinical needs, coming from similarly resourced families, and attending the same schools.

For example, among fourth grade children with clinically significant reading difficulties, we find that 74 percent of white children are receiving special education services. The contrasting percentages for black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian children are only 44 percent, 43 percent, 34 percent, and 48 percent, respectively. U.S. schools may be biased against identifying minority children as having disabilities.

Minority children’s under-identification has been occurring in the U.S. since at least 2003. These findings are also consistent with those reported by public health researchers.

Unrecognized disabilities may partially explain both racial achievement gaps in the U.S. and the school-to-prison pipeline. U.S. schools are more likely to criminalize the behavioral problems of minority children including through suspension and expulsion yet provide treatment for the same behaviors of white children. Many adolescents and adults in the criminal justice system, who are disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities, have unrecognized disabilities.

Why are minority children so much less likely to be identified as having disabilities than similarly situated white children? Teachers may not recognize that a disability may underlie repeated academic difficulties. Minority parents and community members lack access to evidence-based information about the signs and symptoms for disabilities. Minority parents of children with disabilities report stigma as well as dismissive providers. Materials used by U.S. schools to explain the special education system often require college level schooling to understand. And federal legislation and policy, including the new Equity in IDEA regulations, may be unintentionally limiting access to special education services by minority children with disabilities.

What can be done to ensure equity in IDEA? Teachers and parents should have better access to evidence-based information about disabilities. The special education system should not rely so heavily on teacher referral. Instead, U.S. schools should use universal screenings. Universal screenings have helped address minority children’s under-identification for both gifted education and pediatric care. Federal legislators and policymakers should use the best available empirical evidence to ensure that the civil rights of minority children with disabilities are being protected as they attend U.S. schools.

This empirical evidence consistently indicates that minority children are less likely to be identified as having disabilities than similarly situated white and English-speaking children attending U.S. schools. Federal legislators and policymakers should be monitoring for under-identification. Such civil rights monitoring could be done through analyses of the NAEP as well as state or local datasets that approximate contrasts between similarly situated children including those who are similarly achieving. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights could then investigate districts that are observed in these analyses to be differentially identifying similarly situated children. These efforts would do far more to ensure equity in the U.S. special education system than the current Equity in IDEA regulations.

  • (Pg. 336) Burke’s conclusion/solution: Rescind the regulation requiring states to consider race and ethnicity in the identification, placement and discipline of students.
    • First, she had to ignore all the factors the author notes relating to critical race theory issues.
    • Then, she recommended that the DOE DO WORSE THAN NOTHING! “No replacement regulation is required.” Even though the authors of the article she quoted stated that students should still be monitored, just for under- rather than over-representation and examples of such racial discrimination should then be investigated by the Dept. of Education’s Office of civil rights, she washes her hands of the whole issue other than to share this knowledge with school administrators. No funding. No direction. Nothing. SHE KNOWS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL BE SO UNDERFUNDED, THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO DO THIS, AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS DON’T HAVE TO.

Provide School Meals to Children in Need; Do Not Use Federal Meals to Support Radical Ideology

  • (Pg. 337) Rescind universal lunch programs. Fascinating. The GOP is jonesing to give universal vouchers worth thousands of dollars to the wealthiest families who already send their kids to private schools. But a free lunch to kids in public school? That’s a pizza slice too far!
  • (Pg. 337) Prohibit the USDA or any other federal agency from withholding services, including meals, from federal or state agencies—including but not limited to K–12 schools—that choose not to replace “sex” with “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in that agency’s administration of Title IX. If Trump takes office, this interagency coordination to erase SOGI will not be a problem.

Phase Out Existing Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) Plans: There are just too many of them, in her humble opinion. And the recent plans are too generous.

  • (Pg. 337) Phase out existing IDR loans by making new loans ineligible.
    • The new plan should have an income exemption equal to the poverty line and require payments of 10% of income above the exemption.
    • If new legislation is possible, there should be no loan forgiveness, but if not, existing law would require forgiving any remaining balance after 25 years.
  • (Pg. 338 and 354) Governments fund what they value. We do not value an educated workforce. Privatize all student loans – end including borrower defense to repayment, closed school discharge, Grad PLUS and Parent PLUS loans, Public Service Loan Forgiveness and GEAR-UP.  BECAUSE MARKETPLACE is always better! “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college. 

OTHER STRUCTURAL REFORMS THAT THE DOOMED DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION REQUIRES

(Pg. 338) Reform Federal Education Data Collection

  • The Heritage Foundation believes that the MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR influencing student educational achievement and attainment is FAMILY STRUCTURE. (See Dept. of Health and Human Services for more Christian Nationalist agenda items!)
    • Department of Education (or whatever takes its place, should make student data on family structure available to the public.
    • Data collection efforts should be consolidated under the Census Bureau.
    • Data collection for higher education should be improved by storing at the Department of Labor.

(Pg. 339) Reform the Negotiated Rulemaking Process at ED

  • The law currently requires the Dept. of Education to engage in negotiated rulemaking prior to creating new regulations.
    • Ms. Burke wants Congress (or just have Trump executive-order it) to eliminate what she feels an expensive, time-consuming and difficult process that won’t agree with the fascists who will be in power at the time anyway. So why not just limit it to public hearings with short participation windows, all during working hours?
    • Plus, there won’t even be a Dept. of Education, so this is just her playing the game.

(Pg. 340-341) Reform the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) for the “benefit of students”

(highly unlikely) and “taxpayers” (we think Ms. Burke is really just talking about lenders here.)

  • Biden’s administration is apparently abusing us with payment pauses and HEA loan forgiveness programs, “borrower defense to repayment,” closed school discharge and Public Service Loan Forgiveness. (Seriously?)
  • Immediate steps to commence rulemaking, or whatever a new fascist government does, to rescind or greatly modify prior regulations.
  • Turn system to private lender, backed by government guarantees.
    • They would COMPETE, allowing for market prices and signals to influece educational borrowing, adding consumer-driven accountability into higher education. (Yes, just like food, oil and all the other monopolies compete!)
  • If this proves too politically unpopular even for the lickspittle GOP legislators in Congress –
    • switch to “fair-value accounting” from FCRA accounting. (See box below)
  • Consolidate all federal loan together into one program that utilizes:
    • income-driven repayment,
    • no interest rate subsidies or loan forgiveness,
    • includes annual and aggregate limits on borrowing (keeps the peasants in their lane!)
    • requires “skin in the game” from college to hold them accountable for loan repayment.
  • Spin off federal student aid into a new government corporation with professional governance and management.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? “switching to fair-value accounting from FCRA accounting.”

(Part of Project 2025’s strategy is not just to be soooo huge, that no one will read the whole thing. Another strategy is to use terms or obscure rules to make our eyes glaze over, hoping we’ll just let the issue pass by. Then, when their system locks into place, they can say they warned us, but we were just too stupid, lazy or undisciplined to look stuff up. But Ms. Burke used this phrase in two different places, so we’re going to track it down.)

“…the point of federal student loans is to encourage people to get an education.” At least it was. When we cared about our kids and thought their futures were important to American’s. However, the GOP is very busy with legislation to make student loans more punitive.

FCRA accounting: FCRA stands for the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, which funds federal student loans and the single-family loan guaranee program. Because the federal government can get cash more cheaply than a private bank, it can offer loans to individuals or corporations at interest rates that are cheaper than what the market provides and yet are still profitable for the government. 

“Fair-Value accounting: instead of using the federal government’s actual cost of funds, FVA would have the government book the loans using private-sector interest rates…”as a way to “incorporate the cost of the market risk associated with expecting future loan repayments.” However, accounting as if the federal government had the private sector’s cost of funds doesn’t make it true.” As a result, “fair-value accounting” overstates the loans’ actual cost to the federal government.”

NEW POLICY PRIORITIES FOR 2025 AND BEYOND – (Conservative “Hair-on-fire” agenda)

(Pg. 342) Rescind National Education Associations (NEA) congressional charter. It is mean to oligarchs and doesn’t like the GOP’s imminent destruction of public education.

  • Conduct kangaroo-court hearings “to determine how much federal taxpayer money the NEA has used for radical causes favoring a single political party.” Like public education. Must be Democrats!!!

(Pg. 342-3) Parental Rights in Education and Safeguarding Students – Protecting kids from CRT

  • This is about prohibiting “compelled” Critical Race Theory (CRT) and any other ideas they believe violate state or federal civil rights laws. (inaccurate description of CRT below!)
    • The GOP on Critical Race Theory: Ms. Burke: “Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even—making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life. The theory disrupts America’s Founding ideals of freedom and opportunity. (the Constitution’s role in protecting slavery) So, when critical race theory is used as part of school activities such as mandatory affinity groups, teacher training programs in which educators are required to confess their privilege, or school assignments in which students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist, the theory is actively disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.”
    • Normal people on Critical Race Theory: (edtrust.org) “Across the country, districts with the most students of color on average receive substantially less (16%) state and local revenue than districts with the fewest students of color. That’s about $2,700 less per student — and in a district with 5,000 students, that gap could mean $13.5 million in missing resources.
      Why does this matter? Students of color have long been denied fair school funding because their communities have been long denied fair opportunities to build wealth due to systemic racism. State school funding systems should address these disparities by ensuring that districts with the most students of color receive a combination of state and local funding that is at least as much the amount that districts with the fewest students of color receive      .”

Hey, they have this cool chart! “Gaps in State and Local Revenues per Student Between Districts Serving the Most and Fewest Students of Color, 2018-2020”

  • Lawmakers should pass laws preventing the theory from “spreading discrimination.”
  • Basic Christopher Ruffo right-wing progaganda statements that have ZERO to do with CRT:
    • “No individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin.”
    • “school officials should not require students or teacher to believe that individuals are guilty…for the actions of others based on race or ethnicity.”

(Pg. 343) Advancing Legal Protections for Parental Rights in Education

“The federal government could demand that schools include curriculum or lessons regarding critical race or gender theory in a way that violates parental rights, especially if it requires minors to disclose information about their religious beliefs, or beliefs about race or gender in violation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (20 USC Sec. 1232h).” To remedy the lack of clear and robust protection for parental rights, the next Administration should:

  • (Pg. 344) “Work to pass a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that restores parental rights to a “top-tier” right. – would give parents a “fair hearing in court” and “would require the government to satisfy “strict scrutiny”—the highest standard of judicial review—when the government infringes parental rights.“
  • (Pg. 344) Further ensure that any regulations that could impact parental rights contain similar protections and require federal agencies to demonstrate that their action meets strict scrutiny before a final rule is promulgated. Since they aren’t going to have negotiated rulemaking anymore, the parents must hope that the new administrators will get it right.

(Pg. 244- 345) Protect Parental Rights in Policy – Christian Nationalism agenda alert!

  • (Pg. 344) “Congress should also consider equipping parents with a private right of action.” This means letting parents sue the crap out of schools.
  • Prioritize legislation advancing such rights. Let’s look at one of their suggestions, shall we?

H. R. 5327 – Empowering Parent’s Act. Rep. Good, Bob [R-VA-5]

To establish a private right of action for parents with respect to the teaching of racial discrimination theory and other actions by covered schools, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the “Empowering Parents Act”.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
Congress finds the following (Christian Nationalism agenda):
(1) The family unit consisting of a mother, father, and child is the foundation of civil society.
(2) The rights and authority of parents are God-given and self-evident.
(3) The rights and authority of parents do not derive from the government.
(4) The rights and authority of parents should not be challenged or undermined by the government, but must be preserved and protected.
(5) Parents are responsible for impressing faith, morals, and values upon their children; such responsibility does not belong to teachers, school board members, or politicians.
(6) No teacher, school board member, or public official has the right to politicize or indoctrinate children
(7) More than 70 percent of citizens of the United States support the ability of parents to choose where students attend school. (School vouchers)
(8) It is contrary to the 10th Amendment of the Constitution and the principles of federalism espoused by the founding fathers for the Federal Government to supersede State or local authorities regarding the instruction and testing of students.
(9) Taxpayers have a right to know what publicly funded schools are teaching students. (Since even the Dept. of Education has trouble with public comment on rulemaking and wants to eliminate it or severely curtail it (see above) this should go well.)

SEC. 3. SENSE OF CONGRESS.
It is the sense of Congress that—
(1) a covered school should not—
(A) deny a student the ability to attend school in person;
(B) intentionally expose a student to racial discrimination theory; (Anti-accurate American history)
(C) intentionally expose a student to radical gender theory or sexually explicit content; (Anti-LGBTQ agenda)
(D) require a biological woman to compete against a biological man in an athletic competition hosted or sponsored by such school; (Anti-LGBTQ agenda)
(E) require a biological woman and a biological man to share a private facility, including — (Anti-LGBTQ agenda – Fearmongering 101)
(i) a restroom;
(ii) a locker room;
(iii) a shower facility; or
(iv) a changing room; or
(F) require a student to abide by a health mandate without first obtaining parental consent or require, as a prerequisite for in-person school attendance— (Parents with immunity-challenged kids or family members have no rights here.)
(i) wearing a mask;
(ii) receiving a COVID–19 vaccine; or
(iii) subjecting to a medical screening;
(2) a covered school should—
(A) protect the personal information of every student, as required under section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act (commonly known as the “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974” ) (20 U.S.C. 1232g); and
(B) be parent-led and locally managed with State oversight; (Moms For “Liberty“)
(3) Federal law enforcement agencies should not target a parent for exercising First Amendment rights on school property or in school board meetings; and (parents should be allowed to threaten officials with immunity)
(4) a parent should have the ability to choose the school that the children of such parent attend. (School vouchers – this is an idea, not a right.)

SEC. 4. PROHIBITIONS.

(a) In General.—A covered school may not—
(1) compel a teacher or student to adopt, affirm, adhere to, or profess—
(A) any academic discipline, program, or activity that is premised on the idea that—
(i) the United States is a Nation founded on White supremacy and oppression, or that these forces are at the root of American society;
(ii) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (This is going to be difficult for patriarchal groups.)
(iii) the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist;
(iv) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(v) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (Remember…In this version of America, “sex” can only refer to biological males and females.)
(vi) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (Great! Per Sec 5, do the parents of that Black female protester in Mississippi who was insulted by a frat boy sue the university, the fraternity or both?)
(vii) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex;
(viii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(ix) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or
(x) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race; or
(B) an idea, where such compulsion violates title IV or title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000c et seq.);
(2) compel a student to observe or espouse obscene or sexual materials without the consent of a parent of such student;
(3) instruct or require an employee of such school to refer to a student using a pronoun not associated with the biological sex of such student, without obtaining consent to do so from a parent of such student;
(4) act as the agent of a parent of a student enrolled in such school, for purposes of—
(A) providing verifiable parental consent; or
(B) receiving a notice or other information required to be provided to a parent of such student; or
(5) neglect to report sexual assault or sexual harassment on school property to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.
(b) Rule Of Construction.—Nothing in this section may be construed to prohibit a teacher or a student from discussing public policy issues or matters of public debate.

SEC. 5. PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION.

(a) In General.—A parent aggrieved by a violation of section 4 may commence a civil action against the covered school responsible for the violation.
(b) Relief.—In any action under subsection (a), the court may award appropriate relief, including—
(1) temporary, preliminary, or permanent injunctive relief;
(2) compensatory damages;
(3) punitive or exemplary damages; and
(4) reasonable fees for attorneys.
(c) Statute Of Limitations.—An action under this section shall be brought not later than 30 days after the date on which the violation of section 4 occurred.
(d) Attorney General.—In a case in which a parent commences a civil action under subsection (a), the Attorney General shall have the exclusive authority to oversee, as appropriate, any investigation conducted by the Federal Government in connection with such action.

SEC. 6. DEFINITIONS.

In this Act:

  • (1) BIOLOGICAL MAN.—The term “biological man” means an individual who is recognized as a male on the date of the birth of such individual, based on the genetic and reproductive biological characteristics of such individual.
  • (2) BIOLOGICAL SEX.—The term “biological sex” means the sex recognized on the date of birth of the individual based on the genetic and reproductive biological characteristics of such individual.
  • (3) BIOLOGICAL WOMAN.—The term “biological woman” means an individual who is recognized as a female on the date of the birth of such individual, based on the genetic and reproductive biological characteristics of such individual.
  • (4) COVERED SCHOOL.—The term “covered school” means an elementary school or secondary school, as such terms are defined in section 8101 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 7801).
  • (5) OBSCENE MATERIAL.—The term “obscene material” means material that, considered as a whole—
  • (A) appeals to—
  • (i) the prurient interest; or
  • (ii) a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, excretory functions or products thereof, or sadomasochistic abuse; (Actually, according to the Project 2025 handbook, ANYTHING pertaining to LGBTQ subjects is by definition obscene.)
  • (B) goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of the matters described in clause (A)(ii); and
  • (C) does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. (OMG! We’re back to this shit again!)
  • (6) PARENT.—The term “parent” has the meaning given such term in section 8101 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 7801).
  • (Pg. 346) Check that federal draconian “parental rights” legislation aligns with state draconian bills in GA, FL, MT, WY, ID, OK, VI, AZ. States are the testing grounds for repression on a national level.
  • Parents would have the right of private action (lawsuits) against:
  • LIE ALERT!: Ms. Burke would like you to believe, without evidence, that “social contagion” accounts for the increase in youth seeking transition services, and not just because people stopped being such dicks about transgender people. Despite tons of little footnotes for everything else, there are no links to studies to back this ridiculous assertion.
  • LIE ALERT!: Ms. Burke states that “Heritage Foundation research finds that providing easier access to such treatments and surgeries without parental involvement does not reduce the suicidality of these young people and may even increase suicide rates.” Once again, zero footnotes, zero actual studies referenced. There is currently little to no research on kids undergoing actual transition-related surgeries WITHOUT supportive parents, other than to suggest that the parents start being supportive.
    • The actual medical studies about positive mental health outcomes with supportive parents in relation to gender-affirming care are clear and we have the links!

(Pg. 346) Advance School Choice Policies – GOP SCAM ALERT!

  • (Pg. 346) (Note: second mention!) The GOP legislators would like to hijack the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for their own kids! This is a program providing children from low-income families with vouchers of $9,401 maximum for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and $14,102 maximum for students in grades nine through 12.scholarships.
    • Self-Serve! GOP-Congress, which can’t be bothered to make D.C. a state with equivalent voting rights to states that have less population than D.C. has, wants in!
    • They think they can get the votes, though, to expand eligibility to ALL kids! (Hey, including theirs!) and raise it to $22,856, closer to what they have to pay for private schools.
    • Congress-kids should be able to take this money to private schools, who should be further deregulated so that private schools can control their admissions processes (i.e. not allow in poor Black kids from D.C.)

(pg. 348) Provide Education Choice for Populations Under the Jurisdiction of Congress

  • School voucher/ESA scam cont.: District students, children of active-duty military families and Native American students in public schools around the country should have access to the same kinds of budget-busting voucher/ESA scams that occur in 11 states now, INSTEAD OF INVESTING MORE MONEY INTO THEIR SCHOOLS.

(pg. 350) Expand Education Choice Through Portability of Existing Federal Funds

(pg. 350) Additional School Choice Options.

  • Hey – let’s add K-12 education into a GoFundMe scrabble! “Educational Choice for Children Act. This bill would create a federal scholarship tax credit that would incentivize donors to contribute to nonprofit scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Eligible families could then use that funding from the SGOs for their children’s education expenses including private school tuition, tutoring, and instructional materials.“

ADDITIONAL K–12 REFORMS

(Pg. 351) Allowing States to Opt Out of Federal Education Programs – but still get federal dollars. It’s like wanting your allowance, even if you don’t do your chores around the house.

  • “To restore state and local control of education…Congress should allow states to opt out of the dozens of federal K–12 education programs authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and instead allow states to put their share of federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law. This policy has been advanced over the years via a proposal known as the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (APLUS) Act.”

HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM

(Pg. 353) HEA: Accreditation Reform – ((Note: second mention!) expansion of earlier section (Pg. 332) Rescind Dear Colleague letter undercutting Florida’s SB 7044 allowing more “flexibility” on accreditation.

Just to keep it all straight, we’re going to mark the particularly grifty parts in red, the sops to evangelicals and white supremacists in blue.

  • (Pg. 352) Prohibit accreditation agencies from “affirmative discrimination” and requirements for DEI,
  • (Pg. 352) let states do their own accreditation system,
  • (Pg. 352 Protect faith-based institutions by prohibiting accreditation agencies from:
    • requiring standards and criteria that undermine the religious beliefs of, or require policies or conduct that conflict with, the religious mission or religious beliefs of the institution;
    • Intruding on the governance of colleges and universities controlled by a religious organization.
  • (Pg. 353) Revamp the system for recognizing accreditation agencies for Title IV purposes by removing the department’s monopoly on recognition by
    • (1) authorizing states to recognize accreditation agencies for Title IV gatekeeping purposes and/or
    • (2) authorizing state agencies to act as accreditation agencies for institutions throughout the United States.

(Pg. 353-355) HEA: Student Loans – Privatizing all loans, yada, yada. (rehash of pg. 340) New crap in red.

  • Biden is abusing us with payment pauses and HEA loan forgiveness programs, “borrower defense to repayment,” closed school discharge and Public Service Loan Forgiveness. (Seriously?)
  • Immediate steps to commence rulemaking, or whatever a new fascist government does, to rescind or greatly modify prior regulations.
  • Privatizing all lending programs, including subsidized, unsubsidized, and PLUS loans ( both Grad and Parent), allowing for market prices and signals to influence educational borrowing, adding consumer-driven accountability into higher education. (Yes, just like food, oil and all the other monopolies compete!)
  • If this proves too politically unpopular even for the lickspittle GOP legislators in Congress –
  • switch to “fair-value accounting” from FCRA accounting. (See box above on how this makes student loans more expensive)
  • Consolidate all federal loan together into one program that utilizes:
    • income-driven repayment,
    • no interest rate subsidies or loan forgiveness,
    • includes annual and aggregate limits on borrowing (keeps the peasants in their lane!)
    • requires “skin in the game” from college to hold them accountable for loan repayment.
  • Eliminate Grad PLUS loans (for graduate students) and Parent PLUS loans (for parents of undergraduates).
  • The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which prioritizes government and public sector work over private sector employment, should be terminated. “The current Administration has recklessly engaged in the policy fetish of forgiving and canceling student loans with abandon.”
    • The ABA disagrees, Ms. Burke. “The federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program was created in 2007 in response to the concerns of public sector employers over their difficulties attracting and retaining skilled professionals to fill chronically vacant positions. The program provides employers an invaluable resource by lowering the primary barrier keeping new graduates from pursuing public service careers – student loan debt. An advanced degree frequently is a condition of professional licensure, as it is for lawyers, but the higher student debt incurred in obtaining these degrees effectively prevents borrowers from accepting or staying in low-paying public service jobs.”
  • Congress should amend the HEA to lock in our changes and regressive values.
    • abrogate, or substantially reduce, the power of the Secretary to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive the principal balances of Title IV student loans, as well as to modify in any material way the repayment amounts or terms of Title IV student loans.
    • remove the department’s authority to forgive loans based on borrower defense to repayment; instead, the department should be authorized to discharge loans only in instances where clear and convincing evidence exists to demonstrate that an educational institution engaged in fraud toward a borrower (this will be a lot harder with all the new fake accreditors they want!)
  • Congress should cap the indirect cost rate paid to universities so that it does not exceed the lowest rate a university accepts from a private organization to fund research efforts. This market- based reform would help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.

NEW REGULATIONS

(Pg. 355) Attacking the Accreditation Cartel – (Note: third mention!) Still absolutely NOTHING on their end on protecting students from useless schools.

  • The Secretary of Education should refuse to recognize all accreditors that abuse their power. (this means accreditors that notice DEI or affirmative action policies and such.)
  • New accreditors should also be encouraged to start up.
    • Under Obama: Hey, does everyone remember the whole Corinthian College and ITT Tech scandal? In 2016, the Obama administration withdrew recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), which had certified them both. Low-income students were force into debt while the schools misrepresented future job prospects and the ability to transfer credits.
    • Under Trump: DeVos reinstated ACICS, despite her department’s finding that the agency failed to comply with 57 of 93 federal quality standards. Her department proposes “simplifying the Department’s process for recognition and review of accrediting agencies,” reducing compliance requirements for accreditors and wanted to allow accreditors to “tolerate some risk” (actually the students are the ones at risk.)
    • Under Biden: “The U.S. Department of Education announced in 2022 that it would discharge all remaining federal student loan balances for former Corinthian Colleges students. The $5.8 billion in forgiveness will impact 560,000 students once it is fully implemented, and has been the largest single act of debt forgiveness the government has ever enacted.”

(Pg. 355) Confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s Influence on Higher Education

We’d just like to remind the audience...”Donald Trump and his businesses hauled in at least $7.8 million from foreign governments and officials of 20 countries during his presidency. The bulk of that came from China, but Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others also chipped in relatively modest amounts, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.“

  • Reverse the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce Section 117 of the HEA, which directs colleges and universities to report gifts from, and contracts with, sources outside the U.S. worth $250,000 or more. “While the Biden administration has appeared to decline to use enforcement mechanisms identified under President Trump, compliance with Section 117 remains a key component of university foreign influence programs and has been emphasized in recent guidance documents issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).“
  • Investigate postsecondary institutions that fail to honor their Section 117 obligations and make appropriate referrals to DOJ.
  • Work with Congress to amend the HEA to tie the HEA’s foreign source reporting requirements to an institution’s ability to receive federal financial assistance, particularly participation in programs funded under Titles IV and VI of the HEA.
  • (dailybruin) One of the House Republicans’ bills proposed, titled the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act, would mandate the reporting of foreign funding by colleges and universities.
    Hurtado said the Republicans’ plan for preventing foreign influence is unnecessary because higher education institutions already have protocols established for their faculty regarding the acceptance of research money.
    “Our institutions already have a safeguard in place for monitoring (federal funding),” Hurtado said. “They (House Republicans) want this big federal thing because they want to pretend they’re actually doing something to prevent foreign influence, and that’s not going to be adequate.”

(Pg. 356) Allowing Competency-Based Education to Flourish (i.e. get access to federal dollars!)

  • This is the GOP plan to loosen requirements for “competency-based education” will also allow the most exploitive correspondence-course providers to line up for federal financial aid. The leading obstacles according to the GOP and numerous potential bad-actors is the requirement that courses include “regular and substantive” interaction between faculty and students. Without this requirement, along with minimum program length and academic rigor, scams from both the provider and the student side can proliferate.
    • Specific concerns for Special Ed: “Competency-Based Education (CBE) is being pushed into schools for all students, including those who have special needs. Before I go on, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at 15-year-olds and their computer use in 31 nations and regions.They found that reading and math scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were lower for students who used computers more, rather than those who used technology less in school (OECD, 2015). How computers are used in the classroom matters. “Those that use the Internet every day do the worst,” said Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills…Schleicher openly worried that if students end up “cutting and pasting information from Google” into worksheets with “prefabricated” questions, “then they’re not going to learn a lot.” 
    • (evolllution)”We must be certain that we are not creating a second-class status of fast academic degrees as we try to save students both time and money. I hope the DOE and the six regional accrediting agencies can consider implementing a moratorium on approving more of the new breed of CBE degree programs. We need to ensure due diligence in conducting a thoughtful analysis of all the current players’ programs and their graduates. Otherwise, this may not be just another educational fad, but the opening of the floodgates.“

(Pg. 356) Reforming “Area Studies” Funding

  • New regulations should clarify the definition and requirements of regular and substantive interaction for competency-based education, as well as for online programs.
  • require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.

NEW EXECUTIVE ORDERS THAT THE PRESIDENT SHOULD ISSUE

(Pg. 357) Guidance Documents

  • The President should immediately reinstate and reissue Executive Order 13891: Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents.
    • This order required all federal agencies to treat guidance documents as non-binding in law and practice and also forbade federal agencies from imposing new standards of conduct on persons outside the executive branch through guidance documents. They required all federal agencies to apply regulations and statutes instead of guidance documents in any enforcement action.
    • Biden’s Executive Order on Revocation of Certain Executive Orders Concerning Federal Regulation “This order revokes harmful policies and directives that threaten to frustrate the Federal Government’s ability to confront these problems, and empowers agencies to use appropriate regulatory tools to achieve these goals.”
  • Require APA notice and comment. President should issue an executive order requiring the Office for Civil Rights’ Case Processing Manual to go through APA (Administrative Procedures Act) notice and comment. This is just punitive.
  • Protect the First Amendment. President should issue an executive order requiring grant applications (SF-424 series) to contain assurances that the applicant will uphold the First Amendment in funded programs and work. What does this even mean?
  • Minimize bachelor’s degree requirements. The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it. Though a number of states are removing college degree requirements, the GOP are hyping this based on their belief that colleges and universities are run by and for liberal elites and are congenitally biased against conservatives. We are sure that the wealthy GOP members will not let their own children forgo the advantages of college. “Degree holders can expect to earn an average of more than $1 million more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma. They also enjoy higher employment rates and are less likely to be laid off in a recession…College degrees are associated with several noneconomic benefits, from improved health outcomes to greater civic engagement, higher rates of marriage, and higher levels of job satisfaction.”
  • Eliminate the “list of shame.” Educational institutions can claim a religious exemption with the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education from the strictures of Title IX. Prevent it from being published in the future. For a group who wants everything to be transparent, publicly saying they won’t publish information is hilarious. Knowing which schools refuse to comply with Title IX obligations (e.g. gender identity, sexual orientation clauses) is important information for students. There are plenty of private organizations that publish the information (here, here for example, and this one from Campus Pride, with the 2023 list of worst colleges for LGBTQ+ students.)

NEW AGENCY POLICIES THAT DON’T REQUIRE NEW LEGISLATION OR REGULATIONS TO ENACT

(Pg. 358) Transparency of FERPA and PPRA Complaints – Well, that didn’t take long to get back to transparency again.

  • The Department of Education should be transparent about complaints filed on behalf of families regarding the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA).
  • At the same time, the Department of Education should develop a portal and resources for parents on their rights under FERPA and PPRA.

(Pg. 358) The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program – This is a two-fer – both a mention of the D.C. program AND and accreditation dig. (Note: fourth mention!)

  • “Although the accreditation regulations should be removed entirely by Congress, in the meantime, the next President should issue an executive order expanding the list of allowable accreditors.” This allows the rich to send their kids to religious schools and the poor kids to stay in failing, defunded public schools, or fly-by-night, unaccredited cheap schools

(Pg. 358) Transparency Around Program Performance and DEI Influence

  • An accounting of how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/ gender ideology,
  • A review of outcomes for GEAR UP and the 21st Century grants programs,
  • The reissuing of the report on school safety from 2018 with updated information,
  • The release of a report to Congress on how to consolidate the department and trim nonessential employees,
  • A report on the negative influence of action civics on students’ understanding of history and civics and their disposition toward the United States,
  • An update of the Coleman report to show the impact of family structure on student achievement,
  • A full accounting of CARES Act education expenditures, and
  • A report on how many dollars make their way to the classroom in every federal education grant and program.

(Pg. 359) Pursue Antitrust Against Accreditors (Note: fifth mention!)

  • The President should issue an executive order pursuing antitrust against college accreditors, especially the American Bar Association (ABA).

What a new administration can do without Congress

Many of the topline K-12 priorities outlined in Project 2025—such as eliminating the Department of Education, using federal funds to expand school choice, and passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to those passed in a number of Republican-led states—would require congressional approval, making them a heavy lift.

Other changes could happen with executive action alone. Those include:

RESOURCES

Fact Check from Arizona – Common myths

Claim: “ESA vouchers save Arizona money.”
The Truth: Each ESA voucher costs Arizona money.

Even the minimum universal ESA voucher is $424 more than district public schools receive for each elementary and middle school student and $540 more for each high schooler. The impact of this loss cannot be overstated: $900 million drained from public education means every one of Arizona’s public schools loses out on $300,000 in desperately needed dollars that will likely result in schools being forced to lay off teachers and slash suddenly unaffordable fixed costs such as fixing broken-down A/C and buses. Supt. Horne has cavalierly stated he is perfectly willing to even push for school closures. 

Claim: “The money follows the child.”
The Truth: Most of this $900 million goes to families that have already chosen private options.

3 out of 4 ESA voucher recipients were already in private school or homeschool and were not receiving state funding. Each of these students is an entirely new cost to taxpayers, and each ESA voucher represents a subtraction from the state budget used to fund public schools — with no identified revenue source for the state to cover those costs.

What’s more, less than half of Arizona’s estimated 60,000 private school students and 40,000 home-schooled students are currently taking an ESA voucher. Of the 57,000 ESA voucher applications so far, roughly 42,000 come from families already sending their children to private schools and homeschool. This leaves at least 58,000 private school and homeschool students still eligible for a voucher. (These numbers are estimated because Horne’s ADE has no standardized reporting system to officially track these students.) If all of these students apply, another $500 million in taxpayer subsidies will be drained from the general fund as a brand-new cost — and a huge hole in our state’s budget.

Claim: “Families are fleeing public schools.”
The Truth: Public school enrollment is steady.

If universal ESA vouchers were causing students to leave public school en masse, we would expect a dramatic drop in enrollment — but the data simply does not back that up. A comparison of Arizona’s 2021-22 public school enrollment with 2022-23 enrollment shows little change. The vast majority – 92% – of Arizona families choose public schools.

Claim: “Vouchers give students from low-income families a choice.”
The Truth: Vouchers don’t cover the costs of most private schools. 

Arizona’s average private school tuition is $9,756 for elementary schools and $15,165 for high schools. This is thousands more than the funding an average ESA voucher provides – meaning vouchers can only be used by those who can afford the difference. Most voucher recipients hail from the wealthiest zip codes in the state, such as Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, and Deer Valley. School districts in these areas run entirely on local property taxes, not state tax monies. For each student in these districts that takes an ESA voucher, the cost comes from state taxpayer dollars, not these local sources; this results in a direct cost to the general fund. And what’s more, private schools can and do say no to students, denying enrollment for any reason they wish, even openly and legally discriminating. It’s not “school choice”; it’s the school’s choice, and that’s no choice at all. 

Claim: “Parents are the accountability.”
The Truth: No accountability or transparency for taxpayers — or parents. 

Unlike the detailed accounting for public schools that accounts for every taxpayer dollar down to the last penny, ESA vouchers mean taxpayers have no way to know ​​how their money is being spent, or what (or whether) children are learning. Voucher-funded private schools have no requirements for accreditation, registration, licensing, approval, teacher certification, or special education and are not required to assess or report academic achievement. 

Home education spending is similarly lax; as long as an item can be tied to a “curriculum,” which is ill-defined and open to interpretation, it meets the definition of an allowable expense. The ESA voucher program doesn’t require parents to spend these tax dollars on core curriculum. Many parents use their ESA vouchers for extravagant purchases like laptops, expensive espresso machines, and bounce houses. In February, the Arizona Department of Education boasted that they’d approved over 111,000 expenses in one day with no receipts, assuming a full 24 hours of work equals approximately ten expenses every second. These approved expenditures are not available for public scrutiny.

Claim: “Arizona will always fund education.”
The Truth: When times get tough, public schools see cuts first.

Finding new revenue is a heavy political lift, especially in this toxic hyperpartisan environment: the Arizona Constitution requires a two-thirds supermajority vote from both chambers of the legislature to increase taxes. The only other solution is to cut spending. Last time the state had to come up with $900 million, despite massive public protests, lawmakers slashed funding for our public schools. 

  • (buckscountybeacon.com) Project 2025 Wants to End Public Education As We Know It.
  • (bgindependentmedia.org) Using taxpayer money for private school vouchers is unconstitutional, public school advocates say
  • (itep.org) Tax Avoidance Continues to Fuel School Privatization Efforts
  • (cbpp.org) State Policymakers Should Reject K-12 School Voucher Plans
  • (NEAToday) ‘No Accountability’: Vouchers Wreak Havoc on States
  • (epi.org) Public education funding in the U.S. needs an overhaul – How a larger federal role would boost equity and shield children from disinvestment during downturns
  • (linkedin.com) The Importance of Private School Accreditation: Ensuring Quality Education for Students
  • (chalkbeat) Do school vouchers ‘work’? As the debate heats up, here’s what research really says
  • (fordhaminstitute) How to ensure equity in IDEA
  • (12news) Attorney General Mayes warns school voucher program might cut into budget for law enforcement
  • (usatoday) Welcome to the GOP’s new education agenda: Loot our public schools for private vouchers – We aren’t against private schools. But we are against taxpayer money going to private schools at the expense of public schools.
  • (Edtrust.org) Equal Is Not Good Enough
  • (kentuckylantern) School voucher proponents spend big to overcome rural resistance – AFC Victory Fund plans to spend $15 million in 2024 to win public dollars for private education
  • (edweek.org) What Would Happen to K-12 in a 2nd Trump Term? A Detailed Policy Agenda Offers Clues
  • (commondreams) Don’t Be Fooled: Voucher Programs Are Coming to Destroy Public Education
    Vouchers for private education—religious or otherwise—are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society.
  • (yesmagazine.org) The Heroes Fighting for Public Education

Whitewashing greed/ Names you might recognize:

(Billionaires love owning schools!)

  • Some billionaires use charters as an excuse to say that they are spending their ill-gotten gains on a “good cause.”  
  • Eli Broad is the billionaire businessman who co-founded the homebuilding giant KB Homes and was also the owner of Sun Life Insurance. He and his wife are two of the largest donors to the movement to privatize public education.
  • The Walton Family The heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune are among the 10 richest people in the country, and have been some of the biggest charter school backers and political donors in the nation. The Walton Family Foundation has spent millions supporting private school voucher schemes and giving grants to right-wing think tanks like the Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
  • Bill Bloomfield
  • Reed Hastings: The Netflix CEO and major political donor is the former head of the state Board of Education, where he helped lead the corporate charter charge. In addition to giving to anti-public school candidates, the San Francisco billionaire has offered $100 million of his personal fortune to promote new tech-dominated charters. He even declared that elected school boards are obsolete and should be replaced with a system of non-profit corporations with appointed board members.
  • Laura and John Arnold: Texas billionaire John Arnold built his fortune as an executive at Enron, and has now turned his efforts to trying to influence education policy in California.
  • Doris Fisher: The co-founder of The Gap clothing company is worth an estimated $2.8 billion. Fisher and her family are major funders of the corporate charter movement, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into PACs and lobbying efforts aimed at weakening California’s public schools.
  • Arthur Rock: The Silicon Valley venture capitalist was an early investor in Apple and Intel. The 86-year-old billionaire has donated to campaigns to support school vouchers, and has become one of the largest supporters of privately-managed charter schools and pro-charter candidates in California.