You’ve probably heard a lot lately about Project 2025, the controversial policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation that lays out what the next Republican presidency should look like.
It involves a dramatic rethinking of how the federal government operates — including a major concentration of power in the White House.
Former President Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, but he has ties to many of the authors and Democrats are continuing to tie him to it.
When it comes to public education, Maria Polletta found Project 2025 uses Arizona as a model. Polletta covers education for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and joined The Show to talk about it.
Interview highlights
When it comes to education, you write that Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Education.
MARIA POLLETTA: That's at least what Project 2025 is proposing. It says very plainly actually in the first sentence of its education chapter that the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. It describes the agency as a cabal of special interests and a bloated bureaucrac. And really says that families and students would be better off without it.
It's important to note that the president as, at least, at least as things stand now, can't unilaterally get rid of the Department of Education. That would require an Act of Congress, which project 2025 acknowledges, and that doesn't seem particularly likely.
But although the plan says the agency should be eliminated, what it really wants to do is ... pick it apart piecemeal, get rid of some programs, shift other programs to other departments and send a lot of funding and related responsibilities back to the states. And a fair number of those policy goals could be accomplished through presidential actions.
So let's talk about the Arizona ties here that you dug into. Arizona is really always known as the pioneer of school choice. — whether it's charter schools or school vouchers to pay for private schools, things like that. Is that at the root of this?
POLLETTA: It's pretty striking how frequently Arizona features in Project 2025's education section, both directly and indirectly. I mean, not even three paragraphs in it's mentioned as a school choice pioneer to be emulated. Just as you said, we as a state have a national reputation for this. Going back to the 1990s, we were the first state to establish school tuition organizations or STOs. Those nonprofits that funnel would be tax revenue to private school scholarships. We've been a leader in the charter school expansion. And, of course, we were the first state to offer universal eligibility to our school voucher program, empowerment scholarship accounts or ESAs. And Project 2025 advocates pretty explicitly taking Arizona's ESA program national in a few different ways, as well as a funding model that's very similar to Arizona's STO tax credits.
There's also proposed changes here for students with disabilities in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), right?
POLLETTA: Correct. So for anybody unfamiliar, IDEA is a federal law that governs taxpayer spending on K-12 students with disabilities to ensure they have access to special education services. And Project 2025 first argues IDEA should be largely converted into a "no strings" block grant to individual states. It's not totally clear which strings they're referring to.
But the plan does call for rescinding Equity and IDEA, which is a policy that requires districts to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling minority students in special education. And if they're being disproportionately disciplined. They want to get rid of that. Project 2025 also says IDEA funding should be partially paid out directly to families of children with disabilities. And here is another place that it directly quotes Arizona's ESA program. That's how they want that portion of IDEA funding to work. So give it directly to the families. They can choose how and where a child learns and use potentially some of that money on tutoring, therapies, other educational materials.
Let me ask you about student equity. This is a big piece of this. When you talked to education experts and advocates, what did they say about that and how this might affect student equity?
POLLETTA: Right. This is a primary concern. Project 2025 paints this really rosy picture of an educational marketplace where parents have the ultimate power to choose a learning setting that best fits their child's needs — which sounds great. But it kind of ... ignores the fact that only public schools are required to be open to everyone, and private schools can generally pick which students to accept or reject. Also, even with vouchers, lower-income families may not be able to fully afford private school tuition. Not to mention some other costs like transportation to get there or technology requirements. Given all those dynamics, among others, education policy and legal experts both told me they worry that Project 2025's proposals are purposely setting up public schools to fail by stripping their funding while concentrating basically higher need, harder to educate kids there.
And they said that doing that while, concentrating high performing, well resourced students at private schools, basically will exacerbate segregation and have some pretty disastrous implications for student equity. Should note here, also, that Project 2025 recommends phasing out Title I funding, which is designed to close achievement gaps at poorer schools. So that would only add to the divide.
And you know, one constitutional law expert I spoke to made the point that that kind of system, that kind of fractured system, would really be at odds with the American tradition of, of using public schools to bring together kids of all backgrounds and produce an informed generation.
