What would Donald Trump do in the realm of K-12 if voters return the former president to the White House?
He and his campaign haven’t outlined many specifics, but a recently published document that details conservative plans to completely remake the executive branch offers some possibilities. Among them:
The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project , which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.
The agenda is designed to be ready for a conservative president to implement at the start of a new administration next year, depending on the outcome of November’s election.
Project 2025 involves former Trump administration officials and other allies of the former president, as well as dozens of aligned advocacy organizations . One of those is Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group that rose to national prominence fighting school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols and has endorsed conservative school board candidates across the country in recent years.
On the campaign trail, Trump has said that parents should elect school principals , called for merit pay for teachers and the abolition of teacher tenure, promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing progressive social ideas, and pledged to establish universal school choice .
But because he’s released little in the way of detailed plans, Project 2025’s 44-page agenda for the U.S. Department of Education offers the clearest picture yet of the education priorities Trump could pursue in a second term, and how a second Trump administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies like private school choice and parents’ rights that have taken root in many Republican-led states.
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Despite the involvement of so many Trump allies, the former president’s campaign hasn’t officially endorsed Project 2025. His campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment from Education Week.
Project 2025’s education agenda revolves around shrinking the federal government’s footprint on public education.
“The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states,” the document reads.
Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.
States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.
Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.
“The future of education freedom and reform in the states is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated,” the document reads.
Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he’s sympathetic to the goal of reducing administrative requirements that accompany federal programs, but he hasn’t seen evidence that there’s enough support among congressional Republicans to end or radically transform Title I or IDEA.
( House Republicans approved a budget last year that would cut Title I by 80 percent , but that plan was bound to fail with Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House.)
“It is picking a fight where you risk getting portrayed as insensitive to the needs of low-income kids [and] kids with special needs,” Hess said. “I’m not sure that the ratio of the bad publicity you risk to the likelihood of winning winds up paying off in the end.”
