A blueprint for dismantling

All roads lead to Arizona … An earful on vouchers … And that class looks like fun.

If you want to understand what the Trump administration is trying to do by dismantling the Department of Education, you should check out Project 2025.

It’s the 900-page blueprint conservative thinkers at the Heritage Foundation crafted ahead of the Trump 2.0 presidency. It came up during last year’s presidential campaign, but most voters didn’t like what was in the blueprint and Trump tried to distance himself from it.

But Project 2025 is key to understanding what you’re seeing in the news today. Dozens of executive orders Trump issued in the past few months are “almost identical to what Project 2025 wanted to impose,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Think of it this way: While millions of people were catching their breath after the first Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation was busy putting together a blueprint of exactly what they wanted the next Republican president to do, particularly in the critical first few months of the term.

And one of the longest sections in their blueprint is devoted to education.

Basically, the blueprint called for the president to eliminate the Department of Education. This is not a new idea in conservative circles. They’ve railed against the department since it was established in 1979 during the Carter administration.

But Trump has come closer to dismantling the department than any other president, including by laying off nearly half the department’s workforce. He still needs congressional approval to get rid of it entirely.

His March 20 executive order calls for officials to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” and return “authority over education” to states and local communities.

The order also calls for “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

State governments and local school districts already handle most of what we think of as public education, like setting curriculum and deciding how to spend local tax dollars. The federal department supplies grant funding, oversees student loans, and generally makes sure the civil rights of students are protected.

But each presidential administration adds its own twist. And Biden’s policies, such as being open to transgender athletes and students, drove the authors of Project 2025 up the wall. They wanted to eliminate any “nonbinary” sex categories, and Trump delivered with an executive order on his first day in office.

As it turns out, the ideal education system in Project 2025 looks a lot like Arizona’s education system, at least what GOP lawmakers have tried to turn it into while the federal Department of Education was still watching over them.

The blueprint highlights Arizona’s school voucher system as a model for what every state should do. In fact, Arizona gets several mentions on the first page of the education section of the document. The goal is to give parents as much freedom as possible to decide where their kids go to school.

Once the Department of Education is gone, Congress could still provide federal funding for schools, but the money would go to states in the form of block grants with “no strings” attached.

At least, no strings that they don’t like. If a college offers in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, then no student at that school could access federal loans, for example.

The blueprint was written in 2023, and it shows. Instead of pushing the anti-DEI crusade that Trump is currently using as a wrecking ball, the blueprint talks about critical race theory. (Remember when that was the big scary boogeyman in education?)

Either way, the authors don’t want race to be considered by education officials, or even track data on race to see how programs are doing. It should go without saying that their definition of racism – “treating individuals differently based on race” – doesn’t quite capture the subtleties of the systemic racism that critical race theory and DEI try to address.

When federal bureaucrats no longer have much of a say in what states do, Congress would start experimenting with schools that are under federal jurisdiction, like Washington, D.C. schools and those run by the Bureau of Indian Education or the Department of Defense.

Under the plan in Project 2025, students in Washington, D.C., for example, would get federal funding deposited in a private spending account that parents can use to pay for tutors, education therapists, books, materials and other items.

Sound familiar?

The spending accounts would be modeled after the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts in Arizona, with the hope that other states would adopt it after they see its success in federally run schools.

Here are some more things you might see in the next few months:

• Crackdown on student loans. Under Project 2025’s plan, officials would drastically reduce the number of people who qualify for income-based student loan repayment programs.

• Divvy up the Department of Education into other agencies, like moving the Office of Civil Rights to the Department of Justice and moving data collection in higher education to the Department of Labor. Trump already said he wants student loans to be housed at the Small Business Administration, and special education services would go to the Department of Health and Human Services.

• Rescind the congressional charter of the National Education Association. They really, really don’t like teachers unions.

• Prevent critical race theory from “spreading disinformation.” (Maybe that one will be replaced by DEI?) Trump already started cutting and freezing federal funding to universities that keep their DEI policies and programs.

• A federal Parents’ Bill of Rights. If you start seeing “private right of action” in news stories, this is what they’re trying to do. The blueprint cites a constitutional amendment proposed by former GOP U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko of Arizona.

Those are just the broad strokes of what’s in Project 2025. It’s a long document and they included all sorts of technical changes that only lawyers can understand.

But the gist of what Trump and his allies are planning to do with education, and pretty much everything else, is all in there.

So if you’d like to get ahead of the feeling that you’re stuck in an endless loop of outrage, it might be worth taking an hour or two to see what’s coming up next.

While you’re at it, check out this website, Project 2025 Tracker. It shows how much of the blueprint the Trump administration has implemented so far.

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As soon as news broke about Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, Arizona officials were quick to speak out.

Gov. Katie Hobbs said the state could lose nearly $1 billion in funding, while Attorney General Kris Mayes, also a Democrat, said she would sue to stop it, along with other attorneys general. Teachers unions in Massachusetts and Maryland just sued, too.

On the Republican side of the aisle, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne says “the first thing I’ll do is throw a party” if Trump succeeds in closing the Department of Education.

Meanwhile, college students are worried they’ll no longer get financial aid now that 300 people at the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid were laid off. Within hours of the layoffs, the online portal for applying for aid went dark.

Parents of students with disabilities worry their kids will lose out, which could affect about 140,000 students in Arizona. The state received $227 million in federal funds for special education last year and nobody knows how much, if any, of those funds the state will get next year.

Power to the ESA parents: The Arizona Board of Education backed down from approving new ESA spending rules after ESA parents gave them an earful, ABC15’s Manuelita Beck reports. The Board of Education was slated to approve a new ESA handbook with spending caps for vouchers, like only allowing parents to spend $500 on counter-top appliances like baking equipment, $4,000 on musical instruments every three years, and $2,500 on physical education equipment. The board will likely revisit the issue at its meeting next month.

Busy bill season: Legislation to allow religious chaplains into schools as a way to combat Arizona’s councilor shortage, to require instruction on Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders’ history in schools and to require school board candidates to list their party affiliation on the ballot continued to make their way through the legislative process last week, per KJZZ, KTAR and Capitol Media Services, respectively. All three bills need a final vote before they can go to Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk.

Ignore the bright red flags: The financial crisis at the West Valley’s Isaac School District wasn’t exactly a surprise – school board members had been receiving letters and reports from outside agencies throwing up red flags for years, ABC15’s Kelsie Blazier and Melissa Blasius report based on district records.

“As we are all very well aware, we are in a negative cash balance,” the former district CFO Lynn Lang, who resigned this year, told the board at a November 2021 meeting.

Fire fodder: The “Book Review Panel” at Higley Unified School District continues scouring books for inappropriate content, the Gilbert Sun News’ Aparna Sekhar reports. The panel has recommended a handful of books be allowed only with permission slips, and banned a few more.

Get ‘em young: A school board member at Yuma Union High School District wants local police to monitor the border to protect students who live in Mexico and cross the border daily for school from potential cartel influence. Last year, a 14-year-old girl was arrested in San Luis with fentanyl in her bag, which the school board member assumes was cartel related, AZFamily’s Alexandra Rangel reports.

We’re a little bit jealous of kids today. They get to play with robots and 3D printers at school. The closest thing we had growing up were those ELMO projectors.

Two students at Catalina Foothills High School aren’t going to let that opportunity get by them, and they’re making sure other students get in on the fun.

They’re in a robotics club that teaches elementary school students how to use 3D printers and design software. To top it all off, they wrote their own curriculum, where science students design and print models of the birds they study.