The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 doesn't call for executing teachers who say "sometimes I think I learn more from the students than they learn from me" -- not even if they have nose rings and pink hair -- nor does it replace Antiracist Baby with Atlas Shrugged in the public-school library.
The 920-page document includes 44 pages on education, reports Libby Stanford in Education Week. In addition to abolishing the U.S. Education Department, it calls for passing a parents' bill of rights and block-granting federal aid. The conservative think tankers would move enforcement of civil rights laws to the Justice Department, which would have to go to court to prove violations, she writes. In addition, 2025 calls for scrapping Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, such as denying formerly male athletes slots on women's teams.
It's a conservative wish list that is neither exciting nor new, writes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. Think tanks on the right and left publish these things hoping to shape policy, he writes.
He thinks "block-granting is reasonable given the morass of regulation that’s made these programs intrusive and counterproductive," and curtailing the office of civil rights' pressure tactics is "overdue."
Project 2025 "isn’t likely to be all that useful as a road map for gauging what a second Trump administration would do on education," Hess predicts. A Vance-style populist as secretary of education would "go hard after DEI," but "it’s not clear the same would be true with Title I, IDEA, school lunches, or Head Start."
Most of the ideas would require legislation, he points out. Thanks to the Supreme Court, federal bureaucrats have less power to interpret the law. "This will make it far more difficult to change policy without first changing the law, constraining the power of Project 2025 diehards."
By the way, a viral graphic showing 31 policies in 2025, including teaching Christian religious beliefs in public schools and banning books and curriculum about slavery, has millions of views, Hess writes. Project 2025 "mentions none of these."
Kamala Harris' education agenda is likely resemble Biden's, writes Stanford. The president has tried to forgive student loan debt by executive order. The courts have blocked that. The administration also is expanding "protections for LGBTQ+ students and school staff through a rewrite of rules for Title IX, the nation’s landmark sex discrimination law."
Harris has been endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, and is very likely to get the National Education Association endorsement once NEA staff end their strike.
In her 2020 Senate campaign, Harris "advocated for universal preschool and free college and called for a $13,500 raise for every teacher by the end of her first term," reports Stanford.
As San Francisco district attorney, Harris "threatened parents with court action if their children missed too much school," she writes "Later, as California’s attorney general, Harris pushed for a 2011 state law that allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a misdemeanor if their child missed 10 percent of the school year."
Harris later said she regrets that position.
She should regret her decision to appeal the Vergara ruling of Judge Treu, whose conscience was schocked by the unequal protection provided by California's state schools: for that reason I will oppose her candidacy for any position forever, and prefer a President Vance, if the courts ever do their job and remove his mentor.