"We Don't Need No Education"
My third critical installment of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership focuses on the Department of Education
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If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education.
— Thomas Jefferson
One of founding father and slaveholder Thomas Jefferson’s legacies is his value for American education. Though that education he advocated for was reserved for white male children and young adults, his belief about the power education holds for Americans and the United States remains strong centuries after his life and death. Education acts as the cement in the United States’ foundation. It is also the cement between the bricks of the building we still construct toward “a more perfect Union.”
It’s that building, foundation and cement that Project 2025 wants to implode.
According to Lindsey M. Burke, PhD who wrote Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on the Department of Education, “students should be free to choose” the k-12 or higher education school they want to attend. Burke believes students of any age should be in charge of their education as much as their parents. Damn the schools and educators.
As a matter of fact over 40 years ago Ronald Reagan, who began his attack on American higher education as California’s governor, and the original Mandate for Leadership attempted to damn American education. Yet they only succeeded to situate it in purgatory. Now The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 not only wants to damn education but burn it to ashes within the flames of a MAGA hell.
Through a rambling Orwellian word salad complete with a dressing made from First Amendment perversion, Kevin D. Roberts, the current president of The Heritage Foundation, proposes in his foreword that neo-liberalism and authoritarianism will fix American education and America itself:
Educating a future electorate no longer matters. What matters to Roberts and Burke, who has never taught in any K-12 or higher education classroom or held an administrative position in any educational setting, are indoctrination and whiteness through the free market and the theories of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Friedman provides her and Project 2025 with a twisted pedagogical framework.
However, Colin Mayer, Leo E. Strine, Jr. and Jaap Winter in their 2020 Forbes article point out several problems with Friedman’s economic theories:
Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman in the New York Times magazine proclaimed that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Directors have the duty to do what is in the interests of their masters, the shareholders, to make as much profit as possible. Friedman was hostile to the New Deal and European models of social democracy and urged business to use its muscle to reduce the effectiveness of unions, blunt environmental and consumer protection measures, and defang antitrust law. He sought to reduce consideration of human concerns within the corporate boardroom and legal requirements on business to treat workers, consumers, and society fairly.
Over the last 50 years, Friedman’s views became increasingly influential in the U.S. As a result, the power of the stock market and wealthy elites soared and consideration of the interests of workers, the environment, and consumers declined. Profound economic insecurity and inequality, a slow response to climate change, and undermined public institutions resulted. Using their wealth and power in the pursuit of profits, corporations led the way in loosening the external constraints that protected workers and other stakeholders against overreaching.
Under the dominant Friedman paradigm, corporations were constantly harried by all the mechanisms that shareholders had available—shareholder resolutions, takeovers, and hedge fund activism—to keep them narrowly focused on stockholder returns. And pushed by institutional investors, executive remuneration systems were increasingly focused on total stock returns. By making corporations the playthings of the stock market, it became steadily harder for corporations to operate in an enlightened way that reflected the real interests of their human investors in sustainable growth, fair treatment of workers, and protection of the environment.
Half a century later, it is clear that this narrow, stockholder-centered view of corporations has cost society severely. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, the single-minded focus of business on profits was criticized for causing the degradation of nature and biodiversity, contributing to global warming, stagnating wages, and exacerbating economic inequality. The result is best exemplified by the drastic shift in gain sharing away from workers toward corporate elites, with stockholders and top management eating more of the economic pie.
Since earning my MFA in Writing, I have taught in a postsecondary education. I can attest that the free market and neoliberalism now drive and dominate postsecondary education to the detriment of students and educators. It is not uncommon that postsecondary students are often referred to as “consumers of education.” The revenue produced from tuition that increases every year is invested in new buildings, new administrative positions and new student amenities rather than new tenured faculty and the voluminous contingent term and part-time faculty who often don’t receive a living wage and benefits like health insurance. As of this writing, Columbia College Chicago’s part-time faculty that had been striking for those reasons among others reached a tentative deal with Columbia College’s administration.
Burke’s chapter makes clear that Project 2025 wants to finish the educational damnation began by Reagan and The Heritage Foundation. Unlike other countries around the world that invest in and support their students and educators, the U.S. Republican party that MAGA has overtaken places the blame of dwindling writing, reading and math skills solely at the feet of teacher unions and educators.
At the same time, MAGA Republicans spend their energy banning books, rewriting history and criminalizing educators. We can’t lose sight that this has all been calculated to control children, teenagers and young adults while keeping them ignorant. Like with other autocracies around the world, children and young adults are the foundation for a totalitarian state to exist and thrive.
My Overall Take on “Department of Education”
Similar to Paul Dans and Kevin D. Roberts’s opening chapters, Burke hides behind weak and dishonest scholarship. It’s used to diminish her and Project 2025’s authoritarian ends to empower a free-market and neo-liberal approach to American public and postsecondary education. Her cynical and weak scholarship coats her disdain for students, educators and education itself. The hypocrisy simmering in Dans and Roberts, comes to a boil with Burke. She has not only benefitted from her whiteness but the education she received from the predominately white institutions of Hollins University, the University of Virginia and George Mason University — another sample of universities she and Project 2025 slander with their propaganda.
She states outright that the Department of Education should be abolished then proposes various programs under the Department of Education to either be placed into existing federal departments not focused on education itself or a bureau exclusively focused on Indigenous American students and their needs. This would destabilize the federal government’s approach to supporting public education and students , especially BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students. The end result would cause confusion and chaos. This is what Project 2025 wants.
Burke uses a corporate mindset to approach and reorganize American education. Reengineering the Corporation was a hot book in the early 1990s, and this is the approach she takes. In my first publishing job, my employer treated this book like a sacrament. I can say from my own experience that this approach causes confusion and creates more work for those in positions of lower seniority. As an entry-level employee, I found myself working for eight supervisors like Peter Gibbons in Mike Judge’s Office Space from various departments. I quickly became responsible for jobs I had not been first hired for. A year into my employment, I quit. The company ended up being bought by another company and folded after several years.
Education is supposed to empower students and build their critical and creative thinking skills; however, those skills over the decades have been further demolished by overreliance on testing and forcing k-12 educators to teach to the test instead of teaching students the writing and thinking skills necessary for life and postsecondary education. Kid you not, a college student I tutored a few weeks ago did not know what a noun and a verb were.
Inmate number P01135809 tried to accomplish the full dismantling of public education in his first term when he appointed Betsy DeVos Secretary of Education. Like Burke, DeVos holds no experience teaching children or college-age students nor in education administration. If inmate number P01135809 wins a second term in 2024, the impact of American education will be apocalyptic and felt for generations to come.
Burke’s rhetorical manipulation and demonization of public education and higher education fails to hide how students of all ages would become the main cogs in Project 2025’s crypto-Nazi Christian theocracy under inmate number P01135809.
Department of Education
The first sentence and paragraph of Burke’s chapter announces Project 2025’s destruction of the Department of Education that would embolden and fund “military academies” and religious schools.
Of course that means “choice” and as seen with charter schools and religious schools, these choices defund public education.
Burke claims placing education in the hands of the states without federal “red tape” and checks will streamline government bureaucracy. What her thin argument ultimately reveals though is that removing the checks will reinforce Project 2025’s terrifying endgame.
Her next paragraph defames higher education itself. All this will produce the non-thinking “obedient workers” that the late, great George Carlin wisely noted in his stand-up special Life Is Worth Losing. This “obedient worker” graduate is what Project 2025, inmate number P01135809, MAGA and America’s corporations depend on.
Burke outlines seven “principles” for enacting this plan:
Burke later provides “evidence” from the Heritage Foundation in deceptive charts meant demonstrate a drop in reading and math skills under the Biden administration. Those charts, however, remain free of context. Those drops occurred because of the Covid pandemic (made worse by inmate number P01135809’s reckless incompetence) that required remote learning. In the end, it ransacked U.S. students’ education.
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Burke also targets Title IX in order to save “the hard-earned rights of women” because
the Biden Administration has sought to trample women’s and girls’ athletic opportunities and due process on campus, threaten free speech and religious liberty, and erode parental rights in elementary and secondary education regarding sensitive issues of sex.
To save “the hard-earned rights of women” (which don’t include the rights for bodily autonomy and reproductive justice), Burke evokes fear of the “other” and “wokeness” and provides these “steps”:
Burke either doesn’t know about or has ignored the peer-reviewed scientific research on gender-confirming care that you can read about here. My guess would be the former. Burke continues:
The further rescindment of federal education protections against marginalized children will continue with disabled students, in particular BIPOC disabled students. Not surprisingly, Burke claims it is part of critical race theory (CRT) that is not taught in pre-K or K-12 schools. My guess is that since Burke never attended law school and has drowned in her whiteness, she remains ignorant of not only what CRT is or who Derrick Bell was.
What Burke conveniently leaves out from Paul Morgan is the following:
“The general limitation of the available studies is that they haven't been able to correct for minority children's unfortunate, but well-established, greater risk factor exposure to factors that themselves increase the risk for disability," said Morgan. "For example, minority children in the U.S. are much more likely to be born with low birth weight than children who are white, as well as more likely to be exposed to lead in their environment.
Another article stipulates:
The results also have important implications for special education practice, research, and policy. “The review indicates that methodological limitations in existing studies help explain conflicting findings as to whether minority children are over- or under-represented in special education,” Morgan explained. “Methodologically stronger studies find that black children are under-represented in special education. This suggests the need for federal legislation and policies that result in more equitable service delivery, possibly through universal screening efforts.
Burke and Project 2025 then go after federal school meals to spite “wokeness”:
If those of us with higher education loans feel left out from Burke’s crosshairs, have no fear:
Burke fails to acknowledge that student loan payments often make building wealth impossible and that students who live in other countries can often leave their four-year university education without any debt.
The further one gets into Burke’s chapter, it is clear that dismantling the Department of Education would overwhelm and overwork other federal departments and bureaus, specificallythe Bureau for Indian Education (BIE) under the Department of the Interior. The BIE specifically serves Indigenous American children in tribal school systems. According to the Bureau of Indian Education:
As stated in Title 25 CFR Part 32.3, BIE’s mission is to provide quality education opportunities from early childhood onward in accordance with a tribe’s needs for cultural and economic well-being, in keeping with the wide diversity of Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages as distinct cultural and governmental entities. Furthermore, the BIE is to manifest consideration of the whole person by accounting for the spiritual, mental, physical and cultural aspects of the individual within his or her family and tribal or village context. The BIE school system employs thousands of teachers, administrators and support personnel, while many more work in tribal school systems.
The cancer of whiteness that Susan Sontag originally stated in 1967 metastasizes in Burke. Her and Project 2025’s anti-Blackness regarding Title VI would nourish inmate number P01135809’s throbbing racism. Remember he called for the executions of The Exonerated Five when they were minors and innocent of the crimes they had been accused of and were later unjustly convicted of perpetrating.
Racism shines through Burke’s patronizing use of quotation marks around restorative justice, which a recent study from the University of Chicago Education Lab found effective in Chicago Public Schools. She also fails to account and mention the fact that student resource officers (SROs) disproportionately and violently punish and traumatize Black and marginalized students.
I also must note that Gail Heriot, the law professor Burke cites, resists affirmative action.
Burke concludes her chapter by stressing elimination for GEAR UP, a
discretionary grant program . . . designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. GEAR UP provides six-year or seven years grants to states and partnerships to provide services at high-poverty middle and high schools. GEAR UP grantees serve an entire cohort of students beginning no later than the seventh grade and follow the cohort through high school. GEAR UP funds are also used to provide college scholarships to low-income students.
Burke says current individuals in the Department of Education won’t face elimination if their “positions are determined to be essential to the mission . . . .”
Like the chapters that precede and follow Burke’s, we are left with destruction instead of imagination and creation.
Thank you for sharing the output huge amount of research you have obviously done for this post. It paints a worrying picture. In the UK, we've also suffered from delusional thinking about the market being the only sensible model for all social institutions and activities to follow, education included.
This is an amazing dive into the plans for public education if Trump is reelected. It's really alarming and I don't think a lot of parents understand how dysfunctional many state's public school systems already are. Unfortunately of the parents who do see the dysfunction many of them are buying exactly this kind of garbage as the solution. It's a real problem. I've always supported public schools and never planned on sending my children to private school. My daughter attends public middle school but after getting into the best public K-12 magnet school in our state for kindergarten I had to pull her out because they would not honor her IEP and she was coming home with bruises, ripped clothing, exhausted and hungry. (She had gross motor delays with balance issues and the school was a multistory building so I believe these were from all the stair-climbing etc, not bullying or abuse). There was no room in any of the elementary schools that were our other choices for the next year and mid year transfers weren't an option either. So she went to a small Catholic school for 1st through 5th grade. This year until a few weeks ago her school of 1000 students had one guidance counselor, no IEP coordinator, and only one assistant principal. Her advanced level 6th grade class read one book last year. I don't know if I can keep her in public school another 5 years. And I feel like a terrible hypocrite for this, but I'm not sure what the solution is.