By Jordyn Britton
Howard University News Service
Caitlin Sullivan, an education consultant and former middle-school teacher, is concerned about the effects of Project 2025 on students and the nation’s future if former President Donald Trump returned to office.
Although Trump claims to know nothing about Project 2025, the plan echoes for what he has been telling Americans on various issues such as the call to dismantle the Department of Education.
Sullivan believes the federal government plays an essential role as a regulator through the Department of Education. Without those checks and balances, she says, it would be much more difficult to contain power at the local and state levels under autocratic leadership.
“The federal role in education has primarily been to a floor of minimum quality and equity and rights protection,” said Sullivan, co-founder and executive director of Leading Now, a non-profit consulting firm for superintendents and school districts across the country.
“So, when you think about rolling back or totally dismantling the federal government’s role in education, that’s where you start jeopardizing the rights of students who are not served by the system now.”
A Presidential Agenda
“Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Promise” rests its claims on the idea that all concepts and plans outlined throughout the book are the consensus of all conservatives. It outlines the political agenda that the next conservative president should and presumably would promote if elected to the highest office in the land.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, is behind Project 2025, which includes writers from Trump’s inner circle and his administration. The book describes “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.”
The four pillars are as follows:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return to self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
While Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation has been a documented supporter of the former president and responsible for helping staff conservative administrations since Ronald Reagan’s time in office in the 1980s. Because of those realities, many Democrats believe that Trump is not clueless on the matter and that, if elected, he would immediately begin enacting the proposals outlined in the document.
Throughout Project 2025, multiple demographics are singled out as being toxic and suffering from “wokeism.” Being woke has traditionally been equated with a state of consciousness or awareness. However, conservatives have appropriated the term into something negative. The Oxford English Dictionary describes wokeism as “progressive or left-wing attitudes or practices, esp. those opposing social injustice or discrimination, that are viewed as doctrinaire, self-righteous, pernicious, or insincere. Hence, such attitudes or practices are seen as constituting a collective social movement or agenda.”
Critics of Project 2025 say the plans for the Department of Education undermine public school systems throughout the country as well as infringe on freedom of choice. Some proposals would:
- Prioritize parental rights over student rights
- Eliminate the requirement for school staff and administrators to adhere to students’ preferred gender pronouns without written parental consent and altogether if it is in violation of anyone’s moral or religious beliefs
- Discontinue critical race theory classes in schools throughout the country
- Cut funding for public schools by allocating taxpayer dollars directly to independent households, giving them the option to choose public or private school rather than putting the money into the local public school system
Revise the language in Title IX to replace “gender identity and sexual orientation” with “defined gender at birth.”
Among other details, the education proposal emphasizes the empowerment of states, schools and families, specifically parents, to control their children’s education however they see fit and within the social and political parameters set by the government.
‘Fair View of History’
Caitlin Sullivan’s experience in education began in 2009 as a middle school teacher at KIPP DC KEY Academy in Washington, teaching sixth and eighth grade. After working in the classroom, Sullivan transitioned to educational consulting as an integral part of many organizations whose missions were to enhance areas such as early learning and teacher preparation programs, charter schools and education technology startups.
Based on her experience as a consultant and in the classroom, Sullivan said that restrictions on teaching aspects of U.S. and world history could be detrimental to students, especially during their formative years.
“That’s really going to deprive middle school students of their base and historical reference points as they become more aware citizens of our country,” she explained.
Instead, Sullivan said that it’s important to teach “a full and inclusive and fair view of history, including slavery and some of the real missteps of our democracy as we’ve built it along the way.”
‘A More Inclusive Democracy’
While the writers of Project 2025 claim it would encourage free speech, robust in-class discussion and safer learning environments for children, passages throughout the plan attack equity, diversity and a multitude of demographics including the LGBTQ+ students and communities of color.
“If these recommendations go through, I think it would really thwart a lot of progress that we’re making to be a more inclusive democracy across race and gender and age and socioeconomic status,” Sullivan said. They could also foster discrimination and erode “a sense of belonging” she added, for “students who are members of the LGBTQ community or who don’t believe in religion.”
Lauren Harris, who grew up in a family of Boston educators, said Project 2025 would have hurt some of the students who “became like a part of our family” after gravitating toward her father for advice and understanding. “My dad is from Boston, like Boston-Boston,” Harris said. “After he came back from Vietnam in the ’70s, he just began to dedicate his life really to helping educate inner-city kids.”
She told a story of a friend who came from a strict Catholic, Dominican household where he was one of five children. He was openly gay at school, but not at home. “He had friends and teachers who cared about him,” she recalled. “But people definitely acted crazy towards him, mostly like other boys in the class.”
“He definitely got bullied and messed with, like after school or on the way home from school a lot, and he struggled with depression.”
Harris continued to explain how Project 2025 would have opened the door to much more bigotry and hatred towards him had it been put in place while he was in school, said Harris, who earned a bachelor’s in human childhood development from the School of Education at Howard University.
“Even though there isn’t anything that specifically says ‘don’t say gay,’ a lot of what is being proposed has inferred repercussions that are going to happen regardless of what it explicitly says.”
The rescinding of federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students would have directly affected her friend, she says, because of his status as well as his sheltered home life.
“I think that it would have the greatest negative effect on kids who are already at risk,” she said, “because all the emphasis on parent rights isn’t relevant to everyone. And a lot of kids, especially in inner-city Boston Public Schools, are independent because they have to be.”
According to 70% of children in Boston live in low-income families, and presumable of that, the majority of those kids if they do attend school, attend Boston Public Schools.
Dismantling the Department
Project 2025’s plans for the Department of Education would alter the infrastructure that has been built over the past five decades, when it became a cabinet-level agency in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter. President Andrew Jackson created the first Department of Education in 1867, but it was downgraded to the Office of Education the following year. It eventually became part of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953.
Education plans outlined in Project 2025 include:
- Dismantling the Department of Education
- Closing the Head Start program for impoverished children
- Ending the funding for schools that cater to low-income families
- Rescinding federal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Those in of state-wide autonomy within education see the potential for it to be advantageous for schools, families and students if the leadership is dedicated to the inclusivity and support of all students.
However, ome states are under the leadership of officials who favor portions of Project 2025 that openly discriminate against children and families. Sullivan cites Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, as an example.
“He’s done a lot to kind of show what would happen if some of the recommendations in Project 2025 were to come to bear,” she said. “He’s a big proponent of a statewide curriculum that’s grounded in patriotism and Christianity.”
Waters is open about his role as a “trusted conservative,” with his supporters including far-right Trump supporters like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Oklahoma Gov. J. Kevin Stitt. On his website, Waters is clear about his pro-life stance, plans to ban critical race theory, and passion for upholding the Second Amendment and every American’s right to bear arms.
Throughout his campaign, Trump has been clear about his intentions for the Department of Education and the ways in which he plans to eliminate the department’s infrastructure as it is now and essentially revert all power to regulate education back to each state.
The rights of public-chool educators and students continue to be in question as the nation inches closer to Nov. 5 and the election comes to a nail-biting conclusion. And the decisions that will be made continue to concern some while they empower others, highlighting the confusion and fragility that Americans feel about the direction the country should take for the next generations.
Jordyn Britton is a reporter for HUNewsService.com. Her article is from a three-part series titled “Inside Project 2025.”
