starting on page 318 of the PDF or page 285 of the Project 2025 document, regarding the Dept of Education:
"
[T]he Department of Education (the department, or ED), discussed by Lindsey Burke in Chapter 11, is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.
Short of this, the Secretary of Education should insist that the department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is “systemically racist,” that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society. The next head of this department will have a lot to do—hopefully culminating in the department’s closure and the salutary restoration of educational control to states, localities, and parents."
This is ridiculously biased, inaccurate, hotheaded, and unscientific. It reads like campaign propaganda, which is a terrible place to start actual policy.
There is no clear definition of what "woke education cartel," "indoctrination," "American ideals," and "systemically racist" mean in this context. And that's just isolated terms, not further troubling ideas like not being concerned with kids' education.
I would like to see less federal
control (it's not "intrusion"
), but we need federal dollars badly. It's the only way to level the playing field among states. Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico will never be able to compete with Wyoming, Connecticut, and Wisconsin without federal assistance. In NC, we will struggle to feed kids without federal money. And then there's curriculum. Shouldn't there be a sound, basic, common education across all states? In the most religiously conservative states, imagine how much science might be left out of the state curriculum. Imagine how unwanted teen pregnancies will soar in those states due to subjective, morality-based, abstinence-only sex ed, as opposed to scientifically-based, comprehensive sex ed including disease and pregnancy prevention. Imagine how skewed history education could get in states at both extremes of the political spectrum without federal oversight.
Without the federal govt, public education is abandoned to private financiers. When public education is beholden to for-profit entities, profits are prioritized over kids, and kids suffer. Look at how the existence of privatized prisons has led to exponential growth in the prison population since the '80s. You think there's a school-to-prison pipeline
now?
Without the fed govt's oversight, students with disabilities are no longer guaranteed equal access to education. If it's not profitable, schools will alienate them through under-serving them. Not because of the scapegoated teachers in the classroom, but because they're not a good investment for private financers.
Your daughter is set to enter school in the next 4 years, ghost. Whatever choice y'all make about that, I would think you'd prefer public school be a viable option. NC now has a Democratic governor, Democratic Lt gov, Democratic Sec of State, Democratic AG, and Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction. Many of them are beholden to the teachers' union I'm a part of, and I sometimes find myself saying we're
too liberal. Now, I'll be retired by then, so having a more agreeable state govt at a time when President Trump may be reducing the fed govt works out great for me personally if I were selfish, but I doubt that would be as appealing to you. And because I'm
not selfish and I serve kids and families
across the political spectrum, I want it to be a state system that works for you, too.