Opinion: The frightening truth about what Project 2025 would do to education in NC

Project 2025 is a much-maligned plan for a second Trump administration that, among other things, would dismantle the federal education department and gut civil rights protections. We break down the frightening truth about how exactly Project 2025 would play out in North Carolina. 

Project 2025–the 900-page right-wing agenda for a second Trump administration–has gained notoriety for its extremist policy recommendations that would reshape the federal government. 

Among these suggestions are 40 pages worth of controversial plans for the U.S. Department of Education, beginning with dismantling the federal agency altogether. In addition to funding numerous state-level education initiatives, the federal agency is, and has been for decades, instrumental in ensuring states like North Carolina mind the civil rights of students, like the right to go to desegregated schools.  

That fight’s not over, by the way, some 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education banned segregation. 

Mark Robinson, NC’s Republican candidate for governor, seemed to echo the plan recently when he told supporters at a private event that the state should refuse federal education dollars, a move that would cost NC more than $1.6 billion that goes to schools. 

Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the project–which was worked on by at least 140 members of his administration–it paints a clear picture of some of the changes he might enact if elected in November. 

In fact, the education portion repeatedly praises and calls for the reinstatement of a number of the policies of Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, who was wildly unpopular with public school educators. 

From eliminating billions of dollars in federal education funding to rolling back Title IX protections and blowing up the Office of Federal Student Aid, Project 2025 would have catastrophic consequences for our education system, public education leaders say, consequences that would hit North Carolina particularly hard. 

Here’s what to know.

 

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A shift of responsibility

One overarching theme of the proposition is to minimize federal funding and oversight of education in the states. 

They’d do that by eliminating the federal Department of Education and many of its crucial programs, shifting full responsibility onto state and local governments. 

The plan would have disastrous consequences for public education in North Carolina, K-12 experts say, where the Republican-controlled General Assembly has made education a bottom priority for the past decade, crippling NC education systems with underfunded budgets and a massive expansion of school choice programs like private school vouchers. 

The proposal would phase out Title I, a crucial program that provides billions of dollars in supplementary funding to public schools with higher proportions of low-income students. 

Around half of NC’s public schools, as well as many private schools, receive Title I funding, and the move would eliminate 6,417 teaching positions, affecting 98,823 students in North Carolina alone. Also on Project 2025’s chopping block is Head Start, an initiative that makes preschool and other early childhood development programs accessible to around 833,000 low-income American families each year.

In getting rid of or scaling back so many impactful federal programs, Project 2025 would shift nearly all the responsibility for funding and monitoring public schools onto state and local governments. This would exacerbate the shortcomings of NC’s education system. The state  ranks 48th in spending per student, and dead last in “funding effort,” which takes into account a state’s ability to fund schools based on its revenue. 

The plan’s architects also prioritize “education freedom” over ensuring the quality of public schools.

What does that mean? It gives money directly to families to send their children to private and religious schools, siphoning funding away from public schools. These kinds of voucher programs have been shown to decrease test scores and primarily benefit families who already send their children to private schools.

Civil rights protections stunted

Civil rights would also be at risk under the agenda, which proposes moving the Office of Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, so that the only avenue for the federal government to enforce civil rights law would be through the courts. 

But that’s just the beginning. 

The proposal demands that the next administration direct the Department of Education and the Department of Justice not to investigate some Title VI cases. 

These standards allow the government to ensure institutions do not disproportionately target students of color via disciplinary action. 

In addition to leaving minority students more vulnerable to discrimination, the project would also outlaw “Critical Race Theory,” claiming that teaching students about race and racism leads to bias against white students. However, CRT is a legal theory, and generally isn’t taught in K-12 schools in North Carolina.

The writers of Project 2025 use education as an excuse to launch an attack on LGBTQ+ rights. 

In April of this year, the Biden administration changed the term ‘sex’ in Title IX to mean ‘sexual orientation and gender identity,’ expanding the protections of the 1972 law outlawing sex-based discrimination to include members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

But a second Trump administration would revert the definition to include only ‘biological sex,’ leaving thousands of students insufficiently protected by Title IX regulations. 

They didn’t stop there. Project 2025 also demands that the next administration work with Congress to pass legislation saying that teachers could not refer to a student by any name or pronouns different from the ones assigned them at birth without a parent’s written permission–and even then, they could not be required “to use a pronoun that does not match a person’s biological sex if contrary to the employee’s or contractor’s religious or moral convictions.” 

They close off their attack on “radical gender theory” by insisting that “federal lawmakers should not allow public school employees to keep secrets about a child from that child’s parents.” 

North Carolina’s Republican leadership in the legislature used similar logic in 2023 when they passed several anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including a bill forcing educators to “out” students to their parents and banning any LGBTQ+-related materials from K-4 classrooms. 

Teachers and guidance counselors can play a huge role in a student’s support system, which can contribute to improved educational outcomes, too. 

The architects of Project 2025 would step in and police these relationships, an ironic proposition given that they claim their goal is to remove the influence of the federal government on education. 

Privatization of student loans, end loan forgiveness 

The architects of the project launch an extensive attack on the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) with a number of proposals that would devastate many current borrowers. 

They would dissolve the FSA and allow the private sector to take over. 

In Project 2025’s ideal world, there is absolutely no loan forgiveness; they recommend that a second Trump administration eliminate all loan forgiveness programs and severely restrict eligibility for Income-Driven Repayment plans–that means that people living on the poverty line would have to make monthly payments. 

Millions of Americans would owe thousands more per year, with some payment amounts even tripling under the Project 2025 plan.

Many of these proposals require a very unlikely amount of cooperation from Congress, and Trump could never enact every suggestion in the 40-page education portion of Project 2025 even if he wanted to. 

But nonetheless, it paints a frightening picture of the conservative vision for our country and the ways that a second Trump administration could tank our nation’s education systems.