Dear Commons Community,

Rick Hess, opinion contributor to Education Week and director of Education Policy Studies at the  American Enterprise Institute, interviewed Lindsey Burke, the lead author of the education section in Project 2025, the controversial, right-wing agenda issued earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation.  Given the attention it has drawn and the questions it raised, it has become an object of interest during this year’s  presidential election. Burke is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.  The American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation are both right-of-center organizations that promote conservative viewpoints on national issues.

Below is the entire interview.

Tony

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Rick: Lindsey, you were responsible for writing the education section of Project 2025. How did that come about?

Lindsey: I direct the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, where I have been for over 16 years. During that time, we’ve thought extensively about how to restore excellence in education. This requires, in part, winding down overly prescriptive federal intervention in local schools, empowering parents with choice and transparency, and limiting ever-ballooning higher education subsidies.

We have written hundreds of research papers and policy reports on these issues, and I was pleased to apply the Center’s recommendations to the Project 2025 Department of Education chapter. This chapter was a collaborative effort with numerous contributors, both those who work for Heritage and our colleagues at other public-policy organizations in the conservative education movement.

Rick: As you see it, how does Project 2025 seek to reshape education?

Lindsey: At its core, Project 2025 seeks to reshape education by reshaping accountability. As my colleague Jason Bedrick has pointed out, accountability means being “directly answerable to the people most affected by [service providers’] performance.” Tell me: Who is accountable to parents when the federal Head Start program fails, as it has for 60 years, to improve children’s education outcomes, as shown by the only nationally representative, randomized control trial of the program? Who is held accountable for the Bureau of Indian Education Schools’ leaving Native American children two grade levels behind the national average—something the federal government has known about and failed to rectify for years, even if it’s made some halting progress? Who is held accountable for the fact that American taxpayers have had to increasingly subsidize higher education as colleges continue to raise prices while producing graduates who know more about microaggressions than macroeconomics? No one is.

That’s the hallmark of distant federal programs that are far removed from localities. Providers are simply not held accountable to the people they’re supposed to serve. The reforms we outline would recalibrate accountability so that it is directed horizontally to parents and taxpayers rather than vertically to Washington.

Rick: You call for several controversial policies, such as block-granting and then eventually eliminating Title I, abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, and morphing Impact Aid into a school choice program. How do you make the case for these controversial proposals to skeptics?

Lindsey: Let me take the abolition of the Department of Education first. Abolishing the department doesn’t mean getting rid of important civil rights protections in law or protections for children with special needs; both of these safeguards predate the department’s creation. It means the removal of myriad ineffective programs and inflationary spending. It’s important to remember that the agency has only been around since 1980 and that federal programs only account for about 10 percent of K–12 education revenue. I often think about a line from that great Hoekstra report “Education at a Crossroads,” in which the authors implored: “If it cannot be demonstrated that a particular federal program is more effectively spending funds than state and local communities would otherwise spend them, Congress should return the money to the states and the people, without any burdensome strings attached.”

That was written in 1998. And it cannot be demonstrated that the feds are doing a better job than states or local school leaders would do. Local communities know local conditions and students far better than distant federal bureaucrats do. Our recommendation is to cut ineffective programs and spending and block-grant money back to the states for those programs that would be retained. Title I would be block-granted, and revenue-raising responsibility for the program would be restored to states over a 10-year period. Impact Aid funding would be better targeted to children from active-duty military families in the form of education savings accounts.

Rick: Some critics would argue that these measures will decrease accountability, since money would be given to states with no strings attached. How do you respond to such concerns?

Lindsey: The closer we can situate dollars and decisionmaking to families, the stronger accountability will be. For example, filtering Title I funding through a complex labyrinth of funding formulas that have no real connection to poverty and can’t be accessed by families in any meaningful way has not improved outcomes or opportunity for low-income kids. Susan Pendergrass documented this in 2018, writing that “Title I dollars are spent on non-low-income children, and many low-income children receive nothing through the program.” Funding meant to reach children gets diluted by administrative costs on the way back to the classroom—a criticism applicable to almost every federal education program. Better to let states and school districts fully direct that funding in a way that meets the needs of their local families.

That principle applies to more than just Title I. States such as Florida and Arizona have made phenomenal progress over the past two decades improving student academic outcomes—especially for low-income and minority children—by adopting common-sense reforms like focusing on reading and providing parents with schooling options. They made this progress despite federal intervention in education, not because of it. And again I would ask: Who has been held accountable for Washington’s track record of failure since 1965, Republican and Democratic administrations alike?

Rick: Former President Trump has denounced Project 2025 as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and said he hasn’t read it. Were you surprised by that reaction?

Lindsey: Project 2025 has been clear from the beginning: We do not speak for President Trump or his campaign. And what we have done with Project 2025 is not new—the Heritage Foundation has been publishing its Mandate for Leadership since the 1980s, and several Republican presidents have taken and implemented our policy suggestions. We remain true to that mission and will continue to offer policy recommendations to conservative administrations, but it is ultimately up to the president to decide which policies to implement.

Rick: Is it realistic to think a second Trump administration might move to implement any of these proposals? What are the political challenges of doing so?

Lindsey: The Trump administration made some smart and important policy changes during Trump’s first tenure in office, including increasing school choice through an expansion of the allowable uses of 529 accounts to include K–12 private school tuition as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; signing a Congressional Review Act repeal of Obama-era regulations on the Every Student Succeeds Act that would have established prescriptive school rating systems from Washington; restoring due process on college campuses; and purging DEI training from federal contracting. The next administration should build on these successes, some of which were overturned by the Biden administration, and Project 2025 provides a menu of options for doing so.

Rick: Trump aside, what kind of reception has Project 2025 received from Republicans in Congress and from conservative activists?

Lindsey: Despite the lies and mischaracterizations, it turns out conservative ideas are popular; they are 80-20 issues. We partnered with Echelon Insights to poll swing-state voters on what they thought of Project 2025, and they strongly support our policies on a wide range of issues—the border, inflation, and energy being a few examples. Nearly half of Americans support eliminating the Department of Education, and grassroots conservatives strongly support winding down “Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle,” as Ronald Reagan famously labeled the Department of Education. When looking at the issues that matter to Americans, we see standing ovation-level support.

Rick: What do you think critics have gotten wrong about Project 2025?

Lindsey: Critics have completely ignored the fact that the left also recommends policies that Democratic administrations should pursue every four years. Just one example is the Center for American Progress, a far-left group that has prepared policy recommendations for liberal presidents including Obama in 2008. In fact, that same organization is now influencing policy in the Biden-Harris administration, as reported by Fox News just a couple of weeks ago. As a 501(c)3, we’re candidate-agnostic and hope any administration would be interested in the policies we outline in this menu.

Rick: Where do you think the critics have a point or you have found yourself thinking, “I should’ve anticipated that?”

Lindsey: I suppose the lesson here is to never underestimate the lengths the mainstream media and the far left will go to maintain their grip on power. For months now, the media have been lying to the American people about Project 2025. We created a fact-checking page just to counter the false narratives and even got the media to admit that much of what is said about Project 2025 is false. We welcome debating our ideas, but it has to be an honest conversation, and that hasn’t been the case much of the time.

Rick: Can you give some examples of what you’d regard as examples of the media lying about Project 2025?

Lindsey: One example that sticks out is when the pundits on Morning Joe claimed Project 2025 increases student-loan payments. Project 2025 would end the Biden administration’s illegal and regressive student-loan cancellation efforts, so the media are counting a return to the expectation of having to make your existing student-loan payments as an increase. It does phase out income-driven repayment but only for new loans, not existing loans. It also eliminates Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So yes, many government and nonprofit employees would no longer have working Americans paying off their master’s degrees.

Rick: How does an effort like this seek to influence federal policy?

Lindsey: Project 2025 builds on Heritage’s long history and legacy of providing policy recommendations for conservative administrations. The Mandate for Leadership has been published in successive editions since 1980, and Ronald Reagan famously handed out copies of it at his first Cabinet meeting. As one of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks, we at Heritage continue to pursue efforts like Project 2025 in the future, providing policy recommendations to safeguard freedom and opportunity in this country and enable Americans to live the good life.

Rick: Last question: What do you think explains the enormous attention to Project 2025 this cycle?

Lindsey: The Harris-Biden administration has no credible, positive record to run on. So, it’s no surprise that they would mischaracterize Project 2025 to deflect from the poor job that the administration has done with inflation and the economy, securing our border, and out-of-control crime. But the left’s hysteria has led people to read a 900-page think tank white paper; that’s quite an accomplishment!