Ending Public Schools IS The Goal
Conservatives aren't even trying to hide it
Peter Greene takes a look at how the Trump Administration’s education agenda is being run by the Heritage Foundation. You know, the place that wrote the Project 2025 that Trump pretended not to know anything about.
As Greene points out, the goal of the Heritagers is to end public education.
The piece highlighted how Linda McMahon has brought into the department many folks from the way-right-wing thinky tank advocacy world.
That includes Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation ed policy honcho who wrote Project 2025’s education section-- which kicks off with a paean to Milton Friedman, granddaddy of school vouchers. The project’s education priorities included erasing LGBTQ persons, turning federal money into stringless block grants, and most of all, vouchers for everyone. ProPublica analyzed hours of video and audio and discovered the same thing-- the Trump/McMahon department is focused on vouchers for everyone as a path out of public schools. They found one quote from Burke, speaking at an event for the Association of Classical Christian Schools in 2024
I’m optimistic that, you know, five years from now a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.
They are planning to move fast - including by way of the private school coupon scheme created by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Green continues with his analysis:
The Department has also partnered with another fresh Heritage hire for Heritage Action, the political action wing-- Tiffany Justice. Justice has dropped the whole “regular mom sitting at the kitchen table baking cookies and running t-shirt sale fundraisers” baloney and embraced her role as a professional political operative. Justice had made it known that she would be delighted to serve as Trump’s education secretary. Justice helped launch the DEI tattling site (which only lasted about three months).
It was Justice who gave ProPublica the clearest, most direct quote. They asked her what percentage of children should be in public school:
I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.
Umm . . .
This is not ok.
But, it’s also not an anomaly.
Here in Tennessee, a new issue advocacy “nonprofit” called Tennessee Leads is hoping to drastically increase the outflow of students from traditional K-12 public schools.
However, the group is not shy about its goals.
We support legislation to significantly increase the availability of Education Freedom scholarships, aiming to provide 200,000 scholarships annually by 2031. This initiative is designed to empower parents with more choices for their children’s education.
And:
Our efforts include advocating for the expansion of public charter schools, with a goal to increase student enrollment from 45,000 to 250,000. This initiative seeks to offer diverse educational opportunities and foster innovation in teaching.
If achieved, these two goals combined would take nearly half of all K-12 students in the state out of traditional public schools.
The timeline? 5 years from now.
This roughly tracks the timeline given by Trump Education Department officials for moving a majority of kids in the U.S. out of public schools.
As Green summarizes:
It’s not about fairness or “rescuing” students from poor schools or the improving power of competition and not even about choice. It’s about ending public education . . .