Nebraska teachers criticize Project 2025’s plans to privatize education

Nebraska teachers rallied in an Omaha suburb at the end of September to protest Project 2025 and its potential impact on education in the state.

Project 2025 is a Republican playbook for a potential Republican presidency and could be implemented if Donald Trump wins the election in November and takes office next year.

Officially called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” the document was put together by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and 100 other right-wing groups; dozens of those involved in drafting the plan are former Trump administration officials.

The plan’s proposals for education include eliminating the federal Department of Education and implementing universal school vouchers.

Teachers told the Nebraska Independent those are scary propositions for the future of education both in the state and beyond.

“The department oversees everything from curriculum to funding to just how education systems and units function in this country,” Lee Perez, a teacher of English as a second language  who was named the 2022 Nebraska Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief State School Officers, told the Nebraska Independent. “I mean, imagine it. That’s like saying the Army can function without the Department of Defense. It’s just a completely insane idea, to be honest with you.”

Perez spoke at the Sept. 30 rally in Millard, outside of Omaha.

On its first page, Project 2025’s chapter on education says that parents should have the option of using local and state taxpayer money to “empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child’s unique needs.” Such a plan would allow taxpayer money to be used to fund private education and funnel resources away from public schools.

Arizona, which implemented a universal school voucher program in 2022, has already experienced budget problems. Arizona’s program has shot far past its $65 million cost estimate to $429 million this year, according to ProPublica. Much of that cost is due to parents who already enroll their children in private schools taking advantage of the new state funds while the state continues to have to spend money on existing public schools.

Perez pointed out that for a largely rural state like Nebraska, siphoning funds out of the public education system and into private schools could be particularly devastating.

“When you look at Nebraska’s 93 counties, only half of them have private schools,” Perez said. “So if you’re going to pull public funding into private schools, if you think about it, in rural Nebraska, that would literally shut many public school systems down in rural Nebraska. So then the question becomes, where do those kids go?”

Also present at the rally was Tim Royers, a teacher and the president of the Nebraska State Education Association teachers union. Royers said that Project 2025 would cripple state and local governments’ efforts to provide a good education to children across the country, and that its entire premise is misleading.

“The common talking point is that the Department of Education at the federal level is this nefarious entity that’s slapping all these mandates in our schools, when, in reality, the federal assistance for education really is to make it so that we can meet all of our kids’ needs, even if there are additional requirements for us to get to the points where the kids are,” he said.

Royers said a lot of the money to help kids in poverty and to support special education comes from federal funding, and losing that support would hurt public schools.

“If you were to say, We’re going to have to cut your school’s budget by 13%, there’s really no other source we can turn to to make up for that money, and especially because it’s some of our most vulnerable populations,” he said.

Overall, Royers said, Project 2025’s education plans are an unhelpful, one-size-fits-all agenda that would do far more harm than good to public education in Nebraska.

“Obviously, we disagree philosophically with Project 2025, but the other fundamental problem with Project 2025 is it’s just this giant sledgehammer. There’s no nuance,” he said. “It’s going to be a complete universal private school choice program. We’re going to completely eliminate the Department of Education, right? There’s no modifications. There’s no tweaking. It’s just fundamentally bad policy.”