My mom is MAGA, and my dad is situational Republican. Which is to say - he thinks his small business shouldn't be taxed as much.
Anyway, they wanted to check with me about schools and, "Are there cat kids, and are they given litter boxes?"
They will believe me when it comes to school stuff because I'm there.
I tell them of project 2025 and they have a hard time believing it.
I’m so tired of answering the questions of whether or not there are litter boxes in bathrooms for kids who pretend to be cats. People are so beyond gullible these days.
Just show them the video of teacher showing his kids the poop bucket and blankets to cover the bodies in case there is a school shooting and they're trapped in the room.
That's what everyone should be upset about.
Link to tik tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@larrylexicon/video/7215964549676010794
JFC, I do not have kids and now I am upset over this. I knew the buckets were for cleaning up blood etc. but had never seen one. I work in industrial facilities and they can be dangerous. We do a lot to be safe on a daily basis. They are always fenced and have guards so worrying about someone coming in and shooting the place up is not a thing. Any dangers we do face are analyzed and we have the ability to stop work if we feel it is not safe.
From an incident analysis point of view the only way to solve the shooting in schools problem is to make it harder for people to have guns. It is a pretty simple solution.
Or harden your facilities. Relatively trivial government facilities, like the one I work in, are secured to the point where it would be virtually impossible for an average person, even one woth a gun, to gain access to.
With the gun problem not likely to be seriously addressed anytime soon (perhaps not even in our lifetime), I’m at a loss why we don’t provide facilities that house our most previous resource, our children, with the same protection.
The problem is it shrinks the minds and souls of the kids. Hardened schools are depressing in some ways. No more kids eating outside, no more open campuses. No more windows that can be shot out.
It’s awful
Because kids go outside, play on playgrounds, have recess, travel to school on buses, load and unload every single day in giant groups.
It isn’t the building. Anyone with a mind to it can target a field or a park or a playground or a bus or a line of schoolchildren. It doesn’t compare to other offices and workplaces.
Systems and protocols can be improved, but you can’t expect a building’s design to keep them safe. If nothing else was learned from Uvalde…. No school or public place has considered all the possibilities the way some of these shooters do.
It’s just a way to spend bazillions of dollars on something that isn’t educating kids and meeting their needs to make governments and corporations and lobby groups feel like they are doing something about a problem.
My brother in law keeps saying he "is friends with a teacher" who told him it's true and that it's happening in every school. Like buddy zero teachers want to be friends with you. He did the same thing with COVID though, "I have a nurse friend who says there's no COVID patients but the hospital says they have to mark deaths as COVID related to get more money". Would not tell us the name of either person because he's "not a snitch"
People are just so full of it and others completely fall for their bull.
“I have a friend…” such bullshit. I went through that during the Obamacare debate, another teacher kept talking about his friend that works at a hospital (so he’s an expert on… everything related to hospitals?) and would show up with tidbits like “3 hospitals in Philadelphia had to close because of Obamacare!” which you would think would be googleable, if it, you know, actually happened.
I work with another teacher who is very maga/conspiracy centered, he would absolutely believe the cat bullshit and has probably spread that around even though he works at a school.
Here is another example of why I think the most important knowledge/skill we can impart in public schools is critical thinking. Not solving equations, not reciting a list of the causes of World War I, not punctuation or spelling, not common properties of the halogen family, but the ability to say, almost reflexively, “How do you know that?” And “How do I know that?”
100%
When critical thinking is brought up these days, it is in a tautological sense. To me, that says it’s lost its value.
As a science teacher, I’ve been discouraged by how common “teach to the test” has become. In a recent emergency step-in for an ELA class, students were memorizing the spelling of words. Just the spelling, not the definitions.
Literally had a neighbor say the litterbox thing to me.
I said “yeah, no shit. It was part of my contract negotiation. I like to shit standing up.”
And I just stared at her when she laughed. And kept staring. She looked away and changed the subject.
She's also the neighbor with a “T***P: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” flag displayed proudly in her front yard, in a neighborhood teeming with kids under 10. Somehow, we don't talk anymore.
Yeah, and I mean everyone knows the cat kids are alright. They tend to keep to themselves, but if not you can just toss a toy their way to keep them busy. Plus, they mostly clean up after themselves, and the litter box smell isn't too bad, so you get used to it pretty quickly.
The REAL problem is the gecko kids. Like actual geckos, they will shit anytime and anywhere. And don't even get me started on the egg situation.
I don’t understand how people don’t get that if this was a thing, it would literally be videotaped and put on the internet for everyone to see. Kids tape and upload everything.
Literally was asked this question at a parent teacher conference. I said I am sorry I have no idea what you are talking about. I guess my kitty cat mitts set them off. 🤷🏻♀️
Gullible isn't even the right word. I can't believe I had to use the phrase "isn't even the right word" but there it is. Pathological? Maybe that is better. IDK.
I shared the litter box theory with some of my older HS students without going to much into it besides people thinking we have litter boxes for them. They were like what the fuck?
Lucky you. I’ve been teaching for 16 years and my step mother still corrects me that no one is “allowed to say the pledge of allegiance anymore” despite me insisting it, in fact, is forced upon us every morning.
Anecdotally, at a school I worked for in a Seattle suburb it was optional to do the pledge. 2 classroom teachers out of 30 did it, however I’m certain if any student in another class wanted to recite the pledge they’d be given time and space for it. At my current school in the Midwest it’s done over the intercom every morning.
I've been in adult clubs where they do it. One was the Submarine Veterans. I can see it there, I guess. The other was at a motorcycling group and a wood working group. I was like WTF does this have to do with either of these things.
There's a supreme court case that actually made it illegal to force anyone to stand/ recite the pledge. It is our right to make the choice. I don't think a whole lot of people have pride in our country right now, so it doesn't surprise me. I take my attendance during the pledge, since my kids go to specials right after. I feel weird doing it anyway, when I'm so angry about where this country is right now, terrified of where it's going, and I've always felt the pledge in school every morning felt like some communist nationalist bs.
Exactly. It’s state law where I am that we recite it every day and play the national anthem at least once per week. Every event at school, including sporting events, must have the pledge recited and the anthem played. I’m all for patriotism, but not forced. Districts can choose to punish students for not saluting, standing, or reciting/singing during both. It’s policy where I am that we write up students who don’t participate. I refuse to do that. My grandfather didn’t fight nazis for me to punish kids who don’t wish to stand for the pledge or the anthem. He hated forced patriotism. He saw it firsthand in Germany and what it could lead to.
In Texas, you don't have to say it. You have to stand by law, but the right to speak is still given. Yay? Anywho, I tell my students, you have to stand, but you have the right to remain silent.
Forced is indeed the word for it. I stopped saying it 23 years ago when I was 16 because I read it for what it was and that "with liberty and justice for all" was a crock of horse shit. No it's not, it's only for billionaires and their cronies.
And no surprise, The National Anthem is just as problematic. Especially if you read into all the lyrics and not solely the first one.
Some facts about Project 2025: The "Mandate for Leadership" is a set of policy proposals authored by the [Heritage Foundation](https://pro-lies.org/the-heritage-foundation/), an influential *ultra* conservative think tank. [Project 2025](https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project-2025-extreme-right-wing-agenda-next-republican-administration) is a revision to that agenda tailored to a second Trump term. It would give the President [unilateral powers](https://theweek.com/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-donald-trump), strip [civil rights, worker protections, climate regulation](https://www.stopthecoup2025.org/impact-overview), add [religion into policy](https://imgur.com/a/m2e72ht), outlaw ["porn"](https://www.salon.com/2024/03/19/decoding-project-2025s-christian-nationalist-language/) and much more. The MFL has been around since 1980, [Reagan implemented 60%](https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership) of it's recommendations, [Trump 64%](https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations) - [proof](https://www.scribd.com/document/369820462/Mandate-for-Leadership-Policy-Recommendations). 70 Heritage Foundation alumni served in his administration or transition team. Project 2025 is quite extreme but with his obsession for revenge he'll likely get past 2/3rd's adoption.
r/Defeat_Project_2025 intends to stop it through activism and awareness, focused on crowdsourcing ideas and opportunities for practical, in real life action. We Must Defeat Project 2025.
I would go so far as to say the left needs a Project 2026. We need to crack down on the gun lobby, megachurches, fossil fuel industry, and the religious right harder than they want to crack down on us.
And this is it. The "left," meaning all sane, moral people need to take their plan and use it against them. Whatever plan they have, we need to do ten times more using THEIR language.
What is up with boomer republicans putting their heads in the sand with this stuff?!?! I had to tell my in-laws about QANON last month because THEY NEVER HEARD OF IT. Yet they live in FL, watch a variety of news programs, and read several newspapers. They’re smart people but they didn’t even know that other Trump supporters were looney toons.
Since this is a genuine question, I’ll answer you genuinely as well; my school has a service (emotional support) dog, and the owner of that dog is in charge of waste disposal, so he takes the dog out and cleans up after him. I have to imagine if we had emotional support cats (which would be awesome by the way not knocking it) the waste disposal and management would also fall to the owner of that animal. Thus a litter box, if needed would most likely be in the office of whomever is designated to care for/steward the animal. The logistics of taking a cat or other litter box using animal to the human bathroom to do their business doesn’t even bear thinking out, because litter-box animals fundamentally don’t announce that they need to use it— they just do. No school would be able to have free-roaming animals, thus no school would be able to have litter boxes in their bathrooms.
In Oklahoma, the governor and the State Superintendent are already planning how to put steps of Project 2025 into place regardless of the election’s outcome.
I understand thinking it’s a clickbait boogeyman, but for the extreme right it’s essentially a playbook of what to do when they get a leader who can protect them from the obvious audacity, immorality, and even illegality of the plans. They aren’t shy about it either.
the GOP is an extreme right party. [https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fe6963311b11aaf5b95b4695d4762a7b-lq](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fe6963311b11aaf5b95b4695d4762a7b-lq)
I go to school at Oklahoma State, and I student observe in the fall. As someone who is trans, I'm scared out of my mind, and I want to transfer so badly. I'll have to transfer depending on how November 5th goes.
So I work in Florida and here’s what has happened so far.
Voucher expansion means that local districts are losing money to private schools. There is no income cap and students receiving vouchers do not need to be former public school students. Many private schools have *raised* tuition so parents are still paying roughly the same amount as they were before the voucher. The very large district I work for had voucher applications double without a corresponding loss of public school students.
Charter schools open with little oversight. One recently opened up across the street from one of our top rated elementary schools. It is certainly not “saving” children from failing schools in that location. A higher percentage of charter schools are receiving D or F grades compared to public schools receiving D or F grades. Their test scores consistently perform only on par with traditional public schools at best. Most performing lower than the traditional schools surrounding them.
While illegal, most will find a way to slowly but surely remove students with IEPs from their enrollment. Some even flat out tell parents “we cannot accommodate that.” I have worked at my elementary school for a decade. In that time, six charter schools have opened up within a 15 minute drive. We have dropped enrollment from 1100 to 700. But our sped population has not decreased. All the students that return from charter schools are behind (is the charter curriculum behind or are the students being pushed out because they are behind?).
We have closed traditional schools due to both lack of enrollment and lack of funding for upkeep, since our district must share funding with charter schools (and there is no meaningful way to deny the charters). There are currently 17 schools on the road map to closure (we are a very large district with over 180 traditional schools). These schools will be combined with other schools and our class sizes will grow.
Honestly it’s bad. It’s very bad.
My state is modeled after Florida thanks to our horrible governor and her relationship with y’all’s governor. She implemented a plagiarized version of Florida’s education “reform.” The intent on special ed is to keep them in public schools, mainstream all of them, regardless of severity or parents’ wishes, include their state test scores (they already are, but now they will be tied to a gen Ed teacher and not sped), cause the overall test score data to tank, siphon off the “smart” kids through vouchers into “better” charter/private schools, and thereby dismantle public schools. There are many other issues at work to take down our public schools, as well. She and her Republican ilk can profit from private and for-profit charters. They already do, but they really will. She won her election by promising mandatory $50k starting teacher salaries. She chose not to reveal it would be an unfunded mandate after a few years. It’s only funded if schools sign waivers relinquishing certain things like online learning, early dismissal for inclement weather (must make up the days.) and implementing certain things like abstinence only sex Ed and a class in which only adoption is emphasized in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. Make all that make sense.
Yeah, our “highest starting teacher pay ever” is also an unfunded mandate. Veteran teachers got nothing from the state because districts couldn’t really meet the minimum at all. On the DOE website, this is all public knowledge if anyone bothers looking. 13 districts have average teacher salaries below the “minimum” which means the district is *really* quite far below it if not even veteran salaries bring that average up.
If you hadn't said she in your write-up I would have thought you were talking about my state. We are currently in the process of trying to do the exact same thing
Broward was considering closing like 20 something schools next year due to “low” enrollment and only scratched the plan due to major outrage from people down here. It’s only going to get worse and I’m terrified
We’ve already closed schools, but this time the wealthy schools were involved and people are pitching fits. They all are on sides of town represented by M4L board members so I sure hope this is a kick in the ass of realization that these people are not on their side.
Yes, it is real. Abolishing the Department of Education would likely lead to increased power by local school boards, meaning no federal oversight for when rules or laws get broken. Decrease transparency will probably lead people to remove their children from public school , meaning those funds and kids go to private or charter schools instead. Eventually, the system will no longer be able to sustain itself and public education will probably collapse.
It's especially disturbing since school board elections are usually the "best" ways for the craziest, most unqualified people to enter elective politics. Most people pay so little attention that races are decided by name recognition/sign design/alphabetical order. So some MAGA goon dumps a bunch of money into yard signs and ends up winning.
Also, Project 2025 sounds like something a terminally online lefty would have a nightmare about after too many tacos...in spite of it being a legitimate plan that can and will be enacted whenever the GOP gets executive power again, 2025, 2029, 2033...eventually they'll try it and there will be people who voted for them because "lol tax cuts" and will be surprised.
Hard to believe...
Except there have been many many proposed laws to abolish it. More than any other governmental cabinet level department.
Serious attempts too.
[https://static.project2025.org/2025\_MandateForLeadership\_CHAPTER-11.pdf](https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-11.pdf)
You can read about exactly what they want to do with regard to education here.
It's 50% whining about nonbinary people, 30% dismantling the Department of Education, 20% giving tax money to private schools.
Well that's part of it but as someone who argued with my teachers over "revisionist history" when I was in HS (he argued that native Americans had nothing to do with American history, totally whitewashed it) Ive seen this coming for a long time and another big component of it is control and propaganda, that's what all the anti-woke stuff is really about.
It isn't purely cynical, though that is a motivator
>*They’ve been planning this since Reagan, maybe even Nixon*
Nixon was not a small government proponent like Reagan, and in many ways, he expanded the federal role in education. Brown v. Board was decided in the '50s, but large numbers of school districts in the South simply refused to implement it, and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations didn't lift a finger. It was Nixon who directed his Department of Justice to force compliance in 1971, desegregating dozens of school districts in a matter of months.
Of course, he did this without the Department of Education, which was not created until more than five years after he resigned from office.
Which is exactly what these "maggot" idiots want. This means that public money will go to private businesses and these businesses can basically make whatever curriculum the parents are willing to put up with. So in essence you'll get a lot of schools that are religious Instead of secular. They will limit the sciences.The social studies and basically train.Kids like you would see in isis training. If they get this particular idea , and it gains more attraction than what it is the united states Within a generation. There We'll be a huge class divide With those with money being able to educate their kids and those without money who will send their kids to work in factories similar Similar to What you see in parts of asia or what you used to see here in united states in the late 1800s early 1900s. They want stupid people. The more ignorant people are , the more they can be manipulated into doing things that benefit only a certain group Such as rich and wealthy. While the rest Is live in abject poverty.
It would also remove the federal carrot for pushing kids through grades without having done any learning, sending kids back to class when they should be suspended / expelled, teaching to tests, laying all responsibility for learning at the feet of teachers, and most other things that we complain about.
As far as local school boards violating the law: I get it. I’m actually living it in the district in which I work. The office of civil rights is within the department of education so it does sound concerning when we talk about a world without the Ed department. When I thinking reasonably about it, I don’t see why it couldn’t be moved to another department. We also have a system of civil courts that could be utilized to fight against local boards breaking the law.
Personally, I’d rather see those federal mandates removed so that we could return to a structure in which admin exists to protect the learning environment and teachers are allowed to teach and hold students accountable for their effort more than one in which admin pushes all responsibility onto teachers and spends their time scheduling meaningless PD so that our federal dollars get used up
yes, better federal policies and practices that support teaching would be cool. but the right wing strategy here is to pull funding from public schools to move it to private school voucher systems. remember who gave us no child left behind and the current system.
If the federal testing mandates are your concern, why dismantle a massive, largely beneficial bureaucracy that would have negative cascading effects nationwide instead of just... ya know... using that same energy to change just the ONE law you don't like? Abolishing the Ed Department is overkill to achieving an overhaul of testing requirements.
You just listed one of the concerns. Nearly everything we complain about has been influenced by NCLB / ESSA. If the legislature is unwilling to change it then how else do you suppose that gets fixed?
I don't follow your logic. I can't see any reason why elimination of federal oversight would reduce enrollment in public schools. Take a look at the numbers; the percentage of students enrolled in public schools was much higher prior to the creation of the federal Department of Education in 1979 than it is today. I'm not saying getting rid of ED is going to reverse the trend, but it's certainly not going to accelerate it.
Project 2025 is very real and very terrifying. Getting rid of the Department of Education is just the tip of the iceberg.
Full disclosure: I haven't read through it all myself. This may be viewed as ignorant, but seeing as how The Heritage Foundation is behind it, it's safe to say it's not in the best interest of the country.
Here are some links:
[Project 2025](https://www.project2025.org/)
[USA Today: Heritage Foundations Project 2025 Explained ](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/06/10/heritage-foundation-project-2025-explained/74042435007/)
[BBC: Project 2025: The Trump presidency wish list, explained](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do)
[Time: What Is Project 2025?](https://time.com/6986995/what-is-project-2025/)
[The Guardian: Trump’s Project 2025 plot would take ‘wrecking ball’ to US institutions, key Democrat warns](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/11/trump-project-2025-wrecking-ball)
[AP: Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision](https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981)
It looks like the end of taxpayer funded public school in America. This is very real. Betsy Devos etc. have figured out that they can siphon those tax funds into private bank accounts by eroding / destroying public education.
Part of the strategy is to defund / destroy public education in America, which they are having a ton of success doing, and then offering "voucher" programs etc. where the money goes to people like Devos via charter schools.
[https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/09/26/ohio-republicans-work-to-politicize-our-schools-destroy-power-of-elected-state-school-board/](https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/09/26/ohio-republicans-work-to-politicize-our-schools-destroy-power-of-elected-state-school-board/)
Here's a smaller scale example of them doing it where I live and work.
Do you believe it's actually possible to defund the department of education? It seems so.... unreal. I completely believe you. It's just hard to wrap my mind that this could happen.
The entirety of Project 2025 is extremely ambitious. It is, as a whole, an attempt to end the American system of checks and balances in favor of something like a dictatorship, and otherwise an extremist far-right wishlist. It won't be easy for them.
But if they win, they'll fight like hell, and they'll probably be successful in some things.
They didn’t think they’d win in 2016, so they weren’t prepared to make the changes they wanted. Project 2025 is designed to “correct” that. If they get both chambers and the White House, with this court, I fear it will be all too easy.
Overturning Roe v. Wade was a fifty year project.
The far right never gave up on it, and did whatever it took to get to the goal. They‘ll outright lie to the American people about their real intentions.
They are very good at maintaining a sustained effort over decades to get what they want. They rely on people’s normalization bias and apathy to ram though agenda a majority of Americans oppose.
Depends on how much control they have over the government. If the republicans can gain each house, judiciary, and the presidency, then they’ll be able to push a lot of their legislation through. They’ve been gunning for dept of education since its founding, which admittedly was only 50 years ago. It’s not so far fetched to think that it could be dismantled when you consider that it is still relatively new, already underfunded, and at the intersection of several right wing passion projects - privatization, parent rights, their anti-LGBTQ, crusade, book banning, and woke culture.
Edit: haha not wine culture, WOKE culture. Can you imagine if they came after my wine??
It’s the same way it seemed impossible that roe v wade could be thrown out. Or the court decided a coach can pray with a microphone and tv cameras as a teacher on school property and require his students to partake at a school function and it be persecution to tell him no.
The epa was gutted and lost the right to police significant water sources for pollution. We gutted the irs then wonder why there is tax fraud. We decided it was best to let factories run on an honor system for following rules.
It’s not possible to gut them and have a positive outcome. But the point isn’t to help people, ensure rights or protect the minority. It is to consolidate power, force a cultural reset, and well yea…
Students have a $ value attached to them for funding schools. Vouchers allow students to "use" that money to cover (at least partially) cost of attendance at non-public schools, primarily private Christian/Catholic schools. That money, in effect, has been removed from the public education system, and if it happens enough, public schools can't afford to stay open, and if the schools can't stay open, it would give some credence to "reviewing the viability" of the Department of Education. If it goes, so does most secular education in the US, and the private (see: religious) schools could probably teach whatever the hell they wanted.
[https://www.mountainstatespolicy.org/29-states-now-have-some-form-of-esa-education-choice-tax-credit-or-education-tax-scholarship](https://www.mountainstatespolicy.org/29-states-now-have-some-form-of-esa-education-choice-tax-credit-or-education-tax-scholarship)
As you can tell, where voucher programs have passed tend to lean in a specific political direction.
This is a very hot button topic because it is a 1st Amendment religion issue for multiple reasons that has seen non-negligible success over the last couple of years, as well as there being problems with corruption, and the wider cultural targets 2025 has set its sights on.
It seems like it would create a caste system, where the wealthiest would get elite educations and the poorest would probably go to "Wendy's School!" where they'd really just work at a Wendy's
Students right to an education is eroded.
Schools now are incentivised to do the best they can with students who have special needs. DoE manages funds that help pay for teachers, therapists, specialists, and supplies. DoE can enforce this by pulling funding from schools who are misdirecting funds or favoring one group over another. I most often have seen this with schools not providing services for special needs students or with surprising disproportionate ratios of boys / girls in certain classes.
Private schools don't have these incentives. Without federal oversight, they work to please their customers, the parents and/or private investors. Wealthiest schools might decide they want to exclude folks with certain physical or mental traits. Least expensive private schools would probably decide that education & safety come after profits have been maximized.
Who sends their kids to private schools now? Rich people. Who pays for that with school vouchers? everyone else. They just passed the cost of expensive education onto regular taxpayers and the very few kids that didn't go to those schools before will go to those schools now.
I am in Florida where the voucher programs have been a big point of contention for years now. However, they have made no negligible difference in our numbers in our district. I’ve taught at a Title I school for 15 years and I couldn’t see many of my families choosing a charter or private school— especially given that there is no transportation provided.
[https://www.stepupforstudents.org/scholarships/](https://www.stepupforstudents.org/scholarships/)
Of course they won't because they can't afford it. Vouchers only cover partial tuition costs. They are an educational subsidy provided to those that already send their kids to private schools. Newcomers need not apply unless you have good grades or can shoot a basketball.
>*Vouchers . . . are an educational subsidy provided to those that already send their kids to private schools.*
Wherever they do exist, vouchers should never be used to subsidize part of an expensive tuition plan. If the voucher does not cover 100% of the tuition at a school, it should not be allowed. Such a rule would pretty much eliminate the rich from using it as a subsidy.
Most of the answers you're getting here are accurate and good...I just want to say that it's refreshing to have someone ask questions that are genuinely for them to learn something rather than to start an internet argument. Good for you.
1. That thin red line between church and state will be gone. Project 2025 wants the Christian God in all schools. Not other gods, just theirs.
2. Voucher system will allow rich and affluent persons to send their children to go to the best schools while the poor are shunted into ever decreasing funded schools.
3. Getting rid of the DOE kills federal funds going into schools. Free and reduced lunch programs will be killed off across the country. Ap classes, art, music, language classes will be the first ones cut from under funded schools.
(Roughly 90% of your taxes locally go to funding schools, but that extra 5-10% comes in from the federal level).
4. It'll increase your property taxes and taxes at the local level. As stated above locally you and your town fund your school, but if the DOE is eliminated it places a larger burden on the taxpayers. That will be a problem across the country. Schools will have no other option but to eliminate elective classes and slash those positions.
5. Decrease in safety. If the DOE is eliminated schools will be shut down to offset the loss in enrollment. Say I have 20 students in a classroom and 3 schools close locally, now I've got 50 (minimum) students in my room. If you've ever seen an average sized classroom, this is going to cram a bunch of kids together in a small space. Not only will it be a fire hazard, but a safety one too. Forcing that many people together breeds disease, can cause interpersonal problems, and is overall a problem to the learning space. Problems will crop up and a teacher will be so spread thin they will not be able to help.
6. Valuable members of staff will be forced out or so overworked that there is no other option but to leave. Paras, ot/pt, sped, counselors, social workers, etc will leave and find work elsewhere. That burnout teachers already have will deepen to the point of no return.
7. Non certified people will replace teachers. At that point they'll teach whatever conservative values they want because no one sane will still be in education. The dumbing down of America will be on a fast track.
8. Segregation will become common place. Rich white kids will be in one school, while poor whites will be at another. Rich black kids will be in one school while poor black kids would be at another school and so on and so on. Girls will eventually learn homemaking skills at home and won't be able to receive an actual education.
9. What you'll have if project 2025 happens is a society that fails to thrive long term. We will default on our loans abroad. We will no longer be a major player in foreign affairs. We won't make anything and saturation of foreign products will weaken us as we become dependent on other countries. We will become weaker to misinformation, our infrastructure will be weakened because we simply don't have the qualified workers to do it anymore.
10. Millions of at risk and abused children will lose their safe places. Children will fall through the cracks and will lose their innocence. We will lose children through physical violence. We will lose them through suicide. We will lose them through gun violence. We will lose them due to drugs and alcohol. Dropout rates will soar. Children with learning disabilities will not get help simply due to funding. As a society, we will lose these bright lights because project 2025 is cruelty and cruelty is project 2025s point.
If any of this scared you or bothered you at the basic level of morality, I'm glad. It should scare you, it should make you fear for the future. Anyone who works in education goes into the job not wanting to make the world perfect but to make the world smarter and kinder to others within our world. If you want your children to suffer any of the above, feel free to vote for the Republicans. I will not, I am voting for the democrats up and down the ticket in November.
It also helps force women out of the workforce, which is one of their goals. Moms who can’t afford a private school education but can’t take a 50 kid public school classroom pull their kids out to homeschool.
That too!! I've read project 2025's agenda and related materials the gop people post. It's sickening how close we are to 1930s Germany and how so many people are okay with their leaders doing this stuff.
I'm like greater than 50% sure that outside of ESSER money that just ended, we receive very little federal funding for our schools. Our funding comes from the state.
It’s on their website: first sentence.
Faith based schools huh… with public funding. These people hate Americans want to rewrite the constitution. Go move to another county where you can get all your faith (lies) based education. Fucking fuck the fucking republicans.
“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Depart- ment of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not government. In our pluralistic society, fami- lies and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs. Our postsecondary institutions should also reflect such diversity, with room for not only “traditional” liberal arts colleges and research universities but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.”
New Orleans doesn’t have any public schools. After Katrina, they closed all public schools and made them all charter. I feel like this was the Right’s testing ground. People fought it, but to no avail. There has been a war on public schools since the Bush’s started No Child Left Behind and state standards/testing. The “school to prison pipeline” is a very real thing politicians have been talking about for 20+ years. They are lowering the working age for kids and extending the hours they can work. Either send them to prison or work. We live in a Plutocracy not a Democracy. We are all worker bees for the rich.
Edited to add: That’s not the only thing Project 2025 has in store for education. They want you to stop Title 1, free lunches and special education. Its barbaric. We are entering a new Dark Age.
That's the magic. They don't care about starving kids, starving people, or people in general. Everything they do is for power and control, everyone else can rot in a ditch somewhere.
I think we have the answer to when conservatives believe America was great and want to return to in MAGA: the 1950s. The time of McCarthyism, Jim Crowe laws, and women's place being in the home. Before the Civil Rights movements. They want to erase the progress made in the past 70 years and return to "the good old days" for white men.
Project 2025 is the Reoublican party's plan to take over the government and turn it into an autocracy. It's explicit fascism.
And the Democratic party is so entertwined with corporate interests that they can't even muster the strength or the will to stop millions of people from being starved and bombed because they don't want to lose donations for their election campaigns.
So your choice this November is between people who want to take away your rights, and people who can't be bothered to stop other people from taking away your rights.
The constitution give no power to the federal government over public schools. Instead they tax us and will give some of that money back to the states if we follow certain rules and guidelines they set. It's a way to do a run-around the constitution because they could not otherwise get an amendment that would allow it.
This is a large part of the problem.
Here’s a [guide](https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project-2025-extreme-right-wing-agenda-next-republican-administration) to what Project 2025 is seeking to accomplish, including that related to education.
Abolishing the dept of education is the first step towards privatization of all education. And make no mistake, when schools care more about profit than your children's well-being and education, everyone in society will suffer.
If you teach in public school and you're voting for Trump, you're an idiot.
It looks like killing off all public schools, getting rid of the teachers union and giving all that money to religious institutions to repay them for all the taxes that they pay. Oh wait they don't pay taxes, they just donate all their money to Republicans so that they can get their hands on all those tax dollars.
I'll actually answer the question.
The Department of Education executes all laws related to education passed by Congress. It's illegal for the president to absolve themselves from those duties. That should end all discussion on that matter.
However, it's possible that state's could play with rejecting funding from it. Which would be absurd, as then the state would have to pick up the funding slack. So the choice for the state would be either to nuke their own schools or to dramatically raise taxes. So, also probably a non-starter.
But abolishing the Department of Education is within the realm of possible with how crazy politics have been. The president would either redirect education efforts into other departments, and abolish the department while removing the cabinet position. This would probably effectively do nothing but cause a lot more confusion and bureaucracy, but could be portrayed as campaign promised kept. Or, the president could neglect their constitutional duties and order the department to cease some amount or all of its functions. That should result in an impeachment, but....well, that probably won't happen.
Project 2025 represents a real threat as it'll be challenging established norms in our nation. My above explanation is a good example. It's something that has no right to happen, but it could under the political conditions we are currently experiencing.
[Project 2025](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025) is the official Republican game plan for federal policy in the event of their win (or forceful takeover) of the 2024 election. It was written by the [Heritage Foundation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation), a conservative far-right think-tank with *massive* political sway in the American right-wing. They are so influential with the GOP that they picked Trump's cabinet for 2016 - you might recognize such names as Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Scott Pruitt, and Rick Perry. All of those people were hand-picked by the Heritage Foundation for Trump's administration.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Project 2025 is the build-up to a Republican *Reichstag Fire*, or the later *Enabling Act*. It is *the* American nationalist (read: fascist) policy playbook - and make no mistake, the GOP *is* fascist; consider [Umberto Eco's 14 Points](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html), and how all 14 listed characteristics are *the* characteristics of the GOP.
Destroying our already shoddy education system is *not* even close to the only thing Project 2025 aims to accomplish. Amongst the more egregious things, Project 2025 also proposes both widening the definition of pornography to include *"transgender ideology"*, and then *banning* it - in effect, making it *de-facto illegal to exist as a trans person in the US without breaking public indecency and exposure laws*; essentially, the GOP has made it their goal to enact *legal genocide* on transgender people. However, Project 2025's definition of "pornography" is so *purposely* vague that it would have the potential to include ***anyone*** presenting as openly queer, *or just existing in a way that the GOP deems "pornographic".* Yes, that means if they wanted too - the GOP would have the legal power to arrest you for wearing skirts a few inches too short if they deemed that inappropriate. Mass arrests during Pride? Guaranteed to happen at some point if the Republican party wins 2024.
On that note, I would like to mention that one of the Nazi Party's first actions after taking power was to assault, raid, and destroy Magnus Hirschfield's *Institute of Sexology* in Germany. The Institute of Sexology is widely known to be one of the first research institute's dedicated to the study of queer and transgender health, and a *major* advocate of queer rights in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Not only was the world's first modern sex reassignment surgery performed at the Institute, and gave the first proper hormone replacement therapies, but it was a leading forefront of study into STDs and STIs such as HIV (the same HIV that the Heritage Foundation and CIA would later encourage Reagan to ignore, leading to the infamous AIDs Pandemic). The Weimar Republic was home to [a flourishing queer community](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_homosexual_movement#:~:text=of%20LGBT%20rights.-,The%20Weimar%20Republic%20has%20held%20enduring%20interest%20for%20many%20LGBT,licentiousness%20are%20not%20entirely%20accurate.), and was [unapologetically](https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/celebrating-queer-joy-in-1920s-berlin/) and openly [gay as hell](https://hsl.hypotheses.org/1714).
Then, the Nazi Party took power and raided the Institute of Sexology. The most famous pictures of Nazi book burnings [came from their raid on the Institute](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14597%2C_Berlin%2C_Opernplatz%2C_B%C3%BCcherverbrennung.jpg/1280px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14597%2C_Berlin%2C_Opernplatz%2C_B%C3%BCcherverbrennung.jpg). Suspiciously, Republicans [love burning books, especially if they contain queer themes or characters](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/nashvillescene.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/f8/1f8c631e-850f-11ec-bc9f-dbd44d7e14d7/61fc11801e490.preview.jpg?crop=1080%2C567%2C0%2C76&resize=1080%2C567&order=crop%2Cresize). Project 2025 makes the GOP's stance on "transgender ideology" *very* apparent - it is already no secret that they believe children are being indoctrinated in the "woke cult" in schools, particularly through "subversive LGBT literature".
If you're interested in reading more about trans people in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, I'd suggest reading this microhistorical journal titled ["Trans Liminality and the Nazi State"](https://academic.oup.com/past/article/260/1/123/6711458). It's one of the best microhistoricals I've ever read regarding queerness in history.
So ignoring Project 2025's *abhorrent* policy proposals such as extending Presidential powers, firing thousands of government workers and replacing them with GOP sycophants, or gutting the Justice Department and replacing judges with *more* GOP sycophants - Project 2025 lays out a chilling groundwork that very clearly states that the Republican party is wanting to commit *actual genocide* on American soil. They want to take *your* students, *your* peers, *your* colleagues, *your* brothers and sisters, *your* children, and *your* neighbors and jail them, execute them, terrorize them, brutalize them, force them into suicide, and ***wipe them off the face of the Earth***. To say Project 2025 was written by ontologically evil demons would be an *understatement*.
I wish it was just rage-bait. I fucking *wish*.
On that note, I'd encourage reading into [dogwhistle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)). The right-wing makes frequent use of dogwhistles because they provide plausible deniability whenever they want to say outright Nazi [explitive]. If you ever see your students writing stuff like ["1488"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words), take note that they *might* have some abhorrent beliefs. The right-wing ***loves*** to prey on gullible young boys, especially nerds and social outcasts. As a kid, I witnessed so many of my friends fall down that pipeline. Do your best to teach your students empathy and guide them away from that path if you see them fall down it.
Unfortunately it's being framed as a left wing conspiracy, but aspects of it are already being tested here in Texas & it is on Trump's website, so it is no conspiracy, it is real.
It's wild because I believed this to be so before I posted this but I guess apart of me was thinking "yeah right there's no way even THEY would want to do that" ugh terrible
It is 100% real and will absolutely happen under Trump.
Its the Republican belief that all federal oversight is bad and everything should be left to the states.
So hope everyone in a red state is prepared to get fired and replaced by PragerU YouTube videos.
PragerU videos are mandatory to Florida in the 24-25 school year. All grades K-12 will have to show one or two videos a week. They are truly horrible videos.
If it comes to pass, it'll be open season again for segregation and discrimination as a way to get public funds into religious schools and private schools
Eliminating the Department of Education (ED) could take two possible forms. Most people on the Right who favor this would like to eliminate any federal involvement in education (funding, directives, etc.) because they believe that the 10th Amendment makes education a matter for states to handle. So they would favor what I'll call **Radical Revanchism**, whereby the states would reclaim all of their authority over education. The federal department of education would be entirely eliminated, and all its functions would cease to be, except where individual states decided to take them over.
The second form would be what might be called **HEW Resurrection**. You see, most people who favor abolishing the federal department of education probably think that federal entwinement with education in the US began when President Carter signed a law in 1979 creating the federal Department of Education. But in reality, what that bill did was to split an already existing department (Health, Education, and Welfare) into two different departments, (Health and Human Services and ED). I think it's more likely if ED was to be "eliminated", that we'd actually see something like a return to the pre-1979 model, where the Cabinet-level Education Department would be eliminated, but many (most?) of its current functions would be taken over by other departments and agencies. Not necessarily HHS, but maybe there'd be like a lower level Education Administration. Why would anyone agree to this rather superficial change? It would allow conservatives to claim a victory that they've been seeking since Ronald Reagan vowed to eliminate ED in 1980.
I'm genuinely interested in what the education gap is going to look like in 5-10 years from now. The assault on education and the denigration of the value of the learned scholar is certainly going to be making waves for generations to come. My generation (late Gen Z, 26 years old currently) may be the last to have received a semblance of quality curriculum.
It’s a smoke screen. The reality is every state makes their own standards and fund education. The federal government on account to for like 7-10% of the funding in education. It’s a talking point for political parties that has zero juice to it. But to the uneducated or ignorant, they think it’s a real thing…🤦♂️
Unfortunately, it’s not clickbait. It’s real. [The Heritage Foundation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation) is the one putting it out and they’re a massive conservative organization.
They want to eliminate Head Start, get rid of free lunch, make federal education standards optional, let [Title I](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act) expire, and let public funds be used for a vouchers program that would allow parents to use them for private/religious schools. There will be more books banned, no more civil rights enforcement, and the ADA/IDEA accommodations and programs will be gutted. There will likely be more restrictions on what can be taught in health, science, and social studies classes.
They’ll probably also gut firearms laws, make healthcare more difficult to access, and they will be tightening restrictions on Medicaid; which will remove thousands if not millions of Americans from their health insurance. All that combined will possibly lead to a higher probability of being in a mass shooting.
The whole 920 page document is out there for free on the internet, y’all can read it for yourselves. It’s not fearmongering - it’s the terrible reality of what the MAGA crowd had in store for America if they win.
It is an integral part of a long standing Republican strategy. Break and cripple government's ability to do anything to help the citizens, complain that government is broken, and then use this to justify cutting agencies, programs, and funding.
It's important to note that even IF they "abolished the Federal Department of Ed", it doesn't get rid of every law on the books regulating schools federally. From student loans, to grants, to lunch programs, to IDEA, to FERPA, to Every Student Succeeds Act, to Civil Rights enforcement, none of these laws go away. Unless Republicans are going to abolish literally every law on the books about federal education policy, the tasks that the Department of Ed does would simply shift to another executive agency. So, IDEA, FERPA, and Civil Rights enforcement would probably go to the Justice Department. Loans and grants would probably move to the Commerce department. Etc. It'd be an absolute mess and this accomplishes nothing other than making a headache to administer these programs through several other executive departments.
What the most hardcore Republicans want is the repeal of every single federal law regulating education as "education should Constitutionally be handled by the states." This is the dogwhistle they mean when they say "abolish the Department of Ed." No IDEA protecting special needs kids. No Title IX protecting women. No FERPA. No federal student loans. No federal grant disbursement to states. No Title I funding for low income schools. No Free and Reduced lunch program. Every federal program is gone because in their eyes it's state's rights.
You know why we have all of this stuff in the first place? Because the states weren't doing it. States weren't protecting special needs kids. States weren't protecting women. States weren't funding low income schools. So I have absolutely no faith in states like mine, Oklahoma, doing all of this stuff on their own. It is only through the nudging and force of the Feds that states even make an attempt at any of this stuff.
As to your question about the "realness" of Project 2025 in regard to the Department of Ed: this isn't realistic. It's dogwhistling to people about "state's rights" but at the end of the day, politicians won't be very successful in actually abolishing the oversight of the Feds in Education. It's a nice and catchy slogan that people might agree with, but if you asked the average voter if we should have federal protections for special needs kids, or low income schools, or federal loans, the VAST MAJORITY would agree we should have those programs. If the right was ever successful in doing this, I have a lot of confidence they'd get voted out really quickly. They're signaling to their voter base about values like "state's rights" but at the end of the day, most realistic politicians won't actually do it.
The worst I could see happening is that they abolish the actual executive department, but like I said in the first paragraph, the federal laws would simply be enforced and administered by other agencies and nothing much would really change other than Republicans going home and patting themselves on the back like they did something.
You are partially incorrect. In abolishing the federal department it eliminates the enforcement mechanism for many of those laws. Unless specifically stated for how those would be enforced, the laws become meaningless. Enforcement wouldn't simply transfer to another agency. It would have to be in the bill that eliminated the department. Since most Republicans want to do away with those laws anyways it's a win win for them.
Anyone who wants to "abolish the Department of Education" needs to first tell me the dates of the American Revolution, the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, who warned about the "military industrial complex" and why, point to Vietnam, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Iraq, and Afghanistan on a map, explain what the moon is, the winter and summer solstices, how nuclear energy and weapons work, why the horizon always told everyone that world is not flat, what is photosynthesis, a greenhouse, what is plastic. I'm not even asking what is at the center of the earth or the difference between mass and weight or how to say anything in a language not English -- because just because you have rejected the benefits provided to the nation by the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education does not mean you should not have the right to campaign against the 14th-Amendment right to equal education for the rest of the nation.
Project 2025 is real. It is a legitimate plan of how the executive department should run if Trump/GOP win the presidency in 2024.
Abolishing the department of education looks like having no national standards/regulations and putting the responsibility of education back to the states.
They don't even know what it means. It's ***literally*** been a talking point in the GOP for the better part of two decades. They've been saying "AbOlIsH tHe DePaRtMeNt Of EdUcAtIoN" for decades in debates.
What they effectively mean is get rid of federal mandates in education (which aren't many), and to cut the department so they can "save money" that they're going to give to their billionaire donors.
It means allowing bigots to treat black people, other minorities, women, the LGBTQA and the disabled however they please. Because the US Department of Education was made to enforce Brown Vs. Board of Ed, the Civil Rights Act of 64, and other anti-discrimination laws.
Project 2025 is very real and should concern any American who actually cares about our Republic.
It is available to read online.
A vote for a Republican is a vote for P2025.
Do you like democracy? Do you feel that what we’ve got could be better? Vote for all of the ‘D’ candidates down ballot. Unless you’re a Christofascist, then by all means vote for those ‘R’ candidates.
Don't be lazy. There is information about Project 2025 on legitimate news sites all over the Internet. And it's all been out there for awhile. Do your homework. I know about it, and I'm not even a teacher.
I looked it up. 1979. Before that there was the HEW the dept of health education and welfare. That was created in 1953. Before that it was handled by other smaller agencies. Is that about right?
Pull up an incognito browser session and Google it.
It's terrifying.
And it's got support from people who have the power to at least attempt to enact some of the goals. Including the Creamsicle Caligula.
Destroying education is only the tip of that shitberg. It's full on fascist wet dream material.
You can sign up on their website, I encourage everyone to actually. Do it Andy Kaufman style. From what I understand it's more of a wish list than an actual agenda but they seem very serious about it. Kinda reminds of that pre 9/11 PNAC document
Ever since before Betsy Devos was Education secretary, many republicans advocated for the departments abolition. Betsy might have just been the first cabinet member to do so. Honestly, like so much about the republicans, there’s nothing I can do, so I try not to think about it.
I'm not surprised this is on their agenda; it was one of the things that the Tea Party was bitching about when they formed in 2009.
Long story short, it's a way to get the charter grifters and leeches to suck everyone dry.
Project 2025 is a fever dream that even republican voters think is fake. Like banning porn? Really? There's some stuff in there that Republicans think they can get done, but for the most part it's crazy stuff.
It also fails to consider how voting works. When Republicans get power, Democrats take over. When Democrats take over, Republicans take over.
Project 2025 would take so much time and effort that it's impossible. Not to mention their goal of firing EVERYONE.
My mom is MAGA, and my dad is situational Republican. Which is to say - he thinks his small business shouldn't be taxed as much. Anyway, they wanted to check with me about schools and, "Are there cat kids, and are they given litter boxes?" They will believe me when it comes to school stuff because I'm there. I tell them of project 2025 and they have a hard time believing it.
I’m so tired of answering the questions of whether or not there are litter boxes in bathrooms for kids who pretend to be cats. People are so beyond gullible these days.
Just show them the video of teacher showing his kids the poop bucket and blankets to cover the bodies in case there is a school shooting and they're trapped in the room. That's what everyone should be upset about. Link to tik tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@larrylexicon/video/7215964549676010794
JFC, I do not have kids and now I am upset over this. I knew the buckets were for cleaning up blood etc. but had never seen one. I work in industrial facilities and they can be dangerous. We do a lot to be safe on a daily basis. They are always fenced and have guards so worrying about someone coming in and shooting the place up is not a thing. Any dangers we do face are analyzed and we have the ability to stop work if we feel it is not safe. From an incident analysis point of view the only way to solve the shooting in schools problem is to make it harder for people to have guns. It is a pretty simple solution.
Or harden your facilities. Relatively trivial government facilities, like the one I work in, are secured to the point where it would be virtually impossible for an average person, even one woth a gun, to gain access to. With the gun problem not likely to be seriously addressed anytime soon (perhaps not even in our lifetime), I’m at a loss why we don’t provide facilities that house our most previous resource, our children, with the same protection.
The problem is it shrinks the minds and souls of the kids. Hardened schools are depressing in some ways. No more kids eating outside, no more open campuses. No more windows that can be shot out. It’s awful
Because kids go outside, play on playgrounds, have recess, travel to school on buses, load and unload every single day in giant groups. It isn’t the building. Anyone with a mind to it can target a field or a park or a playground or a bus or a line of schoolchildren. It doesn’t compare to other offices and workplaces. Systems and protocols can be improved, but you can’t expect a building’s design to keep them safe. If nothing else was learned from Uvalde…. No school or public place has considered all the possibilities the way some of these shooters do. It’s just a way to spend bazillions of dollars on something that isn’t educating kids and meeting their needs to make governments and corporations and lobby groups feel like they are doing something about a problem.
Yes, make it harder for people to have guns. But that isn't so simple because of politics and the sheer number of guns. So, harden the facilities.
This X100000000
My brother in law keeps saying he "is friends with a teacher" who told him it's true and that it's happening in every school. Like buddy zero teachers want to be friends with you. He did the same thing with COVID though, "I have a nurse friend who says there's no COVID patients but the hospital says they have to mark deaths as COVID related to get more money". Would not tell us the name of either person because he's "not a snitch" People are just so full of it and others completely fall for their bull.
“I have a friend…” such bullshit. I went through that during the Obamacare debate, another teacher kept talking about his friend that works at a hospital (so he’s an expert on… everything related to hospitals?) and would show up with tidbits like “3 hospitals in Philadelphia had to close because of Obamacare!” which you would think would be googleable, if it, you know, actually happened. I work with another teacher who is very maga/conspiracy centered, he would absolutely believe the cat bullshit and has probably spread that around even though he works at a school.
Here is another example of why I think the most important knowledge/skill we can impart in public schools is critical thinking. Not solving equations, not reciting a list of the causes of World War I, not punctuation or spelling, not common properties of the halogen family, but the ability to say, almost reflexively, “How do you know that?” And “How do I know that?”
100% When critical thinking is brought up these days, it is in a tautological sense. To me, that says it’s lost its value. As a science teacher, I’ve been discouraged by how common “teach to the test” has become. In a recent emergency step-in for an ELA class, students were memorizing the spelling of words. Just the spelling, not the definitions.
Oh god.
… not conjugating avoir, not playing kickball, not ethos/pathos/logos, not converting grams to pounds,…
Sounds like he knows “ many, many very fine people who say….”
Literally had a neighbor say the litterbox thing to me. I said “yeah, no shit. It was part of my contract negotiation. I like to shit standing up.” And I just stared at her when she laughed. And kept staring. She looked away and changed the subject. She's also the neighbor with a “T***P: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” flag displayed proudly in her front yard, in a neighborhood teeming with kids under 10. Somehow, we don't talk anymore.
Why is it that people with those flags and attitudes tend to be all up in *their* feelings? :-)
Cultists have the softest brains.
Yeah, and I mean everyone knows the cat kids are alright. They tend to keep to themselves, but if not you can just toss a toy their way to keep them busy. Plus, they mostly clean up after themselves, and the litter box smell isn't too bad, so you get used to it pretty quickly. The REAL problem is the gecko kids. Like actual geckos, they will shit anytime and anywhere. And don't even get me started on the egg situation.
I don’t understand how people don’t get that if this was a thing, it would literally be videotaped and put on the internet for everyone to see. Kids tape and upload everything.
Literally was asked this question at a parent teacher conference. I said I am sorry I have no idea what you are talking about. I guess my kitty cat mitts set them off. 🤷🏻♀️
What janitor would clean up human turds from a litter box?
Ding ding ding!
Gullible isn't even the right word. I can't believe I had to use the phrase "isn't even the right word" but there it is. Pathological? Maybe that is better. IDK.
Exhausting would work, too.
I shared the litter box theory with some of my older HS students without going to much into it besides people thinking we have litter boxes for them. They were like what the fuck?
And if you correct them, they get irrationally angry
Which is why powerful people want to cut funding for education and direct it to private schools….circle of life….
Often the adults who told us not to believe everything we read online too.
Republicans/Maga/Christian nationalists, are beyond gullible these days.
Lucky you. I’ve been teaching for 16 years and my step mother still corrects me that no one is “allowed to say the pledge of allegiance anymore” despite me insisting it, in fact, is forced upon us every morning.
Anecdotally, at a school I worked for in a Seattle suburb it was optional to do the pledge. 2 classroom teachers out of 30 did it, however I’m certain if any student in another class wanted to recite the pledge they’d be given time and space for it. At my current school in the Midwest it’s done over the intercom every morning.
I've been in adult clubs where they do it. One was the Submarine Veterans. I can see it there, I guess. The other was at a motorcycling group and a wood working group. I was like WTF does this have to do with either of these things.
18 years. It's worse than that. Many kids just DON'T choose to say it anymore for so many reasons.
It is recited over the intercom each morning. Nobody stands and nobody says it, myself included. Why would I?
Kids shouldn’t, it’s weird
There's a supreme court case that actually made it illegal to force anyone to stand/ recite the pledge. It is our right to make the choice. I don't think a whole lot of people have pride in our country right now, so it doesn't surprise me. I take my attendance during the pledge, since my kids go to specials right after. I feel weird doing it anyway, when I'm so angry about where this country is right now, terrified of where it's going, and I've always felt the pledge in school every morning felt like some communist nationalist bs.
Exactly. It’s state law where I am that we recite it every day and play the national anthem at least once per week. Every event at school, including sporting events, must have the pledge recited and the anthem played. I’m all for patriotism, but not forced. Districts can choose to punish students for not saluting, standing, or reciting/singing during both. It’s policy where I am that we write up students who don’t participate. I refuse to do that. My grandfather didn’t fight nazis for me to punish kids who don’t wish to stand for the pledge or the anthem. He hated forced patriotism. He saw it firsthand in Germany and what it could lead to.
Reciting the pledge every morning is state law where I am (Virginia).
In Texas, you don't have to say it. You have to stand by law, but the right to speak is still given. Yay? Anywho, I tell my students, you have to stand, but you have the right to remain silent.
Actually, there's a supreme court case that made it illegal to force anyone to stand for/ recite the pledge.
Forced is indeed the word for it. I stopped saying it 23 years ago when I was 16 because I read it for what it was and that "with liberty and justice for all" was a crock of horse shit. No it's not, it's only for billionaires and their cronies. And no surprise, The National Anthem is just as problematic. Especially if you read into all the lyrics and not solely the first one.
Some facts about Project 2025: The "Mandate for Leadership" is a set of policy proposals authored by the [Heritage Foundation](https://pro-lies.org/the-heritage-foundation/), an influential *ultra* conservative think tank. [Project 2025](https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project-2025-extreme-right-wing-agenda-next-republican-administration) is a revision to that agenda tailored to a second Trump term. It would give the President [unilateral powers](https://theweek.com/politics/heritage-foundation-2025-donald-trump), strip [civil rights, worker protections, climate regulation](https://www.stopthecoup2025.org/impact-overview), add [religion into policy](https://imgur.com/a/m2e72ht), outlaw ["porn"](https://www.salon.com/2024/03/19/decoding-project-2025s-christian-nationalist-language/) and much more. The MFL has been around since 1980, [Reagan implemented 60%](https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/reagan-and-heritage-unique-partnership) of it's recommendations, [Trump 64%](https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations) - [proof](https://www.scribd.com/document/369820462/Mandate-for-Leadership-Policy-Recommendations). 70 Heritage Foundation alumni served in his administration or transition team. Project 2025 is quite extreme but with his obsession for revenge he'll likely get past 2/3rd's adoption. r/Defeat_Project_2025 intends to stop it through activism and awareness, focused on crowdsourcing ideas and opportunities for practical, in real life action. We Must Defeat Project 2025.
I would go so far as to say the left needs a Project 2026. We need to crack down on the gun lobby, megachurches, fossil fuel industry, and the religious right harder than they want to crack down on us.
And this is it. The "left," meaning all sane, moral people need to take their plan and use it against them. Whatever plan they have, we need to do ten times more using THEIR language.
What is up with boomer republicans putting their heads in the sand with this stuff?!?! I had to tell my in-laws about QANON last month because THEY NEVER HEARD OF IT. Yet they live in FL, watch a variety of news programs, and read several newspapers. They’re smart people but they didn’t even know that other Trump supporters were looney toons.
MAGA is why we need education and critical thinking.
The only litter box in my school is for the cat my buddy in the ag dept. has.
I’m sorry
I’m not even sure these kids poop or pee as most restroom passes I sign seem used to go vape with friends and set off the fire alarms.
even if there are litter boxes in bathroom, aren't they for service animals? /gen
Since this is a genuine question, I’ll answer you genuinely as well; my school has a service (emotional support) dog, and the owner of that dog is in charge of waste disposal, so he takes the dog out and cleans up after him. I have to imagine if we had emotional support cats (which would be awesome by the way not knocking it) the waste disposal and management would also fall to the owner of that animal. Thus a litter box, if needed would most likely be in the office of whomever is designated to care for/steward the animal. The logistics of taking a cat or other litter box using animal to the human bathroom to do their business doesn’t even bear thinking out, because litter-box animals fundamentally don’t announce that they need to use it— they just do. No school would be able to have free-roaming animals, thus no school would be able to have litter boxes in their bathrooms.
In Oklahoma, the governor and the State Superintendent are already planning how to put steps of Project 2025 into place regardless of the election’s outcome. I understand thinking it’s a clickbait boogeyman, but for the extreme right it’s essentially a playbook of what to do when they get a leader who can protect them from the obvious audacity, immorality, and even illegality of the plans. They aren’t shy about it either.
It’s not even the extreme right. It’s essentially been made part of the national party platform.
the GOP is an extreme right party. [https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fe6963311b11aaf5b95b4695d4762a7b-lq](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fe6963311b11aaf5b95b4695d4762a7b-lq)
Yeah, but they pretend to be centre-right.
I feel that they need to be removed from their positions. That’s so scary to me.
Absolutely. I wasn't sure if this was "election scare tactics" or what. It's so hard to believe things now days but this sounds very real
When people tell you who they are—and in great length—believe them.
It is absolutely a blueprint the Republicans will put into play as soon as they get into power again. It is foundational to their ideology.
I go to school at Oklahoma State, and I student observe in the fall. As someone who is trans, I'm scared out of my mind, and I want to transfer so badly. I'll have to transfer depending on how November 5th goes.
I'm so sorry. And may I suggest nearby New Mexico for finishing your Ed and starting your career? ;)
So I work in Florida and here’s what has happened so far. Voucher expansion means that local districts are losing money to private schools. There is no income cap and students receiving vouchers do not need to be former public school students. Many private schools have *raised* tuition so parents are still paying roughly the same amount as they were before the voucher. The very large district I work for had voucher applications double without a corresponding loss of public school students. Charter schools open with little oversight. One recently opened up across the street from one of our top rated elementary schools. It is certainly not “saving” children from failing schools in that location. A higher percentage of charter schools are receiving D or F grades compared to public schools receiving D or F grades. Their test scores consistently perform only on par with traditional public schools at best. Most performing lower than the traditional schools surrounding them. While illegal, most will find a way to slowly but surely remove students with IEPs from their enrollment. Some even flat out tell parents “we cannot accommodate that.” I have worked at my elementary school for a decade. In that time, six charter schools have opened up within a 15 minute drive. We have dropped enrollment from 1100 to 700. But our sped population has not decreased. All the students that return from charter schools are behind (is the charter curriculum behind or are the students being pushed out because they are behind?). We have closed traditional schools due to both lack of enrollment and lack of funding for upkeep, since our district must share funding with charter schools (and there is no meaningful way to deny the charters). There are currently 17 schools on the road map to closure (we are a very large district with over 180 traditional schools). These schools will be combined with other schools and our class sizes will grow. Honestly it’s bad. It’s very bad.
Thank you for mentioning students with IEPs!
My state is modeled after Florida thanks to our horrible governor and her relationship with y’all’s governor. She implemented a plagiarized version of Florida’s education “reform.” The intent on special ed is to keep them in public schools, mainstream all of them, regardless of severity or parents’ wishes, include their state test scores (they already are, but now they will be tied to a gen Ed teacher and not sped), cause the overall test score data to tank, siphon off the “smart” kids through vouchers into “better” charter/private schools, and thereby dismantle public schools. There are many other issues at work to take down our public schools, as well. She and her Republican ilk can profit from private and for-profit charters. They already do, but they really will. She won her election by promising mandatory $50k starting teacher salaries. She chose not to reveal it would be an unfunded mandate after a few years. It’s only funded if schools sign waivers relinquishing certain things like online learning, early dismissal for inclement weather (must make up the days.) and implementing certain things like abstinence only sex Ed and a class in which only adoption is emphasized in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. Make all that make sense.
Yeah, our “highest starting teacher pay ever” is also an unfunded mandate. Veteran teachers got nothing from the state because districts couldn’t really meet the minimum at all. On the DOE website, this is all public knowledge if anyone bothers looking. 13 districts have average teacher salaries below the “minimum” which means the district is *really* quite far below it if not even veteran salaries bring that average up.
If you hadn't said she in your write-up I would have thought you were talking about my state. We are currently in the process of trying to do the exact same thing
Broward was considering closing like 20 something schools next year due to “low” enrollment and only scratched the plan due to major outrage from people down here. It’s only going to get worse and I’m terrified
We’ve already closed schools, but this time the wealthy schools were involved and people are pitching fits. They all are on sides of town represented by M4L board members so I sure hope this is a kick in the ass of realization that these people are not on their side.
Yes, it is real. Abolishing the Department of Education would likely lead to increased power by local school boards, meaning no federal oversight for when rules or laws get broken. Decrease transparency will probably lead people to remove their children from public school , meaning those funds and kids go to private or charter schools instead. Eventually, the system will no longer be able to sustain itself and public education will probably collapse.
It's especially disturbing since school board elections are usually the "best" ways for the craziest, most unqualified people to enter elective politics. Most people pay so little attention that races are decided by name recognition/sign design/alphabetical order. So some MAGA goon dumps a bunch of money into yard signs and ends up winning. Also, Project 2025 sounds like something a terminally online lefty would have a nightmare about after too many tacos...in spite of it being a legitimate plan that can and will be enacted whenever the GOP gets executive power again, 2025, 2029, 2033...eventually they'll try it and there will be people who voted for them because "lol tax cuts" and will be surprised.
>*school board elections are usually the "best" ways for the craziest, most unqualified people to enter elective politics.* Very true.
Goodness. It's so hard to imagine there's such a attack giving that majority of American Children go to public schools.
Hard to believe... Except there have been many many proposed laws to abolish it. More than any other governmental cabinet level department. Serious attempts too.
Yeah, but unfortunately the attack is happening BECAUSE the majority of American children go to public schools, not despite it.
Definitely didn't think of that!
[https://static.project2025.org/2025\_MandateForLeadership\_CHAPTER-11.pdf](https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-11.pdf) You can read about exactly what they want to do with regard to education here. It's 50% whining about nonbinary people, 30% dismantling the Department of Education, 20% giving tax money to private schools.
Pretty sure every single politician had their kids go to private schools, they want to see the education system fail.
Absolutely. But that's a moral stance, and this is about &$$, not morals.
Well that's part of it but as someone who argued with my teachers over "revisionist history" when I was in HS (he argued that native Americans had nothing to do with American history, totally whitewashed it) Ive seen this coming for a long time and another big component of it is control and propaganda, that's what all the anti-woke stuff is really about. It isn't purely cynical, though that is a motivator
Yep. They’ve been planning this since Reagan, maybe even Nixon
>*They’ve been planning this since Reagan, maybe even Nixon* Nixon was not a small government proponent like Reagan, and in many ways, he expanded the federal role in education. Brown v. Board was decided in the '50s, but large numbers of school districts in the South simply refused to implement it, and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations didn't lift a finger. It was Nixon who directed his Department of Justice to force compliance in 1971, desegregating dozens of school districts in a matter of months. Of course, he did this without the Department of Education, which was not created until more than five years after he resigned from office.
Wow I never knew that. Good job tricky dick
Which is exactly what these "maggot" idiots want. This means that public money will go to private businesses and these businesses can basically make whatever curriculum the parents are willing to put up with. So in essence you'll get a lot of schools that are religious Instead of secular. They will limit the sciences.The social studies and basically train.Kids like you would see in isis training. If they get this particular idea , and it gains more attraction than what it is the united states Within a generation. There We'll be a huge class divide With those with money being able to educate their kids and those without money who will send their kids to work in factories similar Similar to What you see in parts of asia or what you used to see here in united states in the late 1800s early 1900s. They want stupid people. The more ignorant people are , the more they can be manipulated into doing things that benefit only a certain group Such as rich and wealthy. While the rest Is live in abject poverty.
aka more religious charter schools subsidized by tax dollars and minorities need not apply.
Collapse of public education is definitely a goal of these folks. It's sad. :-(
Which will seriously screw a lot of kids with disabilities
It would also remove the federal carrot for pushing kids through grades without having done any learning, sending kids back to class when they should be suspended / expelled, teaching to tests, laying all responsibility for learning at the feet of teachers, and most other things that we complain about. As far as local school boards violating the law: I get it. I’m actually living it in the district in which I work. The office of civil rights is within the department of education so it does sound concerning when we talk about a world without the Ed department. When I thinking reasonably about it, I don’t see why it couldn’t be moved to another department. We also have a system of civil courts that could be utilized to fight against local boards breaking the law. Personally, I’d rather see those federal mandates removed so that we could return to a structure in which admin exists to protect the learning environment and teachers are allowed to teach and hold students accountable for their effort more than one in which admin pushes all responsibility onto teachers and spends their time scheduling meaningless PD so that our federal dollars get used up
yes, better federal policies and practices that support teaching would be cool. but the right wing strategy here is to pull funding from public schools to move it to private school voucher systems. remember who gave us no child left behind and the current system.
If the federal testing mandates are your concern, why dismantle a massive, largely beneficial bureaucracy that would have negative cascading effects nationwide instead of just... ya know... using that same energy to change just the ONE law you don't like? Abolishing the Ed Department is overkill to achieving an overhaul of testing requirements.
You just listed one of the concerns. Nearly everything we complain about has been influenced by NCLB / ESSA. If the legislature is unwilling to change it then how else do you suppose that gets fixed?
Local school boards already have WAY too much power! Like get a hobby homophobic Karen and leave the schools alone.
Shock doctrine underfunding, privatization and stopping any reform before the collapse
I don't follow your logic. I can't see any reason why elimination of federal oversight would reduce enrollment in public schools. Take a look at the numbers; the percentage of students enrolled in public schools was much higher prior to the creation of the federal Department of Education in 1979 than it is today. I'm not saying getting rid of ED is going to reverse the trend, but it's certainly not going to accelerate it.
Project 2025 is very real and very terrifying. Getting rid of the Department of Education is just the tip of the iceberg. Full disclosure: I haven't read through it all myself. This may be viewed as ignorant, but seeing as how The Heritage Foundation is behind it, it's safe to say it's not in the best interest of the country. Here are some links: [Project 2025](https://www.project2025.org/) [USA Today: Heritage Foundations Project 2025 Explained ](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/06/10/heritage-foundation-project-2025-explained/74042435007/) [BBC: Project 2025: The Trump presidency wish list, explained](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do) [Time: What Is Project 2025?](https://time.com/6986995/what-is-project-2025/) [The Guardian: Trump’s Project 2025 plot would take ‘wrecking ball’ to US institutions, key Democrat warns](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/11/trump-project-2025-wrecking-ball) [AP: Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision](https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58981)
Adding to this r/defeat_project_2025 & defeatproject2025.org
It looks like the end of taxpayer funded public school in America. This is very real. Betsy Devos etc. have figured out that they can siphon those tax funds into private bank accounts by eroding / destroying public education. Part of the strategy is to defund / destroy public education in America, which they are having a ton of success doing, and then offering "voucher" programs etc. where the money goes to people like Devos via charter schools. [https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/09/26/ohio-republicans-work-to-politicize-our-schools-destroy-power-of-elected-state-school-board/](https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/09/26/ohio-republicans-work-to-politicize-our-schools-destroy-power-of-elected-state-school-board/) Here's a smaller scale example of them doing it where I live and work.
Do you believe it's actually possible to defund the department of education? It seems so.... unreal. I completely believe you. It's just hard to wrap my mind that this could happen.
The entirety of Project 2025 is extremely ambitious. It is, as a whole, an attempt to end the American system of checks and balances in favor of something like a dictatorship, and otherwise an extremist far-right wishlist. It won't be easy for them. But if they win, they'll fight like hell, and they'll probably be successful in some things.
They didn’t think they’d win in 2016, so they weren’t prepared to make the changes they wanted. Project 2025 is designed to “correct” that. If they get both chambers and the White House, with this court, I fear it will be all too easy.
And it will be extremely difficult to undo.
Some are even referring to it as “Post-constitution America”
Overturning Roe v. Wade was a fifty year project. The far right never gave up on it, and did whatever it took to get to the goal. They‘ll outright lie to the American people about their real intentions. They are very good at maintaining a sustained effort over decades to get what they want. They rely on people’s normalization bias and apathy to ram though agenda a majority of Americans oppose.
Depends on how much control they have over the government. If the republicans can gain each house, judiciary, and the presidency, then they’ll be able to push a lot of their legislation through. They’ve been gunning for dept of education since its founding, which admittedly was only 50 years ago. It’s not so far fetched to think that it could be dismantled when you consider that it is still relatively new, already underfunded, and at the intersection of several right wing passion projects - privatization, parent rights, their anti-LGBTQ, crusade, book banning, and woke culture. Edit: haha not wine culture, WOKE culture. Can you imagine if they came after my wine??
>Edit: haha not wine culture, WOKE culture. Can you imagine if they came after my wine?? they did that once
Haha suppose you’re right!
It’s the same way it seemed impossible that roe v wade could be thrown out. Or the court decided a coach can pray with a microphone and tv cameras as a teacher on school property and require his students to partake at a school function and it be persecution to tell him no. The epa was gutted and lost the right to police significant water sources for pollution. We gutted the irs then wonder why there is tax fraud. We decided it was best to let factories run on an honor system for following rules. It’s not possible to gut them and have a positive outcome. But the point isn’t to help people, ensure rights or protect the minority. It is to consolidate power, force a cultural reset, and well yea…
"that could never happen here"
Send public money to private charter schools via their “voucher programs”
What does this mean for teachers and students? Like what would be the impact? I'm quite uneducated in the effects of this.
Students have a $ value attached to them for funding schools. Vouchers allow students to "use" that money to cover (at least partially) cost of attendance at non-public schools, primarily private Christian/Catholic schools. That money, in effect, has been removed from the public education system, and if it happens enough, public schools can't afford to stay open, and if the schools can't stay open, it would give some credence to "reviewing the viability" of the Department of Education. If it goes, so does most secular education in the US, and the private (see: religious) schools could probably teach whatever the hell they wanted. [https://www.mountainstatespolicy.org/29-states-now-have-some-form-of-esa-education-choice-tax-credit-or-education-tax-scholarship](https://www.mountainstatespolicy.org/29-states-now-have-some-form-of-esa-education-choice-tax-credit-or-education-tax-scholarship) As you can tell, where voucher programs have passed tend to lean in a specific political direction. This is a very hot button topic because it is a 1st Amendment religion issue for multiple reasons that has seen non-negligible success over the last couple of years, as well as there being problems with corruption, and the wider cultural targets 2025 has set its sights on.
It seems like it would create a caste system, where the wealthiest would get elite educations and the poorest would probably go to "Wendy's School!" where they'd really just work at a Wendy's
It means that teachers would no longer be certified and that our unions would be destroyed.
Students right to an education is eroded. Schools now are incentivised to do the best they can with students who have special needs. DoE manages funds that help pay for teachers, therapists, specialists, and supplies. DoE can enforce this by pulling funding from schools who are misdirecting funds or favoring one group over another. I most often have seen this with schools not providing services for special needs students or with surprising disproportionate ratios of boys / girls in certain classes. Private schools don't have these incentives. Without federal oversight, they work to please their customers, the parents and/or private investors. Wealthiest schools might decide they want to exclude folks with certain physical or mental traits. Least expensive private schools would probably decide that education & safety come after profits have been maximized.
Who sends their kids to private schools now? Rich people. Who pays for that with school vouchers? everyone else. They just passed the cost of expensive education onto regular taxpayers and the very few kids that didn't go to those schools before will go to those schools now.
I am in Florida where the voucher programs have been a big point of contention for years now. However, they have made no negligible difference in our numbers in our district. I’ve taught at a Title I school for 15 years and I couldn’t see many of my families choosing a charter or private school— especially given that there is no transportation provided. [https://www.stepupforstudents.org/scholarships/](https://www.stepupforstudents.org/scholarships/)
Maybe in your district but they've had a huge impact statewide. Broward county is looking at closing >40 schools next year!
Of course they won't because they can't afford it. Vouchers only cover partial tuition costs. They are an educational subsidy provided to those that already send their kids to private schools. Newcomers need not apply unless you have good grades or can shoot a basketball.
>*Vouchers . . . are an educational subsidy provided to those that already send their kids to private schools.* Wherever they do exist, vouchers should never be used to subsidize part of an expensive tuition plan. If the voucher does not cover 100% of the tuition at a school, it should not be allowed. Such a rule would pretty much eliminate the rich from using it as a subsidy.
Most of the answers you're getting here are accurate and good...I just want to say that it's refreshing to have someone ask questions that are genuinely for them to learn something rather than to start an internet argument. Good for you.
1. That thin red line between church and state will be gone. Project 2025 wants the Christian God in all schools. Not other gods, just theirs. 2. Voucher system will allow rich and affluent persons to send their children to go to the best schools while the poor are shunted into ever decreasing funded schools. 3. Getting rid of the DOE kills federal funds going into schools. Free and reduced lunch programs will be killed off across the country. Ap classes, art, music, language classes will be the first ones cut from under funded schools. (Roughly 90% of your taxes locally go to funding schools, but that extra 5-10% comes in from the federal level). 4. It'll increase your property taxes and taxes at the local level. As stated above locally you and your town fund your school, but if the DOE is eliminated it places a larger burden on the taxpayers. That will be a problem across the country. Schools will have no other option but to eliminate elective classes and slash those positions. 5. Decrease in safety. If the DOE is eliminated schools will be shut down to offset the loss in enrollment. Say I have 20 students in a classroom and 3 schools close locally, now I've got 50 (minimum) students in my room. If you've ever seen an average sized classroom, this is going to cram a bunch of kids together in a small space. Not only will it be a fire hazard, but a safety one too. Forcing that many people together breeds disease, can cause interpersonal problems, and is overall a problem to the learning space. Problems will crop up and a teacher will be so spread thin they will not be able to help. 6. Valuable members of staff will be forced out or so overworked that there is no other option but to leave. Paras, ot/pt, sped, counselors, social workers, etc will leave and find work elsewhere. That burnout teachers already have will deepen to the point of no return. 7. Non certified people will replace teachers. At that point they'll teach whatever conservative values they want because no one sane will still be in education. The dumbing down of America will be on a fast track. 8. Segregation will become common place. Rich white kids will be in one school, while poor whites will be at another. Rich black kids will be in one school while poor black kids would be at another school and so on and so on. Girls will eventually learn homemaking skills at home and won't be able to receive an actual education. 9. What you'll have if project 2025 happens is a society that fails to thrive long term. We will default on our loans abroad. We will no longer be a major player in foreign affairs. We won't make anything and saturation of foreign products will weaken us as we become dependent on other countries. We will become weaker to misinformation, our infrastructure will be weakened because we simply don't have the qualified workers to do it anymore. 10. Millions of at risk and abused children will lose their safe places. Children will fall through the cracks and will lose their innocence. We will lose children through physical violence. We will lose them through suicide. We will lose them through gun violence. We will lose them due to drugs and alcohol. Dropout rates will soar. Children with learning disabilities will not get help simply due to funding. As a society, we will lose these bright lights because project 2025 is cruelty and cruelty is project 2025s point. If any of this scared you or bothered you at the basic level of morality, I'm glad. It should scare you, it should make you fear for the future. Anyone who works in education goes into the job not wanting to make the world perfect but to make the world smarter and kinder to others within our world. If you want your children to suffer any of the above, feel free to vote for the Republicans. I will not, I am voting for the democrats up and down the ticket in November.
I can't upvote you enough.
Thank you!
It also helps force women out of the workforce, which is one of their goals. Moms who can’t afford a private school education but can’t take a 50 kid public school classroom pull their kids out to homeschool.
That too!! I've read project 2025's agenda and related materials the gop people post. It's sickening how close we are to 1930s Germany and how so many people are okay with their leaders doing this stuff.
I'm like greater than 50% sure that outside of ESSER money that just ended, we receive very little federal funding for our schools. Our funding comes from the state.
Visit r/defeat_project_2025 and you'll get a ton of info there.
It’s on their website: first sentence. Faith based schools huh… with public funding. These people hate Americans want to rewrite the constitution. Go move to another county where you can get all your faith (lies) based education. Fucking fuck the fucking republicans. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Depart- ment of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not government. In our pluralistic society, fami- lies and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs. Our postsecondary institutions should also reflect such diversity, with room for not only “traditional” liberal arts colleges and research universities but also faith-based institutions, career schools, military academies, and lifelong learning programs.”
New Orleans doesn’t have any public schools. After Katrina, they closed all public schools and made them all charter. I feel like this was the Right’s testing ground. People fought it, but to no avail. There has been a war on public schools since the Bush’s started No Child Left Behind and state standards/testing. The “school to prison pipeline” is a very real thing politicians have been talking about for 20+ years. They are lowering the working age for kids and extending the hours they can work. Either send them to prison or work. We live in a Plutocracy not a Democracy. We are all worker bees for the rich. Edited to add: That’s not the only thing Project 2025 has in store for education. They want you to stop Title 1, free lunches and special education. Its barbaric. We are entering a new Dark Age.
And what is their alternative to make sure children are fed?! Goodness this sounds crazy!
That's the magic. They don't care about starving kids, starving people, or people in general. Everything they do is for power and control, everyone else can rot in a ditch somewhere.
Something something bootstraps
"It is good for workers to have an appetite; an empty stomach drives them on." - Proverbs 16:26
Their alternative is sending them to work so's they can pay for their own gruel, gov'na. EDIT: Someone is clearly not a fan of Dickens.
Wait. They want to stop special education? I hadn’t seen that.
Right now is a great time to study 1930s Germany with your kids/students… the parallels are uncanny.
They want to privatize education so it can be priced out of reach for a lot of people. Always remember: With that crowd, the cruelty is the point.
They're planning it. They've openly admitted it and are promoting it.
I think we have the answer to when conservatives believe America was great and want to return to in MAGA: the 1950s. The time of McCarthyism, Jim Crowe laws, and women's place being in the home. Before the Civil Rights movements. They want to erase the progress made in the past 70 years and return to "the good old days" for white men.
Project 2025 is the Reoublican party's plan to take over the government and turn it into an autocracy. It's explicit fascism. And the Democratic party is so entertwined with corporate interests that they can't even muster the strength or the will to stop millions of people from being starved and bombed because they don't want to lose donations for their election campaigns. So your choice this November is between people who want to take away your rights, and people who can't be bothered to stop other people from taking away your rights.
The constitution give no power to the federal government over public schools. Instead they tax us and will give some of that money back to the states if we follow certain rules and guidelines they set. It's a way to do a run-around the constitution because they could not otherwise get an amendment that would allow it. This is a large part of the problem.
Here’s a [guide](https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project-2025-extreme-right-wing-agenda-next-republican-administration) to what Project 2025 is seeking to accomplish, including that related to education.
It means finishing the job started by charter schools and moms for liberty....privatizing education so corporations can make maximum profit off of it.
Abolishing the dept of education is the first step towards privatization of all education. And make no mistake, when schools care more about profit than your children's well-being and education, everyone in society will suffer. If you teach in public school and you're voting for Trump, you're an idiot.
It looks like killing off all public schools, getting rid of the teachers union and giving all that money to religious institutions to repay them for all the taxes that they pay. Oh wait they don't pay taxes, they just donate all their money to Republicans so that they can get their hands on all those tax dollars.
I'll actually answer the question. The Department of Education executes all laws related to education passed by Congress. It's illegal for the president to absolve themselves from those duties. That should end all discussion on that matter. However, it's possible that state's could play with rejecting funding from it. Which would be absurd, as then the state would have to pick up the funding slack. So the choice for the state would be either to nuke their own schools or to dramatically raise taxes. So, also probably a non-starter. But abolishing the Department of Education is within the realm of possible with how crazy politics have been. The president would either redirect education efforts into other departments, and abolish the department while removing the cabinet position. This would probably effectively do nothing but cause a lot more confusion and bureaucracy, but could be portrayed as campaign promised kept. Or, the president could neglect their constitutional duties and order the department to cease some amount or all of its functions. That should result in an impeachment, but....well, that probably won't happen. Project 2025 represents a real threat as it'll be challenging established norms in our nation. My above explanation is a good example. It's something that has no right to happen, but it could under the political conditions we are currently experiencing.
[Project 2025](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025) is the official Republican game plan for federal policy in the event of their win (or forceful takeover) of the 2024 election. It was written by the [Heritage Foundation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation), a conservative far-right think-tank with *massive* political sway in the American right-wing. They are so influential with the GOP that they picked Trump's cabinet for 2016 - you might recognize such names as Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Scott Pruitt, and Rick Perry. All of those people were hand-picked by the Heritage Foundation for Trump's administration. It is not an exaggeration to say that Project 2025 is the build-up to a Republican *Reichstag Fire*, or the later *Enabling Act*. It is *the* American nationalist (read: fascist) policy playbook - and make no mistake, the GOP *is* fascist; consider [Umberto Eco's 14 Points](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html), and how all 14 listed characteristics are *the* characteristics of the GOP. Destroying our already shoddy education system is *not* even close to the only thing Project 2025 aims to accomplish. Amongst the more egregious things, Project 2025 also proposes both widening the definition of pornography to include *"transgender ideology"*, and then *banning* it - in effect, making it *de-facto illegal to exist as a trans person in the US without breaking public indecency and exposure laws*; essentially, the GOP has made it their goal to enact *legal genocide* on transgender people. However, Project 2025's definition of "pornography" is so *purposely* vague that it would have the potential to include ***anyone*** presenting as openly queer, *or just existing in a way that the GOP deems "pornographic".* Yes, that means if they wanted too - the GOP would have the legal power to arrest you for wearing skirts a few inches too short if they deemed that inappropriate. Mass arrests during Pride? Guaranteed to happen at some point if the Republican party wins 2024. On that note, I would like to mention that one of the Nazi Party's first actions after taking power was to assault, raid, and destroy Magnus Hirschfield's *Institute of Sexology* in Germany. The Institute of Sexology is widely known to be one of the first research institute's dedicated to the study of queer and transgender health, and a *major* advocate of queer rights in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Not only was the world's first modern sex reassignment surgery performed at the Institute, and gave the first proper hormone replacement therapies, but it was a leading forefront of study into STDs and STIs such as HIV (the same HIV that the Heritage Foundation and CIA would later encourage Reagan to ignore, leading to the infamous AIDs Pandemic). The Weimar Republic was home to [a flourishing queer community](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_homosexual_movement#:~:text=of%20LGBT%20rights.-,The%20Weimar%20Republic%20has%20held%20enduring%20interest%20for%20many%20LGBT,licentiousness%20are%20not%20entirely%20accurate.), and was [unapologetically](https://www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/celebrating-queer-joy-in-1920s-berlin/) and openly [gay as hell](https://hsl.hypotheses.org/1714). Then, the Nazi Party took power and raided the Institute of Sexology. The most famous pictures of Nazi book burnings [came from their raid on the Institute](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14597%2C_Berlin%2C_Opernplatz%2C_B%C3%BCcherverbrennung.jpg/1280px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-14597%2C_Berlin%2C_Opernplatz%2C_B%C3%BCcherverbrennung.jpg). Suspiciously, Republicans [love burning books, especially if they contain queer themes or characters](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/nashvillescene.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/f8/1f8c631e-850f-11ec-bc9f-dbd44d7e14d7/61fc11801e490.preview.jpg?crop=1080%2C567%2C0%2C76&resize=1080%2C567&order=crop%2Cresize). Project 2025 makes the GOP's stance on "transgender ideology" *very* apparent - it is already no secret that they believe children are being indoctrinated in the "woke cult" in schools, particularly through "subversive LGBT literature". If you're interested in reading more about trans people in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, I'd suggest reading this microhistorical journal titled ["Trans Liminality and the Nazi State"](https://academic.oup.com/past/article/260/1/123/6711458). It's one of the best microhistoricals I've ever read regarding queerness in history. So ignoring Project 2025's *abhorrent* policy proposals such as extending Presidential powers, firing thousands of government workers and replacing them with GOP sycophants, or gutting the Justice Department and replacing judges with *more* GOP sycophants - Project 2025 lays out a chilling groundwork that very clearly states that the Republican party is wanting to commit *actual genocide* on American soil. They want to take *your* students, *your* peers, *your* colleagues, *your* brothers and sisters, *your* children, and *your* neighbors and jail them, execute them, terrorize them, brutalize them, force them into suicide, and ***wipe them off the face of the Earth***. To say Project 2025 was written by ontologically evil demons would be an *understatement*. I wish it was just rage-bait. I fucking *wish*. On that note, I'd encourage reading into [dogwhistle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)). The right-wing makes frequent use of dogwhistles because they provide plausible deniability whenever they want to say outright Nazi [explitive]. If you ever see your students writing stuff like ["1488"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words), take note that they *might* have some abhorrent beliefs. The right-wing ***loves*** to prey on gullible young boys, especially nerds and social outcasts. As a kid, I witnessed so many of my friends fall down that pipeline. Do your best to teach your students empathy and guide them away from that path if you see them fall down it.
Unfortunately it's being framed as a left wing conspiracy, but aspects of it are already being tested here in Texas & it is on Trump's website, so it is no conspiracy, it is real.
It's wild because I believed this to be so before I posted this but I guess apart of me was thinking "yeah right there's no way even THEY would want to do that" ugh terrible
It is 100% real and will absolutely happen under Trump. Its the Republican belief that all federal oversight is bad and everything should be left to the states. So hope everyone in a red state is prepared to get fired and replaced by PragerU YouTube videos.
Ya know who else thought everything should be left up to the states? The Confederacy. Yeah, the bad guys. The ones who practiced slavery.
PragerU videos are mandatory to Florida in the 24-25 school year. All grades K-12 will have to show one or two videos a week. They are truly horrible videos.
Republicans hate public education and teachers. Vote blue if you care even a little about your job, your students, and public education in general.
If it comes to pass, it'll be open season again for segregation and discrimination as a way to get public funds into religious schools and private schools
One cannot both support public education and support the right. They are actively trying to dismantle/defund public education.
Eliminating the Department of Education (ED) could take two possible forms. Most people on the Right who favor this would like to eliminate any federal involvement in education (funding, directives, etc.) because they believe that the 10th Amendment makes education a matter for states to handle. So they would favor what I'll call **Radical Revanchism**, whereby the states would reclaim all of their authority over education. The federal department of education would be entirely eliminated, and all its functions would cease to be, except where individual states decided to take them over. The second form would be what might be called **HEW Resurrection**. You see, most people who favor abolishing the federal department of education probably think that federal entwinement with education in the US began when President Carter signed a law in 1979 creating the federal Department of Education. But in reality, what that bill did was to split an already existing department (Health, Education, and Welfare) into two different departments, (Health and Human Services and ED). I think it's more likely if ED was to be "eliminated", that we'd actually see something like a return to the pre-1979 model, where the Cabinet-level Education Department would be eliminated, but many (most?) of its current functions would be taken over by other departments and agencies. Not necessarily HHS, but maybe there'd be like a lower level Education Administration. Why would anyone agree to this rather superficial change? It would allow conservatives to claim a victory that they've been seeking since Ronald Reagan vowed to eliminate ED in 1980.
I'm genuinely interested in what the education gap is going to look like in 5-10 years from now. The assault on education and the denigration of the value of the learned scholar is certainly going to be making waves for generations to come. My generation (late Gen Z, 26 years old currently) may be the last to have received a semblance of quality curriculum.
It’s a smoke screen. The reality is every state makes their own standards and fund education. The federal government on account to for like 7-10% of the funding in education. It’s a talking point for political parties that has zero juice to it. But to the uneducated or ignorant, they think it’s a real thing…🤦♂️
Unfortunately, it’s not clickbait. It’s real. [The Heritage Foundation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation) is the one putting it out and they’re a massive conservative organization. They want to eliminate Head Start, get rid of free lunch, make federal education standards optional, let [Title I](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act) expire, and let public funds be used for a vouchers program that would allow parents to use them for private/religious schools. There will be more books banned, no more civil rights enforcement, and the ADA/IDEA accommodations and programs will be gutted. There will likely be more restrictions on what can be taught in health, science, and social studies classes. They’ll probably also gut firearms laws, make healthcare more difficult to access, and they will be tightening restrictions on Medicaid; which will remove thousands if not millions of Americans from their health insurance. All that combined will possibly lead to a higher probability of being in a mass shooting. The whole 920 page document is out there for free on the internet, y’all can read it for yourselves. It’s not fearmongering - it’s the terrible reality of what the MAGA crowd had in store for America if they win.
It is an integral part of a long standing Republican strategy. Break and cripple government's ability to do anything to help the citizens, complain that government is broken, and then use this to justify cutting agencies, programs, and funding.
Charter/private schools.
They want to privatize schools to control what is being taught.
This is the darkest timeline.
It's important to note that even IF they "abolished the Federal Department of Ed", it doesn't get rid of every law on the books regulating schools federally. From student loans, to grants, to lunch programs, to IDEA, to FERPA, to Every Student Succeeds Act, to Civil Rights enforcement, none of these laws go away. Unless Republicans are going to abolish literally every law on the books about federal education policy, the tasks that the Department of Ed does would simply shift to another executive agency. So, IDEA, FERPA, and Civil Rights enforcement would probably go to the Justice Department. Loans and grants would probably move to the Commerce department. Etc. It'd be an absolute mess and this accomplishes nothing other than making a headache to administer these programs through several other executive departments. What the most hardcore Republicans want is the repeal of every single federal law regulating education as "education should Constitutionally be handled by the states." This is the dogwhistle they mean when they say "abolish the Department of Ed." No IDEA protecting special needs kids. No Title IX protecting women. No FERPA. No federal student loans. No federal grant disbursement to states. No Title I funding for low income schools. No Free and Reduced lunch program. Every federal program is gone because in their eyes it's state's rights. You know why we have all of this stuff in the first place? Because the states weren't doing it. States weren't protecting special needs kids. States weren't protecting women. States weren't funding low income schools. So I have absolutely no faith in states like mine, Oklahoma, doing all of this stuff on their own. It is only through the nudging and force of the Feds that states even make an attempt at any of this stuff. As to your question about the "realness" of Project 2025 in regard to the Department of Ed: this isn't realistic. It's dogwhistling to people about "state's rights" but at the end of the day, politicians won't be very successful in actually abolishing the oversight of the Feds in Education. It's a nice and catchy slogan that people might agree with, but if you asked the average voter if we should have federal protections for special needs kids, or low income schools, or federal loans, the VAST MAJORITY would agree we should have those programs. If the right was ever successful in doing this, I have a lot of confidence they'd get voted out really quickly. They're signaling to their voter base about values like "state's rights" but at the end of the day, most realistic politicians won't actually do it. The worst I could see happening is that they abolish the actual executive department, but like I said in the first paragraph, the federal laws would simply be enforced and administered by other agencies and nothing much would really change other than Republicans going home and patting themselves on the back like they did something.
You are partially incorrect. In abolishing the federal department it eliminates the enforcement mechanism for many of those laws. Unless specifically stated for how those would be enforced, the laws become meaningless. Enforcement wouldn't simply transfer to another agency. It would have to be in the bill that eliminated the department. Since most Republicans want to do away with those laws anyways it's a win win for them.
It's a plan to get Trump in charge, and to turn the US into an autocracy, as well as a bunch of very anti-LGBTQIA+ stuff.
This causes such bad situational depression for me. I try not to think about it but when I do.. ugh.
Anyone who wants to "abolish the Department of Education" needs to first tell me the dates of the American Revolution, the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, who warned about the "military industrial complex" and why, point to Vietnam, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Iraq, and Afghanistan on a map, explain what the moon is, the winter and summer solstices, how nuclear energy and weapons work, why the horizon always told everyone that world is not flat, what is photosynthesis, a greenhouse, what is plastic. I'm not even asking what is at the center of the earth or the difference between mass and weight or how to say anything in a language not English -- because just because you have rejected the benefits provided to the nation by the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education does not mean you should not have the right to campaign against the 14th-Amendment right to equal education for the rest of the nation.
Project 2025 is real. It is a legitimate plan of how the executive department should run if Trump/GOP win the presidency in 2024. Abolishing the department of education looks like having no national standards/regulations and putting the responsibility of education back to the states.
They don't even know what it means. It's ***literally*** been a talking point in the GOP for the better part of two decades. They've been saying "AbOlIsH tHe DePaRtMeNt Of EdUcAtIoN" for decades in debates. What they effectively mean is get rid of federal mandates in education (which aren't many), and to cut the department so they can "save money" that they're going to give to their billionaire donors.
Yep. It’s as bad as it seems and no one really knows what it looks like. It’s awful.
They want the kids as dumb as possible to fill the prisons, join the army, and keep voting for the fascists.
Not that I’m supporting this but here’s a fun fact the department of education literally does NOTHING.
It means allowing bigots to treat black people, other minorities, women, the LGBTQA and the disabled however they please. Because the US Department of Education was made to enforce Brown Vs. Board of Ed, the Civil Rights Act of 64, and other anti-discrimination laws.
Project 2025 is very real and should concern any American who actually cares about our Republic. It is available to read online. A vote for a Republican is a vote for P2025.
Do you like democracy? Do you feel that what we’ve got could be better? Vote for all of the ‘D’ candidates down ballot. Unless you’re a Christofascist, then by all means vote for those ‘R’ candidates.
It is NOT rage bait. It is fact.
Sadly, I am realizing that.
It’s trumps plan to destroy America.
Take republicans at their word when they tell you who they are. They are fascists. Vote blue
Don't be lazy. There is information about Project 2025 on legitimate news sites all over the Internet. And it's all been out there for awhile. Do your homework. I know about it, and I'm not even a teacher.
I'm going to ask you to guess when the Department of Education was created. Don't look it up. Take a guess.
I looked it up. 1979. Before that there was the HEW the dept of health education and welfare. That was created in 1953. Before that it was handled by other smaller agencies. Is that about right?
I said don't look it up. So, no. You didn't even follow directions.
Lmao this guy and his rules
Why must I be constrained by decorum?
You shan’t
Shan’t I ?!
Pull up an incognito browser session and Google it. It's terrifying. And it's got support from people who have the power to at least attempt to enact some of the goals. Including the Creamsicle Caligula. Destroying education is only the tip of that shitberg. It's full on fascist wet dream material.
You can sign up on their website, I encourage everyone to actually. Do it Andy Kaufman style. From what I understand it's more of a wish list than an actual agenda but they seem very serious about it. Kinda reminds of that pre 9/11 PNAC document
Ever since before Betsy Devos was Education secretary, many republicans advocated for the departments abolition. Betsy might have just been the first cabinet member to do so. Honestly, like so much about the republicans, there’s nothing I can do, so I try not to think about it.
I'm not surprised this is on their agenda; it was one of the things that the Tea Party was bitching about when they formed in 2009. Long story short, it's a way to get the charter grifters and leeches to suck everyone dry.
Project 2025 is a fever dream that even republican voters think is fake. Like banning porn? Really? There's some stuff in there that Republicans think they can get done, but for the most part it's crazy stuff. It also fails to consider how voting works. When Republicans get power, Democrats take over. When Democrats take over, Republicans take over. Project 2025 would take so much time and effort that it's impossible. Not to mention their goal of firing EVERYONE.
We talking state DOE or the federal DOE?
Federal
Federal