*** Watch Sarah and Stephen discuss this bill on Tiktok or our Substack, or listen to the discussion on our Podcast: BillTrack50 Beyond the Bill Number on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or where ever you get your podcasts ***
Project 2025 - what is it?
"Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" is a conservative playbook for reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, commonly referred to as Project 2025. It was written by the Heritage Foundation but with contributions from over 300 experts, oversight from a 54-member advisory board and support from over 100 conservative organizations. It runs to 800 pages, and is a detailed plan of the policies that a Republican administration should seek to enact immediately on taking office, across a broad swathe of policy areas covering all government departments.
Kevin Roberts, the heritage Foundation's president, describes components of the plan. The next conservative president, he says, will focus on “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future”:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely — what our Constitution calls the “Blessings of Liberty.”
Given the importance and prominence of this document in discussions around the future of America under a possible second Trump presidency, over the coming months we will explore some of the key policies that are set out in the document, look at where similar policies have been tried by the states previously, and attempt to assess their effect.
We have contributed some of these articles to a wider examination of Project 2025 by Fulcrum: "a platform where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives." Sign up to the Fulcrum newsletter to get articles delivered directly to your inbox.
Education Savings Accounts
"Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise" outlines an ambitious plan to expand education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to decide how to spend some of the public money allocated to their children’s education, across the United States as part of Project 2025. It recommends that Washington should transform education for students in active-duty military families, those studying in D.C., and students attending schools on tribal lands into model systems by allowing every student the option of using an ESA. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) should be changed, as should the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), to allow ESAs.
Advocates of ESAs claim that increasing choice drives up the quality of education for children and is a more efficient use of public money. Opponents claim they often benefit those who are already advantaged, and are a method of using taxpayer money to fund private, religious education. Is a massive expansion justified?
What is the history of vouchers and ESAs?
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, established in 1989, is one of the longest-running and largest voucher programs in the country. State funds are used to pay for the cost of children from low-income families to attend private schools. The real push for school choice began to gain momentum later. In 2008 The Arizona Supreme Court struck down two voucher systems, on the grounds that they could be used to fund religious education and were therefore unconstitutional. Many state constitutions have specific amendments expressly prohibiting taxpayer money from going to religious organizations - generally called Blaine Amendments. In response in 2011, Arizona introduced the nation's first ESA program, which avoided constitutional issues by providing funds directly to parents and allowing them to choose how to spend the money. This has been the model adopted by other states.
Following the initial implementation, several states enacted similar legislation, each with its unique variations. For instance, Florida expanded its voucher program significantly with the Gardiner Scholarship Program, catering specifically to students with disabilities. Nevada introduced a universal ESA program in 2015, intended to be available to all public school students, though it faced legal challenges and has yet to be fully implemented.
What challenges have ESAs faced?
According to CNN, since the new rules went into effect in September 2022, Arizona’s ESA program has grown from 12,000 students to about 75,000. This has ballooned the costs - to $332m over the last year rather than the estimated $64.5m, at a time when Arizona is dealing with a significant budget deficit. CNN also found that wealthy communities disproportionately benefit and half the students benefiting never attended public school - they were always privately educated.
About half of the money that went to private schools in 2023 went to religious schools, the vast majority Christian. For example, Dream City Christian School received more than $1.3 million in ESA funding in 2023. It includes a “statement of faith” on its website that rejects ‘sexual immorality’ such as homosexual or bisexual behavior and states that “rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person”.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has struggled to implement such a scheme despite strong Republican majorities in the legislature. In total 21 bills were introduced in 2023 all of which died, including an unprecedented four special sessions. Read my blog about the third special session and the fourth special session for more details. Proponents (largely parent groups and private schools) insisted that the 'education savings accounts' will allow parents more choice over the schooling their children receive, with some citing concerns with how gender and race theory are taught in Texan schools. House Republicans, particularly those representing rural communities, have always been suspicious of anything which risks affecting funding to public schools. Rural communities tend not to have many private schools, and in Texas the public schools will often act as community hubs, so representatives will not support measures which risk drawing funding away from them. Enough Republicans opposed the bills to kill them off.
Do ESAs work?
Studies have shown mixed results with some suggesting modest academic gains for participating students while others highlight persistent achievement gaps and limited long-term benefits. For example, a 2019 study by the Urban Institute found that students who used Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program were more likely to enroll in college. However, other studies, such as those by Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Martin Carnoy, have shown no significant improvement in standardized test scores for voucher recipients.
In states like Indiana and Louisiana, where voucher programs have been in place for several years, research has indicated that participating students initially experience slight declines in academic performance before eventually catching up or slightly outperforming their public school counterparts. However, critics argue that these gains are marginal and do not justify the potential harm to public education systems.
ESAs and vouchers are often promoted as tools to provide greater educational equity, particularly for low-income families and students with special needs. Programs like Arizona’s ESA have indeed provided new opportunities for these groups. However, critics argue that these initiatives can exacerbate inequities by diverting funds from already underfunded public schools, leaving the most vulnerable students behind.
The fiscal impact of ESAs and vouchers is another contentious issue. Supporters claim that these programs can save states money by reducing the number of students in public schools, thereby lowering public education costs. Conversely, opponents highlight that the administrative costs of managing these programs and the potential for reduced public school funding can strain state budgets and negatively impact public education systems.
Is Project 2025 right in seeking to expand ESAs?
Few would argue that increased parental choice and some degree of control over their child’s education is necessarily a bad thing. But it does appear that some current ESA programs are characterized by a lack of transparency over who is benefitting, and evidence suggests they are being used to fund parents to send their children to private Christian schools to the detriment of the wider public education system.The jury is still out over the question of whether they actually improve educational attainment, with no strong indicators that they are some kind of silver bullet for struggling education systems. Given this, without serious research and robust safeguards (which are unlikely, given that Project 2025 actually wants to eliminate the federal Department of Education entirely) an expansion of ESAs across the country seems hard to justify.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 offers free tools for citizens to easily research legislators and bills across all 50 states and Congress. BillTrack50 also offers professional tools to help organizations with ongoing legislative and regulatory tracking, as well as easy ways to share information both internally and with the public.