Donald Trump’s education plan reflects the startling policies drafted by The Heritage Foundation in Project 2025 (2025 Presidential Transition Project).^[1] This plan includes abolishing the Department of Education (DOE), ending loan forgiveness, promoting school vouchers, and redefining the term “discrimination” to weaponize civil rights laws.^[2] This attack on education is not new to the Republican party.^[3] Many conservative politicians in the past have threatened to dissolve the DOE to give the states greater control over their education system, encourage school choice (i.e. private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling),^[4] and make it harder for individuals to pursue legal action against school districts.^[5] Conservatives paint the abolishing of the DOE as a means of ensuring states have the right to govern their state education without federal interference.^[6] However, this facade is rooted in a widespread fear among conservatives of “indoctrination.”^[7] As more Americans attain equity within an unjust system, conservatives fear that teaching about those who are outside of their model of “American”— white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle class, Christian—will push their children away from conservatism and “indoctrinate” them with non-conservative values.^[8]

Abolishing the DOE will effectively cut federal funding for public schools across America.^[9] This funding is essential to providing equitable resources throughout states and within districts. Project 2025 seeks to block “Title I” grants to under-resourced schools so funds can be given equally to all schools, no matter their need.^[10] This means less federal funding for schools serving communities living in poverty and more funding for schools in wealthy communities. This funding reduction may additionally lead schools to cut special education programs as a means of conserving money.^[11]

A lack of funding for under-resourced schools is especially detrimental to students who are the most marginalized—Black disabled students. Black students are overrepresented in under-resourced schools and special education programs.^[12] Black students who are inappropriately identified as having disabilities are hyper-surveilled in segregated learning environments making it more likely for them to be driven into the arms of the carceral system through suspensions, zero-tolerance policies, and high arrest rates by school officers.^[13] While many Black students are inappropriately identified as students with disabilities, there are also many Black students who need special education resources to not just thrive in school but to survive.^[14] Black students who receive appropriate special education resources are less likely to fall victim to the school-to-prison pipeline,^[15] drop out of school, and view themselves in a negative light because they have been given the proper resources to succeed.^[16] The school-to-prison pipeline is entrenched with Black students,^[17] students with disabilities,^[18] students living in poverty,^[19] and those living at the intersection of all three. Trump’s education plan directly targets students who are the most marginalized through a feigned commitment to “equality,” but his true commitment is to increase the disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and incarceration of Black children.

1. Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Education, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (Aug. 2024), https://civilrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Project-2025-Education.pdf.

2. Id.

3. Bᴇᴛᴛɪɴᴀ Lᴏᴠᴇ, Pᴜɴɪsʜᴇᴅ Fᴏʀ Dʀᴇᴀᴍɪɴɢ 50 (2023) (“When Reagan took office in 1981, he had four education goals: abolish the Department of Education, put prayer in schools, drastically cut the federal education budget, and introduce school vouchers to allow public dollars to be spent on private schools.”); see also Katherine Knott, Republicans Could Abolish the Education Department. How Might That Work?, Inside Higher Ed. (Nov, 4, 2024), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2024/11/04/what-abolishing-education-department-could-mean.

4. Lᴏᴠᴇ, supra note 3, at 63 (“School choice promised to allow parents, irrespective of race to choose outside of their zoned public school in the interest of their children’s education, while in reality, that choice was fraught at best and damaging at worst. Money that would have gone to making local public schools more equal and more viable for Black children was made available for transfer to already more privileged white schools.”).

5. Id. at 55 (Referring to a quote from Heritage Today, responding to the 1983 report A Nation at Risk “By catering the demands of special-interest groups – racial minorities, the handicapped, women, and non-English speaking students – America’s public schools have successfully competed for government funds, but have done so at the expense of education as a whole.”).

6. Erica Meltzer, Ending the U.S. Department of Education: What it would mean and why Trump and Project 2025 want it, Chalkbeat (Aug. 23, 2024), https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/08/24/if-trump-abolished-the-department-of-education-what-would-happen/ (“When Donald Trump told Elon Musk one of his first acts as president would be to ‘close the Department of Education, move education back to the states,’ he was invoking a GOP promise that goes back to President Ronald Reagan and the department’s founding.”).

7. Knott, supra note 3 (“‘They’re trying to push gender ideology, which is just nuts, and all these other things,’ said Eric Hovde, the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin, on a podcast in early October. ‘They’re trying to social engineer your children.’”).

8. Id.

9. Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Education, supra note 1.

10. Id.

11. Antonio L. Ellis, How Trump’s Education Plan to Close the Department of Education Threatens Special Education, Diverse Education, (Nov. 14, 2024) https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15708299/how-trumps-plan-to-close-the-department-of-education-threatens-special-education (“This funding is crucial for many school districts, particularly those in low-income areas, where resources are already stretched thin. Without a federal agency to allocate and manage these funds, there is a real risk that the financial burden would fall disproportionately on states and local governments. As a result, schools could face budget shortfalls that might force them to increase class sizes, cut specialized programs, or lay off support staff, all of which would be detrimental to students with disabilities.”); see also Mark Lieberman, How Trump’s Policies Could Affect Special Education, Education Week, (Nov. 18, 2024) https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-trumps-policies-could-affect-special-education/2024/11 (“[S]tates and districts could be forced to dedicate a larger share of their finite budgets to the costs of serving students with disabilities, at the expense of other crucial priorities.”).

12. Carrie Stetler, Disability Studies Faculty Focus on ‘Special Ed to Prison Pipeline,’ Rutgers Newark, (Oct. 25, 2023) https://www.newark.rutgers.edu/news/disability-studies-faculty-focus-special-ed-prison-pipeline.

13. Id.

14. See generally Bᴇᴛᴛɪɴᴀ Lᴏᴠᴇ, Wᴇ Wᴀɴᴛ Tᴏ Dᴏ Mᴏʀᴇ Tʜᴀɴ sᴜʀᴠɪᴠᴇ: Aʙᴏʟɪᴛɪᴏɴɪsᴛ Tᴇᴀᴄʜɪɴɢ Aɴᴅ Tʜᴇ Pᴜʀsᴜɪᴛ Oꜰ Eᴅᴜᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ Fʀᴇᴇᴅᴏᴍ (2019).

15. What Is The School-to-Prison Pipeline?, ACLU, (June 6, 2008) https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-school-prison-pipeline (“The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This pipeline reflects the prioritization of incarceration over education.”).

16. Stetler, supra note 12 (“Shallish views this as proof that the right kinds of interventions and educational settings can nurture potential that has been thwarted. For instance, many who arrive in prison as functionally illiterate go on to educate themselves and their peers or enter programs where they earn advanced degrees.  ‘But what matters is that students not be tracked toward prison to realize their potential in K-12 schools. It’s also important that universities continue to support educators and families in ways that are race-conscious, linguistically equitable, and disability affirming.’”).

17. Id. (“Black children in New Jersey are 30 times more likely to be detained or incarcerated than their white peers, even as Black and white youth are charged with committing offenses at similar rates.  Black children in the U.S. are nearly five times as likely to be confined as their white peers.”).

18. Id. (“According to Shallish, at least one in every three youth arrested in the U.S. has a disability. ‘An overwhelming majority of the prison population identifies as disabled or becomes impaired as a result of incarceration,’ she said. ‘But there is less attention to the role disability plays because it’s under the guise of clinical judgment, which many believe to be right and true, but can in fact be very subjective.’”).

19. Juvenile Justice, Youth.Gov, https://youth.gov/youth-topics/homelessness-and-housing-instability/juvenile-justice-system.