Project 2025's Federal Schools Plan: Vouchers, Parental Notification, and Erosion of DC, BIE, and DoDEA Public Education
Project 2025's education agenda targets only K-12 districts under federal jurisdiction (DC, BIE, DoDEA) — requiring parental permission for preferred names/pronouns, expanding DC vouchers to all income levels, and creating federal ESAs. These proposals undermine tribal sovereignty and public school funding, while the parental rights EO and Title IX rule are already harming students. The draft rightly focuses on civil rights impacts but overstates the scope.
The Project 2025 education chapter reads like a blueprint for dismantling federal public education under the guise of parental rights and school choice.
First, the parental notification provisions: requiring written permission for school staff to use a student's preferred name or pronoun not on the birth certificate, and banning federal funds for gender-affirming care. These are not hypothetical—they've already been executed via the February 2025 Executive Order on Protecting Parental Rights and the April 2025 Title IX final rule. The result? Transgender and nonbinary students, particularly in BIE and DoDEA schools where the policy directly applies, are already being forced into unsafe environments. The rollback requires rescinding that EO and initiating new Title IX rulemaking.
Second, the school choice expansion: raising DC voucher caps to match the $22,856 per-student public school funding, and creating federal ESAs for DC, military, and BIE students. These remain proposed but are dangerous. Diverting public funds to private schools—overwhelmingly non-union, non-accountable, and often religious—will leave public schools, especially tribal schools, underfunded and further segregated. The BIE graduation rate of 53% is used as a pretext for privatization, but the solution is investing in those schools, not abandoning them.
From a climate and environmental justice lens, this matters acutely. BIE schools on tribal lands already suffer from toxic water, mold, and inadequate HVAC systems. Vouchers won't fix a contaminated well or a leaking roof; clean school infrastructure funding would. And DoDEA schools, which serve military families, are often near military toxic waste sites (PFAS, solvents). Diverting their funding to ESAs would leave these environmental hazards unaddressed. The real need is not less public oversight—it's strong enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act on tribal and DoD lands.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Rescind EO 14170 (Parental Rights Executive Order) The President can rescind the executive order, and the Department of Education and OPM can issue new guidance reversing pronoun restrictions and parental notification mandates in federal K-12 systems and workplaces.
- Reverse OPM pronoun guidance OPM can issue a new memorandum rescinding the Feb 2025 guidance and restoring pronoun fields on federal forms and workplace policies.
- New Title IX rulemaking on gender identity The Department of Education can initiate rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act to reinterpret sex discrimination under Title IX to include gender identity, reversing the April 2025 final rule—a process likely requiring 12-18 months.
- Congressional Review Act disapproval (if before rule effective date) If Congress passes a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act before the Title IX rule's effective date (Aug 1, 2025), the rule can be nullified and the agency barred from issuing substantially similar rules.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 12: Department of Energy (pp 379-381)"— 346 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise surgeries without parental involvement does not reduce the suicidality of these young people and may even increase suicide rates. l The next Administration should take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today—especially young girls. School officials in some states are requiring teachers and other school employ- ees to accept a minor child’s decision to assume a different “gender” while at school—without notifying parents. In California, New Jersey, and certain districts in Kansas and elsewhere, educators are prohibited from informing parents about children’s confusion over their sex if the children do not want their parents to know. Such policies allow schools to drive a wedge between parents and children. The next Administration should work with Congress to provide an example to state lawmakers by requiring K–12 districts under federal jurisdiction, including Wash- ington, D.C., public schools, Bureau of Indian Education schools, and Department of Defense schools, with legislation stating that: l No public education employee or contractor shall …"