Seventy years ago, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine as unconstitutional. Today, the legacy of the court’s unanimous decision faces its greatest threat in Project 2025. This far-right manifesto offers a blueprint for the massive retrenchment of segregated schooling, an effort that all Americans should find outrageous and offensive.
The court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board mandated the end of legal segregation. Yet the justices provided little guidance for how to accomplish this. The following year, the Court issued a second opinion on the case simply ordering that communities and school districts proceed with desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” White communities and school districts throughout the South seized upon the ambiguity of the word “deliberate,” however, to slow-walk efforts toward integration. It was not until 1969’s Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education that the Supreme Court unambiguously ordered the immediate desegregation of all public schools.
History, however, proves the durability of American racism. Across the country, school segregation is on the rise. Today, more than one-third of American schoolchildren attend same race/ethnicity schools where 75% or more of the school population are of a single race/ethnicity. Roughly 1-in-10 Black students attend a school in which 90% or more of the school is Black, and more than 14% of Hispanic and white school children attend a school in which 90% or more of the school is their same race or ethnicity.
Recent data from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project shows that in Mississippi, the average white student attends a school in which the number of white students is 44% higher than it is in the average Black student’s school. And just this past year, the Department of Justice announced that 32 school districts across Mississippi remain under federal desegregation orders for noncompliance.
We are a nation, then, standing on the edge of a dangerous precipice. One slip, and we can easily backslide into an era of “separate and unequal.” Unfortunately, this is precisely what Project 2025 seemingly aims to accomplish. But how?
First, Project 2025 pledges to increase school choice by diverting “existing federal education spending to fund families directly.” Historian Nancy MacClean explains that the origins of school choice are rooted in white southerners’ initial efforts to defy the court’s Brown v. Board decision. Under the guise of school choice, white leaders across the South conspired to provide state-funded school vouchers to white families who did not want to send their children to integrated schools. These programs ushered in the formation of private “segregation academies,” open to all but the poorest of white families.
Current research shows that school-choice programs, including charter schools, contribute to school segregation. Other research finds that white families’ schooling preferences are inversely associated with a school’s Black student enrollment. Put differently, the more Black children enrolled in a given school, the less likely white parents will choose that school for their own children.
Second, Project 2025 proposes transitioning Title I funding to a “no-strings-attached formula block grant” administered by each state as its leadership sees fit. Established in 1965 through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Title I provides federal funding to schools serving low-income children and their families. Today, Title I funding is available to schools where 40% or more of the students are from low-income families. And while states and local school districts are the ones administering Title I funds, those funds must be used to increase the academic achievement of low-income students.
Under Project 2025, however, individual states would have the authority to spend that money at their discretion. If the institutionalization of school-choice facilitates separate schools for white and non-white children, restructuring Title I would secure those separate schools’ unequal status.
Evidence from other state-administered block grant programs prove instructive. With Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), states spend 80% of the money on things other than direct aid such as workforce training, prevention and fatherhood. A recent report from Georgetown University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality found that when it comes to TANF, states with larger Black populations are more likely to have less generous maximum benefits and income eligibility limits, and they may enforce harsher sanctions for those who struggle to find work. And as Mississippians are well aware, the loose oversight over TANF money in Mississippi has resulted in tens of millions of dollars meant to help impoverished children and their families being misspent on measures that have little if anything to do with alleviating poverty.
Nationally, about 80% of all K-12 students attending low-income schools are Black or Hispanic. With school-choice policies further segregating Black and Hispanic children into low-income schools, restructuring Title I would make it more difficult for these schools to meet their students’ needs.
Finally, Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Department of Education, ending the collection of data on racial disparities in public schooling and transferring civil-rights enforcement to the Department of Justice. Moreover, under Project 2025, court litigation would be the only remedy for civil-rights violations. While school choice and the conversion of Title I into block grants advance racial retrenchment, these measures seek to insulate states and local school districts from effective recourse.
Current data shows that majority-Black and Latino schools offer fewer courses in mathematics and science than schools with lower enrollments of Black and Latino students. Other research on school discipline shows that Black children, especially Black boys, are disciplined more than any other group in school. Project 2025 would severely restrict the role this evidence plays in holding schools and administrators accountable. The previous Trump administration routinely showed disdain for defending civil-rights violations. A second Trump term promises more of the same, if not worse, I fear.
The stakes for American schoolchildren could not be any clearer. Project 2025 would erase decades of efforts to provide every child, no matter their race or ethnicity, equal access to public education. America’s children cannot afford to return to a pre-Brown era. And so, the choice is clear. We must offer a full-throated rejection of Project 2025 and any candidate or elected official associated with it, directly or indirectly.
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