Lindsey Burke, the author of the Project 2025 plan to overhaul the American education system, is pushing Mississippi leaders to adopt the Trump administration’s education plans—including using public funds to support “school choice” initiatives like vouchers for attending private schools.
Burke, a former Heritage Foundation employee who is now the deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the U.S. Department of Education, argued for the policies during a Mississippi House Education Freedom Select Committee hearing in late August. Mississippi families may soon have access to federal school vouchers created under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, she told legislators on Aug. 25.
“Mississippi will have the opportunity to opt in to the program in the coming months,” Burke said at the hearing.
The Educational Choice for Children Act
That program, called the Educational Choice for Children Act, introduces a federal tax credit scholarship program. It allows families whose household incomes do not exceed 300% of the median gross income for their area to receive voucher funds to pay for K-12 education costs incurred through private, religious and homeschool programs. The program is funded through a novel federal tax incentive scheme that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to individuals and corporations who donate up to $1,700 to certified scholarship-granting organizations.
“Parents should decide where their kids go to school. This bill helps them do that,” its author, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said in July.
Those scholarship funds can pay for private-school tuition; school materials; textbooks; room and board; transportation; computers; exam fees; speech and occupational therapy for students with disabilities; fees for dual-enrollment programs with colleges and universities; and homeschool costs.
Mississippi House Education Committee Chairman Rep. Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, told the Mississippi Free Press on Sept. 24 that he did not yet know if the Legislature would have to pass legislation to enact the program or if Gov. Tate Reeves could do it on his own. The legislation says that a governor or state agency must formally approve the program to opt in; it also says that states must approve and identify in-state scholarship-granting organizations that meet federal requirements.
If Mississippi opts into the scholarship process, Burke said the State would develop a process for vetting scholarship-granting organizations. She said those organizations would then need to create processes for what the voucher system would look like. States can begin opting in starting in fall 2026.
In January 2027, taxpayers could begin making donations to those organizations and claim their tax-credit scholarships if their state opts in to the program, Burke said. Donors do not have to use the scholarship on themselves or their own children; they can designate their tax-credit scholarship to someone else.
Lindsey Burke worked at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025, for 17 years. Her most recent titles at the foundation were director of the Center for Education Policy and the Mark A. Kolokotrones fellow in education. She wrote Chapter 11 in Project 2025, which depicted the organization’s plan for how the next Republican president should address public education, including eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and prioritizing school vouchers.
“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not the government. In our pluralistic society, families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs,” Burke wrote as the mission for her chapter.
Though President Donald Trump denied former Vice President Kamala Harris’ warnings during the 2024 election that Project 2025 would be his policy blueprint if elected, he has spent his second presidency so far implementing much of the agenda—including private school funding and his ongoing effort to scale back and eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
Private School Choice Programs Already Available in State
Three private school choice programs are already available in Mississippi.
Mississippi’s Equal Opportunity for Students with Special Needs Program, an education savings account program, allows students with disabilities to have a government-authorized savings account that collects part of the funding that would have otherwise been used for the students’ public-school education.
Mississippi had 345 students enrolled in the special needs program as of April 2025—7% of eligible students statewide. Ninety schools participate in the program.
“Every single child in Mississippi from day one should get an ESA to enroll in a private school that suits their needs or pay for private education options, hire tutors, (or) direct it to whatever works well for them,” Burke told lawmakers.
She said 246 kids, or 4% of eligible students, are in the Mississippi Dyslexia Therapy Scholarship for Students with Dyslexia Program. It is a school-voucher program exclusively for students with dyslexia that allows the participating students to attend public schools outside of their district or accredited private schools that provide dyslexia therapy.
Five schools participate in the program, which the State enacted and launched in 2015, education reform organization EdChoice reports.
The state’s other existing school-voucher program is the Nate Rogers (Speech-Language) Scholarship for Students with Disabilities Program, which was enacted and launched in 2013. Only one school and 10 students in the entire state participate in this program—3% of eligible students statewide, EdChoice reports.
The Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review’s December 2024 report shows that 515 students in 109 schools were involved in the education savings account programs from 2023 to 2024, and 82% of the schools that students attended using educational savings account scholarships were not specialized or special purpose schools for children with disabilities.
The History of ‘School Choice’ in Mississippi
Like much of the South, “school choice” laws, particularly those involving vouchers for private schools, have a sordid history in Mississippi. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education outlawed segregating schools by race. But most schools in Mississippi remained starkly separate and unequal. In Jackson, instead of combining schools’ Black and white student bodies, school leaders raised more funds to give to Black schools, although the funding still was not equal to white schools’ funding.
During a 1964 special legislative session, the all-white Mississippi Legislature passed a tuition grant law that allowed public funds to pay for private schools so that white people could send their children to private schools using taxpayer dollars.
The segregationist Citizens’ Council opened the first segregation academy in the state in Jackson in the fall of 1964. That school was known as Council School No. 1; it is now called Hartfield Academy, located in Flowood, Mississippi. Though private schools today cannot discriminate by race, Hartfield Academy remains significantly whiter than the local public schools.
Under pressure to desegregate, the Mississippi Legislature enacted a “freedom of choice” school program, which allowed students to choose which private schools they wanted to attend. In late 1969, after 16 years of delays, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered public schools that remained segregated to desegregate immediately. In response, dozens of private whites-only segregation academies opened across the state when classes resumed for the Spring 1970 semester.
A 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawed private schools discriminating in student admissions based on race, but many private schools around the state that began as segregation academies still remain significantly whiter than nearby public schools.
Rep. Jeffrey Hulum, D-Gulfport, hearkened to that history as he offered skepticism of Burke’s proposal to the Legislature during the Aug. 25 hearing.
“Education freedom, school choice have never really been freedom in the state of Mississippi,” he told Burke.
The lawmaker said he was concerned about the quality of education students receive in private schools.
“If you want to go to a private school, you should be able to pay for that, not lay it on the public and public funds to pay for that,” Hulum said. “Because if you think about how academies and charter schools started in Mississippi, it was because certain individuals did not want their kids to go to certain schools, and they pulled it out. And now, this is going to happen. They’re going to bust the financial system because they’re going to raise the price (of private schools).”
‘Even The Best School Is Not the Best School for Everybody’
During the Aug. 25 hearing, Mississippi House Rep. Kevin Felsher, R-Biloxi, noted that the Mississippi Constitution forbids the State from giving public school dollars to private schools. Burke explained that through the tax credit program, the money goes to families so they can choose to use it to pay for their children to attend private schools, rather than the State giving funds directly to private schools.
“Even the best school is not the best school for everybody,” Burke told Felsher.
Parents need to prioritize their children’s education, Rep. Dan Eubanks, R-Walls, said during the hearing. He asked Burke how the State could incentivize parents to hop in the “driver’s seat to direct their children’s education.”
“We can legislate all day long, and we can come up with new programs and throw more money at stuff,” he said. “But until parents make that a priority—that their children’s education seems that they are being educated and that they are holding them accountable to get educated—I think we’re going to have this problem forever.”
“We’ve looked at what choice does: it moves families from being passive recipients of the public system to active consumers of education,” Burke responded, adding that schools need to encourage parents to play active roles in their children’s education.
Rep. Randy Boyd, R-Mantachie, questioned whether expanding the school voucher program could lead to students transferring from public schools to private schools to avoid state testing, since the government does not require private schools to conduct state testing.
“I don’t think there are a lot of parents who would say, ‘I’m going to seek out a private school because I want to not have my kid take the state tests, for whatever reason,’” Burke said.
Boyd also questioned whether or not the State should switch its final tests for students to be based on ACT testing “to level the playing field.”
“Maybe. I mean, there’s a bounty of research that shows there’s a big disconnect between test scores and clear life outcomes,” Burke said.
Rep. Gregory Holloway, D-Hazlehurst, said Mississippi has many rural areas without private schools and asked what options would be available to rural students. Burke said that, on average, a family is about 11 miles away from a private school; she did not say where her data was from or if she was referring to national or state data. The Learning Policy Institute found that 42% of private schools in Mississippi are in urban or suburban areas in the 2021-2022 school year.
Burke said that in rural areas across the U.S., the school voucher option is “especially effective” with the education savings account model.
“It might take a little more time for the supply of private schools to come to a rural area. What is nice about an ESA is that it still gives you that voucher option if you want it for a family to pay for private-school tuition. But in a rural area, it also gives a family the ability … to have a private tutor come to them or do online options,” Burke said. Public-school students could obtain private tutors through this model.
The Mississippi Legislature underfunded the state’s public education system for 16 years until lawmakers passed the Mississippi Student Funding Formula ahead of the 2024-2025 school year. The formula replaced the Mississippi Adequate Education Program that had been dictating education funding, though lawmakers had not fully funded education under MAEP’s standards since 2009.
“Did you think that there’s a direct correlation between fully funding education and academic outcomes?” Holloway asked.
“Yes, there is,” Burke replied.