This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
Since its establishment, the U.S. Department of Education has led the nation’s efforts to improve and advance elementary and secondary education. When Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979 to establish the agency, it defined one of its core functions, in part, as follows: “to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”
Now, the far-right authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025 puts that mission at risk. It proposes dismantling the key role of the federal government to increase access and close the educational opportunity gap, especially in communities with lower property values, since a large portion of the country’s K-12 system is funded with local property taxes. In doing so, the playbook creates intentional harm on today’s children and generations to come. One of Project 2025’s most extreme plans includes abolishing the U.S. Department of Education—the only federal agency that is mandated to ensure equal opportunity and accountability and to fund states and school districts for elementary and secondary education.
The policy proposals of Project 2025 undermine public education, a fundamental pillar of our democracy. Specifically, they recommend that the next far-right administration redirect taxpayer dollars intended for K-12 public education to fund private and religious schools for the wealthy; roll back Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex; eradicate Head Start; block student debt cancellation programs and increase monthly payments for student loan borrowers; censor anti-racist curricula that teach tolerance in schools; and eliminate school nutrition programs, particularly for children experiencing food insecurity during the summer when they lack access to school meals.
Moreover, Project 2025 proposes disinvestments in programs that support states in meeting the academic needs of the nation’s most vulnerable students, including students with disabilities served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and low-income students at Title I-eligible schools.
Title I supports low-income students and nearly 2 in 3 public schools
Title I, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) obligates supplemental federal funding to states to ensure that all children, regardless of their income status, receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education. Title I was created in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was signed into law by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. In enacting Title I, Congress recognized that students in high-poverty schools have greater educational needs—which continues to be a reality—and states lacked the resources to close this divide; therefore, federal aid was required to provide the academic services and opportunity necessary for these students.
Since its inception, Title I has been a critical program to address chronic funding and opportunity gaps between students experiencing high poverty and their more affluent peers.
More than half of the nation’s public schools serve a high concentration of low-income students, with 63 percent of traditional public schools and 62 percent of public charter schools in the 2021-22 school year identifying as Title I-eligible. Since its inception, Title I has been a critical program to address chronic funding and opportunity gaps between students experiencing high poverty and their more affluent peers. Despite its impact, Title I has experienced significantly low levels of funding over the years.
Title I supports the teacher workforce
Title I funding is critical to hiring and retaining well-prepared teachers in schools. During the 2023-24 school year, every state in the country reported a teacher shortage in one or more subject area. But high-poverty schools are at a double disadvantage when it comes to teacher shortages: Recent research shows that turnover rates are higher at high-poverty schools (29 percent) than at schools with lower concentrations of poverty (19 percent). Indeed, teachers are leaving high-poverty schools at alarmingly high rates due to poor working conditions and unmanageable workloads.
During the 2023-2024 school year, every state in the country reported a teacher shortage in one or more subject areas.
Title I provides necessary resources for districts to support and incentivize teachers in hard-to-staff schools that serve a higher percentage of low-income students and students of color. In order to close the achievement gap between high-poverty and wealthier schools, districts need more federal aid through Title I and other programs to support early-career teachers and retain outstanding teachers who make up the “Irreplaceables,” due to their high performance and success.
Project 2025 would worsen current teacher shortages by eliminating nearly 6 percent of the workforce
Project 2025 would decimate more than 180,000 teacher positions and negatively affect the academic outcomes of 2.8 million vulnerable students across the country. The loss of 180,000 teacher positions represents 5.64 percent of the teacher workforce nationally, which is roughly 3.2 million public school teachers. Table 1 illustrates the loss of teacher positions and affected students in each state as a result of phasing out Title I funding. At least 5 percent of teacher positions in 32 of the 50 states would be lost if federal Title I aid were eliminated. In some states, such as Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, and Florida, nearly 10 percent teacher jobs would be lost. Louisiana would experience the greatest impact, with more than 12 percent of teaching positions eliminated.
Project 2025’s proposal to phase out Title I reverses national efforts to retain teachers, including legislation to increase teacher pay—a contributing factor to retention. Today, the average teacher salary in the majority of states is below the minimum living wage, and teachers are being paid 5 percent less than what they were a decade ago when adjusted for inflation.
Conclusion
Title I funding directly benefits teachers and students in suburban, rural, and urban schools across the country. Districts use this funding to provide direct student support services and to hire and retain teachers. Project 2025’s proposal to eliminate Title I funding would lead to the loss of teacher positions, high teacher-to-student ratios, and a lack of school-based programs and quality instruction. This would be devastating to local schools, students, families, and communities.
Teaching is the only profession that prepares workers of every industry. Teachers, and the students they serve, must receive adequate support in preparation to entering the workforce, supporting the social and emotional development of future generations, and being informed citizens our democracy can rely on.
Methodology
The analysis in Table 1 used official fiscal year 2023 spending data from the U.S. Department of Education to demonstrate individual state and national funding implications if the federal “Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies” were to be eliminated, which Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership proposes happen over 10 years.
To calculate the funding-cut equivalent of teacher jobs as a result of this proposal, the authors divided the most recent average teacher salary from the 2021-22 school year, according to state figures from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), by the percentage of total compensation that goes toward wages and salaries associated with primary, secondary, and special education school teachers, according to U.S. Department of Labor data, to get the total employer cost for employing public K-12 school teachers. The authors then divided the total Title I dollar amount that each state receives from the U.S. Department of Education by the above sum. To calculate the percentage of the teacher workforce represented by that figure, the authors divided the funding-cut equivalent of teacher jobs for each state by the total number of public K-12 teachers in the state as of 2022, which is the latest available data from NCES.
In regard to the figure indicating the potential teacher positions at risk, the authors acknowledge that there are programs that make up the total funding amount that states receive for elementary and secondary education that may not go directly toward teacher compensation; however, if that funding were altogether cut and the services it funded remained, other state and local revenue would need to fill the hole, leaving the equivalent funding cut equal to roughly 182,000 teacher positions.
Finally, to calculate the number of students affected by this proposal, the analysis multiplied the most recent data for state-by-state pupil-to-teacher ratios from the NCES by the number of teachers affected.