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As a civil rights attorney, I advocate for students to be treated with respect and dignity, and I’ve seen firsthand how students’ opportunities, health, and well-being can be derailed when they aren’t treated that way.
I’m also a parent of two young kids.
And I’m scared about Project 2025’s plan for students.
Project 2025 wants to strip students of federal civil rights protections. Significantly, this includes closing the U.S. Department of Education—the only federal agency that is tasked with ensuring equal educational opportunity for all students. Because removing the entire department requires congressional action, and Republicans have been unsuccessful in attempting to abolish it for decades, Project 2025 highlights other ways to significantly chip away at civil rights, including eliminating the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and ending administrative enforcement of civil rights violations in schools. Not only would students not have a place to go to assert their civil rights with the federal government, but under Project 2025, they would have fewer rights altogether. Project 2025 lays out a plan to dismantle crucial civil rights protections in schools, including by removing protections addressing racial disparities in school discipline—something that especially impacts Black girls—and by turning Title IX, the federal law protecting students from sex discrimination, on its head.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration strengthened the Department of Education’s Title IX regulations. The Biden rules restored protections for student survivors of sexual violence that the Trump administration weakened in 2020 and clarified protections for LGBTQI+ students and pregnant and parenting students, including students who terminate their pregnancies. But Project 2025 seeks to immediately undo Biden’s Title IX regulations, restore the Trump administration’s anti-survivor regulations that were created with the help of “men’s rights” advocates, and redefine “sex” to mean only “biological sex recognized at birth” in an attempt to deny the very existence of transgender people.
Let me be clear. Such a narrow view of gender harms all women and girls by allowing anyone to question the gender of any one of us, often done through harassment and violence (yes, this is happening), if we don’t fit their stereotypical notions of white womanhood.
Project 2025 explicitly seeks to make schools more hostile towards LGBTQI+ students. It seeks to exclude nonbinary students as a category from civil rights data collection—a category that the Biden administration added a few years ago—and sanctions disrespect and harassment of students by encouraging school employees to misgender students. Intentional misgendering not only causes students to feel devalued, but it also creates heightened stress and anxiety and exposes transgender students to violence.
Pushed by far-right extremists, states have already begun passing laws targeting LGBTQI+ students. Whether it’s allowing misgendering or preventing bathroom use or sports participation, these attacks have only negatively impacted students and made them less safe in schools. Project 2025 would double down on these harms.
Project 2025 seeks to enshrine censorship in schools and relies on dangerous rhetoric by referring to LGBTQI+ issues as “pornography.” Students should have access to materials that show diversity in characters and experiences and teach about social issues and accurate history. But by promoting book bans and censorship of inclusive learning materials—policies pushed by extremist groups like Moms for Liberty (a member of Project 2025’s advisory board)—Project 2025 seeks to significantly limit what can be taught in school and devalue, or outright deny, the experiences of groups that have been historically marginalized throughout our history.
By seeking to impose an extremist ideological agenda in our schools, Project 2025 would undermine the ability of all students—especially women and girls, students of color, LGBTQI+ students, disabled students, and students from low-income families—to feel safe, supported, and welcomed, and to develop the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
I know. It’s all very, very bleak.
But if you want to learn more about Project 2025’s plan for education and gender equity broadly, read this and sign up for our updates here.
