By Maria Polletta | AZCIR
Project 2025, a contentious policy blueprint for the next Republican presidency, seeks to dramatically concentrate power in the White House while fundamentally changing how the federal government operates on nearly every front.
And when it comes to overhauling public education, the sweeping right-wing manifesto borrows heavily from Arizona’s playbook.
The roughly 900-page “Mandate for Leadership”—crafted by think tank the Heritage Foundation and other conservative heavyweights—lays out an aggressive roadmap for dismantling the federal Department of Education, rethinking funding for low-income students and those with disabilities, and broadly diverting public school dollars to less-regulated alternatives like private schools and homeschooling.
Promoting universal school choice as “a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue,” it argues that “every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.”
That’s precisely how school vouchers work in Arizona, a longtime darling of the school choice movement and the first in the nation to offer universal voucher eligibility. Heritage education policy expert Lindsey Burke, who authored Project 2025’s education section, references Arizona as a school choice pioneer almost immediately.
