Textbooks tell us that political parties pursue power, interest groups protect their welfare, and think tanks conduct research on policy-relevant topics. These distinctions have never been absolute. Historically, parties adopted platforms designed to win elections; think tanks have always had a partisan coloration. But lines that differentiate these types of political organizations blur today as never before.
This election year, Democrats are accusing Donald Trump of running on a platform written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank known for its policy advocacy. They point out that nearly 200 of those involved in drafting Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-page report produced as part of the foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project (commonly known as Project 2025), served in the first Trump administration. The chapter on education was written by Lindsey Burke, a long-term Heritage staffer, though she acknowledges help from former members of the Trump administration, including Jim Blew, who served as Assistant Secretary for the Office of Planning Evaluation and Policy Development. But Donald Trump denies that Mandate serves as a guide for his presidential plans, saying it is merely the “wish list” of policy advocates and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The probable truth—only future historians will know for sure—lies somewhere between Democratic accusations and Trump denials. A comparison of the K–12 plank in the platform just adopted at the Republican convention with the K–12 recommendations included in Mandate’s education chapter finds few contradictions between the two documents—though Project 2025 goes into vastly more detail than does the document approved by the delegates in Milwaukee.
The most obvious difference between the two texts is their length. The platform’s K–12 education plank is barely a page long, while the Heritage education chapter runs over 40 printed pages. Clearly, the party wants to say little that could stand in the way of achieving power; the think tank wants that power turned into policy.
But does Heritage tell us the true meaning of the vague words contained in the Republican national platform? The answer is closer to “it depends” than either “yes” or “no.”
The party platform’s education plank is hardly meaningless. Although it contains a lot of “mother and apple pie” language, such as “support schools that focus on Excellence and Parental Rights” and “prepare students for great jobs and careers,” it delineates sharp disagreement with policies favored by many Democrats and the Biden administration. Mandate offers dozens of education policy recommendations, large and small, but some of them address major issues also considered in the platform. To assess the strength of the Democratic accusations and Republican denials, let’s compare how the two documents address six topics: federal spending, the future of the U.S. Department of Education, school choice, special education, civics education, and race and gender issues.
Federal Spending. Mandate takes a clear, strong position on federal spending that is not explicitly shared by the Republican platform. The latter claims the United States spends more money on schools than any other nation, but it fails to promise any cuts to K–12 expenditure, thus sparing the national ticket from charges that it is set on starving the public school. Mandate, on the other hand, calls for the elimination of a wide range of federal education programs, estimated to save nearly $20 billion annually, and proposes that “[o]ver a 10-year period, the federal spending [on compensatory education, the largest federal program] should be phased out.”
Abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Though the platform treats spending levels sub silentio, it boldly resurrects Ronald Reagan’s proposal to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. About what to do with all the education-related activity that must continue somehow, the platform says nothing. One must assume Republicans expect some other federal agency to take over the job—as was the case before Jimmy Carter and Congress created the department in 1979. Mandate does not differ in principle, but it is good deal more realistic when it proposes that the department be gradually eliminated over the course of the next decade and offers suggestions as to which agencies could do the same job more effectively. As programs are phased out, federal funding should take the form of no-strings-attached block grants to states, it says, though it also recommends that states be asked to distribute the funds to parents to be used at the school of their choice.
Universal school choice. At every quadrennial meeting since 1996, the GOP platform has backed some form of school choice, whether it be vouchers, charters, or tax-credit funded scholarships. But in 2024 Republicans break new ground by calling for “universal school choice,” which would allow any family, regardless of income, to receive public funding to help pay for their child’s attendance at the school of their choice. The platform is quite specific in its endorsement of education savings accounts and equitable treatment of homeschoolers. It does not mention charter schools.
Mandate plays a long riff on these policy commitments. It notes that “portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly or allowing federal tax credits to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 education savings accounts . . . could significantly advance education choice.” The school voucher program Congress created in Washington D.C. is to be expanded and deregulated, charter school funding should be subject to less regulation, and compensatory education dollars are to be given to low-income families to be spent at the school they prefer.
Special education. Federal fiscal support for special education has had deep, consistent support from both sides of the political aisle ever since 1975, when the first federal special education law was enacted by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Gerald Ford. Even though the party platform calls for the abolition of the Department of Education, it says nothing about what should happen to the single most popular federal K–12 education program. Mandate squares the circle by tossing the program over to the Department of Health and Human Services—the same agency from which most of what is now within the Department of Education was ripped under President Carter.
Civic education. The platform supports “schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization,” but the only specific policies to which it commits the national ticket is restoration of the 1776 Commission—an advisory committee created by President Trump and disbanded by President Biden—and a “veto” of “efforts to nationalize civic education.” Mandate has little to say about civic education other than to call for a “report on the negative influence of action civics on students’ understanding of history and civics and their disposition toward the United States.” Apparently, the party is more deeply committed to local control of schools and curriculum than to any particular vision of civic education.
Race. Given the heat race issues have generated in the national political conversation on K–12 schools, the reticence with which this issue is treated in both the education plan of the party platform and the Heritage document is surprising. The platform merely commits the party leadership to defund schools that “engage in inappropriate political indoctrination,” foregoing any attempt to define that vague phrase. Mandate is considerably more specific on matters of race. It calls for a return to the Trump Administration’s regulations with respect to affirmative action and racial discrimination and an end to the use of disparate impact analysis as evidence of racial or ethnic discrimination in school discipline policies. It also makes clear what Heritage finds objectionable in critical race theory in a passage worth quoting at length:
Those who subscribe to [critical race] theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even. . . . The theory disrupts America’s Founding ideals of freedom and opportunity. So, when critical race theory is used as part of school activities such as mandatory affinity groups, teacher training programs in which educators are required to confess their privilege, or school assignments in which students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist, the theory is actively disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.
Mandate calls for “legislation that prevents [critical race] theory from spreading discrimination.” But the report also says “educators should not . . . refrain from discussing certain subjects in an attempt to protect students from ideas with which they disagree. Proposals such as this should result in robust classroom discussions, not censorship.” In other words, the report expresses a positive view of open discussion of these issues within the classroom.
Sex and gender. In their platform Republicans forthrightly declare: “We will keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.” In its education chapter, Heritage takes virtually the same position. It calls for the restoration of the regulations pertaining to sexual discrimination and harassment under Title IX that had been promulgated by the Trump Administration. It also would require schools to identify the sex of a child by the gender given on the birth certificate, and the federal government to avoid collecting statistics on gender identification other than male and female.
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Reading Heritage’s Project 2025 Mandate and the Republican Party Platform side by side might be compared to reading the narratives of the life of Jesus contained in the gospels composed by Mark and John. They hardly say the same thing. One is spare, the other complex. But the two texts can be construed, if one wishes, as entirely consistent with one another. Democrats can cite the Republican platform as proof of their accusation that Mandate is in fact a blueprint of what to expect under a potential second Trump administration. Yet so much said by Heritage is not explicated in anywhere near the same detail in the platform that Trump can deny any connection to the think-tank wish list.
Nor should it be thought that either the platform or Mandate provides more than a few hints as to what direction the federal government will try to move the nation’s education system, should Donald Trump be inaugurated next January. Much will depend on the composition of Congress, the range and intensity of litigation, economic and fiscal realities, and the state of public opinion. Still, the two documents, read together, strongly suggest that a Trump presidency implies a smaller federal footprint in K12 education, support for school choice, less federal regulation, opposition to affirmative action and reversal of the sex and gender policies of the Biden Administration. But commercial real estate investors are advised not to set aside resources for the purchase of a vacant building at 400 Maryland Avenue in Southwest D.C., the current home of the U.S. Department of Education. Its current occupant is unlikely to move.
Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically.
