Hi, I'm Joy Reid, and this is the second episode of our special How to Win series, The Threat of Project 2025. On this episode, we'll be talking all about the threat of Project 2025 to education.

The most terrifying policy proposals for a possible Trump second term are all spelled out in one document, Project 2025.

This Project 2025 Manifesto by Trump, loyalists, and extreme Republicans is based on darkness.

For those of you that missed episode one of the series, Project 2025 has been getting a lot of attention these last few months. We're referring to the Heritage Foundation's and 22-page playbook for the next conservative president. This document is called Mandate for Leadership 2025. One of the most glaring ideas is the elimination of the Department of Education, a pet project coming from the head of the organization himself, Kevin Roberts.

My life's work is to end the US Department of Education.

I'm not going to stop until it's gone.

The Heritage Foundation, for decades since Reagan was President, has had that as its number one educational objective. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, some of the proposals on education sound exactly the same.

One other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work needs back to the states.

Abolishing the Department of Education would undoubtedly have deep felt ramifications for students, parents, and teachers across the country, such as the elimination of the Title I program, which provides funding for low income schools and populations. But when you look even deeper at the Project 2025 proposals, it's not only the headline grabbers that are worth scrutinizing. Some of the other proposals include ending student debt relief, rolling back long-standing civil rights protections, Promotion of colorblind education in a continued attack on DEI and so-called critical race theory in education, and encouraging massive statewide school voucher programs that would allocate public money for private school education. Some of these proposals would be new, but other ideas have a blueprint to follow from states that are already turning these ideas into reality. Governor Ron DeSantis' message was clear. Here.

He wants to stop woke activism.

That's the name of the new legislative proposal he announced on Wednesday, the Stop the wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act.

What would it do?

Block critical race theory from schools and workplaces.

I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history.

The office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, rejecting a proposed advanced placement course on African-American studies for high school students. Florida's Department Department of Education sending this letter, As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.

Governor Abbott says his parent empowerment mission is put into one word, freedom. The governor fully backs education savings account, which would allow any parent to opt out of sending their child to their local school district and receive state money to educate their child at a school of their choice.

We must reform a curriculum, and we must empower parents.

We're going to get into all of that in this episode. To help us do that, I'll be speaking with writer and author Michael Harriet, who has read all 922 pages of the Project 2025 playbook, Teacher and historian Marvin Dunn, who takes kids on Florida Black History tours in direct opposition to Governor Ron DeSantis's attack on so-called Woke Education, and Texas House Republican, Hugh D. Schein, who took a stand against his governor's push for school vouchers and paid a price for it. That's all coming up on this special episode of How to Win: The Threat of Project 2025 on Education. Before getting into some of the nitty-gritty on Project 2025, I wanted to get some historical context for the type of attacks that the Heritage Foundation is waging on public education. And there is no one better on that subject than Michael a columnist at the GRIO and author of Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America. Michael knows this history extremely well, but he's also been digging into the specific ideas the Heritage Foundation has for education, like his recent piece for the GRIO entitled, I read the entire Project 2025. Here are the top 10 ways it would harm Black America.

In that piece, he looked at Trump's Agenda 47 alongside the 922-page Mandate for Leadership 2025 to gage what a second Trump administration might look like. Thank you for joining us, Michael.

Thank you for having me.

I want to start by asking you about the origins of free public schools and the participation, inspiration, and I would say credit that is owed to enslaved people in South Carolina for that.

I think it's always important to remember that the American education system, as we know it, did not exist before the Majority Black Constitutional Delegation of South Carolina, invented it in 1868. South Carolina was a Majority Black state, so its Constitutional Delegation was Majority Black. When they came out of their Constitutional Convention, one of the things it included was this special weird clause that put what they called superintendent in charge of education, and it was equal for all, and it specifically forbade education, what they call sectarian education, and it was free for all. It was funded by state taxes. So a constitutionally mandated public education that was free for all had never existed in the United States before Black people invented it. We dreamed it up. It wasn't for us. It was for everyone.

Let's talk about the reaction of White Conservatives to that, to the idea of free public school, because this benefited, as you said, not just formerly enslaved Black children, it actually benefited White children, because my understanding is that it was not common in the South, even for White children, to get a free public education.

The White population of the South had a lot less lower literacy rate than the rest of the country. Remember, these were people who lived in rural areas, and a lot of them were farmers. You couldn't go walk down the street to a school. And so when this public education system that benefited them was created, their first move by the so-called redeemers, the people who wanted to return the south to white rule, was to kill this public education system. When I say kill, it's not a high despobolic additive that I'm trying to use. They began just burning down schools. There are studies that show 867 African-American schools in the south were burned between 1868 and 1878. It was an arson campaign, and then they resegregated the schools. They redeemed the state, revoked the Constitution in most of the Southern states, and forced constitutional segregation into the public education spheres.

Let's talk about the push to erase the memory of that period, to erase the memory of reconstruction, but also to rewrite the history of what came during what you rightly call the redemption period, the violence, the lynching, the push to erase that history and also to erase the history of the Confederacy. It was a concerted effort. Can you describe it?

A group of women who became the United daughters of the Confederacy began a program. It was led by a woman named Elizabeth Rutlitch. She essentially pushed what they called the Lost Cause Movement. The Lost Cause Movement was to redefine the Civil War and the Antebellum era. They didn't They just want to say that the people of the south had been victimized. They wanted to make it as if the south had won. So they created these narratives of happy slaves. It's important to remember that that narrative didn't exist before then. Well, the daughters of the Confederacy changed that narrative. They made the Confederate soldiers into heroes. They popularized the use of the Confederate flag. What they did is they started this movement where they got these white women who were largely homemakers to begin getting on local school boards. They began approving and disproving of history books that fit their narrative. If a book didn't fit the daughters of the Confederacy's narrative about the lost cause, then the entire state couldn't use it. So of course, publishers began conceding that if you want your book published, it has to recreate history in this framing by these white women who said that the Confederacy was not about White supremacy, that slavery was a happy institution, and that the entire Civil War was about state's rights and taxation and not about the desire to create a white supremacist nation that was separate from the regular United States of America.

They were the patriots in this rewriting of history.

That version of history really became standard throughout education in the United States. Most of us who went to public schools, unless we had really great history teachers, really learned a very stilted version of history. And so fast forward to what's happening today. The 1619 Project, which was published in the New York Times, it set off just a wave of other honest history projects and books, including your book, Black AF History, which also, I think, changed a lot of people's views about history. What was the impact of the 1619 Project? And also, What backlash did it create?

It's funny because it's often accused of trying to reeducate people. And it actually did. It taught people that they had learned a wrong narrative. And that wrong narrative informs the way we think. So if you didn't know that Black people created the American education system, you might think that all of the things that supposedly ale Black America is because we don't focus on education and hard work. If you don't know about the history of slavery, you might believe that Black people are lazy and that Black culture promotes laziness. And so what the 1619 Project did is reframe that thinking and reframe the origin story of America. We believed in an impossible myth that a country could become a global superpower, an economic superpower, without all of this free labor. We believed in something that could not be possible. And so it reframed that thinking, and it introduced logic into the equation instead of this mythical lost cause. And it angered some people. And I really believe that it angered so many people, not just because they were racist, but when you turn your entire education upside down and everything that you know turns out to be wrong, you're more likely to say, Well, all my history teachers were right, and there's one woman at the New York Times is wrong, versus the fact that all of the history that you read was controlled by a group of white women who are still doing it today.

They're no longer the United daughters of the Confederacy, but they're the Moms for Liberty, and they're these women who are still appearing at school board meetings and trying to reframe the way we learn.

The response during the Trump administration to the 1619 Project, they called it the 1776 Project. Part of the goal was to reverse what Nicole Hannah Jones and her research had done and to re-institute the stilted version of history that Conservatives are more comfortable with. That ethos and even the language from the 1776 project shows up in Project 2025. So let's talk about Project 2025 a bit. Now, you've read all 922 pages of the Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. What would it do regarding education and the way people are taught about race and about racism?

Project 2025 does a number of things. First of all, it implements this white creation of the definition of critical critical race theory. So critical race theory is a graduate-level legal theory that looks at certain subjects, whether it's history or economics, through the lens of race. And it's a really important reason to do that. What Project 2025 says is, first of all, it redefines critical race theory, according to Christopher Ruffo, a white power promoter, and uses his definition that says, Well, if you teach that certain groups were responsible for more discrimination than that is illegal. Well, Project 2025 doesn't just codify that definition. It says that anything, any teacher, any school, any program, any government institution that teaches this accurate version of our past is not just illegal, but it's worthy of termination from the federal government. It implements the lost cause into not just the education system, but into the entire federal bureau bureaucracy.

Another part of Project 2025 is promoting what they call color-blind education. Here's a quote, Safeguarding civil rights. Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory. What would colorblind education look like under Project 2025?

Well, it's important to know that when they say colorblind education, what they mean is not focusing on whiteness. So colorblind education, what would it look like? Well, there's a part of Project 2025 that would defund colleges that promote what they call area studies. Black history is an area study. Gender studies is an area study. Hispanic history is an area study. So they would defund institutions. And again, it's not that they want to erase any learning about the history of Black people. They want to erase the history of the stuff that White people did. What does race-blind institutions and education look like? It looks like an institution that doesn't recognize that for the entire history of the American education system, we have studies that show that teachers disproportionately punish Black and Brown students who commit the same offenses as white students. After Obama issued what they call a Dear Colleague Letter, Warning and informing School Districts of That, it suddenly disappeared. Well, colorblind education would erase that color blind education would eliminate teaching about the truth of the civil rights movement. So it would become this multiracial coalition that fought for all instead of what it really was, a Black-led movement that fought for Black rights, that was led by Black people and gave that freedom to all.

So it really reframes all of history, all of education, all of sociology, and it extends to a lot of other things. We know that if Black kids read stories about kids that look like them, about characters that look like them, they're more likely to read. But that is, again, critical race theory. That's diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it is grounds for termination and grounds for your school to be defunded. So this is what they mean by race-blind education.

One person fighting against this reframing of History is Dr. Marvin Dunn.

Dr..

Marvin Dunn is a Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology at Florida International University.

He leads the Teach the Truth tours on Black History in the State of Florida and is the author of A History of Florida Through Black Eyes. Thanks for joining me, Dr. Dunn.

My pleasure. My pleasure.

Well, let me start by asking how the history tours are going. When was the last one?

The last one was two weekends ago. We took about 45 Miami Dade County teachers to three places where terrible, terrible things happened in Florida. And it was just transformative for them and for me. It's important joy for me to take teachers to these places because they're the ones that we count upon to tell these stories and keep them going and to pass them on to our young people. So I just got back from the last one two weeks ago, and we're planning another one for the end of October. They're coming along just fine.

That's fantastic. I mean, people sometimes forget that Florida is part of the South. It's not just palm trees. It's also a really rich history of Black involvement in creativity, but also of enslavement and horror of entire towns burned to the ground and of Black folks trying to strive after enslavement and being thwarted by mobs of white rejectionists. That history is actually required to be taught in the schools, though we know that only 11 of 67 counties follow that law that was created in honor of the Rosewood Massacre and those descendants defendants. But your job and the things that you do in teaching history have gotten a lot harder since the current governor, Ron DeSantis, came to office, and he passed something called the Stop Woke Act, which was designed to essentially eliminate the teaching of honest history in schools. That's correct. How much harder has your job gotten with Ron DeSantis in office?

Joey, I have colleagues at Florida International University that I've known for 30 years who will not return a phone call, who will not return an email. They know now that their emails, their communications are being watched by the state. I've seen good people leave Florida who refuse to teach in the state where the governor determines whether you get tenure or not. Now with this Project 25, we're learning that the state, the federal government, will tell universities what words cannot be used on the university campus. You can't use DEI if you go with Project 25. You can't use transgender. You can't use institutional racism. So what we are now seeing is, in my view, the destruction of public education as we've known it in my lifetime.

You mentioned Project 2025, but I think it's appropriate because in some ways, Florida is already living under Project 2025. Ron DeSantis has already implemented, with the help of Chris Tararufo, the person who perverted the idea of critical race theory, he's already basically instituted some of the same things that would happen nationally. So talk about what that looks like in the classroom and what it looks like in the real world.

Chaos. Absolute chaos. Project 2025 says that parents rights are non-negotiable. Can you imagine What havoc that point of view, that practice would have in a public school, where a parent could come into a school and have dozens of books removed from library because he or she does not want his or her child exposed to that material? We see the confusion in for her. We know the counties don't know how to implement the mandates that have come down from DeSantis. So if your state moves in the direction that DeSantis has moved Florida, look for chaos, confusion, and look to lose a lot of educators at all levels.

There's been a chilling effect in Florida from the Stop Woke Act. For a while, you were a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Governor DeSantis. You're no longer teaching the class that you taught for a long time in Black history at Florida International University. You taught that class for 34 years. It was canceled in the past few years. Do you believe that that was due to Ron DeSantis' opposition to the teaching of Black history?

It was a direct result of that. We were going along so well. I'd gone back to university to teach administrators how to do local Black history tours in Miami. What places to go to, what students need to be taught about local Black history. We were moving along very, very swiftly and getting it done. We had planned to do it over the course of a year. Stop woke comes along, and we are now totally frozen. Nothing has happened for months. Nothing will happen. And now we have people who may have learned how to teach their students about local history, frightened away, chilled away from trying to do this work.

And as a historian, as an author, as somebody who's focused and dedicated your life to the teaching of history and to specifically teaching Black history, what's the impact on learners, on K through 12 students and college students, when they're not allowed to learn this history? Because it seems that the governor of Florida believes it's harmful to White children to learn about history that may be negative when it comes to what White people have done in history. He thinks that's harmful to them. What do you think is the impact of withholding that history?

Well, the impact is that coming generations may not learn of the fault of previous generations. Don't kids need to know about the Holocaust? Do we dare not teach them? Do we dare not teach them about slavery or about what happened to the Native America of this country? How dare we not teach those things? And how do we teach those things without also causing an emotional respiration to students? Joe, they should respond to these things. Emotionally. I wouldn't want to teach a student about slavery or about the Holocaust and not have them have some emotional response to it. But guilt? Why would a white person today have guilt about what happened in slavery 150 years ago? What I think white people need to do, in a sense, is to stop running away from the history. You had nothing to do with slavery, but you're a white, and that history still carries forward with privileges for you. May not be your fault, may not even want those privileges, but race counts in our country, and there are debts to be paid for that.

As somebody who leads people on Black History tours, what is generally the reaction when people learn this history from you? Do you feel that in learning some of the darker parts of our history, people walk away from it feeling dejected, or do they walk away from it feeling inspired?

They walk away feeling inspired. We can stand around. We have stood around the grave of a 50-year-old Black boy who was lynched in live up Florida in 1944 by three White men, same as Emmett Till. I've taken high school students, White, Black, to that boy's grave several times, and we sit and talk and pray and sing. Not a single word of hatred about white people comes from that experience from anybody. It just doesn't come. The sense is this is a terrible thing. And students say to me, Dr. Dunn, we should have known about this. We should have known about these things. And their anger that I've heard comes from these things being denied them in their education.

Florida used to be a very high-ranked state when it came to education. It slid in recent years. And you've even seen advanced placement history banned, banished from the schools. What's been the impact, in your view, as an educator, of doing things like that?

The impact has been the disappearance of Black history in schools in Florida. The state of Florida does require Black history to be taught, but very, very few counties actually do it. And the state is also limiting how we teach certain stories that did happen in Black history. For example, we mentioned Rosewood. The state of Florida does require that that story be taught. They also require that the story of the O'Koy race ride of 1920 be taught. But they're requiring that those stories be taught as examples of Black on white violence as well as white on Black violence, as if everybody did it. So you got to teach the story, but don't say it was just white folks that harm Black people. And that didn't happen. The state is requiring our teachers to teach a lie. This is an example of state mandated education to teach lies.

Do you view this as changing the purpose of education from informing young people to propagandizing them?

Oh, that is exactly where we're moving, particularly as we see the impact of the right wing in education. The indoctrination that I see coming from the right is to have children taught that America is a perfect nation, that our heroes, our founding fathers were flawless. But can we teach about Thomas Jefferson and the fact that he raped a 14-year-old enslaved child that he owned and gave him four children? Can we teach the full history of our founding fathers? No, we cannot. We can only build up this country as if it was perfect from the beginning and that we have Christian principles behind us that will sustain us as a great nation. I just think that's a flawed way to approach how we educate children and how we see our nation.

For people who would want to see Project 2025 implemented in this country, can you speak as somebody who lives in a state where those kinds of laws already exist? What warnings would you give to Americans about what it would look like if Project 2025 became the law of the entire United States?

If they move in the directions that they want to move, they will go away with the Department of Education and will be sending block grants to states for them to decide how they want to spend money on education that would have come from the federal government. Just title one alone is $16 billion that will now not go to directly poor kids and supporting poor people, but we go to the state legislature and let them decide how this money will be used. It's very frightening when I think about all of the programs, all of the support programs that have been built up over decades that will disappear once Project 2025 becomes a reality. These things will go immediately.

As Dr Dunn points out, Project 2025 poses a threat not just inside the classroom, but to our entire education system. When we come back, a look at how that's playing out in other states.

Welcome back.

Now that we've gotten some important context and history for what the Heritage Foundation hopes to achieve, we should talk more about what these policies could actually look like. Here again is Michael Harriet. Another big plank of Project 2025 is the elimination of the Department of Education.

It's one of their primary goals. What would be the impact of that?

There was a study done in 2019 that looked at school funding from every school district in America. We found out that the average Black school is underfunded at about $1,266 per student versus the average majority White school district. Even the richest majority Black school districts are underfunded less than the poorest White school districts. Well, the Department of Education tries to rectify this by a program that we call Title I Funding. So poorest school districts, majority, minority school districts get funding from the Department of Education and from the federal government because of Title I. Project 2025 would eliminate Title I funding. They would give that money to the states that already underfund majority Black school districts. It would eliminate student loans for many of the students' Pell grants would be gone. They want to eliminate student loan repayment that are based on income. So all of this would be eliminated by the Department of Education Some of it they would put under different federal departments, but most of it would be returned to the states, which is counterproductive because the reason that the Department of Education exist is to aggregate the discrimination in certain states. It would return the education system back to discrimination that necessitated the Department of Education at the federal level.

Let's go back to history for just a moment. We know that after Brown versus the Board of Education, the reaction across the South was violent opposition. We also know that one of the impacts of desegregation, which happened over the next 20 years, including through the Nixon administration, was that a lot of white parents pulled their kids out of public schools altogether and began sending them to private schools, leaving public schools continuing to be segregated, and in some cases, as segregated as they were before Brown v B. Board. We also know that the Supreme Court and the IRS have not allowed segregated private schools to receive tax dollars, and that is something that Conservatives have opposed. Project 2025 would promote vouchers to pay for private education. They would push something called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, ESAs, that would essentially give parents 90% of the money that the federal government would normally give to a particular school district and instead allow the parents to use that money to pay for private schools, religious schools, online courses, or private Talk a little bit about that and what the impact would be.

So one of the things that happened after Brown versus Board of Education, these schools are called segregation academies, and they still exist. States all across the South and the Midwest, and even in the North, still run segregation academies. I grew up in a town with a segregation academy, and they are often right wing. They're often heavily indoctrinated with Christian nationalism. They often push the lost cause. They have no oversight. But But the good thing is they're not supported by our tax dollars. What project 2025 would change that? They would essentially support these religious and private institutions that don't cater to communities but can cater to a belief, a religious belief, social or racial belief, and our tax dollars, your tax dollars and mine, would be used to fund those. The impact of that would be less funding for the schools in our communities. If your kid doesn't get to go to Segregation Academy because of transportation or because of any other issues, their school would get less funding. What you're going to have is a further delineation between the have and the have nots when it comes to education. People who attend public schools will likely attend schools that are even more underfunded.

People who attend these private segregation, usually majority white schools, will get better education. The problem with that is it's really stealing money from taxpayers to fund the educational opportunities for white students. Because What we find is that colleges look at them different just because they are a private school. Their kids get accepted into colleges at higher rates. And so it increases the discrimination, not just on the K through 12 level, but on the college level, which increases the discrimination on the employment level. And so it will reinforce these racial disparities throughout the social and economic project that we call America, and we'll be paying for It's a good point.

The fight over school vouchers is playing out right now in states across the country. Conservative administrations in states like Arizona and Texas have been pushing these efforts for years, but it's an issue that has divided people on all sides of the political spectrum. That's not unlike many of the ideas in Project 2025, such as the extreme abortion stances, which are broadly unpopular in America. To get a better sense of this nuance, I wanted to speak with a conservative who has raised his own concerns around school vouchers in deep-read Texas. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been trying to implement statewide school vouchers for years with backing from Christian conservative donors, but he's faced opposition from within his own party. This past Last year, however, the Texas Republican Party underwent a reckoning on the issue. Governor Abbott, with the help of outside PAC money from former Education Secretary, Betsey DeVoss, and TikTok investor Jeffrey Yass, successfully primaried 15 members of his own party who opposed school vouchers. Representative Hugh D. Shine was one of those House Republicans who lost their primary after being unwilling to support the governor's plans. Representative Shine, thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, thank you.

Why don't you start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your district in Texas that you represent?

I represent House district 55, Central Texas. It's between Waco and Austin. Our community is primarily a community made up of public schools. We do have a couple of private schools and a couple of charter schools. But the public school system in Belk County and in the district I represent pretty well dominates the community and the education process.

Now, you are a Republican, and of course, the governor of the state of Texas is Republican, Greg Abbott, would you consider yourself to have been pretty lined up with him politically?

I'm a conservative Republican. I'm a Reagan Republican. I was an appointee by Reagan and served in his administration. So yes, I'm a conservative, and I have been aligned with the Republican Party. As a matter of fact, I was the first Republican ever elected in Bell County.

And yet, Governor Abbott supported a primary challenge against you that ultimately was successful.

It seems that the one place that the two of you disagreed was on the issue of vouchers. Talk a little bit about that disagreement.

Well, the disagreement is obviously one that is important to the governor. It's also important to us in this district. In district 55, our Chambers of Commerce, our business groups, our municipalities, all supported resolutions opposing the voucher. It was obviously an easy decision because I represent the district, and I truly believe that as representatives, we should have a close, strong feel for the folks in our district and represent their needs in the legislative process. That's what I did. The governor had asked me a couple of times about supporting the vouchers, and I indicated to him that my district didn't support them, and I would not be voting for it.

Let's talk a little bit about vouchers a little more specifically. I think people understand them to be dollars that normally go to a school district, instead go to each child, go to each family, and then they can spend them as they want. In your view, what's wrong with that?

Vouchers are not conservative. I think that's That's a very important statement to make. Vouchers don't encourage competition. But when you look at the voucher system in our school system, we have a public school system that receives mandates from the federal government as well as the state government. It's not a level playing field. I guess that's the best way to put it, because private schools are private. They don't have those mandates from the federal government or the state government. Public schools have open enrollment. They have to take all students, regardless of whether they're disadvantaged students economically or they have special needs. They We have elected school boards that are accountable to the parents in the district, and they're elected by those parents in the district. There's financial audits by the state for our public schools. In fact, we have the Texas Education Agency that governs policy and procedures, and we have legislative oversight through the House and the Senate public education committees. We also have the permanent school fund that guarantees facility debt and a retirement system for our educators that are all tied together. Whereas on the private sector, on the private side, you We have none of those.

There's no open enrollment. In fact, private schools get to choose. There's no elected board. Quite frankly, in the discussion that we had, there was no provision for any financial audit if state money went to private institutions. I consider my duty as a legislator to be a steward of the tax monies that people entrust to the state. With that responsibility as a steward, I consider that duty very strongly and consider During that, if there's not open enrollment, if there's not accountability, if there is no elected board and no financial audit, I think those state funds cannot be used in that setting.

You've expressed some concern about the way that the voucher system that the governor wants to implement in Texas would impact rural students, specifically, would impact teacher pensions. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes, I will. The dollar amount it looked like would be about three and a quarter billion dollars a year for those who are in homeschool as well as private school. For every 1% of students that would be brought out of public schools, that would increase the cost of the state another billion dollars. Those kinds of effects, then you're going to impact the facilities that we have in Texas for our schools. But then you also have a pension system that as you pull students out of public schools, you're going to be having less impact of teachers in the system. So that's going to infect the teacher retirement system.

It sounds to me like you're concerned that rural school systems might not survive a voucher system.

Well, they would have to survive because there's really not enough population in some of those areas to support private schools. We have 254 counties in the state of Texas. From Brownsville to Dalhart, it's over 800 miles of traveling just in that direction. I think when you look at the magnitude that something like this would have as far as delivering public education across the state, it would definitely have an impact, and I think it would drive up costs. Again, the financial impact of this, both for taxpayers on the property tax side, for those who are in public education, the increased costs that they would have down the road, I think we would find ourselves with an entitlement program that would continue to increase in costs through perpetuity.

Thank you for tuning in to this special series, The Threat of Project 2025, presented by the How to Win 2024 podcast. For more on the ongoing risks to education and what our kids get to learn in schools, please tune in to season 2 of the Velshi Band Book Club. Each week on that show, my colleague and friend, Ali Velshi, talks to authors like Roxanne Gay, Tim O'Brien, and Jacquelyn Woodson about the epidemic of book banning and why combating this trend is crucial for our democracy. The first two episodes of the show dropped this Thursday, or you can subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple podcast to get the first two episodes now, along with early access to each new episode and ad-free listening to the entire series. Our series, The Threat of Project 2025, continues next week with two new episodes on what's at Stake for LGBTQ Rights and Climate Change, hosted by Jen Saki and Chris Hayes. Be sure to tune in. The Threat of Project 2025 series is produced by Max Jacobs. Our Associate Producer is Jamaris Perez, Jamaris Perez. Katherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are our sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production.

Ayesha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Cutler is the Senior Vice President of Content Strategy at MSNBC. And I am Joy Reid. Search for How to Win 2024 wherever you get your podcast and follow the series.