Texas Legislators Must Reject Project 2025’s School Choice Deception
Texas Legislators must STOP HB 2, 3 and 4 All Include Deceptive Semantics
By Alice Linahan 02/27/2025
In alignment with Project 2025, the national conservative policy blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation, President Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and replace it with "school choice" initiatives. However, far from restoring educational sovereignty to states like Texas, Project 2025’s policies would instead expand federal and corporate control of education. These policies are designed to streamline the ed-technocracy necessary for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), where students are treated as human capital rather than individuals with free-thinking potential.
Trump’s Project 2025 Ties and School Choice Agenda
Although Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, key figures in his administration—including potential appointees—are directly involved in its execution. Linda McMahon, his nominee for Secretary of Education, has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation and is a staunch advocate of public-private “school choice” schemes. These initiatives, similar to those championed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are structured to funnel public tax dollars into corporate-controlled education, ultimately extending federal oversight over private and home schools through the imposition of education savings accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarships.
How Project 2025 Threatens Texas' Education System
Despite claims that abolishing the Department of Education will return educational control to the states, Project 2025 proposes transferring its responsibilities to other federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Labor (DOL). This restructuring would place Texas schools under the purview of federal workforce and mental health tracking programs, further entrenching federal influence rather than eliminating it.
Additionally, Project 2025’s school choice reforms, such as the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), seek to establish federal tax credits for corporate-backed "Scholarship Granting Organizations" (SGOs). These organizations will dictate how education funds are allocated, creating an infrastructure that allows big business—not parents or educators—to set the standards for education in Texas.
Texas ESA Expansion: A Trojan Horse for Federal and Corporate Control
Texas legislators, under pressure from Governor Greg Abbott’s administration, have been aggressively pushing for universal ESAs. However, as demonstrated in other states, these ESA programs come with significant regulatory strings attached. The Alabama CHOOSE Act, which serves as a model for Project 2025’s ESA policies, mandates standardized testing, data tracking, and compliance with government health and safety codes for any school or homeschool receiving ESA funds. If Texas follows suit, so-called school choice policies will only serve to expand federal oversight over private education, limiting parental rights rather than enhancing them.
Furthermore, ESAs will drive Texas families toward digital learning platforms dominated by Big Tech. Adaptive learning software, AI tutors, and biometric tracking tools—such as those developed by companies like Oracle and Peter Thiel’s Palantir—will become essential to modernized education. These platforms will enable continuous data mining of student performance and behavior, integrating Texas students into the global digital economy controlled by the ed-tech elite.
State Education Compliance Mandates: Common Core, TEKS and Digital Surveillance
House Bill 3 mandates compliance with state education standards, including alignment with Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), accreditation from recognized bodies such as the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission (TEPSAC), and adherence to assessment and reporting guidelines set by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
TEKS-aligned instruction ensures that curriculum covers fundamental knowledge and skills in core subjects, including English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Fine Arts, Health, and Physical Education. However, these standards are aligned with the federal Common Core College and Career Readiness Standards outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), further tying Texas education to federal frameworks.
What is Common Core? The Common Core is based on UNESCO’s World Education Curriculum. In 2015, the United States signed a global goals agreement known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Education is the fourth goal globally, aligning U.S. education with international standards. The choice readiness model utilizes education and student data to sort students into one of three tracks: COLLEGE (leader or authority), CITIZEN /MILITARY(includes military as protector or authority), or CAREER/ WORKER. This framework is detailed in the 2015 UN Report, which outlines the restructuring of education to meet global workforce demands. This is clearly embedded inside of HB 3.
Text from Texas HB 3
Moreover, the Next Generation of Assessments and Accountability will replace the STAAR assessment, shifting toward continuous, background data collection within online digital learning platforms. This means that student assessment will no longer be a periodic event but an ongoing surveillance mechanism that monitors student performance in real-time. This development raises concerns about student privacy, data security, and the broader implications of digital profiling.
Adding to these concerns is the fact that all the data privacy protections supposedly in place are rendered meaningless due to changes made under the Obama administration to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). These changes weakened FERPA’s original safeguards, allowing third parties—including corporations and government agencies—to access student data without parental consent. This effectively opens the floodgates for mass data-mining, behavioral tracking, and ultimately, the commodification of Texas students.
The Medicalization of Education: Schools as Behavioral Laboratories
This atrocity is “The Medicalization of Our Schools.”
A view from the classroom of today would astound onlookers: mental health and social, emotional, and behavioral interventions have replaced academics. With these wrap-around mental health services and interventions into personalities, values, beliefs, and dispositions at school, teachers are expected and forced to monitor and collect personal behavioral data on our children that has nothing to do with education. This personal data is logged into state longitudinal data systems, shared, and ultimately exposes our children to ‘surveillance capitalism.’
Schools represent a “captive audience” and as such, prime targets for social policy change. Medicaid is now a primary funding source for these interventions, merging education with healthcare and further embedding government oversight into family life. The merging of federal data in HR 4174 escalates this agenda.
The universal screening of every child for social, emotional, and behavioral mental health issues has become the policy to maximize federal Medicaid funding. Schools are financially incentivized to identify as many students as possible as needing behavioral interventions, creating a system where normal childhood behaviors can result in life-altering labels and diagnoses.
The implications of this are dire. Through Medicaid’s reimbursement structure, children labeled with behavioral issues are assigned DSM codes (Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders), which follow them for life. This could have severe consequences for their future opportunities—impacting higher education, job prospects, and even Second Amendment rights.
A Corporate Takeover of Texas Education
Project 2025’s school choice policies are not about empowering parents or improving education. Instead, they create a system where corporations and government entities dictate the funding, curriculum, and student outcomes in both public and private schools. Through PFS scholarships backed by ECCA tax credits, businesses gain control over educational funding streams while being subsidized by federal and state governments. These scholarships, along with Title I ESAs, place additional government regulations on private, religious, and homeschool education, forcing them to conform to federal standards in order to receive funding.
At the same time, corporate-backed education technology (ed-tech) products, funded through these policies, enable constant surveillance of students by tracking their behaviors, learning progress, and even social credit metrics. This means education in Texas will no longer be about academic achievement but about conditioning students to fit the workforce needs of corporations that control these education pipelines. The ultimate result is an education system dominated by Big Business and Big Government, using taxpayer dollars to push a technocratic agenda in which Texas students are treated as human capital for the 4IR economy. (Source: Klyczek, John, 2025)
A key player in Texas advancing these corporate-driven education reforms is the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Through TPPF Kent Grusendorf and Brooke Rollins are key individuals who forced this into Texas, TPPF played a significant role in bringing online digital virtual learning into the state while pushing Common Core-aligned College and Career Readiness Standards. Their influence has helped shape legislation that aligns Texas education policies with federalized workforce training and data-driven education reforms that prioritize corporate interests over parental rights and student privacy.
One of the leading voices in Texas pushing for School Choice is Kent Grusendorf, a former Texas State Representative and Chair of the House Education Committee and current Senior Fellow focusing on Education Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF)
✔ Grusendorf led efforts to digitize curriculum and remove textbooks in Texas.
✔ Technology lobbyists heavily influenced his policies and had direct access to his office.
✔ Donna Garner testified against Grusendorf’s push for digital curriculum on multiple occasions.
Grusendorf was instrumental in passing SB 6, which opened the floodgates for Common Core instructional materials in Texas.
✔ He was also a key figure in pushing the Visioning/Transformational TASA/TASB plan.
✔ Now, he is leading the charge on School Choice.
Back to the The Project 2025
The Project 2025 education playbook is fundamentally aligned with the longstanding agenda of the Koch-backed State Policy Network (SPN), which includes influential think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. These organizations have been working for decades to transition Texas education from a publicly governed system to a private, corporate-driven enterprise.
Under the guise of "school choice," these policies promote tax-credit scholarships that shift funding from public schools to corporate-controlled charter and private institutions. Many of these schools will be required to conform to data-driven "Pay for Success" (PFS) models, in which student outcomes are financially incentivized based on social credit metrics and workforce readiness benchmarks. In essence, Texas schools will be transformed into talent pipelines for corporations rather than institutions dedicated to fostering independent, critical thinkers.
Legislators Must Protect Texas’ Educational Sovereignty
A Warning to Texas Legislators
Let’s be clear: the legislation below has the potential to devastate our state and irreversibly alter our children's futures. If Texas legislators vote for HB 2, 3, or 4, they will be on the wrong side of history. When the consequences of these misguided policies come to light—when Texas families realize their children’s education has been turned into a corporate-controlled data-mining operation—the burden of responsibility will rest squarely on the shoulders of those who supported it. Future generations will not forget, and neither will the voters who trusted you to protect Texas from federal overreach and technocratic control.
I highly encourage you to read the article linked below.
Source Material for this article: Klyczek, John. (2025, February 13). "In Alignment with Project 2025, Trump Pledges to Eliminate the Dept. of Ed and Replace It with ‘School Choice.’"
John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over a decade. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to several publications, including New Politics, OpEdNews, and the Activist Post. Klyczek holds a black belt in classical tae kwon do, and he is a certified kickboxing instructor under the international Muay Thai Boxing Association. His website is https://schoolworldorder.info