Even with her expertise, she still appreciates the support she gets through a University of Arkansas-run network. With funding from a federal grant, 250 participants from across the state work on increasing and for delays in speech, motor or social skills. 

“We try to catch those things early,” said Eichler. The network helped her become nationally accredited and now she’s one of the top-ranked providers in Arkansas. “The better we get, the better our kids get. It’s a win-win for our state.”

But President Donald Trump now wants to eliminate the funding that paid for that network and similar projects nationwide. Launched in 2014 during the Obama administration, were intended to expand pre-K for 4-year-olds from low-income families. During his first term, Trump significantly the grants into what Katharine Stevens, an early-childhood policy expert, described as a “conservative-friendly” effort to promote parent choice and put decisions about improving early learning in the hands of states.

The funds benefit kids from birth to age 5, not just pre-K students. That’s why it’s hard for her to understand Trump’s reason for eliminating them. 

“I sympathize with people who are feeling like the federal government has just grown way out of control,” said Stevens, founder and president of the Center on Child and Family Policy, a right-leaning early childhood think tank. But the grants, she said, have delivered “a lot of bang for the buck” by making it easier for parents to find high-quality programs. “Just doesn’t make sense to end it.” 

Despite his first-term goal of allowing states to take the lead, Trump wants to cut the program because it doesn’t increase the supply of preschool slots. The would save $539 million. Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, whose has guided much of the president’s second term, said the funding falls short because child care and early education programs don’t meet the demand. 

“These taxpayer dollars have primarily gone towards the planning and administrative side of preschool — things like ‘identifying needs’ and ‘engaging stakeholders,’ ” she said. “What’s needed most is more child care providers and more slots for children.”

The grant program might result in or incentive payments for providers, but doesn’t necessarily bring new teachers into the field, she said.  

In an earlier , the Trump administration pinned its objections on former President Joe Biden’s use of the “unproductive funds” to “push [diversity, equity and inclusion] on to toddlers.” As an example, a brief paragraph points to Minnesota, which listed DEI buzzwords like “racial equity” and “intersectionality” as for the grant in 2021. 

But many of the grants have gone to red states like Alabama, Florida and Idaho that have used the money to keep parents in the workforce and of early care and education programs, including Head Start.

Last October, 10 states and the District of Columbia received a , totaling $87 million over three years. One grantee, Kansas, is set to receive $21 million. In keeping with the to reduce regulations, the to speed up the fingerprinting process for staff and streamline applications for extra funding.

Minnesota intends to use its $24 million to support , family engagement efforts and salaries for early-childhood mental health professionals. The goals that the administration labeled DEI are not for classroom activities, said Anna Kurth, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Education, but to help children from low-income families gain access to services. 

As Congress debates next year’s budget, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking Democrat on the and a former preschool teacher, said she hopes the grants continue. 

“President Trump talks a lot about parental choice, and here he is pushing to ax investments to expand families’ child care and pre-K options,” she said in a statement to ����Ӱ��. “Congress has got to reject these cuts, and I’ll be doing everything I can to ensure we do.”

It’s unclear whether Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who chairs the committee, agrees with the president’s budget plan. But in announcing a Preschool Development Grant in 2023, she said it would “build an educational foundation for Maine children that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.”

‘Shore it up’

Parents have before their children become old enough for school, including long waitlists for good programs and costs that are often out of reach. Providers face their own financial obstacles. They’re compared to those in professions requiring similar training, and over 40% depend on and other public assistance programs to get by.

Stanford University’s , which has captured the impact of the pandemic on families and the workforce, shows that the percentage of early education providers struggling to afford at least one basic need increased in 2022 and was still high in 2024. 

Eliminating the grants won’t solve those problems, said Philip Fisher, who directs the Stanford Center on Early Childhood and founded the survey.

“If you think about a market that’s teetering on the edge of collapse, resources that go into that market are going to help shore it up,” he said. “This may not directly put money into the pockets of providers or parents to pay for care, but it creates a more efficient system and enhances quality — a huge issue for a lot of parents.”

States have used the funds to address some of those challenges and to encourage early education leaders from school districts, child care centers and faith-based programs to tackle them together.

With a for 4-year-olds already in place, used its roughly $48 million in federal grants to coach child care providers, help teachers get bachelor’s degrees and improve transitions for kids into kindergarten.

The University of Arkansas spent the it received in 2023 to improve quality in rural areas, like Eichler’s town of Romance, about 45 miles north of Little Rock. 

“Large centers just aren’t viable in some of our communities,” said Kathy Pillow-Price, director of Early Care and Education Projects at the university. “Family child care providers really support us and our workforce.” 

‘Private and faith-based’

With advocates concerned about the future of Head Start, which the administration initially proposed to eliminate, the fate of the Preschool Development Grants has received less attention. 

Trump’s budget, released May 30, preserves Head Start — rejecting, for now, a Project 2025 to end it. The document didn’t specifically cite Preschool Development Grants, but it called for shifting more child care funding toward . Trump’s Jan. 29 on school choice echoed that theme by calling for families to use their child care subsidies for“private and faith-based options.”

But experts say the grants have already met those expectations. As in Arkansas, Idaho used its funds to support the growth of licensed in “child care deserts,” like rural areas. Leaders also offered providers training in business practices. 

Christian and other religious early-childhood programs have been among those benefiting from the federal money. According to a , “faith-based entities” were among the new partners in 2019 participating in state and local efforts to improve services. 

The grant program has been a boon to member schools by supporting quality improvements and training opportunities for staff, said Althea Penn, director of early education for the Association of Christian Schools International. 

Stevens, with the Center on Child and Family Policy, remembers how the goals of the program from primarily expanding pre-K during the Obama years to encouraging states to identify their own priorities under Trump. 

“We need state-level innovation,” she said. “That is the entire purpose of these grants.”

The full program, entitled , is a roadmap for conservative rule whose heft rivals that of the more prolix Harry Potter novels. Laid out in 43 bullet-pointed pages, its chapter on education offers prescriptions that range from the sweeping to the picayune — proposing both to eliminate Title I grants to high-poverty schools and to revise accreditation requirements under the Higher Education Act. 

The ultimate goal is the wholesale abolition of the Department of Education, with many of its dedicated offices and responsibilities distributed either to states or other agencies. Jack Jennings, a retired policy maven who formerly served as Democrats’ top education aide in the House of Representatives, said that prize may prove difficult to win. 

But even failing the ideal, he argued, the plan offers a step-by-step playbook to shrink the federal government’s role in schools as much as possible over the next four years.

“They want to get rid of the department in the long term, but the way to do that in the short term is by spinning off agencies until they don’t have anything left,” Jennings said. 

With this week’s Republican National Convention putting a spotlight on the party’s aspirations for governance, the text could become the public face of conservative policy throughout the campaign.

Mandate for Leadership is the intellectual product of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation and its efforts to guide the next presidential transition, dubbed Project 2025. It is only the latest of a series of “policy bibles” issued by Heritage, , which have heavily influenced Republicans presidents and presidential candidates.

Each of its 30 sections focuses on revamping a different domain of the U.S. government in the event of a GOP victory in November. Beyond those specific battle plans, its authors with the flexibility to fire and replace thousands of civil servants, sometimes referred to as denizens of the “deep state.”

Perhaps more importantly, the chapter delves into a level of detail seldom seen even among wonk monographs, carefully listing the agency regulations and executive orders it intends to either cull or restore.

President Trump with Project 2025 earlier this month, calling some of its notions “ridiculous and abysmal” after the effort provoked from Democrats and the media. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who was announced as the former president’s running mate on Monday, that only Trump will determine the priorities of his potential administration; his own pronouncements on education — including as a means of curbing DEI efforts and to abide by the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences in admissions — have largely avoided the issue of K–12 schools.

Yet Mandate for Leadership’s education portion bears a striking resemblance to that of , which promises to expand school choice, revert educational authority to states, and combat “gender indoctrination” in classrooms.

Several longtime education observers believe that many of those goals could be enacted with the help of friendly courts and Republican majorities in Congress. Jennings said it was rare for a strategy document to both set out an ideological vision and instruct its audience how to realize it “by chapter and verse.”

“This is very meaningful,” Jennings said. “In my experience, it’s the most precise that any candidate for president has been in terms of what they’re going to do in office.”

NEA as ‘radical’ interest group 

Written by Lindsey Burke, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, much of the Mandate’s chapter on education argues for a dramatic downsizing of Washington’s powers. 

Title I, to nearly two-thirds of public schools, would be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and disbursed to states as a block grant with no strings attached; within a decade, the states would assume the responsibility of funding it themselves. Roughly fourteen billion dollars of special education funding under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act would similarly be shifted to the purview of HHS. 

In both instances, Burke suggests that existing funding be targeted directly to eligible families for use as “micro-education savings accounts.” ESAs, which provide money for families to use on education expenses such as private school tuition, have become the favored school choice policy for Republican governors in the Biden presidency, with new programs just over the last three years.
Federal authority could also be used to broaden school choice in schools under the direct jurisdiction of the U.S. government. The chapter advocates that ESAs be made available to students in Washington, D.C. — , though eligibility in the District is currently limited by income — as well as those attending schools on military bases and on tribal lands.

The chapter continues by calling on lawmakers to rescind the special congressional charter of the National Education Association, which Burke labels a “demonstrably radical special interest group.” The was created in 1906 in recognition of the NEA’s special educational mission, and has periodically from Republicans for exempting the organization from paying property taxes on its sizable headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The proposed revocation would likely have few practical consequences, but would come as a blow to the prestige of America’s largest labor union. The NEA did not respond to requests for comment about the proposition. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story.

Finally, Burke expounds at length on the need for greater protections for family autonomy, including legislation that would allow parents to seek legal redress if the federal government enforces a policy “in a way that undermines their right and responsibility to raise, educate, and care for their children.” In the absence of written parental consent, staff at schools under federal jurisdiction would also be forbidden from addressing students by a name or pronoun other than that which appears on their birth certificate. 

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group GLSEN, said in a statement that a change of that kind would give parents “stronger judicial scrutiny than victims of sex discrimination.”

“Project 2025 exists outside the bounds of common decency and is a roadmap for an extremist refashioning of the United States that erases legal recognition of marginalized communities and tears apart the threads that bind our nation together,” Willingham-Jaggers wrote.

Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who served as an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, said Burke’s plan combined perennial conservative calls for a reduced federal role — Heritage’s also advocated that Title I and IDEA grants be made “portable” for families — with a sizable complement of “new regulations, new rights, new programs.”

“To me, the chapter is a little schizophrenic,” Finn said. “It’s about 70 or 80 percent ‘Let’s do away with this,’ and 20 or 30 percent ‘Let’s do new stuff that we want to get done.’ And they want to use their new leverage in the federal government to get it done.”

Both forceful and wide-ranging, the education portion is the most assertive statement of policy intentions that Trump and his conservative allies have offered over the last few years. But pledging to unshackle states from federal interference — or else nationalizing the K–12 push of red states, which have spent the last few years rapidly expanding school choice and passing parental rights laws — the paper may also reflect a somewhat reduced interest in advancing new federal policies and programs. 

The often-vicious education controversies of the last few years, from COVID-related school closures to trans participation in youth sports, helped stoke a parent empowerment movement that captured national attention. But some of that energy dissipated as groups like Moms for Liberty and Republican aspirants like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis failed to convert their followings into national political gains.

An this spring found that just 54 candidates out of the 166 endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their races during the 2023 local election cycle; involving one of the group’s founders has proved a distraction as organizing efforts ramp up for November.

A succession of Republican governors achieved a breakthrough beginning last year by establishing or expanding ESA programs in their states, but lasting victories on culture-war issues have been harder to achieve. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s widely-publicized attempt to display the Ten Commandments in every K–12 classroom even by Republican-appointed judges.

Democrats have taken aim at Project 2025, making it their central target as doubts form around whether President Joe Biden will be replaced on the party’s presidential ticket. A recent YouGov poll found that while most Americans still haven’t heard much about the effort, feel unfavorably toward it. 

Heath Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies presidential transitions, said that K–12 schools were “not as central” to President Trump’s political vision as issues like trade and immigration.

“There’s an irony to that because of the prominence of school issues in the conservative movement over the last few years,” Brown remarked. “But it doesn’t seem that the Trump campaign or the MAGA movement is nearly as concerned with schools today as they were 18 months ago.”

The president’s critical year one

The success of the Mandate education plan may hinge significantly on what happens in the next 18 months. 

If Trump wins, Republicans would also need to hold the House of Representatives and retake the Senate in order to advance legislation on codifying parental rights or shrinking the Department of Education. And given how contentious some of those proposals are likely to be, Jennings said, the president would likely need to act fast.

“The president has most of his power the first year he’s in office,” he said. “It’s a four-year term, and if he’s going to get something done, he has to do it right away.”

In the hyper-partisan climate of the 2020s, incoming presidents tend to enjoy their highest poll numbers and maximal sway with Congress in the . But reorganizing government can be achingly slow work: When then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sought to alter Title IX regulations related to sexual assault on college campus, the process of review and revision . President Biden’s Department of Education spent revising the revisions, which largely brought federal guidance back in line with the pre-Trump standard.

The task of dismantling an entire cabinet department, or at least scattering its responsibilities elsewhere within the executive branch, would be exponentially more complicated, said Brown. Even Republicans otherwise favorable to Trump’s platform might rebel once it became clear that their states and districts could lose out on federal dollars. Discussions have emerged among conservative legislators in Tennessee and Oklahoma about whether to forgo federal funds tied to mandates around gender identity recognition, but have thus far .

“The White House would face, on each and every one of these proposals, forceful resistance from those in Congress who believe in these programs; from all the advocates of these programs, whom the administration ultimately has to work with; and also the career officials, who understand that the programs are written into law and that changing them is likely infeasible,” he argued.

But some of the most prominent ideas in the Mandate for Leadership could likely be pursued without congressional approval. Most famously, the document recommends reinstating a Trump-era executive order known as Schedule F, which would in policymaking roles. While it would likely take years to identify, reclassify, terminate, and replace all the civil servants that a second Trump administration might like to target, such a reform holds the potential of fundamentally changing the way the Department of Education (among countless other agencies) functions.

Finn, who would agree in principle to an “intelligent voucherization” of federal programs like Title I, said he believed much of the Project 2025 agenda could well be realized with a concerted push. 

“I really think you could do a fair chunk of this in a single term if you had the right stars lined up in Congress. Not many of these things are, on their face, unconstitutional; therefore, if you changed the laws and the regulations, the courts — especially a conservative Supreme Court — would be unlikely to undo the changes.”

At a hosted by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, DeSantis pointed to recent dismal national test scores as vindication for his decision to fully reopen schools in the fall of 2020. He touted his parental rights agenda and defended his opposition to mask mandates and quarantines for children who weren’t sick.

“The way different places handled COVID is going to reverberate in terms of the educational outcomes for these kids for quite some time,” he said. “We got the big issues right. Unfortunately, a lot of places around the country got the big issues wrong.”

The event coincided with the release of a new , which ranks Florida as first in the nation for school choice, transparency on education and the extent to which it keeps “overburdensome” regulations to a minimum. But as with recent appearances in and , the events also offered an opportunity to position DeSantis, who is running for reelection against Democrat Charlie Crist, as a potential national candidate. 

“You can stand for regular people, and we can beat these elites,” he said, acknowledging the “blowback” he faced from teachers unions for requiring schools to be open five days a week. “I’ll take the arrows. That’s what a leader does.”

In the , DeSantis has at least a 5 percentage point lead over Crist. Critics say his policies defy Republicans’ preference for local control, and he’s facing a federal lawsuit over a new law that limits what teachers and college professors can say about race and gender in the classroom. 

DeSantis-backed school board candidates picked up seats across Florida in last month’s primary. But Corey DeAngelis, a speaker at the event and a senior fellow at the conservative American Federation for Children, said the anti-union message resonates beyond Florida.

He pointed to the defeat of nine out of 10 in the Republican primary who were backed by the Tennessee Education Association. 

“Coming out against parental rights in education is becoming a form of political suicide,” he said, citing Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s statement in last year’s Virginia governor’s race that he didn’t think “parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Many observers link that comment to his defeat by Republican Glenn Youngkin.

‘Political games’

McAuliffe during that campaign for having American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten join him at a rally. But that hasn’t stopped some Democratic candidates from giving the teachers unions even more visibility this year. 

In Florida, Crist chose United Teachers of Dade President as his running mate. And in Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, in a tight race against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz for a Senate seat, said if he wins, would be to the teachers unions.

Democrats are divided over whether President Joe Biden’s could lift their chances at the polls in November. But some, like Nevada incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, running against Republican Adam Laxalt, on passage of the American Rescue Plan, which included $122 billion for K-12. 

Heather Harding, executive director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future, is among those trying to redirect the conversation on education away from culture wars. Funded by organizations that , the nonprofit is organizing parents and educators to counter conservative activist groups like Moms for Liberty.

“Many politicians across the country are manufacturing controversies and outrage for their own personal gain,” Harding said in an email, without naming DeSantis specifically. “Their political games are hurting our children’s education and futures.”

The left-leaning Network for Public Education issued its own earlier this year, ranking states on their “resistance to the privatization of public education.” Nebraska and North Dakota, which have neither voucher programs nor charter school laws, both received an A+.

By contrast, the Heritage Foundation’s new tool measures education policies that matter most to conservatives. States received more points if they support alternative teacher licensing programs and dropped Common Core standards. They ranked lower, however, if they have a lot of districts with diversity officers, which according to their , “provide political support and organization to one side of the debate over the contentious issues of race and opportunity.”

The report card builds on earlier efforts — from groups like and the conservative — to identify states with more choice-friendly features at a time when the movement to give families more options has picked up momentum.

Arizona, which came in second in the report card, recently opened up its to any family. Proponents of expanded choice want to see public education funds “follow the child” into whatever school, public or private, the parent chooses.

“If you like your public school, you can keep your public school,” DeAngelis said, offering a twist on the motto former President Barack Obama used to promote the Affordable Care Act. “I think we’re going to look back in a couple of decades … and think it was just absolutely ridiculous that we forced families to take their kids’ education dollars to residentially assigned government-run institutions.”