In now-delayed book, Heritage president details MAGA plans to remake education: “America's teachers have gone insane”

Kevin Roberts' Dawn's Early Light: “We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too"

Written by Madeline Peltz

Research contributions from Justin Horowitz

Published

Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts’ now-delayed book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. In a review of the chapter on American education titled “Schools Should Teach Piety,” Roberts attacks teachers and advocates for gutting the public school system through so-called “school choice” policies.

“A revolution in American education has begun,” Roberts threatens, before later specifying the scope of his vision: “We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too.”

Media Matters previously reported on the content of Dawn’s Early Light in which Roberts attacks birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. In the chapter on family policy, he says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice" but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift,” and he labels reproductive choice methods as a “snake strangling the American family.” Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance wrote the foreword, calling Roberts’ ideas an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

Roberts begins the book’s education chapter with a warning: “I’ll state it extra clearly for the FBI: I am a parental rights extremist.” Presumably he is referring to the false right-wing media narrative that the FBI is targeting conservative parents who show up to and complain about policies at school board meetings. (This is not an accurate understanding of the way that the FBI tracks threats across the country — in this case, those made against school employees — and the bureau explicitly stated that it “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”)

The Heritage president then goes on to attack teachers (emphasis added):

The current educational crisis does not really arise from a fundamental disagreement about rights, about whether a parent or a teacher should educate a child. In a healthy society, it would be both. The problem is that our schools have been transformed from institutions designed to cultivate children’s souls into godless assembly lines meant to shape obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion.

Right now, parents’ rights must be jealously guarded because America’s teachers have gone insane. The reason many parents are having to reassert their rights is that teachers are trying to enforce a truly radical agenda, one that assumes that reality is a social construct.

Roberts repeatedly describes this “radical agenda” of America’s teachers in paranoid, conspiratorial terms.

“It might seem to average American parents as though our current educational environment is a passing fad,” he writes. “In fact, it’s the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones.”

Teachers are shaping their students into “ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” the Heritage Foundation president warns, later adding that “the various educational factions of the Party of Destruction” are seeking “to replace parents, to replace the tradition parents are trying to hand on with a very different one, like a cuckoo kicking another bird’s babies out of the nest to replace them with its own.”

Roberts also passionately advocates for so-called “school choice” policies.

“The most powerful tool we have in realizing the ideal of American education is universal school choice,” he claims. “Universal school choice lifts all boats by ensuring that parents are supported to make the decisions that are best for their kids and creating meaningful competition and market signals to all schools, including public schools.”

“School choice” is a favorite cause of the right and is associated with the conservative push to upend and destroy the American public school system. The term refers to policies providing private school vouchers or promoting school privatization, which conservatives and right-wing media argue is an answer to “woke” public school curriculums. These private school vouchers take funding away from public schools and ultimately do not benefit school kids — as the American Federation of Teachers notes, “research shows that voucher programs either fail to increase student performance or actually hurt student achievement.”

Throughout the chapter, Roberts recounts his experience founding and running John Paul the Great Academy, a private Catholic school in Louisiana. He suggests the “classical education movement” rather than progressive teaching practices “may help save Western civilization.” Philosophical debates aside, he clearly seeks to take the practices that served a small, private, Catholic community and apply them broadly to the entire public education system.

We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too. We seek to return American education to a tradition that encourages the love of beauty, awakens wonder, teaches gratitude for our republic, and instills piety toward our nation, even as it teaches a prudent and circumspect history of its flaws. We fight for this regardless of whether your kids are in a public school, a charter school, or a private school or homeschooled.

The publication delay of Dawn’s Early Light comes amid backlash against the Heritage-led initiative Project 2025, which aims to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration and has deep ties to former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.

Project 2025 seeks to overhaul America’s education system and the support it gets from the federal government by eliminating the Department of Education, gutting federal loan programs, lifting regulations on federal education spending, and redirecting public school funding “to fund families directly” to allow “education choice.”

In the introduction to Project 2025, Roberts wrote that “bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” This language echoes years of right-wing media attacks against schools and teachers as “woke” “groomers” who push radical racial and gender propaganda. 

Project 2025 is also partnered with the extreme far-right group Moms for Liberty, an extreme far-right group that rose to prominence in the backlash to COVID-19 school policies and has opposed various LGBTQ- and diversity-related efforts in schools and school libraries.