Is Donald Trump right about what Gov. Scott Walker did to Wisconsin schools?
Is Donald Trump right about what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s education policies have done to the state’s public schools?
Trump, who is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, is going from one opponent in the race to another — as well as people who aren’t even challenging him — to savage them in one fashion or another. Sometimes, his accusations are, well, ridiculous, such as when he disparaged Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, and, by extension, all prisoners of war, for getting caught by enemies in war. Then there was the time he got mad at South Carolina Sen. Lyndsey Graham and publicly released his cell phone number.
Trump said publicly that he could now attack Walker because a Walker supporter had said something mean about Trump (in the turnabout-is-fair-play spirit). At a rally in Iowa at Oskaloosa High School, Trump said:
“Wisconsin’s doing terribly. It’s in turmoil. The roads are a disaster because they don’t have any money to rebuild them. They’re borrowing money like crazy. They projected a $1 billion surplus, and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion. The schools are a disaster. The hospitals and education was a disaster. And he was totally in favor of Common Core, which I hate!”
He has also recently said Walker was a flip-flopper on the Core: “Scott Walker changed when he saw he was getting creamed, so now he’s not in favor.”
So is any of this accurate?
It is true that Walker’s administration projected a $1 billion surplus but faces a $2.2 billion deficit. A story in the Chicago Tribune late last month said:
It wasn’t long ago that the forecasting arm of the Wisconsin legislature was predicting that state government by mid-2015 would be flush with a surplus topping $1 billion, which Gov. Scott Walker could have showcased in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Today, that projected surplus has morphed into a $2.2 billion budget deficit that Republican lawmakers are struggling to fix.
And it is true that Walker has been at the very least inconsistent on Common Core, being for it before being against it (as I wrote here). Walker’s flip-flops led to an open letter recently signed by an unusual coalition of groups and Is Donald Trump right about what Gov. Scott Walker did to Wisconsin schools? - The Washington Post: