Trump Fails A Crucial Test
Donald Trump doesn’t have any use for public schools — he never attended them, sent his kids to them or supported civic efforts to strengthen them.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that Trump would propose a plan that would decimate public education. But 90 percent of America’s children attend public schools. Trump’s plan to expand failed voucher programs and destabilize public schools is a grave threat to them and to this essential public good.
Trump’s $20 billion proposal to “voucherize” public education would harm 10 children for every 1 child he purports to help. It appears that Trump would cut all Title I funding for low-income students and an additional $5 billion in federal education funding.
The Title I cuts alone could strip funding from up to 56,000 public schools serving more than 21 million children. His plan would rob 5 million public school students with disabilities of essential services.
An additional 5 million English language learners would be denied educational supports. Eight million students would lose the Pell grants that make it possible to attend college. Students across the country would lose tens of thousands of highly qualified teachers and classroom aides, resulting in unacceptably large class sizes and depriving students of one-on-one attention.
And for what? To expand access to charter schools, which generally perform no better than public schools, and voucher schools, which perform far worse. Not surprisingly, a version of Trump’s idea was flatly rejected by bipartisan majorities in Congress just last fall when they passed the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act.
When Trump unveiled his proposal last week in Cleveland, the venue he chose made the case against his own plan. The for-profit charter school where Trump made his announcement received a D and an F on the annual Ohio Department of Education report card, and Ohio’s voucher and charter school sectors have been Trump Fails A Crucial Test | Huffington Post:
