Trump surrogate: GOP candidate would dismantle ‘corrupted, incompetent urban school systems’
A surrogate for Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump told a group of urban school superintendents on Friday that Trump would seek to do away with “corrupted, incompetent” public school systems in America’s cities, replacing them with charter schools and vouchers for private schools.
Such an approach would “encourage competition in the marketplace and eventually dismantle the corrupted, incompetent urban school districts that we have in America today,” said Carl Paladino, Trump’s New York State co-chairman, drawing audible boos from an audience composed largely of people who run the school districts Paladino criticized.
Paladino was unfazed: “A monopoly will not continue to work, it will not solve the problem,” he said, decrying what he described as school districts’ dysfunction and their “incestuous relationships with teachers unions.”
The remarks came at an education town hall in Miami on Friday in conjunction with the 60th annual conference of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of urban school systems. Moderated by journalist Dan Rather, it featured Paladino — who is also a school board member in Buffalo, N.Y. — and Mildred Otero, a surrogate for and former senior adviser to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as three leaders of school systems in swing states.
Friday’s event represented a rare opportunity to hear in-depth discussion of education issues from the two major-party campaigns. The candidates themselves received no direct questions about their education policies during the three presidential debates, and the subject has received little attention on the campaign trail.
Otero, responding to Paladino’s broad criticisms of urban school systems, said it was wrongheaded to believe that there are no examples of success or improvement in urban education. Then she pivoted to Clinton’s plans to expand public preschool and address skyrocketing student debt.
Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the nation’s fourth-largest school system in Miami-Dade County, took exception to Paladino’s premise that there’s something particularly wrong with urban schools. “Poor kids in non-urban districts often perform exactly like poor kids in urban districts,” Carvalho said. “The difference is there are a lot more poor kids in urban districts.”
Math and reading performance in urban districts trails the national average, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” But urban districts have been gaining ground, slowly closing the gap with the rest of the country.
[Trump pitches $20 billion education plan at Ohio charter school that received poor marks from state]
Paladino has been a controversial figure on the national political scene. In August, he told the New York Observer that there is “no doubt” that President Obama is a Muslim, a rumor many Trump surrogate: GOP candidate would dismantle ‘corrupted, incompetent urban school systems’ - The Washington Post:
