Trump school voucher plan would face huge obstacles in California
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education virtually guarantees that his administration will try to promote a “school choice” agenda, which includes giving vouchers to low-income children that could be used to help pay for, among other things, private school tuition.
Promoting vouchers, especially for private schools, has been a decades-long passion of DeVos’. It is also the most specific idea Donald Trump proposed for K-12 schools during a turbulent campaign in which education issues were rarely mentioned. Trump first floated this idea on Sept. 8, just two months before election day. “I want every single inner-city child in America who is today trapped in a failing school to have the freedom, the civil right, to attend the school of their choice,” Trump said at a speech in Cleveland.
As outlined on his website, his plan would grant vouchers worth as much as $12,000 each to every low-income student in the United States to use at the private, magnet, charter or traditional public school of his or her choice.
School choice, his website declares, “is the civil rights issue of our time.” This not a new idea for Trump, suggesting that it is likely to have staying power after he gets to the White House. He described a similar notion in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.”
But how would such a plan work in California? At the moment, there are more questions than answers.
“It is hard to know how this will play out because we don’t have a firm proposal, just Trump school voucher plan would face huge obstacles in California | EdSource: