DFER Dances Around Trump’s Public School Wrecking Ball
By John Thompson.
Rachel M. Cohen’s “The War on Public Schools” warns that “Charters, vouchers, and disposable teachers are Trump’s targets.” Cohen’s American Prospect article details both the president-elect’s agenda, and a political history that Democrats shouldn’t ignore.
Trump has long proclaimed his plan to invest $20 billion dollars for expanding charters and private-school vouchers. Charter supporter Martin West suggests that Trump is likely to triple the annual federal investments in charters. Moreover, Republicans are “eager to expand Washington, D.C.’s private-school voucher program.” The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke says, “I think [the Republican Congress and new administration] could eventually turn D.C. into an all-choice district like we see in New Orleans.”
One would have thought that regardless of one’s position on choice that one lesson of post-NCLB school policy is that there are many mediocre, average, and bad charters but there aren’t nearly as many high-performing, high-poverty charters as would be necessary to significantly improve urban and rural education. But, Betsy DeVos’ husband, Richard, was an investor in K12 Inc., a national for-profit virtual charter school company. If voucher funding is expanded, true believers in competition could delude themselves into believing – or claiming to believe – that for-profit online learning will create scalable solutions.
Before Rob Goad was named as the White House education advisor, Cohen described his Title I portability agenda. She reviewed the defeat of portability after President Obama threatened to veto “any version of the law that contained it,” and she wrote, “a White House report issued in 2015 said that Title I portability would DFER Dances Around Trump's Public School Wrecking Ball - Living in Dialogue:
