The Jeff Bryant Report
Trump Is Vulnerable On Education. Do Democrats Care?
THIS WEEK: SCOTUS Okays Vouchers? … Vouchers Disappoint … TrumpCare Hurts Kids … CBC Dumps Trump … College Loan Fail
TOP STORY
Trump Is Vulnerable On Education. Do Democrats Care?
By Jeff Bryant
“A string of special election defeats has left Democrats bewildered at how they can continue to lose against a party led by the most unpopular president ever … As Democrats retool their messages about the economy and healthcare to more sharply differentiate their party from the party of Donald Trump, will they cleave from the Republican education platform too? There’s new evidence they should.”
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NEWS AND VIEWS
Supreme Court Ruling Could Shape Future of School Choice
The New York Times
“A Supreme Court ruling that a church-run preschool must be granted publicly funded tire scraps for its playground seemed … to be narrowly drawn… But school choice advocates across the nation saw the decision as a game changer in the divisive debate over publicly funded vouchers for private religious schools … Voucher opponents, however, considered the narrow scope of the Supreme Court decision to be an indication that the court was not interested in taking on the fundamental church-state divide.”
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School Voucher Recipients Lose Ground At First, Then Catch Up To Peers, Studies Find
The Washington Post
“Students who received publicly funded vouchers in Indiana and Louisiana appeared to lose significant academic ground in the first two years after switching to private schools but then caught up to their public-school counterparts in subsequent years … The studies do not show that vouchers led to significantly stronger math and reading performance overall … There are no examples of any statewide [voucher] program producing overall positive academic results … Students who returned to public school experienced what the researchers described as ‘modest-to-substantial achievement losses during their time in private schools.’”
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Hidden Costs of Senate Health Care Bill: Uninsured Kids Do Worse In School, More Likely To Drop Out
The 74
“Senate Republican … Obamacare repeal proposal … preserves the House bill’s sweeping cuts to the entitlement, which furnishes roughly $4 billion annually to school districts … But Medicaid isn’t the only piece of the GOP’s repeal efforts that will touch classrooms … Some 4.4 million kids could lose [healthcare insurance] coverage by 2019 …. A wealth of research suggests that access to early medical care through insurance programs like Medicaid leads to better academic and life outcomes down the line.”
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Black Caucus Dumps Trump Meeting, Says DeVos Won’t Protect Civil Rights
Education Week
“The Congressional Black Caucus … in a Wednesday letter to the president … points to a number of areas where the Trump administration ignored the group’s input, and says that the president’s proposed budget for fiscal 2018 would ‘devastate’ the communities represented by the CBC … ‘Secretary [of Education Betsy] DeVos has also refused to protect children from being discriminated against … and terminated an Obama administration program focused on improving school diversity and student achievement in the lowest-performing schools across this country’ … The CBC letter criticizes the proposed Trump budget for seeking cuts to TRIO, a department program designed to help disadvantaged students reach and succeed in college, because of the impact of such cuts on historically black colleges and universities.”
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Consumer Agency Condemns Abuses in Loan Forgiveness Program
The New York Times
“The government’s consumer watchdog is adding its voice to a growing chorus of warnings about problems with a federal program that permits people who take public service jobs to have their student loans forgiven after a decade. Confusing rules, bureaucratic tripwires and outright errors are hindering thousands of people as they try to take advantage of the program … The volume of complaints is especially alarming because the program has not yet reached its first milestone: forgiving debts … Many borrowers who expect to qualify are knocked out by technicalities … Even paying too much can inadvertently disqualify people.”
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