Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos Gets Kellyanne Conway to Help Push a $5B Voucher Program
Peter Greene is a retired Pennsylvania teacher who contributes education-related articles to Forbes magazine. I find his writing style both informative and engaging.
Today, I share with my readers excerpts from Greene’s October 02, 2019, piece, entitled, “Betsy DeVos Enlists the Help of Kelyanne Conway and American Enterprise Institute to Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program.”
School choice is DeVos’ raison d’etre.
The sale is not going well.
From Greene’s article:
On Tuesday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway sat down with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to make one more pitch for DeVos’s Education Freedom Scholarships. The program seems unlikely to succeed on the federal level.What Is She Selling?The EFS are what’s known as a tax credit scholarship. Several states have them, and they work like this: a donor gives money to a scholarship organization, then that program issues a scholarship for a student to attend a school, while the government credits some portion of the donation against the donor’s tax bill. In the case of DeVos’s program, the amount would be 100%. If I donate $100,000 to a scholarship organization, I pay $100,000 less in federal taxes.What Are The Problems With Her Program?DeVos has been plugging the program with variations of the following quote from Tuesday’s discussion:“Our Education Freedom Scholarships proposal…doesn’t grow the CONTINUE READING: Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos Gets Kellyanne Conway to Help Push a $5B Voucher Program | deutsch29
