When Betsy DeVos Goes on the Campaign Trail for President Trump, Here Is the Ideology She Promotes | janresseger

When Betsy DeVos Goes on the Campaign Trail for President Trump, Here Is the Ideology She Promotes | janresseger

When Betsy DeVos Goes on the Campaign Trail for President Trump, Here Is the Ideology She Promotes

If you listened to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Message last week, you know that he lauded school choice and attacked government schools: “The next step forward in building an inclusive society is making sure that every young American gets a great education and the opportunity to achieve the American Dream… Yet for too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.”

In the speech, Trump said these words as part of supporting Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s proposed $5 billion program for private school tuition vouchers. DeVos’s tax credit vouchers have been the centerpiece of the President’s proposed education budget for several years running, and so far they haven’t actually made it into federal policy.  Instead Congress has continued to support more essential federal programs, Title I for the schools serving children in poverty, and the mandated programming under the Individuals with Disability Education Act.  In the leanest years, Congress has kept these two essential federal supports at least flat-funded.  And in December of 2019, in the final budget for the current year, Congress added $450 million for Title I and $410 million for IDEA. Such modest increases for these essential programs are not enough to help our 90,000 public schools even keep up with the growing number of children qualifying for these programs, but at least Congress has been absolutely clear about its priorities: Neither tuition tax credits nor any other private school tuition vouchers are a current Congressional priority.

But despite that Betsy DeVos’s federal tuition tax credit proposal seems to be going nowhere, we are seeing and hearing from Betsy a lot these days.  As the President pursues his 2020 CONTINUE READING: When Betsy DeVos Goes on the Campaign Trail for President Trump, Here Is the Ideology She Promotes | janresseger