Why charter school leaders are furious at Trump and Betsy DeVos
Now, some leaders in the charter world, including the head of the nation’s largest charter school organization, are furious at them.
On Monday, the Trump administration released its 2021 budget proposal, and there was a gargantuan surprise in the Education Department’s plan for charter school funding.
It calls for the effective elimination of the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), which has funded the expansion of charter schools since 1994 to the tune of $3.3 billion. Forty percent of operational charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — were created with money from this program.
Instead of maintaining CSP as a discrete program, the administration is proposing it be lumped with nearly 30 other Education Department programs — including support for homeless students, civics education, magnet schools and school safety — into a single $19 billion block grant for states to use as they want on programs most important to them. The administration said it wants to give states more control of how they spend federal money while reducing the federal education footprint. States could use grant funding to expand charter schools, but other priorities would compete with it.
The administration’s main education priority doesn’t even show up in the Education Department’s proposed budget. Instead, it appears as a line item in the Treasury Department as a tax expenditure: $5 billion to give tax breaks for a program called the Education Freedom Scholarships, which would use CONTINUE READING: Why charter school leaders are now furious at Trump and DeVos - The Washington Post
Big Education Ape: Betsy DeVos Personally Saves Philly Student from a Government… Charter School(?) | deutsch29 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/02/betsy-devos-personally-saves-philly.html