Donald Trump, whose own children went to private schools that cost about $50,000 a year (or more), has swallowed the far-right Republican doctrine that public schools are “government schools,” and thus somehow less than legitimate.
Donald Trump laid out a $20 billion initiative to bust up a federal “education monopoly,” accusing Democrats of having “trapped” black and Hispanic children in “failing government schools.”
In a speech in Cleveland, and on his website, Trump vowed to support school choice and merit pay for teachers.
“Our campaign represents the long-awaited chance to break with the bitter failures of the past and to embrace a new and strong American future,” Trump said, the Washington Examiner reports.
“There’s no failed policy more in need of change than our government-run education monopoly and you know that’s exactly what it is.”
The Democratic Party has “trapped millions of African-American and Hispanic youth in failing government schools that deny them the opportunity to join the ladder of American success,” he told the crowd, according to the Examiner.
Obviously no one has ever told him that every high-performing nation in the world has a strong public school system, not a choice system of charters and vouchers.
If this guy is elected, you can kiss public schools goodbye.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I figure we’re likely to kiss the world good-bye so his ed policy won’t matter.
Agreed. This would be expected.
As a concerned citizen, I am thankful for our government schools that are largely responsible for making our country what it is today. Our public schools are the keystone of our democratic principles and must be defended at all costs. They have provide opportunities to generations of Americans. The way Trump and many of our leaders demonize public education is a baseless lie that is frankly unpatriotic. Corporate education cannot teach civic duty or American history with the same level of commitment as a government school. In fact, a private company will always put profit ahead of people. Public education is not without its problems and flaws, and now many of the problems stem from being under siege by corporations and politicians that seek to turn our public funds over to clueless private entities. Our best hope for a stable, productive, collective future is in improving and fully funding our public schools.http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Public-education/An-American-imperative-Public-education-
What does he define as a government school? Any school that gets public money? Or any school that does not have to abide by all the local, state and federal regulations? This supposed pejorative, “government school,” is just so much flim-flam hokus-pokery of no value, merit or consequence. For the most part, the public schools are the creations of the local duly elected school boards plus an overlay of state (mostly) and federal regulations. This is of course a shot at the district schools where most of the kids are educated. It’s not a monopoly, it’s a valued public service much as the police and the fire departments are. It’s just vilely smarmy, misleading and duplicitous to characterize the district public schools as being a monopoly.
Whoops, should have said: “Or any school that DOES have to abide by all the local, state and federal regulations?
Trump is like a kid that sings the national anthem as “Jose, can you see?” He is mouthing all the right wing rhetoric that a speech writer gave him to regurgitate. There is no doubt if given the chance, he will destroy public schools, especially if he can find a way to make it pay and fleece taxpayers in the process.
And he is courting Koch money with this line; this “government” schools as indoctrinating boogeymen comes straight out of Kansas.
Finally, we found the cliff!
We have been walking, or have been collectively shoved toward this cliff for years. We did not know exactly where that tipping point was. Well, we just heard it from one of the most dangerous men in our life time.
Women and children first?
Our Nation is in HUGE trouble!
WHO IS PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN?
Corporate GREED & Profeteers plan to squeeze every ¢ent out of our society…
Remember, they are capable of charging us $600 Epipens, where children die if parents can’t afford to save their kids.
Evil is knocking loud and clear…but millions cheer.
What happened to us?
I’d still like these regressive right wingers who rant against “gubmint skools” to please explain how almost 14,000 different school districts amount to a monopoly. The lies, abuse and misuse of the language is so rampant that folks think that “free market schools” would do tremendously better than those gubmint skools. Effing Insane.
When these suburban moms have to take out $30,000 loans for their kids’ elementary school because Trump destroyed their good public schools, maybe they will stop voting Republican. But I hear that demographic is turning against Trump in droves.
Duane, they do not care if the schools do better, they have stated here in Nevada they would like to get the schools off the budget and force parents to pay the full cost in the market of K-12 schooling. They echo Romney in saying you will get the education you can afford and it is the parents responsibility. They do not really care about quality of schools, they will have their private schools, they do not believe education is a right.
“Obviously no one has ever told him that every high-performing nation in the world has a strong public school system, not a choice system of charters and vouchers.”
Of course, each of those nations also has a far better educational process to create the TEACHERS. Whereas educational courses are a part of a college education, it is by far a smaller part as compared to those high performing nations. AND, as far as access is concerned, many of these same nations treat the “confessional” schools the same as they do the public schools. Meaning: If I want to send my kids to a Christian (Muslim, Jewish, Montessori) School, for example, the State makes no difference in funding. Each school is held to the same standards as far as teacher education is concerned and such.
When I sent my oldest off to school, it was an easy choice: A public school with a principal cussing at the kids during recess, or a “Christian” school where things like that would never be tolerated. Even though it was more dangerous for the kids to get there (Major traffic artery to cross), and even though the Christian school was at the border of one of the worst parts of town, I preferred a non-cussing staff.
Rudy, most high performing nations do NOT fund religious schools.
England
Holland
Belgium
France
Germany
Spain
Greece
Italy
Sorry, Rudy. NOT the high performing nations. The US reached an understanding in the early 19th century that public money would not go to religious schools. Our public schools promote civic unity, not religious separatism. We have n geographical lines that define religious groups. We are all Americans.
We are all Americans.
But some of us are
African-American
Hispanic – American
Asian-American
Caucasian – American
And a great number more of Americans
High performing nations – the majority of the nations mentioned are high performing nations.
Religious based schools are subject to the same rules and requirements as the public schools.
At the “Christian” school where my children attended, they had large numbers of Muslims, Hindi, Catholics, atheists… All people whose parents appreciated the strict behavior guidelines for behavior, the consistency of teacher interaction etc.
it’s easy to lambast what you have not experienced. From personal experience growing up in the Netherlands, having brought up my kids there till early high school.
Rudy,
Yes, This nation is composed of hundreds of groups from different races, religions, and ethnic groups. Our founders had the wisdom to understand that there would be no established religion. Our beautiful experiment in pluralism works to the extent that our public institutions do not support separatism. You are free to send your children to a religious school but at your own expense. The public purse does not pay for purposeful religious or racial or ethnic separatism. I do not need to pay for the religious education you choose for your children. I do need to pay for schools open to all.
My experience was the opposite. A Catholic school that called my kid by number rather then name and locked him in a closet, or a public school with well-trained, compassionate teachers.
Rudy, the suburban public schools my kids went to were excellent and I could never understand why parents in my neighborhood would pay to send their kids to religious schools with less qualified teachers. Part of it was they didn’t want their children associating with “heathens” and some of them went so far as to home school their kids to have even more control.
My children attended a diverse elementary school which had a lot of international students, all races and religions, due to its proximity to SUNY at Buffalo. I thought that was a better choice.
To each his own. However, if you feel the public school wasn’t good enough for your child, I don’t see why I should have to pay my taxes to support your alternative choice.
Rudy you make no sense.
You say that at the Christian school attended by people of different faiths, “parents appreciated the strict behavioral guidelines”.
FYI: Those “strict behavioral guidelines” only work if you drum out the kids who don’t follow them. And in America — at least until the education reformers and Donald Trump have their way — we have always believed in an obligation to teach EVERY child at age 5 or 6. Not just the ones who can adhere to those “strict behavioral guidelines”.
In fact, the term “strict behavioral guidelines” gives free license to suspend and get rid of any pupil you don’t want to teach, regardless of whether their infractions were actually caused by acting out after long term condoned bullying directed at the child and cheered on by the administration or not. That can’t happen in a public school since drumming out the kid obligates you to spend $50,000 or twice that for a private school placement.
Can you understand how those are VERY different incentives? In one school, the more you bully a kid to get him out, the less you spend. In public school, not addressing the child’s learning and behavioral needs in other ways simply means you pay the enormous cost of his education elsewhere. Maybe if we forced charter schools who want to push out kids to pay $100,000/ year for each child who they deem “unteachable”, you wouldn’t see so many push outs.
Even if he is elected, none of his cruddy ideas will come to fruition. But I’m still sending Hillary some extra dollars.
I hope most people find his rantings as ignorant as I do. Perhaps his lunacy will highlight what is already being done ed reformers to dismantle the public school system. Does anyone really believe that Walmart and Bill Gates and their coterie of fellow billionaires and hedge fund managers can provide the children of everyone else a better education than our public schools?
Here is a link that to an article that among other things, shows how Trumps son in all probability plagiarized an article on education that appeared in the American Conservative magazine. He did so in the speech he gave at the republican convention. It is possible that Donnie Jr. Is advising his dad on education policy, but where he gets his ideas from (who pours them into the top of his head) is unknown at this time. http://www.morningnewsusa.com/republican-national-convention-july-19-highlights-kimberlin-brown-sheila-carter-tiffany-trump-makes-political-debut-american-muslims-pray-trump-2391165.html
A CORRECTION: it appears that Donnie jr. Had permission of some sort to use Mr. Buckles work, but the exact relationship and agreement isn’t known. None of that changes the fact that both Trump jr. and the original author are dead wrong in their descriptions of the actual problems afflicting America’s education system.
I just wonder who is Trump’s master? Trump has shown that he is not intelligent enough to JUST MAINTAIN his father’s fortune, but he has slowly and deadly fallen into A MASSIVE DEBT of 640 millions of dollars to banking business.
Lastly, how can he be such intelligent in praising all dictators like Putin, Kim Jong-Un …and criticizing his own American Political Force, making fun of his republican political colleagues…?
Who controls Trump’s debt, will be his master. Is it Russian or fascist tycoon, or charter owners? Back2basic.
This is quite obvious to everyone here, but all of Trumps talking points about education policy are recycled from the most blatantly false ones that originated in no small part from the right wing reformers. Again, Trump is being a sock puppet, parroting others lies and slander.
I’d like to change the voting system so that I can vote against a candidate without voting for another one:
Dear voter, for each candidate, please circle exactly one of yes or no, where “yes” means, you want the candidate for president, and “no” means you do not want the candidate for president.
Note that two “yes”s mean, either candidate is fine for president, and two “no”s mean this year you don’t want a president.
Hillary Yes No
Donald Yes No
I have no problem voting FOR Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump sounds EXACTLY like a Democrat reformer!
He has the same talking points and the same ideas. Trump wants to break that “government monopoly” because he really, really cares about the mostly minority low income children “trapped in failing public schools”. Just like the reformers do!
Donald Trump sounds remarkably like Arne Duncan, Peter Cunningham and all the minions who do the bidding of the billionaires who tell them what they should think and not think and when to close their eyes to abuses by charter schools and when it is okay to point out little failings as long as the failings aren’t committed by high performing ones who need to be given free reign to do whatever is necessary to get high test scores.
Trump took his educational policy straight from Pence. Every word he said in his policy speech was nearly word for word from a speech Pence gave in one of his State of the State addresses in Indiana. All of us in Indiana knew it would only be a matter for time before the Pence policies would find their way into Trump’s speeches. Pence is far worse that Trump because he is driven by an ideology that includes hatred for the LGBTQ community, women, teachers, public education, unions and any form of government that does not support his ideology. If anyone is even remotely considering Trump, please look into Mike Pence’s 12-year record as a congressman where the only thing notable he did was to support a shut-down of the federal government or his horrible record as governor of Indiana where he nearly destroyed the public school system.
Trump took his educational policy straight from Pence. Every word he said in his policy speech was nearly word for word from a speech Pence gave in one of his State of the State addresses in Indiana. All of us in Indiana knew it would only be a matter for time before the Pence policies would find their way into Trump’s speeches. Pence is far worse that Trump because he is driven by an ideology that includes hatred for the LGBTQ community, women, teachers, public education, unions and any form of government that does not support his ideology. If anyone is even remotely considering Trump, please look into Mike Pence’s 12-year record as a congressman where the only thing notable he did was to support a shut-down of the federal government or his horrible record as governor of Indiana where he nearly destroyed the public school system.
I just have to feel like ‘getting this out there’, you see, I have Trump-aphobia…
I want to create a list of expectations I have of a Trump president:
He will deport at minimum 11 million immigrants, and will need to deport around 40 million in just 4 years. The problem is we can’t just deport a person, some other nation must be willing to accept them as citizens…
He will probably detain tens of millions of Muslims as well as tens of millions of mentally ill persons. I expect a return to the ‘insane asylums’. This means detention (or at least cameras up arses) of around 40 million citizens.
Have we covered about half of the working population yet? I guess that is yer ‘white man’s job creation agenda’…
And since it is clear that voters are sending congress a clear message of hate, let’s go ahead and assume that is the message here that will blissfully reverberate throughout the government and the world, meaning we need to start including LGBT’s in the group of detained, and likely anyone that is somehow a US-born citizen – only it doesn’t count if it is tomorrow when you were US-born.
Like a psychology article on Trump, he closely resembles the personality traits of the likes of a ‘great aristocrat’ Andrew Jackson, and what did Jackson do? “Get rid of the indians (trail of tears, etc)”
That is why I expect ‘getting rid of those [explicit]’ will be among the first ‘accomplishments’ of Donald Trump being POTUS…
So let’s continue here.
Build the wall, at an approximate expense of 45 dollars per citizen, meaning roughly 17 billion dollars worth of extravagant concrete that is guaranteed to be an attraction for anyone wanting to know if the USA public really is uneducated.
If they want to know then, the level of our own education non-attainment, they then need only direct their attention to the accompanying already-built ‘border fence’.
Then have a nice round of golf in the space between the wall and fence, and the actual border.
Let’s continue with ‘campaign promises’…
He will ‘refinance all USA debt, like a business does’.
I wonder where he will find a banker or anybody, really, who will be interested in lending us over 20 trillion US dollars at an interest rate of, meh, maybe 0.5%?
I’m sure there are a lot of rich people who would love to jump all over that one. Even my old 401K account is salivating at the chance at well below a 1% annual return…
Well, this is going to be a long list, so I’ll try to make it shorter…
He will ‘make hard negotiations’, being the ‘man of the deal’. He will do this by ‘never backing down on even the smallest detail’ to ‘get what he wants’.
I take it that this means we will lose practically every current Ally we have, assuming that he has already stated not only unwillingness for USA to protect its allies even in NATO, but further forcing them to ‘pay us ransoms’ for their own protection, which we will not do anyway.. Sounds like fuzzy logic? Because it is…
Nobody is going to pay us a dime for our lousy protection, especially if it is an international alliance.
But hey, he sure seems to love Russia and China, probably because China owns about 1 billion of Trump’s debt and Russia has close ties to Trump already.
I’m sure if it ever came to another world war, or if world aggression continues, we are in perfect hands with Trump in these matters – after all – he’s a tough dude, look how tough he is with Vladimir…
Well, I guess a man does pick their own battles – why not be soft on tough people and go tough on your own people?
Trump has praised Putin for his dominance over his own country, but called that ‘leadership’. I guess we can expect an increasingly militant-style system of forced control in the USA where citizens are continuously executed, just like in Russia – only now for the USA, when under Trump rule, it won’t just be the mentally ill and african americans getting shot at – it will also be protesters, political dissenters, well, let’s just name it any ‘dissenter or sympathizer’, because the groups belonging to that are already too many to name, let alone keep track of over time…
Let’s just shorten this list up here, and get to the point:
Trump says there will be ‘changes gonna happen so fast you head will spin’.
These are the types of changes to expect.
The truth is, I don’t see how this race is even close. I don’t see how Trump is even ahead in any southern state.
This year makes so little sense, and I know people are desperate for change – but this is what people are voting for.
It’s not just political suicide voting for Trump. The resulting changes just in governance and how that translates to these sorts of changes throughout the USA will be so disruptive that the USA will never recover.
And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
That is why I’m watching this election so close. It’s not that it is a critical moment, or a difficult time for the US.
It is actually that the damage caused in the next four years by the Republicans alone under Trump will be so irreparable, that, well, let’s just say there are life-consequences in this election – for all of you.
There.. I hope I made my ‘self-therapy session’ of Trump-aphobia shorter than expected.