Speaking at a failing charter school in Cleveland run by for-profit entrepreneur Ron Packard, Trump promised that he would re-allocate $20 billion so that every disadvantaged child could enroll in a school of choice. This is a huge boon to charters and vouchers. Packard owns a new charter company but was previously CEO of K12, the virtual charter chain that has been universally panned for poor educational results. His background: Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
Here is the report in the New York Times, where he promised to take existing federal spending and turn it into block grants to states, so that money would follow the child to the school of his/her choice, whether private, religious, online, or public. Unrestricted block grants have been a longstanding dream of Republicans as a way to advance school choice and the free market that will magically “save” all children everywhere.
The absence of any evidence for the superiority of charter schools, online schools, and vouchers is irrelevant to their goal of eliminating “government schools.”
“As president, I will establish the national goal of providing school choice to every American child living in poverty,” Mr. Trump said. “If we can put a man on the moon, dig out the Panama Canal and win two world wars, then I have no doubt that we as a nation can provide school choice to every disadvantaged child in America.”
Mr. Trump’s release of his education plan marked the second consecutive day that he laid out concrete policies along traditional conservative lines, after calling for expanded military spending on Wednesday.
It also reflected a new push by Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, to broaden his appeal outside his traditional base of support. On Saturday, he visited a black church in Detroit. Critics say his outreach is aimed less at black voters than at attracting whites who may have been turned off to his candidacy by the racially tinged remarks he has made in the past.
“You’re going to like the job I do, folks, I’m going to do such a great job,” Mr. Trump told a largely black audience at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, a charter school with about 350 students in kindergarten through the eighth grade.
“You give me the chance — I’ll get all your votes in four years,” he said. “Everybody’s going to be voting for me, by the way: African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, just everybody.”
Here is the politico report on Trump’s radical proposal, including the response of the Clinton campaign.
The Hillary Clinton campaign on Thursday blasted Trump’s new plan, saying it would “gut” nearly 30 percent of the federal education budget to fund private school vouchers, and “decimate public schools across America.”
Clinton’s campaign said Trump would have to cut all federal Title I funding for poor students, in addition to $5 billion in additional federal education funding, to pay for the proposal.
Hillary for America senior policy adviser Maya Harris said the “proposal could strip funding from up to 56,000 public schools serving more than 21 million children” and it “might only serve 1.4 million students, while stripping funding from the other 10.5 million low-income students in America.”
I think that Trump is saying this to pry open the deep pockets of the oligarchs behind the corporate assault on traditional public education. He wants their money. He doesn’t care about anything but Trump. Do Choice and Putin go together?
In 2012, Trump said if he ran for president, he’d make a profit doing it, and that is exactly what he’s been doing as he pays back the loans he made to his campaign with contributions coming in from the Republican Party and conservatives while using his own real-estate holdings, jets, hotels, restaurants to hold campaign events and then charge way more than the going rates before he ran for president.
Trump is making suckers out of the far right and milking them for every dollar he can get.
The same motive is why he selected Mike Pence to be his VP running mate, because Pence was the door that might open a flow of money from the Koch brothers.
Lloyd, every time a Republican campaign event is held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, he bills the campaign $140,000. He quintupled the rent on the space the GOP is using in Trump Tower. He is getting rich while having the time of his life.
The consummate flim-flam artist.
Booo…
In addition to praising Putin, a totalitarian leader, Trump said, “To the victor go the spoils”. Silicon Valley and Wall Street exploiters, share that view but, it is not in the heart and soul of the American people. The Marshall Plan, in the aftermath of WWII, reflected the nation’s principles.
Trump’s claim that we should have taken control of Iraq’s war violates our own laws, which forbid seizure of a defeated nation’s assets. I learned that last night of Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC, where he showed the laws on screen. O’Donnell is the only TV anchor on a major network who has said that Trump is totally unqualified to be president and that his show would not pretend that he is.
I can’t believe the Narcissistic, under educated and under informed Trump, is a national candidate. He doesn’t even know that judges don’t sign laws.
It’s the logical end-point of ed reform. If your ideology is “choice” then “better” doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Trump and his team don’t know it, but Ohio ALREADY HAS every ed reform gimmick and fad that comes down the pike. All of it.
Our captured lawmakers rubber-stamped every single demand by lobbyists- unregulated charters, vouchers, endless testing and data collection, incredibly complex teacher rankings that no one pays any attention to, tens of millions to consultants for our “report card”- we’re an ed reformers dream.
Trump probably hasn’t read Orwell. Nevertheless, in his recent speech on education, he refers to public education as being a “monopoly.”
This isn’t new. The autocratic, opaque, often fraudulent and inferior, publicly funded, private sector corporate charter school industry that makes a profit even if they’re labeled non-profit has been calling the community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools a monopoly for years.
The autocratic and Trump both learned from a master that if you keep repeating a big lie, it will become the truth. Guess who they learned that from? Business Insider provides the answer.
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a-book-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bed-2015-8
There is very little difference between corporate autocrats and dictators.
Trump is mimicking every “reform” catch phrase. I doubt he cares much about ideology, but he knows how to exploit opportunity. “Reform” is a trough of corporate welfare, and I am sure he would love to feed there with the rest of the pigs. After all, to the victor goes the spoils.
I haven’t watched the history of the battles about education in the US as closely as most here (and I appreciate the repartee). However, my first thought upon hearing Trump say that was that, like many “capitalists,” he doesn’t know the difference between a democratic political system and capitalism (as presently defined, e.g., as predatory).
I doubt Gulags and “camps” are close on the horizon; but there certainly are reminiscences of such in the political air, that is, if that sort of ignorance and/or intention play out.
That “gubmint monopoly” on schools is one of the Jebster’s favorite sayings. Idiots with idiologies abound.
Someone please explain to me how around 14,000 democratically founded and elected, separately run school districts can be considered a monopoly. It’s false on the face of it but idiologues like J. Bush and the Trumpster are too effin stupid to understand that.
I have to slap myself in the face to make sure I’m not in some sort of nightmare. I just cannot believe that someone like Trump has gotten this far. But here it is, here is the reality, an outrageously pathological liar, a bad liar, has gained traction and loyal unapologetic supporters amongst a great swath of Americans. And please don’t hand me this crap that Hillary lies, too. Trump is in a class all by himself and not in a good sense of uniqueness. This man has to be defeated.
The press has bent over backwards to legitimize and normalize Trump’s outrageous world view. The reality he represents should make every reasonable citizen cringe and run to the polls to defeat this twisted, sick demogogue.
Not ALL of the press has “bent over backwards” to legitimatize Trump. This from a Hillary campaign e-mail quoting Jonathan Chait from the New York Magazine. “Chait is far from the only media observer discussing the extent to which (Matt) Lauer fell flat in trying to interview the two candidates for president. But Chait actually discusses what the failures mean, and in doing so, he keys in on something important.”
CHAIT says: “The average undecided voter is getting snippets of news from television personalities like (Matt) Lauer, . . . who are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian.”
I wonder if he wants to say what he REALLY thinks.
Chait has attacked me for daring to criticize charters
To Diane who says: “Chait has attacked me for daring to criticize charters.”
No end to it, is there? But do let’s keep talking–maybe there is a brain in there.
The daily media has an ethos of balance. Fair enough. That means they have to pay the same respectful attention to a raving lunatic as to an experienced and qualified candidate.
Lawrence O’Donnell is the only talk show host who frankly acknowledges that Trump is unfit to be president.
To Diane, who writes: “The daily media has an ethos of balance. Fair enough. That means they have to pay the same respectful attention to a raving lunatic as to an experienced and qualified candidate.
Lawrence O’Donnell is the only talk show host who frankly acknowledges that Trump is unfit to be president.”
Fortunately, the idea is spreading, for instance, on the Morning Joe program (also MSNBC) it’s gotten pretty rough. This morning, a commentator referred to him and to his “first suragette” Rudy Juliani as a moron as Rudy defended Trump’s latest (the Russian thing).
But there is also the FALLACY OF THE FALSE BALANCE, which has finally been recognized by SOME of the Press as what they have been conditioned to follow–rightly, in some sense and under normal circumstances, and until they met Trump.
The original assumption is that all are searching for truth. For the Press, it becomes a false balance when someone is deliberately lying, half-truthing, or diverting. Basically, there is no authentic balance between the truth and a lie. Or as some say: we have a right to our own opinion, but not to our own facts.
For Trump, however, there are no facts and no truth, or only the truth that serves his vacuous purpose or that he “likes.” So that there’s just what Trump wants and what he wants US to hear. Under that fallacy, the Press have wrongly been trying to find a “balance” between (1) an outright lie, a half-truth, or a complete diversion, and (2) a truth (or worse, another lie).
Is it any wonder the Press have been so ineffectual. The whole thing is an assault not only on truth, but on civilized discourse–which is only ONE reason why Trump et al are so dangerous to a democracy where freedom of speech assumes that if people keep talking, truth will win out.
Unless I missed something, the only thing Trump is promising is “choice.” He doesn’t promise “quality choices,” just choices between different kinds of crap.
I have noticed this about the rhetoric of the choice narrative. A notable lack of use of the modifier, “quality.”
I would take quality to mean, “capable of lifting a child out of poverty by adulthood.”
“run by for-profit entrepreneur Ron Packard”
Isn’t that being a bit nice. How about “run by the avaricious capitalist dog Ron Packard”?
Packard was paid $5 million a year to manage the growth of K12 Inc., which is listed on the NY Stock Exchange