The AFT analyzed Trump’s education plan, the centerpiece of which is a block grant to the states of $20 billion. This is not new spending. This is a redirection of existing federal funding. As you might expect, it is a sham meant to privatize public schools, with no controls or accountability.
Randi Weingarten released this statement:
Want to know what Donald Trump’s plan to take away $20 billion meant for public school children really means? Since he didn’t do his homework, we did it for him. Trump’s $20 billion cut could:
Strip funding from up to 56,000 public schools—putting at risk the educations of nearly 21 million children;
End Title I funding—the most important funding source for high-poverty schools—and cut $5 billion used for other crucial resources, potentially hurting more than 8 million higher education students who rely on Pell Grants, 5 million English language learners in public schools, and millions of others;
Take away $12.7 billion that 5 million students with disabilities count on to fund their educations; and
Eliminate as many as 300,000 teacher jobs—leaving millions of students in larger classes with less support.
And what would he fund with all these budget cuts? Vouchers for 1.4 million or fewer students—up to the states’ discretion, because Trump would hand the money over as a block grant—leaving at the very least 10.5 million other low-income students in the cold, depriving them of vital services they need.
Trump’s plan would gut nearly 30 percent of the federal education budget and turn it into private school vouchers. News flash, Mr. Trump: There’s been a lot of research on this.
Private school voucher programs don’t work—not for the students who get them, and not for the students in public schools whose schools have been drained of funds. Private schools do not enforce all federal civil rights laws, do not adhere to religious freedom protections provided under the U.S. Constitution, and do not face the same public accountability standards that all public schools must meet, including those in Title IX, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—the very law that Congress just reauthorized in 2016.
Trump has no research or evidence to back up his ideas—just his ideology and zeal to destabilize public schools.
Help us push back against Donald Trump and his flawed ideology by becoming an AFT rapid responder today.
Trump’s speech on education this week repeats the same message the anti-public education zealots have been shilling for years. As far as we can tell, Trump never bothered talking to educators to find out what support they need in order to give every kid a great education. His rhetoric today was just one more sound bite from a reality TV star turned presidential nominee.
None of this comes as a surprise: Donald Trump has never shown any inclination to help our schools serve students. In the years I spent working in New York City, I never once saw him at a civic event, never saw him engaged in an effort to lift up public education. Now he wants to hand our public schools over to private businesses so they can make a profit—no surprise, from a man whose idea of education can best be summed up in Trump University, a fraudulent enterprise built to rip off hardworking students. As far as I’m concerned, his ideas on public education don’t earn a passing grade.
Help me send him that message.
In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
As if we needed yet another reason to dislike Trump, the “dear leader” of The Deplorables. But here one is, anyway.
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Not one of the innovations imposed on me in recent years has had a research base and it has never been of concern to Weingarten. She has jumped on every reformer band wagon without hesitation. This is merely a political ploy to drum up support for Clinton.
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So we have two large unions whose national leadership is considered questionable by at least a sizable minority of their membership. Does that mean we refuse to back efforts to call Trump out because of the source of the call? I somehow have a feeling that attempting to weaken our own unions, however flawed, is not in our best interest. Since I am not and have never been more than a potential vote to someone in the union hierarchy, I am not particularly impressed with their performance in recent years. I am< however, very impressed by what the union movement has done for workers over the history of the movement. As much as I don’t want to “join with Randi,” I support wholeheartedly the sentiments she expressed.
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Well stated
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I am not a teacher but maybe you can explain how it is that the national leadership of the teachers’ union doesn’t represent the views of teachers? Does the local leadership represent their views? Is there a house cleaning the union needs to do and is it impossible to make any changes?
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If membership were more active,leadership would be more in tune with the desires of the membership.
Here is a little story :
Two years ago I am urging fellow Union members to call their Congressional Representatives to reject the TPP. A new member turns to me and asks why he should call, isn’t that the Unions job. The fact that he was newly organized probably meant little. The sad reality is too many think that they can sit back and some magic entity called the Union will deliver.
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Agree!
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These are not Trumps ideas, when it comes to education he has no ideas of his own to speak of. As with so many other things, he is functioning as a sock puppet here, a spokesmodel for the agendas of others, in this case the reformers. His son mouthed similar propaganda at the convention in a speech written for him by a guy who had an article, really an ideological screed, published in The American Conservative where the author apparently “gave permission” to Trump jr. to use his phraseology. The key point here is that of candidate Trump yet again functioning as a figurehead, as a pass through entity for, in this case, all of the toxic stupidities of reform. The irony here is that there’s very little substantive difference between what Trump is shilling for and the Obama education agenda of the past 7+ years. Whatever he hopes to gain for himself and whatever his actual plans for the future are aside, Trump as figurehead is all that his candidacy is and it’s also his greatest weakness, if attention is drawn to it in the correct way. Simply point it out in a small amount of detail and let people connect the dots for themselves, and let the RNC play defense afterwards.
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Really? Does anything Weingarten have to say say anything that hasn’t been clear and obvious for quite some time?
Donald Trump spells the death knell for public education. Nooooooo!!! Really!!!??!? I thought his ideas may be nuanced, sophisticated, and totally against privatization!
Come on. Weingarten is just as complicit in our problems as any reformer. She, like Donald Trump, brings nothing to the table except her own ambitions, hubris, and absolute isolation from reality. Nothing she has to say brings anything new to the table….no new insight, no new perspective, no new angle….nothing. When Randi isn’t actively making decisions that are awful for unionized
teachers, she is articulating and arriving at conclusions that are so obvious as to be banal.
So yeah, a Donald Trump administration would be the death knell for public education. No shit. That isn’t shocking or news.
What’s shocking is that the democrats aren’t, in any way, the life knell of public education. And one reason the democrats have been just as bad as the republicans for the most part is because of awful, traitorous, self-serving, complicit teacher union leadership whose poster child is RANDI WEINGARTEN.
The dems will continue to be just as bad until they are forced to not be.
Rocket science this shit ain’t.
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If teachers can’t convince their own union leaders to represent their interests and not the interest of the union leaders, that doesn’t bode well for changing the Democratic Party.
Why aren’t unions electing representatives that represent their interests? I understand why Dems aren’t — too many low-interest voters. But I’d expect (or at least hope) that teachers would be more engaged and concerned about the leadership of their union.
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Broadly, teachers are not engaged and do not know to be concerned with their leadership or the reform movement in general. Those that do are few. There is nothing close to a critical mass.
It is shocking how so many teachers could be so uninformed. Really. It’s a thing.
Willful ignorance. Only term that can be applied. Many of these people are the “finger-in-ear, happy-thoughts” types who are nominally educated but actually simply credentialed.
Most teachers unions are not populated by informed, engaged, activist types. It’s a heavy lift to spread the good word and get any kind of action out of the bulk of working teachers. A lift that leadership usually can’t do because they are bumbling and dumb too.
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Of course there you have it. I believe you have quoted Mike Lofgren
in the past.
“It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefeller’s or the Mellon’s. ”
Not to pick on teachers, who are little different than other workers. There is hardly anyone in the labor movement today who fought the battles that empowered labor. Not unless they are centenarians. The teachers here in NY had a Union handed to them through the efforts of other powerful Union leaders after a failed strike.
The leadership is “triangulating” with plutocrats out of weakness. That weakness is derived from an apathetic membership. They know how to bitch when things go south. They could care less as long as their own needs are met.
“Don’t it always seem to go,That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone”
On Thursday I will address a small group of Union workers a good percentage of whom are going to be voting to eliminate their union with their choice in this election. Most of them are paid better than NY teachers with far less education
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My American friends who have taught in NYC and NYS tell me that Weingarten as well as the NEA have both cooperated for the most part with the reform movement. Is that really true?
Unions in Northern and Western Europe would not believe any of this were true . . . or would think it was a pathetic joke. Unions there would never have tolerated such reform, and aggressive strikes would have swept their nations, maybe with the exception of England.
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Here, union leadership has spent too much time marinating in the political world and hobnobbing with the reformy enemies of public education in an attempt to have a finger on the pulse of what is going on within the opposition and among policy makers. By constantly equivocating to maintain that position of access they have lost touch with membership and with their own values and knowledge of what education actually is. This is not to say that things would be much different had they remained staunch advocates for fact and evidence based approaches and the continuing improvements that would have been based on them. The oligarchy in America has far more power than ordinary citizens or their traditional advocates, they are powerful to the point of being able to all but completely ignore “the will of the people”, so there may well be a method to the apparent madness and complicity of union leadership. There are cases where this is obviously not the situation and leadership is just wrong, but as you might suspect one has to take things on a case by case basis since we are talking politics and rhetoric, not sound policy here.
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Well Stated
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How utterly sad. It seems like the people of Central and South America – many of them, such as in Mexico, Chile and Peru – strike a lot, although much of “las huelgas” never reach American media, and this is perhaps intentional.
How is it that THEY do it – and they are under far more oppression (although Americans are catching up, I think) – but Americans don’t do it. Are Americans that soft and ignorant? Your past during the 1930s and 1960s would not indicate so.
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“Are Americans that soft and ignorant?”
For the most part, YES!
But hey that “American Exceptionalism” sure is fine and dandy, isn’t it?
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I think Citizens’ Arrest’s response is correct. But giving my old lady’s long view, things were not always like this. I see it as part & parcel of legislative changes happening 1980 >> 2010 Cit-United decision which moved us into our present situation where $ has moved so inordinately to the elite that the vote is ‘outvoted’ by big $ shaping policy to its own interest. This inevitably creates a dispirited, ‘you can’t fight city hall’ attitude that permeates everywhere (including the embattled vestigial public unions). Backlash is only just beginning to be felt at the national level, as we see in the presidential primaries. Hopefully the tide is beginning to turn.
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The leadership of most organizations usually have a prime goal of self preservation. Unions are no different. Could it be that the lack of an active membership is the reason Union leaders seek deals with the political establishment. If Weingarten called for a National strike to save public education, how many Teachers would walk the line how many would cross the line? Exclude NY
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But folks in Europe strike all the time. It’s nothing new.
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Probably none. They are too afraid of losing their jobs:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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It took a long time to heal after they drove old Bernie down. So when Trump turned his anger on immigrants, I was shamefully silent. When he turned his rage on veterans, I must have been asleep. When he treated women as objects, where was I? What planet? Shame on me! But when Donald Trump recently spit his venom at public schools… Let’s just say I am here now, and fully awake.
Obama’s RttT was Bush’s NCLB on steroids. What Trump is proposing is NCLB on steroids with an 8-ball of cocaine up its nose and a heavy machine gun at each hand.
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He is proposing vouchers. He is not doing anything more than getting rid of the concept of a public schools. Vouchers for religious or secular schools, for profit schools, corporate charter schools with their own rules, virtual schools, and so on with the clear message that all public schools are unfit for children who live in poverty.
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Public education needs public advocates in the courts. We are going to have to be more vigilant about challenging “reform” in the courts. All the money behind “reform” makes it difficult to fight them. We need to challenge how they spend public money, civil rights, perhaps taxation without representation and separation of church and state. Clinton has set up her team of “education advisers.” She includes the two complicit union heads and a bunch of other “reformistas.” As Peter Greene states, “Don’t count on Clinton to be the savior of public education.” http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/09/election-education-update.html
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Sorry to go off topic, but I posted a Browning poem earlier, and then tonight I looked at it again and one thing led to another, so…
With apologies to William Shakespeare and all the real poets out there someDAMwhere (and I hope I am not redoing a Poet work I missed (I bet I am))…
Bill Gateses Eyes Are Nothing like the Sun
Bill Gateses eyes are nothing like the sun;
Diane is far more read than he is read;
If she be right, why his ideas are done;
If scams be wires, bad wires grow in his head.
I’ve seen public schools blue, red and white,
But no such fondness hear I in words he speaks,
And in some classrooms there is more delight
Than in the breath that from Pineapple reeks.
I loathe to hear Gates speak, yet well I know
That Eli hath a far less pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw magic bullets go:
So Gates when he deals takes schools aground.
And so by heaven I think this man as rare
As any billionaire he reeks with no compare.
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LCT,
You are an original.
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Thank you, Diane.
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Forgot to change ‘grant’ to ‘say’.
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SDP would be proud of you. I hope our poet returns after the election.
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I miss our poet.
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2old2teach: what you said.
😎
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Me too.
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Okay. Randi Weingarten thinks Trump’s education ideas are bogus. She’s right. They are.
But, so what? Isn’t that just plainly obvious? Are there any of Trump’s policy ideas – if they can even be called that – that are NOT bogus?
Lets remember that in March of 2013, Weingarten wrote a piece with Vicki Philips of the Gates Foundation in which they opined that it was critical for American public education to adopt “a new paradigm” and “align teacher development and evaluation to the Common Core state standards.” Phillips and Weingarten made the preposterous claim that it was absolutely essential that the “mission” of public schooling be changed so that it could “evolve” into a “new paradigm” of “college and career” preparation.
None of that nonsense was true.
Except for taking a bunch of Bill Gates’ cash, Randi Weingarten has been a day late and a dollar short on everything related to the Common Core and genuine, meaningful public school reform.
Yeah, Trump is a real tool. Most people with an ounce of sense know that.
When the top teacher representatives don’t do their homework, and resort to reciting bad “research” and inane pronouncements, then teachers and public schools truly are in trouble. The very fact that this race is even close, and that lots of people still think Whitewater and Benghazi and Emails were legitimate “scandals” and that people should be forced to recite the Pledge, suggests that the citizenship education component of public schooling has gotten severely short shrift.
Such is the current state of public education in the United States.
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“. . .the citizenship education component of public schooling has gotten severely short shrift.
Such is the current state of public education in the United States.”
Exactly!
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