Jeff Bryant spells out the Big Lie embedded in Trump’s budget proposal for education. He plans to cut programs that directly aid poor kids while bolstering charters and vouchers, pretending they are equivalent. They are not. Yet much of the mainstream media has fallen for the Trump-DeVos bait-and-switch.
“Public school supporters are angry at President Trump’s budget proposal, which plans to cut funding to the Department of Education by 13 percent – taking that department’s outlay down to the level it was ten years ago. But the target for their anger should not be just the extent of the cuts but also how the cuts are being pitched to the public.
“Trump’s education budget cuts are aimed principally at federal programs that serve poor kids, especially their access to afterschool programs and high-quality teachers.
“At the same time, Trump’s spending blueprint calls for pouring $1.4 billion into school choice policies including a $168 million increase for charter schools, $250 million for a new school choice program focused on private schools, and a $1 billion increase for parents to send their kids to private schools at taxpayer expense.
“The way the Trump administration is spinning this combination of funding cuts and increases – and the way nearly every news outlet is reporting them – is that there is some sort of strategically important balance between funding programs for poor kids versus “school choice” schemes, as if the two are equivalents and just different means to the same ends. Nothing could be further from the truth….
“The message being spun out of Trump’s education budget is that it takes money away from those awful “adult interests” – like, you know, teachers to actually teach the students and buildings so students have somewhere to go after school to play sports, get tutored, or engage in music and art projects – in order to steer money to “the kids” who will get a meager sum of money to search for learning opportunities in an education system that is increasingly bereft of teachers and buildings.
“Even competent education reporters are falling for this spin, writing that education policy is experiencing a “sea change in focus from fixing the failing schools to helping the students in the failing schools.”
“However, there’s evidence that federally funded efforts like afterschool programs and class size reduction tend to lead to better academic results for low-income children, while the case for using school choice programs to address the education needs of poor kids is pretty weak.
“The Weak Case For Choice
“School voucher programs, like the ones Trump and DeVos seem intent on funding, are particularly ineffective ways to address the education problems of poor kids. Indeed, these programs seem to not serve the interests of poor kids at all.
“Studies of voucher programs In Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Nevada have found that most of the money from the programs goes to parents wealthy enough to already have their children enrolled in private schools.
“Voucher programs rarely provide enough money to enable poor minority children to get access to the best private schools. And a new comprehensive study of vouchers finds evidence that vouchers don’t significantly improve student achievement. What they do pose is greater likelihood that students who are the most costly and difficult to educate – low-income kids and children with special needs – will be turned away or pushed out by private schools that are not obligated to serve all students.
“Charter schools, another program the Trump budget wants to ramp up funding for, also don’t have a great track record for improving the education attainment of low-income students.
“Perhaps the best case made for using charter schools to target the needs of low-income students comes from a study on the impact of charters in urban school systems conducted by research outfit CREDO in 2015. The study indeed found evidence of some positive impact of charters in these communities. But as my colleague at The Progressive Julian Vasquez Heilig points out, the measures of improvement, in standard deviations, are .008 for Latino students and .05 for African American students in charter schools.
“These numbers are larger than zero,” Heilig writes on his personal blog, “but you need a magnifying glass to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction which are far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools. They have 400 percent to 1000 percent more statistical impact than charters.”
“Indeed, choice programs in all their forms, at least in how they are being promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters, seem more interested in diverting money away from public schools than they are intent on delivering some sort of education relief to the struggles of poor families.”
School choice will actually harm children by diverting money from public schools that now enroll 90% of America’s students to provide choices for a few children. Most of those choices will be for schools with uncertified teachers and a Bible-based curriculum.
This may satisfy billionaire Betsy DeVos but it won’t be good for children.
I would LOVE to see that dump HOLD HIS BREATH for at least 15 minutes. That should stop him from lying.
Why might anyone expect anything other than lies, prevarications and falsehoods to abound in this administration and Dept of Ed? As far as Betsy DoMinionist DeVos is concerned its “god’s” work and therefore anything goes in order to please her god.
Ah … DeVoodoo can’t do work that is good for everyone. I can only imagine what she was like as a girl. OY! Bet she lied then and use alternative facts to get her way.
Jeff Bryant nailed it by pointing to the proven results of pre-K and class size reduction. In my classes, the contrasts between kindergarteners who have attended pre-k and those who have not are stark. As class sizes rapidly increase in Newark, the challenges of providing children with individual attention become insurmountable. The Trump trend of placing know-nothings in crucial policy making positions is a threat to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Choice” schemes have always been about a false equivalency, but most of the public and even the media have accepted many of “reform’s” statements as fact. Trump can take pictures with as many black people and truck drivers that he can convince to take a photo with him, but it’s all a lie. Actions speak louder than photo ops; his policies represent a war on the working class. He wants to destroy the remaining social safety nets, and mindlessly ramp up the war machine.
I recently read another compelling piece by Jeff Bryant, and it is a good read along with this post. Bryant shows how anti-government language has been slowly fueling a war on public employees since the seventies. He uses the gradual “conservatization” of his mother to tell this story. The rhetoric against public employees has been a constant drum beat of propaganda. He describes the hostile claims about “choice” that are repeated over decades. These are the tag lines or “mantra” of “reform.” Now with social media and conservative TV and radio, these erroneous statements and false equivalencies are accepted as self evident truths that are not challenged. This article is worth reading because it is scary accurate! https://ourfuture.org/20170322/words-that-hurt-our-public-schools-and-ones-that-help
Thanks for the link.
Hey dont say this slander of him. (TRUMP IS OUR KING) he really is!!!
Are you a monarchist?
Thanks Diane!
Welcome to the Malignant Narcissist’s dystopian world on steroids – an environmentally degraded totalitarian country where only the top 1-percent benefit and the lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the worse it gets.
You can expect lies from the great prevaricator by now. I can add nothing to what has been so eloquently stated above.
No one in DC cares. It’s all charters and vouchers. Public school kids and parents are entirely excluded from the ed reform debate.
Did you see what’s happening in Wisconsin? They have private schools selecting students to accept and the defunded public schools get all the kids who don’t take a voucher.
Public schools are treated as a disfavored “default” system- there only to serve the needs of the favored “choice” schools. They’re destroying public schools and they’re doing it deliberately.
The Wisconsin voucher program was put in without ANY consideration to the effects on public schools. None. NOT ONE of those adults acted as an advocate for kids in public schools. They couldn’t even be bothered to think about what would happen to the public schools.
As far as I’m concerned the whole ed reform gang is irrelevant to kids in public schools. They offer absolutely nothing except for testing. Public school kids could attend school two weeks a year and serve their purpose for ed reform. They take tests and produce data. “The movement’ has no use for them other than that.
I resent paying thousands of public employees who are on an ideological mission to harm my son’s school. I hope they’re not under the illusion they’re working “for kids”- they work for kids in charters and private schools. Public school kids aren’t even considered.
Is there anything more ridiculous than the US Department of Education conducting a “public schools suck!” political campaign?
You’re all paying these people for this. I frankly don’t care if Trump guts the place. They don’t lift a finger for public school kids anyway.