Trump has made clear that he wants federal funds to flow to private and religious schools if any new aid is approved to help public schools reopen. DeVos and Trump will use any opportunity to push federal money to religious schools.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Espinoza case, which ruled that any state that aided private schools had to provide aid to religious schools, has encouraged Trump and DeVos to push harder for federal funding of religious schools.
Thus far, the Democrat-controlled Appropriations Committee in the House has blocked all such requests by DeVos and Trump.
President Donald Trump will ask for a “one-time, emergency appropriation” for a new grant proposal, according to an outline of the plan obtained by McClatchy. The grants would be provided to states to distribute to nonprofit institutions that disburse scholarships to qualified students who want to attend non-public schools.
“I have never heard a single, compelling persuasive reason as to why somebody is against Education Freedom Scholarships, opportunity scholarships, school choice, charter schools. And the reason is this: we’re trying to give these kids just another opportunity and provide their parents with another option,” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, told McClatchy.
The White House is seeking to have 10% of the amount that Congress approves for state and local educational agencies set aside for the grants. Trump will also seek approval of $5 billion in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to the scholarship programs.
The Trump administration has been promoting school choice initiatives for weeks as a way to provide educational opportunities to children in underserved communities and get money to help financially struggling private and Catholic schools before the new school year.
Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article243956302.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These plans have been in the works for a long time and they are designed to subsidize “customer choice,” the prevailing doctrine in a fictional market-based economy. Milton and Rosa Friedman look down from the heavens and smile.
In the Trump administration there is also paranoia that students who attend public schools will receive instruction that may require critical thinking and some knowledge of facts, especially in American History as reviewed by Trump twice, on the Fourth of July. Add his insistence that “our American culture” will be represented in his planned garden of heroes, the repository for all of the statues being taken down.
Laura While the “garden of heroes” idea is TRULY gag-worthy, we can also look at how the National Park Service has given treatment to slavery and other “wart” issues in the history of the United States. They don’t hide it from us . . . they show us what it was like.
I think the point is not to honor so-called heroes or slavery or our many other warts, but to keep our history (of warts and all) in our National memory in a way that we can compare them with where we are presently and recognize the long-term stuff of mindful progress; so that we are less prone to repeat what is the worst about our past; and in the sense of helping to forge the way for our continuous reaching for a better world.
Also, as purely an appreciation of art, many statues ARE truly beautiful, though I’d rather see them gone than honored in the way that Trump wants, along with those involved with what IS a centuries-old national neurosis (as Toni Morrison said when referring to racism). CBK
BTW, I am horrified at the Administration’s and the Court’s obvious ignorance of the importance of Jefferson’s distinction between church and state. CBK
They are aware of the “wall of separation.” They want to tear it down.
Diane They are “unaware of the importance” of the wall. It’s part of the greater Constitutional infrastructure that underpins all secular institutions, including the Courts and separation of powers themselves. CBK
ignorance is a kind word for what is truly happening: WILLFUL and intentional misinterpretation
A warning-
(1) Today, SCOTUS ruled in favor of exemption of religious organizations in a case about birth control medical coverage. (2) SCOTUS ruled a couple of weeks ago to give taxpayer money to religious schools. (3) A current case before SCOTUS could exempt religious organizations from civil rights employment law (Kristin Biel v. St. James Catholic school).
One of Trump’s recent appointees to government was honest in an interview. He said the 4 things he himself valued were, family, profession, religion and, the Red Sox. In many Arab countries where women and gay people are denied human rights, country is subservient to religious leaders, for example, Iran’s Khomeini. After the U.S. ousted the secular Iranian government, the Khomeini established a new constitution giving himself supreme powers.
The GOP’s coup d’etat against the American people is not separate from the plan for a theocracy. Commonweal described a collective of men in D.C. as having enormous political power. George Weigel, one of those men, who was born and lives in the U.S., wrote a book describing the next pope, he, “should challenge the world’s democracies to rebuild their moral foundations offering Catholic social doctrine as one tool …”
Women are prohibited from holding positions of power in the Catholic church. The Manhattan Declaration spells out other features of the Catholic social doctrine. Those views have been rejected by majority American democratic opinion.
Linda,
SCOTUS ruled against the women teachers who claimed discrimination by religious schools.
Linda While I share your concern (as I always have if you read my prior notes), you may want to have another look at Roman Catholic Social Teachings.
This is not the place for that, but please, again, put your broad-brush away? You write as if all RCST is bad. And it’s FAR from it.
I won’t respond further, again, to what I see as STILL your “DIN” isolating the Catholic Church and the right-wing within it; and now your ignorance of RCST, and of the complexity of the issues involved.
However, I share with you and others here in having a total sense of disgust at the Court’s recent decisions. We will all pay for it in the short AND long run. BTW, I don’t have the statistics at hand, but I saw a poll a couple of years ago where over 60+ percent of Catholic parishioners used birth control. CBK
So what will the Democrats who control the House do? . I know, they will horse trade for some cash to reach people in need. Cash that will never reach the needy.
Ed reform gets the national voucher they all lobbied for. It’s an end run.
Good to see they’re all working so hard to open public schools safely. Oh, wait, this has nothing to do with public schools does it?
When they’re finished funding the private schools they prefer do you think someone could maybe address the schools 90% of kids attend? With whatever is left over, I mean.
Evangelical churches reportedly received more than $7.3 billion in PPP loans. They pay no taxes. They are being allowed to loot the public coffers. https://www.newsweek.com/religious-organizations-receive-73-billion-ppp-loans-megachurches-amass-millions-1515963
You are including Catholic churches in the general “evangelical” category? Unusual.
Linda I guess not everyone is one-horse biased against the Catholic Church. CBK
Success Academy isn’t going to be happy about a news report today. It tells the public that one of SA’s major benefactors, John Paulson, wrote a letter to the Spence School ($50,000 a year to attend) in which he allegedly accused Spence of anti-white bias.
I hate when anti-white bias kills people like George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Ahmad Arbury, MLK, …
I hate it when anti-white bias renders people unable to breathe because there’s a knee on their necks killing them.
I hate that anti-white bias gets spun as an attack against the military when a white guy like Paulson takes a knee to protest injustice against whites.
GregB I figured it out. You just can’t stand it that I don’t fit your stereotype. CBK