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.”
