Private companies fund Florida’s school choice program, who then in turn are given tax breaks for their participation in the program. I can think of a good way (cough, taxtherich, cough) Arizona could come up with a billion or two to supplement education for disadvantaged students. And, although the high school graduation rate increased among D.C. voucher students, they didn’t receive better test scores. The speech echoed Trump’s past remarks USA students perform near the bottom of the pack, though we spend more per student than most other major countries in the world. “Yet, our students perform near the bottom of the pack for major large advanced countries”. Trump said the money would have to benefit individual low-income students (rather than schools), and that the grants would favor states that have enacted strong school choice laws.
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Trump said the money should be used by states to enable students to afford tuition at private schools if the family wants to avoid sending their child to an under-performing public school. The real estate mogul shared, “As president, I will establish the national goal of providing school choice to every American child living in poverty”.
Before endorsing choice as the solution to numerous nation’s educational problems, Trump spent 18 minutes criticizing Hillary Clinton’s handling of private emails while secretary of state and defending in unusual detail his assertion, which media reports have shown to be untrue, that he opposed entering the Iraq war.
“This one speech can’t clear that up for me”, Emmalena Alexander, an African-American woman whose son attends the Cleveland school where Trump spoke, told The New York Times.
Packard, a former Goldman Sachs banker who specialized in mergers, barreled into the school choice business in 1999 when he founded K12, Inc., a national leader in online charter schools.
Trump pledged to use the “pulpit of the presidency to campaign for this in all 50 states and will call upon the American people to elect officials at the city, state and federal level, who support school choice so important”.
Trump also argued that the present voucher system will not help these poor children to enroll at quality schools, but if there is a free market, which he plans to implement, it will improve the entire education system.
“Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top are all programs that take decisions away from parents and local school boards”, he wrote.
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A majority of Penn College Republicans do not plan to support their party’s nominee: 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump. Yes, choice programs must be bullet-proofed against over-regulation, but worrying about that possibility shouldn’t stop us from pushing well-though-out choice efforts. This was during the overhaul of the nation’s main federal education law a year ago.
