Trump prioritizes school choice, charter schools in latest budget proposal
Source: Think Progress
The president's spending on federal charter grants has increased by more than 30 percent since he first took office.
Elham Khatami
Mar 11, 2019, 3:58 pm
President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget proposal reinforces the administration’s controversial commitment to school choice while simultaneously seeking to slash the Education Department’s budget for the third consecutive year.
Under the proposal, the president pushes for a first-of-its-kind federal tax credit for donations to private school scholarships, in addition to increasing federal charter school grants by $60 million. The plan seeks to gut the Education Department’s budget by 10 percent, asking for $64 billion for the agency, or $7.1 billion less than the 2019 enacted level. Like last year’s proposal, Trump aims to eliminate more than $2 billion in teacher development funding, as well as over $1 billion in funding for after-school programs.
Trump’s previous two education spending proposals were unsuccessful in Congress and this one is likely to fail as well. However, the administration’s focus on school choice continues to be significant, as it has the attention of Republicans in Congress, who last month introduced a $5 billion measure to fund private school scholarships. That bill is similar to the federal tax credit proposed in the president’s 2020 budget, which aims to implement a private school scholarship tax credit of up to $50 billion over 10 years.
When the bill was first introduced in February, the proposal even garnered the ire of conservatives. The Heritage Foundation said the initiative “poses a threat to education choice in the states, and undermines the goal of a streamlined federal tax code,” adding that “using the federal government to push” for education choice risks igniting the same backlash that President Barack Obama received for his national education policies.
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/trump-budget-charter-schools-f705cdf07603/
Traitor and Devos should be married, I mean really, Michigan has over 50% charters schools and most of the students are failing, and the charter schools are making millions off the taxpayer.........................profit, profit, profit.................
She really needs to be brought in and give testimony.......................on her absolute lack of only thinking except of making money off taxpayers for charter schools.......................
I am so glad that I went to a public school growing up, best education in the world at that time and still is, one of the democrat party main priorities was allocating fund's to "PUBLIC EDUCATION".................always....................
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough.........................
= new reply since forum marked as read
I, too, get really discouraged to see some of our Dems (and that included Obama) supporting the for-profit scam system of education. Once you institute that, it's all about the money. I would LOVE to hear one of our candidates come out with a strong plan to support our public schools. I went to a public school, and so did my husband and 3 adult sons, we all had a strong and well rounded education. My husband is a retired public school teacher, too. He ended up teaching at the high school he attended. (like "Welcome Back Kotter"
Get rid of the politics and the unreasonable demands and the nit picking and the overseeing of every move teachers make (by right wing nut jobs), fund the system properly, and it will soar.
