Trump's first full education budget: Deep cuts to public school programs in pursuit of school choice

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Trump’s first full education budget: Deep cuts to public school programs in pursuit of school choice

By Emma Brown, Valerie Strauss and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel May 17 at 3:14 PM

Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The administration would channel part of the savings into its top priority: school choice. It seeks to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.

President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have repeatedly said they want to shrink the federal role in education and give parents more opportunity to choose their children’s schools.

The documents — described by an Education Department employee as a near-final version of the budget expected to be released next week — offer the clearest picture yet of how the administration intends to accomplish that goal.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/trumps-first-full-education-budget-deep-cuts-to-public-school-programs-in-pursuit-of-school-choice/2017/05/17/2a25a2cc-3a41-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html

[yurbud]

1. Democrats need to make a lot of noise about Public Service Loan Forgiveness

Some of us signed up for much lower payments based on this program that would forgive the loans of those who work in the public sector after ten years and in the private sector after twenty.

The lower payments allow the debt to balloon, which mine had previously done when I had trouble making payments because I had to pay for my own health care out of pocket for a decade and didn't make enough teach college at first to make a payment that was more than my rent.

If you have student loans, have kids who have student loans, or know someone who went to college and wasn't already wealthy, you should call your congressman and senators and tell them ending this program is a really bad idea.
https://www.contactingcongress.org/

Since this article attributes the policy to Betsy DeVos, call the Department of Education too.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/contacts/gen/index.html