Trump didn’t talk a whole lot about education during the campaign, but he said enough to give us a sense of the direction he wants to head. More vouchers, more charters and a modification or elimination of Common Core. “Choice,” not Common Core. That pretty much sums it up.

If you want a model for the educational direction Trump plans to take us, look at Indiana, Mike Pence’s state. As governor, Pence expanded vouchers and pushed aggressively for more charter schools. On the campaign trail, Trump proposed $20 billion in federal dollars for “choice.” And though Trump used the “widows and orphans” appeal for charters and vouchers—helping out all those poor children trapped in “failing government schools”—it looks like the Trump/Pence approach will embrace vouchers for billionaires as well as paupers. According to Pence in September:

“Donald Trump and I both believe that every parent in America should be able to choose where their children go to school, regardless of their income and regardless of their area code, and public, private and parochial and faith-based schools on the list.”

Close to 60 percent of Indiana children are eligible for vouchers. The number is only that low because that’s as far as Pence has been able to expand it.

In Indiana, the average voucher is around $4,000 a year. That’s not going to buy any poor kids entry into expensive, top flight private schools, but there should be lots of poorly funded, low-tuition religious schools that will be happy to fill their classrooms with poor voucher students.

Where will the $20 billion “school choice” money come from if Congress takes to the idea? Don’t expect there to be new funding. That’s not the Republican way. Take it from Title 1, maybe? After all, those poor kids won’t need the extra Title 1 help if they’re all being prepared to attend Harvard and Yale at the charter and private schools of their choice. From the SNAP (food stamp) program? “Let them eat choice!”

As for Common Core, it’s already not so common nationally. It may not be very hard to brush it aside or modify it out of existence. Honestly, I wouldn’t be sorry to see it go, unless it’s replaced with something worse.

Another education-related issue is immigration. If Trump goes ahead with his plans to deport undocumented immigrants at anything like the number he has suggested — his latest figure is 3 million off the bat—the effect of his actions will reach into schools. Children with undocumented parents can find themselves deported or uprooted from their families to live with relatives or friends. Student “Dreamers” granted the right to stay in the country under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) could become easy targets of immigration sweeps.

Some school districts and institutions of higher education have promised not to cooperate with the Feds by giving them student data, and promise to stand behind their students, even, in some cases declaring their campuses sanctuaries. The whole thing could turn very ugly in schools very quickly, disrupting the educational environment for all students, creating a cloud of tension and fear. Some children could be kept home from school for fear of detection. And racial tensions are likely to be stirred up even further than they’ve already been stirred up by the election.

This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2016.

4 replies on “Education In a Trump Presidency: Reading Tea Leaves”

  1. Speaking of failing schools did anybody see the interview with the TUSD parent who, after begging TUSD to discipline students to stop bullying her son, received a call from school security telling her she can never step foot on a TUSD campus or admin building again. Ever in her life. They have accused her of interfering in education.

    Funny, that’s what I have accused TUSD of.

  2. It would seem from what you write here, David, that you are concerned about racial justice and the plight of low-SES citizens who are underserved by our public district schools.

    So where has your commentary been on TUSD’s failures to implement its deseg order?

    (You want to run down attempts to give families alternatives to enrolling their children in schools like TUSD’s Utterback, but you have provided no commentary on the district’s inability or unwillingness to use the desegregation funds allocated to it to fill positions like “Family Liaison” and “Dance Teacher” in a troubled “Fine Arts” magnet that can’t achieve the diversity goals stipulated because it can’t deliver on the promises made by its “magnet status (e.g. actually having Fine Arts faculty in place to educate students). And you endorsed a candidate for the Board of our largest local public school district who has been conspicuous and persistent in her efforts in office to disregard or disparage the people trying to hold the district accountable for doing what is necessary to implement plans made with community participation and Board approval that would, if followed, have some chance of integrating the schools and delivering better services to underserved populations.)

    When will you and others who exhaust themselves arguing against charters and vouchers understand that arguments like those you perpetually make only have the potential for validity when the effort is being made to ensure that public district schools are not, in their on-the-ground, in-practice-as-well-as-in-theory reality, institutions that parents who pay attention to conditions in the schools and have their children’s best interests at heart must choose to exit?

    You can’t (or shouldn’t) say “On the policy level, we must allow no alternatives!” at the same time you refuse to do anything at all to advocate for improving conditions in a poorly managed public district that underserves tens of thousands of students and that, for good reason, thousands of constituents have chosen to leave during the past decade. (And in case you are inclined to reach for another of your knee-jerk, unthinking canned arguments that pay no attention whatsoever either to the REALITY of conditions in the schools or to the endemic behaviors in some poor urban districts’ administrations, please note that asking for people who chronically mis-apply funds to receive more funding is in no way a solution to the problems students experience in districts like TUSD.)

  3. Ummm….the federal government can’t “modify or eliminate” Common Core, because it didn’t create it, and the ESSA clearly preserves standards development for the states. So Trump can say as much as he wants about it, but he can’t really do much one way or the other. ESSA put USDOE out of the standards business as a matter of law.

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