Trump says he’d pay for the $20 billion program by cutting elsewhere in the education budget. That almost certainly includes the $14 billion the federal government spent in 2015 on grants to educate disadvantaged children, defined as children from families making at most 185 percent of the poverty line (just under $45,000 for a family of four). The grants, known as Title I grants, go to states and districts to pass on to schools based on the proportion of disadvantaged students those schools enroll.
.. This idea, known as “Title I portability” in education circles, is by now a mainstream Republican policy proposal. Ronald Reagan called for turning Title I into vouchers during his presidency... Dividing $14 billion in federal funding among the 25 million students poor enough to count as “disadvantaged” yields a voucher of $580. Private school tuition costs, on average, nearly $11,000 per year... But the big idea Trump is touting is that he could get states to kick in enough money to give the vouchers some real buying power... If states added $110 billion of their own money to the $20 billion the federal government would spend, Trump says, every student living in poverty could get a $12,000 voucher, well over the average cost of private elementary school tuition and slightly under the average cost of private high school... If states added $110 billion of their own money to the $20 billion the federal government would spend, Trump says, every student living in poverty could get a $12,000 voucher, well over the average cost of private elementary school tuition and slightly under the average cost of private high school.
What’s the worst that could happen with Betsy DeVos as education secretary? Two scenarios.
I’ve been joking that neurosurgeon Ben Carson‘s — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development — primary qualification is that he grew up in a house. But Betsy DeVos, his choice as education secretary, attended private schools and sent her children to them. So as far as personal interaction with public education, she doesn’t even have that going for her.
.. In this context, asking “What’s the worst that could happen?” is a way of sensitizing people to the fact that the worst-case scenario hasn’t happened to others they know, and is extremely unlikely to happen to them, too.
.. The rhetoric coming from the President-elect and Secretary DeVos is sharp and nasty, bashing “failing government schools” and the teachers who support and work in them. Teachers are demoralized, and there is a drop in applications to teacher preparation programs across the country.