Why A Federal School Choice Program May Be The Dumbest Way For Trump To Promote School Choice Any Republican who proposes expanding rather than ending the federal government's power over education is whistling past the graveyard federalization has made of American education.By Joy Pullmann
March 4, 2019 Some of President Obama’s most egregious abuses of power employed the U.S. Department of Education. That department, and federal laws authorizing its duties, is how his administration imposed Common Core on the nation. A decade later, Common Core has massively failed despite billions spent, but that likely won’t even lay a speed bump beneath the next plan for nationalizing the nation’s schools.
Obama’s U.S. Department of Education also abused federal law to impose race-based discipline rules on the nation’s schools that assisted the Parkland school shooter and made many public schools dens of chaos. That department ignored the plain text and settled interpretation of the law to demand that all the nation’s public schools facilitate transgender bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. That department abused its power to spend billions of dollars on “school turnarounds†that evidence showed would not work, long before the money was spent.
Congress has redressed precisely none of these national embarrassments, despite two years of Republicans controlling both branches and the presidency and plenty of promises. Further, not only can none of these serious injuries the federal government has done to the nation’s children be undone, all indications are that any Democrat successor would go even farther than Obama did. Any Republican who proposes expanding rather than ending the federal government’s power over education is whistling past the graveyard it has made of American education.
Yet that’s precisely what we get from the Trump administration’s backing of Sen. Ted Cruz’s new proposal to create a $5 billion federal school choice program funded by tax credits. The money — and thus the federal strings — could go to public schools, private schools, home schools, even after-school and vocational programs. In other words, this creates the potential for federal control of every single kind of education program in the country.
Memo to GOP: Democrats Don’t Care What the Law Says<..snip..>
http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/04/why-a-federal-school-choice-program-may-be-the-dumbest-way-for-trump-to-promote-school-choice/
