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Thursday, November 24th, 2016

How Trump Could Gut Public Education

Author:     Dana Goldstein
Source:     Slate
Publication Date:     23 November 2016 | 1:57 p.m.
 Link: How Trump Could Gut Public Education
Stephan:   American school children are already under-performers in even basic skills, reading, writing, arithmetic both in absolute terms and in comparison with children in other countries, and we should get ready for a major gutting of public education. Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos,  is a very rich  woman deeply committed to Theocratic Rightist values, vouchers, "Christian" schools, and privatization through charter schools. And also the sister of Erik Prince founder of the infamous contract mercenaries guilty of a massacre in Iraq. So far as I can see in studying the data about charters schools, many appear to be a manifestation of the privatization scam in which business people use students/prisoners/patients as keys to unlock public money. DeVos seems poised to exacerbate this corrupt trend.  
President-elect Donald Trump stands with Betsy DeVos after their meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Saturday. Credit: Mike Segar/Reuters

President-elect Donald Trump stands with Betsy DeVos after their meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Saturday.
Credit: Mike Segar/Reuters

School-choice philanthropist Betsy DeVos is set to become Donald Trump’s secretary of education. The school choice movement that Trump has embraced is bipartisan; centrist Democrats and Republicans both tend to support public charter schools. But DeVos, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, represents the most conservative corner of the movement. She and her husband have funded a series of efforts to turn public school funding into vouchers for students to attend private schools. They have also fought to prevent charter schools, including for-profit charter schools, from being more tightly regulated.

The DeVos appointment signals that Trump is serious about the $20 billion school voucher plan he rolled out on the campaign trail. The proposal would redirect huge swaths of the federal education budget away from school districts and toward […]

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