Education Week - January 25, 2017 - 18

Trump Calls Nation's Schools 'Flush With Cash,' Failing
Harsh inaugural portrait
Of K-12 education system
By Alyson Klein & Andrew Ujifusa
Washington

In his first speech to the nation as president, the newly inaugurated Donald Trump
painted a dark picture of an America that has
left struggling middle-class families behind,
including a public school system that spends
big while getting poor results for students.
"Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families,
and good jobs for themselves," Trump said in
his Jan. 20 address from the rostrum on the
west side of the U.S. Capitol. "But for too many
of our citizens, a different reality exists. ... An
education system flush with cash but which
leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge."
Trump-a real estate developer, reality-TV
star, and political novice who has pledged
to "drain the swamp" of special interests in
Washington-also promised to make Washington a place where the needs of people, not
politicians, are paramount.

"While they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling
families all across our land," Trump said.
The president made no mention of school
choice in his speech. But during the 2016 campaign, he pitched a $20 billion school voucher
program. His choice for U.S. secretary of education, Betsy DeVos-a prominent advocate
and financial benefactor for school choice from
Michigan-shows he's serious about expanding school choice now that he's in the White
House. And the tough language in his inaugural address suggests he'll sell the proposal
by making the case that public schools are
failing.
Anne McCandless, an Advanced Placement government teacher at Providence High
School in Charlotte, N.C., who brought her
class to Washington to see the inauguration,
said she felt stung by Trump's remarks.
"I'm offended because I'm a 25-year veteran
teacher, and so he is telling me that I haven't
done anything," she said. "There's always
room for improvement. There's always room
to change, but that's insulting."
Bobby Howard, a social studies teacher at
Gainesville Middle School in Georgia, who
also attended the inauguration with his students, said the reality at his charter school

doesn't match the president's rhetoric.
"I know he said the system is a disaster. I
don't think it's a disaster," Howard said. But
he added that resources for education could
be better distributed.
But Tom Macluskie, who retired in May
after 26 years of teaching social studies at
Gainesville Middle and joined his former colleagues and students on the National Mall,
is hopeful that Trump can be a change agent.
"I think he's going to do a very, very good
job," said Macluskie. "He's definitely not politically correct, but that may work to his advantage. ... This is almost an experiment."

Complex Picture
Though Trump took sharp aim at the failings of American education, the national picture on student outcomes is a complex one.
Graduation rates are at an all-time high of
83.2 percent, and graduation gaps between
minority and white students are closing. But
in 2015, scores on the National Assessment of
Educational Progress, known as the nation's
report card, fell in math and reading for the
first time in more than two decades.
On the funding side, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which focuses on

reducing poverty and inequality, found that
35 states provided less overall state funding
for education in 2014 than in 2008, before the
Great Recession hit housing prices, sending
down waves of state and local budget cuts to
school districts. In 27 states, per-pupil funding
fell over the same period.
The federal government, which Trump will
now lead, hasn't made up for those cuts. Since
2011, spending on major K-12 programs-
such as Title I grants for disadvantaged students and aid for special education-has been
relatively flat.
Trump's populist message of bringing
change to Washington was a staple of his
campaign speeches. But Jack Jennings, who
served for decades as a top aide to Democrats
on the House education committee, said he
found it hard to square the new president's
promises with his choice of DeVos, who Jennings said had stumbled in showing her
knowledge of basic education polices, such as
federal education laws, in her confirmation
hearing. (See related story, Page 14.)
"I'm incredulous that he says he's going to
bring about better schools with a small group
of billionaires as his advisers," Jennings said.
"He says he is going to change schools with a
woman who has no idea how schools operate."

Key Federal Policy Areas
To Watch Under Trump

ESSA IMPLEMENTATION

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

access or about early-childhood education, beyond a proposal to expand
tax credits for child care, to be championed by his daughter Ivanka.
Big questions loom about how the 45th president and his team will
handle this rapidly shifting landscape. Conservatives are eager for their
best opportunity since the Reagan era to shrink the federal role in education and dramatically expand options for parents, while Trump is sure
to face fierce opposition from educators and advocates who fear that his
administration will move to privatize a sizable chunk of public education.
It may take a while for a clear picture to emerge of just how much
Trump and DeVos will be able to accomplish. Over the coming weeks,
the new administration will need to choose and Congress will have to
confirm the president's nominees for key positions at the department. In
all, the administration is allowed to hire some 150 political appointees
for the agency.
Against this uncertain backdrop, here are six areas for educators to
watch closely this year:

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WILL HAVE A MAJOR ROLE IN IMPLEmenting the Every Student Succeeds Act, the bipartisan
law that passed in 2015 to replace the No Child Left Behind
Act. For instance, the new team will get to decide whether
to delay, revise, or simply toss some of the Obama administration's ESSA regulations, including on accountability.
Congressional Republicans have already targeted the accountability regulation for the elimination through the Congressional Review Act.
ESSA-which retains the previous law's annual testing while turning authority on teacher evaluation, school
turnarounds, and other policy matters over to states and
districts-is slated to be fully in place in the 2017-18
school year. That means the Trump team will get to approve state accountability plans for the new law.

EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
AND FUNDING
TRUMP'S FIRST BUDGET PROPOSAL, WHICH WILL COVER FEDERAL FISCAL YEAR
2018, is likely to come out sometime in late winter or even spring. That
will give educators and advocates a sense of whether Trump is planning
to immediately make good on his campaign promise to get rid of the Education Department, or at least cut it "way, way down."
Scrapping the 37-year-old agency, with a budget of about $70 billion
this year and some 4,000 career employees, would be a tough political
lift, even though both houses of Congress are in Republican hands.
But some proposed program elimination seems likely, particularly
for initiatives that are viewed as part of President Barack Obama's
legacy, such as Promise Neighborhoods, which helps school districts
pair academics with other services, such as affordable housing.
The budget could also provide insight into how the Trump administration plans to deal with across-the-board cuts, known as "sequestration,"
that were enacted under a budget deal in 2011 and are slated to be in
place through the new president's first term.
Over the past few years, Republicans have tangled with the Obama
administration over whether to stop those cuts for both defense spending
and domestic programs, or just for military spending. Trump said during
the campaign that he wanted to end the cuts for defense, but he didn't
address programs such as education. n
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | January 25, 2017 | www.edweek.org

SCHOOL CHOICE
TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY-AND HIS DECISION
to tap DeVos, a longtime voucher and
charter school advocate, as education secretary-presents proponents
of school choice with perhaps their
biggest opening for major federal
backing in the history of that movement.
The explosion of interest in school
choice in recent years has mostly been
at the state level, said Jeanne Allen,
the founder and CEO of the Center
for Education Reform, which supports
school choice and is a strong supporter
of DeVos.
Allen noted that over the past
couple of decades, nearly every

States' initial deadline for those plans is in April, but key
federal players still may not be in the job by then.
"I'm doubtful that they are going to have enough staff in
place to start reviewing plans unless they simply rubberstamp them," said Michael Petrilli, who served in the department at the start of the George W. Bush administration and
is now the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
As education secretary, DeVos could also put a high priority on the pieces of ESSA that will help advance her school
choice agenda, emphasizing, for instance, a weighted-studentfunding pilot that will allow federal, state, and local aid to be
tied to individual students, with more money going to needier
students. And she could encourage states and districts to take
advantage of a provision in the law allowing students at lowperforming schools to transfer to a better public school. n

state has adopted a charter law,
while some have moved on other
forms of school choice, such as education savings accounts. But even
in statehouses, it's typically an "uphill battle, rarely getting the kind
of support and recognition from
Washington that it needs," Allen
said. With Trump and DeVos at the
helm, that's likely to change, she
said.
Trump's only major K-12 pitch
on the campaign trail was for a
$20 billion voucher program, to be
paid for using unspecified federal
funds. That's a long shot in Congress,
which defeated a similar proposal
when it considered ESSA.
But a big voucher initiative isn't the
only way the Trump administration
could further its goal of expanding
school choice.
The administration could work
with Congress to create or expand
education savings-account programs, which can also help families
cover the cost of private schools. It
could also develop a federal tax-

credit scholarship program, giving
individuals and corporations a tax
break in exchange for donating
to organizations that help needy
students cover the cost of private
school.
Or the president and his team
could ask lawmakers to pour resources into federal grants for charter schools or a voucher program
serving District of Columbia students.
One catch: GOP lawmakers from
rural areas are unlikely to be big
fans of school choice programs because students in remote schools
often already must travel an hour
or more to the closest regular public
school. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos said those schools might
benefit from distance-learning
programs. But rural schools have
broadband challenges that might
make it tough for them to take advantage of virtual learning, and at
this point even some choice supporters say the quality of the programs
is still uneven. n

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Education Week - January 25, 2017

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