Trump's Education Pitch Would Help Families
The candidates are making their closing arguments in swing states, but only one of them is using policy to woo voters. And it’s a policy that will help people whether they vote for him or not.
Recently, President Donald Trump spoke in Milwaukee about the value of giving families more options regarding their children’s education. “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.,” said Trump.
Vice President Kamala Harris, by contrast, continues to toe the Democratic party line in her strong opposition to school choice despite flip-flopping on nearly every other major policy position.
Though the federal government spends nearly $120 billion on K-12 schools a year, there is little to show for it when it comes to improving American education to prepare mature citizens for the workforce.
Rather than spending the money on ineffective programs and waste in the K-12 system, the federal government can give that money to parents. Families would then be empowered to make the best decisions to propel their children into lifelong success.
The state of American education is in a crisis. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, basic reading and math scores were down in the country’s public schools.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Education reported that nine-year-olds had the largest reading score decline since 1990. Thirteen-year-olds had the largest-ever decline in math scores. These trends began decades ago. Economic and education analysts have estimated that recent learning declines will result in $1.3 trillion in lost earnings for students over their careers with a total economic cost of $31 trillion.
The failure of American public education is not limited to the classroom. It threatens the prosperity of every student and the economic and national security of the country.
The federal government has had little impact on student success, but not for lack of spending. Out of the more than $17,000 per student spent on public education each year, Washington, D.C. spends about $2,400. And the programs that money goes to are largely ineffective.
The largest program for elementary and high school students is Title I, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiatives. The program had noble intentions as it sought to close the skills gap between low- and middle-to-high-income students by putting federal dollars into school districts with a disproportionate number of low-income families.
But nearly 60 years of bipartisan research has shown that spending billions of dollars on Title I has done nothing to help disadvantaged students. Former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn summarized the effectiveness of Title I well when he said, “The efficacy of the activities that it pays for, and the educational well-being of the disadvantaged youngsters who are its putative focus, seem substantially less important than the maintenance of the program’s vast apparatus and the flow of its dollars.”
Like many government educational programs, Title I has become bloated with bureaucracy and does not serve the best interests of students and their parents.
Good policy should take those dollars away from government administrators and put them directly into the hands of parents who know their children’s educational needs the best. The $2,000 spent per student can go directly to parents who can spend that money wiser than any bureaucrat. When parents can put that money towards educational needs like tutoring, special needs counseling, private school tuition, and others, students will have their unique educational needs addressed.
States would also receive an apportionment of the funds to direct the support to parents. Fortunately, 33 states already have the infrastructure in place through school choice programs to administer these funds. For those remaining states, they currently distribute federal funds to state educational agencies which distribute those dollars locally, so they would not have to create mechanisms from the ground up.
When students lack academic proficiency, it isn’t because their parents have failed them. Government has. And it’s clear the Democrats and their presidential nominee would maintain the failing status quo.
Top-down education will continue to fail until education decisions are taken out of D.C. offices and put on the family dinner table.
President Trump’s bold solution to empower parents and break the one-size-fits-all approach to education can begin to get America’s schools back on track. Giving parents the resources they need to make those decisions is another great addition to pro-family policy solutions that give students the best chance at achieving the American Dream.
And if President Trump is able to implement his plan, students and families will thrive under his education policy, whether they voted for him or not.
