Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 14

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

Trump Renews Push for School Choice, Specifics Scarce
Denisha Merriweather,
center, whose family
took advantage of a
tax-credit scholarship
program in Florida
so that the could attend
a Christian school in
Jacksonville,
is acknowledged by
President Donald Trump
during his address to a
joint session of Congress
in Washington.

Tells Congress such options
aid disadvantaged youth
Now that President Donald Trump has
given his first big speech to Congress, it's
clearer than ever that he remains serious
about his campaign-trail pledge to expand
school choice.
Trump called on lawmakers to "pass an
education bill that funds school choice for
disadvantaged youth, including millions of
African-American and Latino children. These
families should be free to choose the public,
private, charter, magnet, religious, or home
school that is right for them."
But the nitty-gritty details of what form
that expansion might take remain elusive.
And beyond choice-Trump's only specific
discussion of K-12 in his Feb. 28 address-
it remains tough to say what other policy
proposals might be on the president's K-12
priority list.
That's a big shift from the past two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush,
both of whom were knee-deep at this point in
their presidencies in the education initiatives
that would define their K-12 legacies.
Obama by late February 2009 had already
signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which poured some $100 billion
into education and financed some of his marquee competitive-grant programs, including
Race to the Top. And Bush spent much of his
first week in office laying the groundwork for
what became the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act less than a year later.

Choice Push
In his address to Congress, Trump did
touch briefly on a broad swath of issues aside
from choice that have a big impact on schools,
including immigration, health care, and expanded access to child care, though without
offering any concrete proposals.
The strongest signal in that speech of
what the administration may have in store
came not from a policy white paper, but from
Trump's recognition of a person: Denisha
Merriweather, a guest of first lady Melania
Trump. Merriweather "failed 3rd grade twice"
according to Trump, before taking advantage
of Florida's tax-credit scholarship program.
She used the funds to attend Esprit de
Corps Center for Learning in Jacksonville
and became the first member of her family to
graduate from high school and college, according to the White House. Now, she's set to get
a master's degree in social work, Trump said.
"We want all children to be able to break the
cycle of poverty just like Denisha," he said.
Advocates say the administration is mulling
a federal tax-credit scholarship similar to the
Florida program Merriweather benefited from.
That would give individuals and corporations a break on their taxes, in exchange for
donating to scholarship-granting organizations, now in place in more than a dozen
states. Those organizations, in turn, offer
money to low-income and other students to
attend private schools.
The credit could help the Trump administration accomplish its goal of expanding
school choice without cutting federal funds
for schools. One possible model: legislation
introduced by Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., and
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Trump was sched-

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

By Alyson Klein

uled to visit St. Andrew Catholic School in
Orlando, Fla., on March 3 for a "listening
session" on school choice.
To be sure, there are other possible paths
for expanding choice. While out campaigning,
Trump pitched a new, $20 billion program
that would allow federal funding to follow
students to the school of their choice, including a private school.
But that might be a tougher lift politically.
The Senate rejected a similar program back

And it called for making child-care costs
tax deductible for individuals earning up
to $250,000 a year, or couples earning
$500,000 a year or less. Lower-income families would be able to take advantage of the
program through an expanded "earned income" tax credit.
Some experts worry that the approach-
which Trump's daughter Ivanka helped to
champion-wouldn't do much to ensure that
the poorest families get access to child care.

Families should be free to choose the public, private, charter,
magnet, z religious, or home school that is right for them."
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
in 2015, when Republicans had bigger margins in the chamber, in part because Republicans from rural states didn't think it would
do much to help fix their schools.
The administration could also seek more
money for federal programs that bolster
choice, including the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which offers vouchers in the
District of Columbia, or could hike grants for
charter schools, which are currently funded
at more than $330 million annually.

Child-Care Agenda
Trump signaled in his speech that he
wants to make good on another campaign
promise: using the tax code to help families
cover the cost of child care. The president
said he "wants to work with members in
both parties to make child care accessible
and affordable, to help ensure new parents
have paid family leave."
During the campaign, Trump pitched
broadening access to child care, primarily
through tax credits. His proposal called for
six weeks of guaranteed maternity leave-but
not paternity leave-for new parents whose
employers don't already offer the benefit.

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org

"It's a great proposal for Ivanka Trump,"
said Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American
Progress, a left-leaning think tank, who
served in the U.S. Department of Education
under Obama. "It's not a relevant or helpful proposal for your average single working
mother."

Dearth of Details
Though Trump hasn't provided as many
policy specifics as Bush or as Obama had by
this point in their presidencies, that might be
as much about the current moment in K-12
policy as it is about the man in the White
House, said Sandy Kress, who served as a
White House aide on education issues in the
Bush administration.
"I think we're living in different times," he
said. He noted that the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, the law that replaced the
NCLB Act, turns control of most education
policy decisions over to states.
"ESSA is a ref lection of the fact that
there's not much interest now in either party
on edu cation policy," Kress said. "This is not
going to be micropolicy federal programs

and all of the kinds of things that Bush or
Obama had done."
During his first week in office, Bush released an outline of what became the NCLB
law and gave one of his first and most prominent speeches on the subject of K-12 education, Kress recalled.
The law called for states to test their students annually in reading and math in grades
3-8 and once in high school, and to break out
the testing results of certain groups of students, including English-language learners
and those in special education.
Even though ESSA rolls back the federal
footprint considerably, both of those core tenets remain in place.
By the time Obama gave his first address
to Congress on Feb. 25, 2009, lawmakers
had already approved the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's massive pot of
money to help schools weather the recession, including $4 billion for a Race to the
Top program. Among other features, the
program rewarded states for adopting the
Common Core State Standards, which remain on the books in 36 states and the District of Columbia.
And in his speech, Obama laid down a
marker: America would lead the world in college graduates by 2020. He referred to that
goal throughout his presidency to make the
case for everything from increasing access to
early-childhood education to an ultimately
unsuccessful push for free community college.
"He never lost sight of that North Star of
what we were pushing for," said Martin of
the Center for American Progress. As for the
Trump team? "I don't think they've laid out
an affirmative agenda" for public education,
Martin said.
But Rep. Luke Messer, R-Ind., one of the
biggest congressional champions of school
choice, saw Trump's recent speech as a major
marker on the issue.
"No president has spoken about school
choice on a national stage like President
Trump did," he said.
Assistant Editor Andrew Ujifusa contributed
to this report.

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Education Week - March 8, 2017

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