Donald Trump lays out his education plan: Gut public schools

By Laura Clawson
Friday Sep 09, 2016 · 1:35 PM EDT

Donald Trump gave a big education policy speech Thursday afternoon, choosing to deliver it at an appropriate location: a poorly performing charter school with a lot of lobbying money in its background. Trump offered up the usual Republican privatization wish list of vouchers, charter schools, and online charter schools bleeding money from public schools, with the centerpiece being to take all of the federal money currently allocated to schools and districts with the most low-income students and allow it to bleed out to charter and private schools. As education reporter Dana Goldstein tweeted, “I could write something about Trump's ‘plan’ but all there is to say is that it's warmed over early '00s stuff.”

Trump touted merit pay for teachers, which research shows does not improve educational outcomes. He called for vouchers, which haven’t done especially well by students in Milwaukee or Louisiana or, for that matter, Ohio:

Ohio has a state program that supplies taxpayer-funded vouchers to more than 18,000 students. A recent study of that program, released in July by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that students who used the vouchers to attend private schools actually performed worse on standardized tests than similar students who stayed in public schools.

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http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/9/9/1568374/-Donald-Trump-lays-out-his-education-plan-Gut-public-schools