National School Choice Week begins tomorrow
To mark the start of ‘National School Choice Week,’ Corey DeAngelis, senior researcher at the American Federation for Children, joined ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ to discuss the launch of an anti-school choice campaign by the National Education Association.
Former President Trump is proposing that federal education dollars “follow the student” in his potential second term, while pushing his “universal school choice policy” and emphasizing that he supports it “all the way.”
The former president defended school choice last week, making his strongest argument yet for the movement at the federal level.
“We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, DC,” Trump said at an event in Milwaukee.
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“If you want a better education for your child, Kamala Harris stands in your way,” Trump said. “Kamala and the Radical Left Democratic Party want to keep black and Hispanic children trapped in family rule. I think that’s really why.”
The former president said he believes school choice “is the civil rights issue of our time.”
Former President Trump (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
“A child’s destiny should be determined by their love of education, by their parents and by many factors. But it cannot be determined by a ZIP code,” Trump said. “And no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing state school.”
Trump’s universal school choice would allow parents to send their children to public, private or religious schools.
Trump’s stance is reflected in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform. According to school choice advocates, he recognizes the role of federal and state governments in expanding tax credit scholarship programs and Student Savings Accounts. Education, currently serving more than one million K-12 students nationwide.
The Trump campaign said school choice “leads to higher graduation rates, greater parental satisfaction and engagement, lower costs, greater competition among schools, and higher reading and math test scores.”
Right now, 11 states have universal school choice, and 32 states and Washington, DC have at least one private school choice program, but 18 states have none.
“Before President Trump took office, no state had a universal school choice policy. Now, nearly a dozen do, and it’s in large part because of the voice and visibility he gave to raising the issue. into the national consciousness during COVID, but even before that,” former Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Digital.
“There is an increase in the number and needs of American schoolchildren regarding alternatives to conventional public schools,” Conway said. “There is a growing resistance among Kamala Harris and Democrats to allowing these kinds of alternatives — these kinds of options and choices — to be in the hands of parents.”
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats are broadening their opposition to school choice, and teachers unions rejoiced when Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, calling the candidacy a important victory for public educators.
Walz is a former teachers union member who has said he opposes the school choice “agenda.”
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Teachers unions lobbied hard to extend school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many districts were closed for more than a year.
Trump’s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Walz was “a five-alarm fire for parents and students.”
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attends an event at the White House on August 12, 2020. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
As for the Democratic Party platform, Democrats support making all children “regardless of their ZIP code” access to a “quality K-12 public education and making college affordable for all.” Americans.”
Democrats seek to direct federal funds to public schools in an effort to “expand opportunities for higher education and job training.”
Harris’ campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment, but her website lays out her plan to “ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children.”
Harris also plans to focus on working to “end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable so that college can be a ticket to the middle class.”
Harris said she would work to “expand programs that create good career paths for non-college graduates.”
But Conway explained that parents are focused on playing a bigger role in their children’s education, now more than ever.
“There is a continuation of the parental rights renaissance that began during COVID and extended into 2021 and into the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in 2021 and continues unabated in many states across this country,” Conway said, noting than since the COVID-19 crisis. 19, which closed schools at the request of teachers unions, “there are more people running for school board and there are more parents involved in the choice of schools and the nature of the curricula.”
“It takes a charismatic, compelling leader to take this on,” Conway said, referring to Trump.
Kellyanne Conway, former counselor to the president and White House advisor (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
In December 2020, Trump signed an executive order to expand educational opportunities for American children and families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. That order offered flexibility to provide children with emergency K-12 grants to access in-person learning opportunities, an effort to provide an in-person learning option after extended school closures.
The Trump administration also invested nearly $1.5 billion in the development of public charter schools and, under its tax reform bill, made it possible for parents to withdraw up to $10,000 tax-free per year from 529 education savings plans to cover public schools, private or educational. K-12 religious education costs.
“President Trump says this is the civil rights issue of our time, and that’s true, but also, when you look at the large number of charter schools and school choice scholarship recipients and even the alternatives, like students homeschooled, and that’s still a growing piece, but parents want to take matters into their own hands, they know their children best,” Conway said. “If Trump is re-elected, this will be a big problem.”
As for the word “choice,” Conway said the left “wants to appropriate that word,” but only when it relates to abortion.
“The Democratic Party really only wants to talk to women from the waist down, while these parents of school-aged children want people to talk to them from the waist up – their eyes, ears, brains and hearts – and that includes to give them options,” he said. “We should not give up the word ‘choice’ and the idea that women have the right to choose to the left based on abortion. It should be that way, women have the right to choose where their children go to school and what is taught there “
But Democrats believe school choice works against public schools (something Conway rejected) and argue it would defund teachers and the schools themselves.
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“It’s just about competition,” he said. “You can customize your coffee 14,000 different ways at Starbucks. You can have Amazon deliver anything to your house this afternoon. And yet you’re stuck with an option for school.”
He added: “It’s like shopping at a Soviet Safeway for your child’s education, and it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t fit with the rest of the way we live our lives.”
The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
