Trump Education Plan Brings Opportunity for the Poor

Donald Trump proved once again that despite liberal hysteria about alleged racist dog-whistling, he truly does desire to make America great again for all Americans.

The Trump campaign just announced four proposals to improve educational opportunities for American children, including a special grant to help the 11 million school-aged children living in poverty, many of whom are black or Latino.

“Mr. Trump’s first budget will immediately add an additional federal investment of $20 billion toward school choice.”

“Mr. Trump’s first budget will immediately add an additional federal investment of $20 billion towards school choice,” reads the official statement from the Trump campaign on Thursday. “Specifically, Mr. Trump’s plan will use $20 billion of existing federal dollars to establish a block grant for the 11 million school age kids living in poverty. Individual states will be given the option as to how these funds will be used.”

The massive endowment is part of Trumps plan to “establish the national goal of providing school choice to every American child living in poverty,” according to the statement. “We want every disadvantaged child to be able to choose the local public, private, charter, or magnet school that is best for them and their family.”

“Each state will develop its own formula,” the statement continued, “but the dollars should follow the student.” This is in stark contrast to the current system favored by the Left, in which dollars follow teachers’ unions — not children.

The Trump campaign’s statement declared that “Trump will use the pulpit of the presidency to campaign for this in all 50 states and will call upon the American people to elect officials at the city, state, and federal level who support school choice” in order to make school choice “a shared national mission.” To do this, he will need to fight teachers’ unions and their liberal allies — who would happily doom America’s most vulnerable inner city youth to subpar education and subpar schools.

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged increased funding for New York charter schools, which in neighborhoods from Brooklyn to the Bronx have offered kids a chance at an education of which they could only have dreamed previously, teachers’ union darling Mayor Bill de Blasio attacked the idea.

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“We hold a basic belief that every single child in this state is equally important,” de Blasio said, “and we do not support initiatives that take from one group of children to give to another.”

The last thing powerful teachers’ unions want is good schools and high-achieving students, because then their sole excuse for demanding ever more money — failing schools and underperforming students — disappears.

The Trump campaign also announced a proposal to reward top teachers with increased pay. “Mr. Trump will also support merit pay for teachers, so that great teachers are rewarded instead of the failed tenure system that currently exists, which rewards bad teachers and punishes good ones.”

When President Ronald Reagan made a similar proposal in 1983, he was attacked by the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), which characterized his proposal as a “disgraceful assault on the teaching profession.” Reagan responded, however, and argued that merit pay was “the key to improved learning opportunities for the nation’s schoolchildren” and a “crucial step to improve the teaching profession.”