Trump’s planned attack on students, educators
As I have noted before, Donald Trump declared, upon winning the Nevada Republican caucus in February, “I love the poorly educated,” presumably because many under-educated people were voting for him during the GOP nominating process. Unfortunately, so were a lot of well-educated people, or he wouldn’t be the Republican presidential nominee today.
In any event, Trump will have many more poorly educated people to love if he is elected to the White House and Congress approves his plan to abolish or drastically reduce the U.S. Department of Education.
According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, enactment of Trump’s “education plan,” if you want to call it that, could cost 490,000 teachers’ jobs throughout the United States, including as many as 49,000 in Texas. In Texas alone, more than 760,000 students could lose funding for critical education programs.
Here are a few other potential impacts of a Trump presidency on education, and my thanks to Phillip Martin at Progress Texas for calling the analysis to my attention:
# Five million children with disabilities would lose $12.7 billion each year for special education programs. Texas children could lose $1.1 billion of that.
# Nine million low-income students throughout the country would lose $15 billion of Title 1 funding each year.
# Eight million students a year throughout the U.S. would lose Pell grants for college.
# Some $700 million used by states to help educate 5 million English language learners would be cut, including as much as $108 million in Texas.
These are only some of the likely cuts. In all, about $70 billion in federal education funds could be lost each year under a Trump presidency, including $5.7 billion in Texas.
Elections have consequences, and these are but a few of the consequences for educators, students and their parents if Trump is elected.
