Educators are being turned upside down. On Donald Trump’s selection of professional wrestling executive and longtime donor Linda McMahon has been appointed Minister of Education. Because, as you might expect, experts in almost every field are being turned upside down when Trump chooses an underqualified but loyal hack to oversee his field of expertise, or another fox to guard the henhouse.
For example, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, accused McMahon of being unqualified and bent on privatization.
Her main goal in education is to promote vouchers that deplete public schools’ resources and send taxpayer money to irresponsible private schools that are allowed to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are consistent with Trump’s Project 2025 plan.
McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s term, lacks educational experience. She earned her teaching certification from college and worked as a student teacher for one semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010. washington postsince Hartford Courant She discovered that she had claimed an education degree she never earned. Recently, a lawsuit was filed alleging that McMahon and her estranged husband Vince tolerated child sexual abuse by employees of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (McMahon’s lawyer told CNN the claims were “baseless.”)
But she likes gift certificates.
Speaking of discrimination, programs like vouchers were first deployed throughout the South during desegregation, allowing authorities to close public schools. White parents did not want their children to mix with black children and instead provided subsidies to fund white-only private education. Children in hundreds of new private schools that have sprung up to serve them. As this history compiled by the Center for American Progress shows, this was an ugly and horribly racist enterprise.
If states expand their voucher programs, both broke and traditional school operators will get the cash, and public schools and their students will be the losers.
And this is actually still happening. ProPublica We previously reported that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregated schools.” Of the 39 schools reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half reported to the federal government that they had a student body. At least 85% are white.
Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school they were talking about them and I’m a geek. But now the message revolves around school “choice,” and vouchers, which advocates say have been revived in several states in the form of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), can help low-income parents escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent.
But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders fail to mention that public schools are failing in large part because wealthy families have fled en masse, and their budgets have been gutted by voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems. There are billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons and wealthy members of both political parties. All of this multiplication has left many public schools underfunded to the point where teachers literally have to beg for basic school supplies. Some did so during parents’ nights at the public high school my children attended in Oakland, California.
McMahon or not, vouchers have recently come back into vogue as a response to the educational upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic. A Brookings Institution report released last year notes that “in 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine states expanded existing plans, highlighting the momentum coming primarily from red states.”
And, of course, some low-income families will benefit from programs that divert funds that would otherwise have gone to local public schools into Individual Accounts (ESAs) that can be used for K-12 private tuition and related expenses. But the Brookings report points out that there could be a lot of collateral damage.
First, any time you increase government payments (something Republicans complain about in other contexts), scammers and opportunists will emerge. The report cited research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, they were followed by a number of “pop-up” private schools, many of which quickly failed. “This is precisely what is happening now with ESA-style expansion in Arizona,” the report notes. (Arizona, which became the first state to offer ESAs to select students in 2011, expanded the program to all students, including those already enrolled in private schools, in 2022.) According to a follow-up paper from Brookings, the program “is designed to provide a It is considered a “handout for the people.”)
Voucher programs also lead to increased tuition at traditional private schools, “and this is precisely what recent reports on the passage of the ESA show,” according to the Brookings report. So basically, all the sloppy, entrenched operators get to cash in and the public schools and their students are the big losers.
There are other results as well. From the report:
The past decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests that they actually reduce academic achievement. For example, in Louisiana, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts reaching a very large -0.4 standard deviations relative to education policy standards, with declines that persisted for several years. These results have been published in leading journals in the field of empirical public and education policy. Similar results were found in Indiana, with an effect closer to -0.15 standard deviations. Let’s put these negative impacts into perspective. Current estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on academic trajectories are approximately -0.25 standard deviations.
Vouchers more broadly, It matches what I’ve been singing so far. plunder— the steady manipulation of our economic system over the past 45 years to benefit those who do not need government assistance at the expense of those who need it. As I argued in a recent article, this, ironic as it may sound, was the main reason Trump won a second term.
I wrote about the manipulation of our education system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take advantage of our government’s tax-advantaged 529 college savings plan. As with individual retirement plans such as 401(k)s, IRAs, etc., these plans provide much more help to wealthy families than to poor families. The example I used in my book involved two (fictional) students living in Ohio, one rich and the other middle class.
A middle-class family could only invest $6,000 per year in their daughter’s 529. These investment funds can grow tax-free over the years and be used to pay for college tuition and eligible expenses once your child becomes an adult.
And that’s good. They needed that help. But for some reason, the rules allow the rich couple in my example to advance up to five years’ worth of maximum contributions to their son’s 529 at the same time. So they put $150,000 into the 529 they set up for him as a newborn, did it again when he turned 5, and then brought the balance up to the maximum allowed by the state when he turned 10. You can’t contribute any more than that. . With so much cash in your funds to begin with, you can imagine how quickly interest builds up.
Wealthy families gained another lucrative perk in late 2017 when Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his first and most notable achievement. In addition to tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the TCJA now stipulates that parents can take up to $10,000 per year from their children’s 529 funds for K-12 private tuition. At elite private high schools, where tuition typically ranges from $40,000 to $60,000 per year. discursive On the other hand, middle-class kids in underfunded public schools can’t use 529 funds to cover expenses like SAT prep, college counseling, or essay coaching that their schools don’t provide in any meaningful way.
Taking a closer look at the numbers: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5% for the student’s 529 fund, the wealthy family received a tax break of about $117,000. That’s almost seven times what middle-class families receive. Let me mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had his two and a half years of private high school tuition paid for by taxpayers. He also ended up with a whopping $688,660, which would be enough to cover tuition if he chooses law school, medical school, or business school.
It’s no surprise that when I reported these numbers, “Ivy Plus” colleges were enrolling more students from families in the top 1% than from the bottom 50%. And compared to children whose families are in the bottom 20% of the wealth spectrum, children in the top 1% have Episode 77 More likely to attend an Ivy Plus university.
Vouchers only add insult to injury. They can be marketed to sound good and fair. every Americans actually end up providing the most benefits to families who need them the least, without any serious means testing. They are just one of the tools that the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration could use to accelerate the looting that has been going on for decades under the watchful eye of both major political parties.
I can almost hear it now. It’s the “great sucking noise” Ross Perot used to say. However, in this case we are not talking about US jobs moving to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle class being sucked further and further upward into the coffers of our most privileged.
