The new Trump budget includes the possibility of real relief to yeshiva parents.
President Trump last month released his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2018, delivering a down payment on a campaign promise to earmark billions of dollars for school choice. The budget provided the most detail yet on how the administration would like to give parents more control over the education of their children.
The three-sector approach to school choice described in the budget would invest an additional $1.4 billion to expand opportunities for students in public schools, charter schools, and private schools, and would, according to one of the budget documents, represent “an initial investment toward the president’s goal of making $20 billion available annually to support school choice within the next 10 years.”
During a dinner address the night before the budget was released, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos described the initiative as “the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation’s history.” If enacted, it would be exactly that.
Funds set aside in the budget for choice represent three separate allocations: $1 billion for choice in public schools; $500 million for charter schools, and $250 million to help “students from low-income families to attend the private school of their choice and to build the evidence base around private school choice.”
FOCUS Grants:
The public school initiative falls under the heading “FOCUS Grants” (Furthering Options for Children to Unlock Success). A budget narrative says the grants to school districts would support “crucially needed, locally driven efforts to make public school choice a meaningful reality for more students, especially the poor and minority students that are the focus of Title I.”
Grants would go to school districts that agree “to adopt weighted student funding combined with open enrollment systems that allow federal, state, and local funds to follow students to the public school of their choice.”
Charter Schools
On the charter school front, the president proposed $500 million in funding for the current grant program that supports “the startup of new charter schools and the replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools serving students in prekindergarten through grade 12.” The program also supports grants “to improve charter schools’ access to facilities, information dissemination and evaluation activities.” The proposed funding would represent an increase of $167 million over the program’s annualized level in 2017.
Private Schools
The piece of the school choice pie that attracted the most media attention was, ironically, that which was ¼ the size of the public school choice program, one-half the size of the charter school piece, and one 1/236 the size of the $59 billion overall education budget. Predictably, headlines and critics screamed of the president “abandoning” public education for private school choice.
The $250 million private school component of the choice initiative would fall under the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, established by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). EIR grants are available to state education agencies, school districts, and nonprofit organizations.
Funds could be used to “support efforts to test and build evidence for the effectiveness of private school choice as a strategy for (1) expanding school choices for parents who wish to send their children to high quality private schools; (2) improving educational outcomes for students from low-income families or students enrolled in persistently low-performing schools; and (3) increasing competition in order to improve the quality and performance of all schools.”
The budget document states that the administration “believes that expanding public and private school choice through student-centered reforms is necessary to ensure that students from low-income families have access to a quality education that will prepare them for further education and entering the workforce.”
Up to 10 grants would be awarded. The budget includes estimates that 17,500 to 26,000 students could be served by the program through scholarships ranging from $8,000 to $12,000. This includes students who attend religiously-based private schools.
The possibility of assistance to yeshiva parents:
For decades the idea of helping parents who bear the dual education-funding burden has been bandied around. Parents whose children attend private schools pay local taxes which fund public schools and then pay tuition to the schools of their choice. A number of experiments in helping parents fund their children’s tuition at private schools, most notably in Wisconsin, have proven quite successful in upgrading student achievement. The Trump administration believes that it is time to replicate elements of the concept nationwide.
Real change in any governmental agency is a gradual and evolving process but this represents a major shift in thinking at the Department of Education leadership. It seems apparent that the climb toward the ultimate goal of full parental choice over their children’s education has begun in earnest. The way things are moving in Washington these days it is no longer a pipe-dream but something very palpable.
There is a great deal of hope on the part of many school-choice advocates and serious momentum among educational agencies who will need to do their part to make it work. Dr. Don Petry, the eminent dean of school accreditors, calls it a new wave of thinking in Washington.
Leaders of the National Council for Private School Accreditation recently met with Education Secretary Mrs. Betsy DeVos to discuss the “accountability” component of the “choice through student-centered reforms” proposed program. In Wisconsin all schools that want to be accepted into the tuition scholarship program must be accredited by an approved accrediting agency.
At present the only nationally recognized Jewish Accrediting agency is the National Accreditation Board of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch. Rabbi Nochem Kaplan, Director and chairman of the NABMLIC said “I have never seen this kind of optimism among the leadership of the religious and private school community”.
Some of this article is reprinted from CAPE the organ of Council for American Private Education
So much good can come from this if people would only let it. A little appreciation for the president please!
Thank you Rabbi Kaplan, for representing Chabad Education at the White House, and at the Department of Education in Washington DC much continued Htazlcha!!!