On the final stretch, Jan Resseger makes the case for Harris as the better education alternative. Reposted with permission.
While federal policy on public schooling and children’s well-being has not been a prominent emphasis in either the Harris or the Trump campaign, there is widespread alarm about Trump’s education platform among those who prioritize the needs of our nation’s children.
Trump’s Election Would Endanger the Public Schools
First Focus on Children’s education policy director, Lily Klam defines core principles that have long been understood as the foundation of the institution of public schooling: “The purpose of public education has always been to give the nation’s children the knowledge, skills, tools, and development they need to thrive as individuals and as citizens of our democracy.” Klam describes the federal government’s role: providing “strong federal oversight of education to ensure that all children—including those from low-income families, those with disabilities, those experiencing homelessness, English language learners, and other underserved student groups—have the same access to the resources they need to thrive, regardless of their family status, the state in which they live, or other disparities. In addition to serving the needs of students across diverse parts of the country, our federal education infrastructure also houses the Office for Civil Rights, making it the nexus of student protection.”
Trump has already declared his support for several of the dangerous policies described in Project 2025, a proposal developed by the Heritage Foundation and many former Trump administration officials. If Trump is elected and follows through on his education promises, Klam fears the implications: “One of the (Project 2025) agenda’s most alarming proposals advocates for giving all parents ‘the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA)’… (T)axpayer dollars will be used to subsidize the private, oftentimes religious, education of wealthy students, at the expense of the nearly 90% of U.S. students who attend public schools. It’s hard to overstate the destruction that this plan would inflict on the U.S. public education system. Directing each child’s education funding share to an ESA would rob public schools across the country of the funding they need to operate and would force tens of thousands of them to shut down or drastically reduce education services to children. This scenario has already played out in many states that have enacted school voucher and privatization schemes. Executed at the national level, these schemes would radically exacerbate existing inequities, cause extreme teacher shortages and layoffs, and create huge disparities in access to a quality education… The largest federal education (funding) streams, including Title I and IDEA, were created to ensure greater equity for students with disabilities and students in low-income families. The Project 2025 agenda is designed to do the exact opposite: Use government funds to create more inequity in education, especially for the most underserved students.”
In an election update last week for Scientific American, Allison Parshall worries that Trump’s individualist, parents’ rights agenda will further exacerbate the school funding inequity that already exists across the states: “Trump’s most eye-catching campaign promise has been to eliminate the Department of Education… Eliminating the agency, which provides around 11 percent of public school funding nationwide, would require an act of Congress. Even if this were to happen, the Trump campaign has not clarified what it proposes to do with the Department’s two biggest programs—Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)—which collectively provide some $34 billion in funding to educate students from low-income families and those with disabilities, respectively… Project 2025… proposes sending federal funding for Title I and IDEA to states as no-strings-attached block grants—meaning states could use the funds however they choose. The project also calls for phasing out federal spending on Title I funding over a 10-year period. Upending Title I funding ‘would have a very substantial effect on districts that have higher concentrations of poverty,’ says Mark Weber… at the New Jersey Policy Perspective think tank. ‘A big concern for me is that the kids who are already poorly served will fall further behind because there won’t be anything that requires states’ to use the funding equitably’, says Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor emerita of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”
Parshall predicts that Trump’s election would lead to further expansion of vouchers beyond the recent expansions across a number of Red-State legislatures: “Since the start of the pandemic, many states have enacted school choice programs; 19 school choice bills were enacted across 17 states in 2023, and 17 bills have been enacted so far in 2024.” She reminds readers: “Trump has long supported school privatization. During his first term, he appointed school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education. And two Supreme Court cases, decided in part by Trump’s three nominees to the court, recently increased the flow of public funding to private schools by requiring voucher programs to include religious schools.” She quotes Stanford University labor economist Martin Carnoy citing research demonstrating that voucher programs do not raise student achievement: “School choice does produce positive feelings among parents who value the choice of alternative educational possibilities for their kids, but the vast literature on vouchers shows little or no positive impact on students’ learning.”
Kamala Harris Would Support Public Education and Use Federal Power to Expand Equity
Scientific American‘s Parshall describes Kamala Harris’s named priorities during the campaign along with the public education policies that the Biden Harris Department of Education has been able to implement despite the challenges of the GOP-dominated House of Representatives, which has repeatedly tried to slash Title I funding by 80 percent: “In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris opposed Trump’s plan to close the Department of Education. Her platform proposes calling on Congress to triple Title I funding, and to fully fund IDEA to give schools the resources to educate disabled students. On the campaign trail, she has mainly focused on affordability measures for early childhood and higher education. Harris has promised to continue the Biden-Harris administration’s push for universal preschool, which has repeatedly stalled in Congress. She has also promised to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s programs to forgive student debt.”
Parshall adds that the Harris-Walz campaign has also explicitly opposed the expansion of school privatization: “Harris’s platform opposes voucher programs and the use of public funds to pay for religious education. Last year her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz… criticized Iowa’s school choice program: ‘What we end up doing is subsidizing folks who are already attending private, religious schools… or homeschooling. And it leaves our teachers… short.’”
What About Child Poverty?
We all know that child poverty in the United States is alarmingly high and that child poverty leads to opportunity gaps that make it more difficult for children to thrive academically. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have expressed support for the Child Tax Credit, but in a new report, NY Times poverty expert, Jason DeParle precisely explains how the child tax credits the two candidates support are radically different:
“Vice President Kamala Harris has made an expanded child tax credit central to her campaign, and former President Donald J. Trump boasts, ‘I doubled the child tax credit’ (in his 2017 tax bill). With a quick look, voters might think the child-rearing subsidy is the rare matter on which the rival candidates agree. It is anything but. The common vocabulary masks profound differences over which parents the government should help and what constitutes fairness for children in a country of great wealth and inequality.”
DeParle continues: “Mr. Trump sees the $110 billion program mostly as a tax cut, which as president he increased to $2,000 per child and extended to high-income families. But his policy denies the full benefit to the poorest quarter of children because their parents earn too little and owe no income tax. Ms. Harris would expand the tax cuts and add a large anti-poverty plan, sending checks to millions of parents with low pay or no jobs… It is rare that candidates sound so alike while diverging so greatly… Democrats would make the Child Tax Credit ‘refundable’—fully payable to all low- and middle-income families… A policy like the one Ms. Harris supports got a test of sorts as part of pandemic aid and helped cut child poverty in 2021 by more than half. But efforts to renew it failed amid unified Republican opposition.” Congress allowed the Child Tax Credit reforms to expire in 2022, reverting to the previous level of $2,000 per child and making it impossible for the poorest families fully to qualify. Today, “to get the full $4,000 for two children (a $2,000 credit for each child), a single parent must earn nearly $30,000, about twice the federal minimum wage.”
DeParle asks: “How do the Trump and Harris plans differ? Mr. Trump set current policy with a 2017 tax law that doubled the maximum credit to $2,000 and included families with incomes up to $400,000… But millions of children get partial benefits and one in 10 gets nothing, because their parents have low earnings and little or no income tax to offset. Ms. Harris would raise the credit to $3,000 per child—$3,600 for preschoolers and $6.000 for babies. Most notably, she would fully include the poor, regardless of how much they work or earn. Although she calls her plan ‘tax relief for working families,’ non-working parents would qualify… Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that a similar plan would reduce child poverty from current levels by 37 percent.”
For voters who value the institution of public schooling, who oppose school privatization, who want to uphold the principle of adequately and equitably funded public schools, and who know that reforming the Child Tax Credit is the most efficient way to begin ameliorating our society’s appalling rate of child poverty, there is no choice in this election. As President, Kamala Harris would firmly set our society on the path toward pursuing a just and equitable education for all of our children.
