Simply a Thought Mr. Trump

“Simply a Thought  Mr. Trump”, by D. G. Wendt

The Republican Candidate Mr. Trump has decided to have the federal government provide $22 billion to lower income children. The money will come in the form of a voucher for private education for these children, if he is elected president of the United States.

Currently, our country spends $526 Billion on education K-12. The information with this figure did not specify if this was both public and private education.

But, this does show the enormity of the cost for K-12 education per year in the USA. The number of children in the USA; 6-11 years old is 24.6  million, and 12-17 years old is 25 million students.

The gift Mr. Trump will give our underpriviledged children in the form of a voucher represents less than 5% of the $526 billion a year K-12 education costs per year.

I am not a proponment of the federal government becoming involved with the direct payments for private educations. I was raised, attending and graduating from a public high school. The public schools were good and provided a variety of quality classes and teachers to choose from.

“The National Alliance for public schools is growing rapidly. From only a handful of schools in the early 1990′s, by 2009 there were more then 5000 charter schools operating in 40 states and the District of Columbia, enrolling more than 1-1/2 million students.”¹

Yes, I do realize people are disappointed in our public schools, which is one of the reasons parents are enrolling their children in charter schools.

“Charter schools are publicly funded, but governed by institutions outside the public school system, including businesses, non=profit organizations, universities, and groups of individuals who write a charter and get it approved.”¹

“Although, in 2003 a national study by the Deptartment of Education under George W. Bush found that charter schools performed on average no better then public schools. The study results were initially suppressed because the desired conclusions had not been reached. Another study by two Stanford economists involved an enormous sample, 70% percent of all charter students. It found that an astonishing 83 % of charter schools were either no better or actually worse then traditional public schools.”²

It was discovered when doing this study that the charter schools were at best half as good.

“The study concluded that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their tradional public school counterparts.  Further, the study found tremendous variations in academic quality among charter schools and the face of their supporters.”²

Another statistic from Ohio shows that only 8% of charter schools received an effective or excellent rating, while a whopping 63% of public schools received an excellent or effective rating.

What do I believe? I believe we have major problems in our K-12 education today. The Stanford study clearly shows a problem lacking in our K-12 charter schools today.  I believe we should be spending our hard earned education dollars in our public education today, not private voucher programs for private schools. Clearly the charter schools are not as effective, and as the Stanford Study shows, they are half as good as their public school counterparts.

Now what I wish for. Well, this 69 year old woman would like to know that children of today and tomorrow are going to have the same high quality public education we had in the 1950′s and 1960′s when I went to school.  I want to leave this world knowing that we left our children’s public educational system in good shape.

Our country is in tight straits financially; our educational money must be well spent.

I am concerned that for profit K-12 schools will become the norm and, as you can see by the Stanford Study, our students of today are not faring to well by attending these schools.

Mr. Trump might want to reconsider putting $22 billion into vouchers. Put that money to use bettering our public schools, perhaps increasing science, music and art classes in public schools. Perhaps even opening up a few new public schools.

Simply a thought, Mr. Trump, simply a thought.

~~~~~

¹The Case Against Charter Schools:  http://isreview.org/issue/71/case-against-charter-schools

²Public Charter Schools.  Do they really think we’re that dumb? http://www.politicususa.com/2014/08/23/public-charter-schools-dumb.html