Unable to convince federal lawmakers to pass a voucher scheme despite the persuasive talents of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, President Trump today issued an Executive Order calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to create a school voucher program from CARES Act funds.
Peter Greene writes about this and provides the reassuring analysis that President-elect Biden can simply reverse this Executive Order on January 20th when he becomes President Biden (yes, despite Gov. Bill Lee’s reticence to acknowledge it, Joe Biden will be the President on January 20th).
Here’s some of what Greene has to say:
Today the White House (if Donald Trump wrote this thing, then I’m the Queen of Rumania) issued an executive order “expanding educational opportunity school choice” to create “Emergency Learning Scholarships for Students.”
The argument in favor of this is that January 20th is coming and the administration wants their damn vouchers now, dammit. Okay, not really. The argument for this is
1) We totally identified effective measures for resuming face-to-face and we gave you $13 billion whole dollars to do it (never mind the part where we tried to divert a bunch of that to private schools)
2) Continued distance learning is bad. Here are a few statistics we found.
3) Building closures are extra hard on students with special needs, because they cut off not only education but support services. They’re not wrong on this one. Of course, another solution would be to give public schools the resources they need to fix this. In fact, that would be the solution that would make sense, since the public system already knows who and where the students are and what they need. Bringing in another batch of service providers means that they should be done with needs assessments right around June.
READ MORE from Greene on the “Voucher Emergency”
I’m eagerly awaiting the press release from Gov. Lee’s office enthusiastically supporting this ridiculous effort. Next, Tennesseans for Student Success will chime in to support the Gov.
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