Trump pledges to earmark $20B for school choice

[Geee]

The Hill:

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday released a plan to spend big on school choice.

 

Trump’s first budget would add $20 billion toward school choice, which would be used to create a block grant for every impoverished school-aged child in the country, according to a fact sheet released by his campaign.

 

That way, federal dollars could follow students to whatever school they choose — public, charter, or private — and parents would have more flexibility to choose the school that fits their child’s needs.

In order to reach that goal, Trump said, he'd need a major investment from the states.

"If the states collectively contribute another $110 billion of their own education budgets toward school choice on top of the $20 billion in federal dollars, that could provide $12,000 in school choice funds to every single K-12 student who today is living in poverty," Trump said at a campaign event in Cleveland on Thursday.

That number, an average of $2 billion from each state, could be a tougher hill for some states to climb. Bigger states have large education budgets, such as Texas’s $41 billion. But smaller states’ education budgets are as low as $6.3 billion, in the case of Alabama.