by Arianna Prothero
Education Week
November 30, 2016
School choice advocates are waffling between excitement for potentially unprecedented new opportunities under a Donald Trump administration, and concern that the president-elect could also dramatically undermine the school choice movement.
Trump’s promise on the campaign trail to spend $20 billion on school vouchers for low-income students could herald a massive expansion of school choice—especially with his selection of an ardent school choice activist as his new education secretary. But the election’s polarizing outcome and Trump’s comments on race could also prove corrosive to the school choice movement’s increasingly tenuous claim to bipartisan support—in particular for charter schools.
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‘Unprecedented’ Support
In addition to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who oversaw aggressive expansion of Indiana’s school voucher program during his tenure as governor there, Trump has also tapped experts from right-leaning think tanks to advise his transition team on education policy.
“It’s kind of unprecedented to have this many people from the top on down who not only embrace school choice, but understand it,” said Jeanne Allen, the founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Education Reform, a longtime proponent of school choice.