Seven weeks in and he’s sticking to his promises to help the urban poor and improve school choice.
During the campaign, Donald Trump said that improving the quality of life in our nation’s inner cities would be a focus of his presidency and that better outcomes for the urban poor would flow from better educational opportunities. Apparently, it wasn’t just talk.
Since winning the election, Mr. Trump has tapped a school-choice stalwart in Betsy DeVos to head the Education Department. In a joint address to Congress last week, he called for an education bill that would allow low-income families “to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.” On Friday, Mr. Trump and Mrs. DeVos visited a Catholic school in Orlando, Fla., where hundreds of low-income students attend with the help of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.
The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump’s was the first visit to a Catholic school by a sitting president since Ronald Reagan in 1984 and “a clear signal that the Trump administration intends to push forward with expanding school choice as a key priority.” That’s welcome news to millions of low-income minority parents nationwide who have long expressed overwhelming support for reforms that would free their children to matriculate at schools not controlled by teachers unions.
President Obama also claimed to support school choice, but he was referring only to those education options approved by the teachers unions that bankroll the Democratic Party. In practice, the Obama administration worked to shut down voucher programs in Washington and elsewhere....
Read the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal