Analysis: Trump makes clear his aversion to public schools

There was this: "For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools."

What's a "government school" to Trump? A public school in a traditional public school district.

Then there was this, with a reference to a student in the audience: "Now, I call on the Congress to give 1 million American children the same opportunity Janiyah has just received. Pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act - because no parent should be forced to send their child to a failing government school."

Trump urged Congress to pass that legislation, which would create a $5 billion federal tax credit program that would fund scholarships to private and religious schools. The scholarships would be funded by individuals and businesses who want to privately donate but who would then receive a federal tax credit on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

Trump spent most of his education-related comments on the subject of "school choice," which he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have put at the top of their schools agenda. DeVos has said her chief priority was to expand alternatives to traditional public schools, which she once called "a dead end."

DeVos and like-minded school-choice supporters have long disparaged public schools as "government schools," and they have been attempting to redefine "public education" to mean any school that receives any public funding. In this framework, a religious school that discriminates against LGBTQ students but accepts students who pay tuition with help from a program that uses public money would be considered "public."

Much of the research on vouchers shows that private schools do no better and often worse in terms of student academic achievement than public schools. But DeVos has said her priority is in expanding school choice, not holding private schools to account for providing an excellent education.

Critics who oppose the privatization of public education slammed Trump's education comments even before he finished delivering his speech Tuesday night.

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States, said in a statement: "Tonight, Donald Trump once again put the agenda of Betsy DeVos, the least qualified Secretary of Education in U.S. history, front and center in his State of the Union by renewing his push to divert scarce funding from the public schools that 90 percent of students attend into private school voucher programs."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union, said in a statement: "Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos have made no secret of their antipathy for public education. Rather than strengthen the cornerstone of our democracy and the chief enabler of pluralism and opportunity, they choose to defund and destabilize it. No amount of rebranding vouchers and privatization as 'choice' and 'freedom' changes that."

In his State of the Union address, Trump also called for more vocational and technical education in high school and mentioned the importance of the constitutional right for prayer in schools.

While his education comments were a small part of his speech, they were significantly more than he offered in his 2019 State of the Union, which mentioned education policy in a single sentence.