Trump team prepares dramatic cuts

[Blue]

What rat fuckers he and his buddies are.

Of course there are no, zero, nada cuts to the precious pentagon.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/31499 ... -390202465

BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 01/19/17 06:00 AM ESTTrump team prepares dramatic cuts
TheHill.com

Autoplay: On | Off
Donald Trump is ready to take an ax to government spending.

Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned.

The changes they propose are dramatic.

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

The proposed cuts hew closely to a blueprint published last year by the conservative Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has helped staff the Trump transition.

Similar proposals have in the past won support from Republicans in the House and Senate, who believe they have an opportunity to truly tackle spending after years of warnings about the rising debt.

Many of the specific cuts were included in the 2017 budget adopted by the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus that represents a majority of House Republicans. The RSC budget plan would reduce federal spending by $8.6 trillion over the next decade.

Two members of Trump’s transition team are discussing the cuts at the White House budget office: Russ Vought, a former aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence and the former executive director of the RSC, and John Gray, who previously worked for Pence, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) when Ryan headed the House Budget Committee.

Vought and Gray, who both worked for the Heritage Foundation, are laying the groundwork for the so-called skinny budget — a 175- to 200-page document that will spell out the main priorities of the incoming Trump administration, along with summary tables. That document is expected to come out within 45 days of Trump taking office.

The administration’s full budget, including appropriations language, supplementary materials and long-term analysis, is expected to be released toward the end of Trump’s first 100 days in office, or by mid- to late April.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), Trump’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, has not yet weighed in on the proposed spending reforms because he is still awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

Mulvaney voted for the RSC budget offered as a more conservative alternative to the main House Republican budget in 2015. The House did not vote on the RSC budget for fiscal year 2017.

The preliminary proposals from the White House budget office will be shared with federal departments and agencies soon after Trump takes the oath of office Friday, and could provoke an angry backlash.

Trump’s Cabinet picks have yet to be apprised of the reforms, which would reduce resources within their agencies.

The budget offices of the various departments will have the chance to review the proposals, offer feedback and appeal for changes before the president’s budget goes to Congress.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s first budget will include reforms to Social Security or Medicare, two major drivers of the federal deficit.

Trump vowed during the campaign not to cut Medicare and Social Security, a pledge that Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), his pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, told lawmakers in testimony Wednesday has not changed.

Yet it could be very difficult to reduce U.S. debt without tackling the entitlement programs. Conservative House budgets have repeatedly included reforms to Medicare and Social Security, arguing they are necessary to save the programs.

The presidential budget is important in setting policy and laying out the administration’s agenda, though Congress would be responsible for approving a federal budget and appropriating funds.

Moving Trump’s budget through Congress could be difficult. In 2015, with the GOP in control of the House, the RSC budget failed by a vote of 132 to 294.

Moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Appropriations Committee are likely to push back at some of the cuts being considered by Trump.

But they seem likely to have the support of Mulvaney, a conservative budget hawk who backed the RSC budget.

“Mick Mulvaney and his colleagues at the Republican Study Committee when they crafted budgets over the years, they were serious,” said a former congressional aide. “Mulvaney didn’t take this OMB position to just mind the store.”

“He wants to make significant, fundamental changes to the structure of the president’s budget, and I expect him to do that with Vought and Gray putting the meat on the bones,” the source added.

The Heritage blueprint used as a basis for Trump’s proposed cuts calls for eliminating several programs that conservatives label corporate welfare programs: the Minority Business Development Agency, the Economic Development Administration, the International Trade Administration and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. The total savings from cutting these four programs would amount to nearly $900 million in 2017.

At the Department of Justice, the blueprint calls for eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Violence Against Women Grants and the Legal Services Corporation and for reducing funding for its Civil Rights and its Environment and Natural Resources divisions.

At the Department of Energy, it would roll back funding for nuclear physics and advanced scientific computing research to 2008 levels, eliminate the Office of Electricity, eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and scrap the Office of Fossil Energy, which focuses on technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Under the State Department’s jurisdiction, funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are candidates for elimination.

Conservatives allied with fiscal hawks such as Pence, Paul and the Heritage Foundation say the time is long past due to get serious about cutting the federal deficit.

“The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step in showing that the Trump Administration is serious about radically reforming the federal budget,” said Brian Darling, a former aide to Paul and a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation.

[Blue]

2013:

The $146 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) represents just
0.012% (about one one-hundredth of one percent) of federal discretionary spending.

2016: $147,949 million.

I wonder how much of the budget goes to military contractors, Monsanto, Exxon and Merck? Hmmmm....

[seemslikeadream]

he wants to destroy public education

Inside Donald Trump's Extremist Education Agenda

The Hillsdale College connection links Trump to the right-wing evangelical community of Betsy DeVos.
By Jeff Bryant / AlterNet January 3, 2017


Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency left education policy experts at a complete loss to explain what this would mean for the nation’s schools. During his campaign, Trump gave few clues about what would inform his education leadership, only that he had some antipathy for the Department of Education, he was no fan of Common Core and he would advocate for more “school choice.”

After his election, experienced education journalists at Education Week predicted Trump would embrace conservative Beltway think tanks and state education policy leaders who had bristled under the rule of Obama’s education department, and would reject the influence of teachers unions, civil rights groups, and politically centrist education “reform” groups.

Many who pointed out “personnel is policy,” speculated Trump would pick an education secretary from the ranks of his transition advisers who came mostly from the above-mentioned DC-based circles and state government centers. Other knowledgeable sources predicted Trump might draw education policy knowhow from “outsider” sources, such as the military, big business or the charter school industry.

Not a single source I can find anticipated Trump would look for education expertise in the deep, dark well he repeatedly seems to draw from: the extremist, right-wing evangelical community.

The DeVos Nomination

The first clue that Trump would embed the extremist views of radical Christian orthodoxy in the White House’s education policy apparatus was his nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the nation’s next Secretary of Education.

As Politico reports, DeVos is a “billionaire philanthropist” who “once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to ‘advance God’s Kingdom.'”

Politico reporters point to numerous recordings and interviews in which DeVos and her husband Dick, a billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, promote education policies as avenues to “greater Kingdom gain … lament that public schools have ‘displaced’ the Church as the center of communities," and refer to their efforts to advance private, religious schools as a "Shephelah," an area where battles, including between David and Goliath, were fought in the Old Testament.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Katherine Stewart, an expert observer of the Christian right, writes, “Betsy DeVos stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right.”

Stewart points to numerous examples of DeVos-related family foundations that have generously donated to “conservative groups” pushing religious right doctrine including, the Alliance Defending Freedom,” the legal juggernaut of the religious right,” and “Colorado-based Christian ministry Focus on the Family.”

But Trump’s selection of DeVos for education secretary is not the only clue that the nation’s education policy may be in for a sharp veer to the religious right. As Stewart reports, “The president-elect’s first move on public education [was] Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the nation … Liberty University teaches creationism alongside evolution.”

Falwell Jr. Came First

The Associated Press was first to break the story about Falwell Jr. being offered the job, reporting also that he declined it saying, “He couldn’t afford to work at a Cabinet-level job for longer than [two years] and didn’t want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.”

“Here is Trump, ready to hand the job [of Secretary of Education] to a religious zealot whose sole goal,” writes Michelangelo Signorile, the Gays and Lesbians editor for the Huffington Post, “would likely be to infuse evangelical Christian doctrine into public schools.”

Signorile also calls Falwell Jr. an “enemy of LGBTQ rights” and states, “It’s hard to believe Falwell would continue the Obama administration’s pro-LGBTQ programs if he actually became Secretary of Education, nor would he likely take the job with any stipulation that he must so.”

Need more evidence that Trump will usher in an education agenda largely dominated by the evangelical community? Another candidate Trump also considered for education secretary was Larry Arnn.

The Hillsdale College Connection

As the Daily Caller reports, “Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College, a small conservative liberal arts school in Michigan known for declining all federal funds.”

Hillsdale College, located in Hillsdale, Michigan (the Devos family’s home state), is regarded as “the conservative Harvard,” in some circles, and has been the recipient of generous donations from numerous funders of the rightwing conservative movement including the Koch brothers' family foundation. Hillsdale also sponsors the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Hillsdale students overwhelmingly supported Trump for president, according to the campus newspaper, and at least seven Hillsdale professors and administrators publicly endorsed him.

According to an article in The Atlantic, Hillsdale is one among a number of conservative private colleges that rejects federal funds including financial aid for students. Many of these colleges, while they are rejecting federal funds, “are seeking, exemptions from the US Department of Education from provisions under Title IX of the laws governing higher education, which protects students from discrimination in housing, athletics, and access to facilities on the basis of such things as gender, sexual orientation, sex or pregnancy outside marriage, or having an abortion.”

Hillsdale has a long-held reputation for discriminating on the basis of gender preference and identity, and news outlets in the LGBT community have reported incidents in which Hillsdale staff and officials openly discriminated against gay students.

Arnn also came under fire from many liberal sources for describing nonwhite students as "dark ones" during a state legislature subcommittee hearing regarding the adoption of Common Core State Standards. Hillsdale’s official apology for that incident was arguably worse than Arnn’s remark, a Michigan blogger notes, as the college used its apology as another opportunity to take a swipe at government enforcement of affirmative action policies.

In addition to Hillsdale’s strong resentment of federal intrusion, especially on issues of civil rights, the college also has deep commitments to another favorite of conservative, religious advocates: charter schools.

A Chain Of Religion-Based Charter Schools

As I report in an in-depth investigation of the conservative movement’s influence on charter school expansions in Colorado, in addition to reinforcing gender and race inequity, Hillsdale operates the Barney Charter School Initiative, which is essentially a consultant service for a chain of 16 charter schools called Classical Academies. These charters purport to offer “the same course of study that helped propel Western Civilization to the top of the world,” according to what at least one of these schools says on its website.

The Barney project’s strong political agenda was revealed in its former mission statement, since taken down, which said the Initiative seeks to “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” The statement also said, “The charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education.”

Charter schools created with the help of the Barney Initiative are also proving to be an ideal vehicle for evading laws enforcing separation of church and state. Since my investigation into the opening of a Barney-related charter in Colorado called Golden View Classical Academy, an independent news outlet in that state confirms the school indeed provides students a religion-based curriculum on the taxpayers’ dime.

As Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent reports, charter schools like Golden View “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”

Goodland recalls when Golden View applied to the district school board for approval, the school’s director “assured the board Golden View would not use a religious curriculum” and “agreed to comply with the intent of Colorado’s sexual education law by providing ‘appropriate instruction on human anatomy, reproduction and sexuality.'”

Yet, she notes the school’s family handbook, “adopted before the charter application was approved includes references to teaching about sexual intercourse only “in the context of a monogamous relationship between two people of opposite sexes,” a focus on abstinence, admonitions on “the moral and physical consequences of promiscuous sex,” and the “limited effectiveness” of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

Goodlad blames a loose, unregulated waiver process for allowing charter schools like Golden View to skirt state laws, and she points to Colorado public officials who provide charters ample leeway to ensure they have the “autonomy” which they claim justifies their existence.

Keep in mind, Barney-related charters like Golden View, that essentially function like private religious schools while receiving taxpayer money, are scattered across the country; their network is growing, and a Trump administration that has pledged to provide more money for “school choice” will only help fuel more rapid expansions of these schools.

“Neither the public nor lawmakers understand the extent of the problem,” Goodlad concludes.

How DeVos And Hillsdale Intersect

Unsurprisingly, Hillsdale president Arnn says Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, “is someone he ‘knows and admires,'” according to right-wing news outlet Breitbart.

And why not, since Hillsdale also has strong ties to DeVos and her immediate family.

As the Hillsdale campus newspaper reports, DeVos’s “roots in Michigan philanthropy run deep and also intersect with Hillsdale College. Betsy DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, a 1992 graduate of Hillsdale College and the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, now named Academi. In 2009, the DeVos family also founded ArtPrize, an international art competition that featured the work of five art professors and students this year. Most notably, Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, co-founded Amway with Jay Van Andel. Van Andel’s son, Steve, was a 1978 graduate of Hillsdale and currently serves as the chairman of Amway. In 2013, after he donated to graduate school scholarships and operations, Hillsdale named its graduate school of statesmanship in his honor.”

Jay Van Andel was also, at the time of his death, a trustee of Hillsdale College, according to Wikipedia.

Most Extremist Administration Ever?

“Those who know DeVos say her goals are not sinister,” Politico reporters caution, “though they acknowledge the policies she’s likely to advance would benefit Christian schools. In fact, Trump’s $20 billion school choice program that would allow low-income students to select private or charter schools was devised with the help of the advocacy group DeVos headed until recently.”

Despite the strong evidence Trump’s education agenda may be driven by right-wing evangelicals, advocates for charter schools in the Democratic Party keep looking for reasons to believe Betsy DeVos is not going to be the extremist she is often portrayed as in media reports.

On hearing the news of the DeVos nomination, the politically centrist hedge fund-backed Democrats for Education Reform released a statement congratulating DeVos on her appointment and applauding her “commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools,” while at the same time regretting that her nomination is the outcome of a political campaign driven by “bigoted and offensive rhetoric.” (Never mind the charter schools DeVos helped grow in Michigan seem less than “high quality.")

Another centrist Democrat deeply embedded in the investment community, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Partners, hopes a Trump administration will offer up a plan for charter school expansion that includes “sweeteners for the Congressional Black Caucus” – a condescending and white privilege phrase if there ever was one.

Emma Brown, the education reporter for the Washington Post, notes many advocates for charter schools “worry” Trump’s embrace of charter schools may be identified with his “rhetoric about immigrants, inner cities, and women,” but still hope some kind of “strong accountability” will be in the new administration’s charter school governance, even though those accountability measures have proven to be easily gamed by the savviest charter operators.

“Playing the politics of niceness has never been so convenient for the Dems of education reform,” writes college professor and former charter school leader-turned reform critic Andre Perry. “DeVos’s belief in limited state oversight, for-profit charter management, and vouchers didn’t give Democrat proponents of charter schools any pause in the past. And for many it doesn’t now.”

If Perry is correct, that’s a shame, because anyone who strives for a clear-eyed view of the Trump administration’s oncoming education agenda will find there is no evidence—zero—of anything other than the most extreme policy agenda for the nation’s public schools.
http://www.alternet.org/education/insid ... -hillsdale

[Agent Orange Cooper]

It's a start.

[seemslikeadream]

lovely that Eric Prince's sister the billionaire Devos who destroyed Michigans public schools is going to destroy public education ....when she and her children NEVER had to go to public schools and wants guns in school to protect children from bears!

I imagine you have no children or are rich enough to send the children you do have to a private school

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Children are better off without public school. I would homeschool.

[seemslikeadream]

The DeVos Legacy: Crumbling Schools, Poisoned Water
Submitted by Arn Pearson on January 19, 2017 - 2:09pm



Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, wants America to believe she's all about giving parents the right to choose what's best for their children. But her radical policies and politics have left a legacy of crumbling schools and poisoned water in her home state of Michigan that parents neither asked for nor wanted.

Billionaire DeVos—who has no relevant education experience and never attended public school—won the nomination by virtue of her family being one of the largest soft money contributors to the Republican National Committee and the dominant political force in Michigan, where Trump's razor-thin margin helped him clinch his Electoral College victory.

At her confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders asked DeVos, "Do you think that if you were not a multi-billionaire, if your family had not made hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to the Republican Party, that you would be sitting here today?"

DeVos once infamously admitted that her family "expects a return on our investment" in political campaigns.

It looks like she just got it.

DeVos and her husband Dick have been leading advocates for privatizing public education, expanding charter schools, and providing taxpayer-funded vouchers for private and religious schools, and have bankrolled politicians and special interest groups to promote that agenda.

The DeVos family has been promoting and funding efforts to "Christianize" public education for more than twenty years. In the DeVos' personal worldview, public schools inappropriately vie with religion for the hearts and minds of students.

"Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's Kingdom," said Betsy in a 2001 interview. "As we look at many communities in our country, the church has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity," added Dick.

Their radical solution entails redefining "public education" by weakening and defunding public schools while diverting tax dollars to subsidize private and religious institutions, in ways that confront current constitutional notions about the separation of church and state.

Parents in Michigan chose to reject that vision by wide margins. A voter initiative for school vouchers pushed by the DeVos family in 2000 was spurned by 69% of the voters, and Dick DeVos lost by a huge margin when he ran for governor in 2006, despite spending $35 million of the family fortune.

Instead of walking away from their unpopular positions, Betsy and Dick DeVos shifted gears and adopted a "long-game" strategy of advancing for-profit charter schools, privatizing government, busting public sector unions, and deregulating private schools.

The DeVos family pumped millions into state elections, ballot initiatives, and right-wing groups, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP). They used their fortune to grease the skids for Governor Rick Snyder's election in 2010, and then backed aggressive campaigns to win passage of Michigan's controversial emergency manager law and "right-to-work" legislation.

All in all, the DeVos family pumped more than $44 million into Michigan Republican campaign committees and candidates between 1997 and 2012, and followed that up with another $8.3 million in Michigan's 2014 and 2016 elections. And that's just what was disclosed. They spent millions more on special interest groups that do not report their spending to influence elections and legislation.

Following his election, Governor Snyder won passage of the emergency manager law used to strip Flint of any local control and take over Detroit's public school system, which was championed by the DeVos-funded Mackinac Center. Voters repealed the law at the ballot in 2012, but Snyder quickly rammed through a new version. The results have been disastrous.

Under Snyder's control, Flint was forced to abandon its clean water source and accept polluted water from the Flint River—water that corroded the city's outdated lead pipes and resulted in the lead contamination of drinking water for thousands of children and families. The poisoning of Flint became a national scandal and sparked congressional hearings and a criminal investigation, which so far has resulted in the indictment of two former Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder.

In Detroit, Snyder used state control to defund public schools and allow a "Wild West" of charter schools to spring up. The condition of public schools deteriorated to dangerous levels, prompting hundreds of Detroit teachers to launch "sick outs" in January 2016 out of protest. Detroit parents lost their democratic rights, while unelected managers closed two-thirds of their schools.

Educational standards didn't fare any better. After six years under emergency managers, Detroit's testing scores had declined to the lowest in the nation, the school system was drowning in red ink, and nearly a third of charter schools had folded due to academic or financial reasons. The New York Times called it, "a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States."

The deplorable situation in Detroit's schools prompted the legislature to act in 2016, but heavy lobbying by the DeVos family and GLEP resulted in killing charter accountability standards adopted by the Senate while imposing new limitations on public schools and penalizing "sick outs" as illegal strikes. Critics point out that GLEP had greater access to negotiations on the bill than did Detroit's legislative delegation.

Legislators voting for the DeVos-backed bill had received thousands in campaign contributions from the family, not unlike the hundreds of thousands received by U.S. Senators now handling Betsy DeVos' nomination.

And rewards for those who toed the DeVos line came quickly. According to the Detroit Free Press:

The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.

The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.

Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos has been pushing the same education privatization and deregulation scheme nationally through groups like the American Federation for Children, the Alliance for School Choice, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

And it appears she has the same future in mind for the nation as she had for Detroit. When asked by Senator Tim Kaine to commit that all schools that receive federal funding—including charter and private schools—should be held to the same accountability standards, DeVos hedged and then said "no."

Whether Trump embraces Betsy DeVos' radical agenda, or is now doling out federal agencies to billionaire campaign funders the way past presidents have doled out ambassadorships, it's clear that the nation's public schools will be DeVos' next casualty if the Senate confirms her as Education Secretary.
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2017/01/132 ... oned-water

[seemslikeadream]

Children are better off without public school. I would homeschool.

you know there are a whole lot of people in this country that could never homeschool their children they are just not qualified ...
what do you want to do with all those kids....let them just roam the streets?

[82_28]

Fuck this country is fucked. And the whole world due to "our" existing footprint. Like 'em or hate 'em on the left, the Democrats are going to have to filibuster like crazy for forever. They are going to have to obstruct everything. Gah. How awesome.

[seemslikeadream]

what a mess

children having to rely on unqualified parents to teach them

I'm sure he wants to do away with fire departments also ....let everyone put out their own house fires

and no money to fix roads


too bad we all can't be billionaires

moms and dads have to work ..too bad they can't afford to stay home with their children I am sure they would love to

everyone is not as well off as you Agent Orange Cooper

[seemslikeadream]

"Excuse me, human! Which way to the charter school?"

[justdrew]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... eral-lease

We need to shut this so-called "government" the fuck down. Nothing happens until:

1. Total reform of the system, I want ACTUAL representation based on population

Nothing goes on anymore in the FedGov until seats in congress and electors represent equal numbers of constituents. I WILL NOT BE GOVERNED in any legitimate sense until damn near empty fucking states do not have massively more power than high population states.

Tax strike. ZERO withholding on all wages. No filing, no payment, until the system is totally reformed.

Local State and Federal. No more "districts" proportional representation in all elections, supervised by a single national organization, done by mail, online or in person polling stations. 100% voter verifiable trail.

It's non negotiable, we do this, or this country can go fuck itself to death.

[brekin]

Children are better off without public school. I would homeschool.

you know there are a whole lot of people in this country that could never homeschool their children they are just not qualified ...
what do you want to do with all those kids....let them just roam the streets?

AOC will teach them.

[DrEvil]

Children are better off without public school. I would homeschool.

This is a pretty insane thing to say. As Slad pointed out: what about all the parents who are in no way qualified to teach their kids?

Good public schools is one of the things that made America a great place to begin with. It ensured that everyone had at least the basic skills necessary to function in a modern society, and the skills needed to go on to college and actually make it through.

The alternative is the Devois way: private schools (many of them of the batshit religious variety) funded by taxpayer dollars and teaching wildly variable curriculums (not to mention the complete nightmare of oversight, assuming you would want some kind of quality control), or home schooled kids completely dependent on the skills of their parents.

It would be a fucking disaster and long term it would accelerate the decline of the US.

They should go the opposite way: make sure everyone has access to well-funded public schools, raise teacher pay a lot (being a teacher should carry the same kind of prestige as being a doctor or lawyer currently does), ban all religious schools (yes, really - they're a fucking plague on the human condition. If you want your kid raised religious then do it on your own time and dime) and put strict limits on private schools in general.

If you want to build a great nation you start with a great education system. The current administration wants to do the opposite, either because they're ideologues or because they realize that a well educated public is less likely to vote for them in the future.

[Blue]

They should go the opposite way: make sure everyone has access to well-funded public schools, raise teacher pay a lot (being a teacher should carry the same kind of prestige as being a doctor or lawyer currently does), ban all religious schools (yes, really - they're a fucking plague on the human condition. If you want your kid raised religious then do it on your own time and dime) and put strict limits on private schools in general.

If you want to build a great nation you start with a great education system. The current administration wants to do the opposite, either because they're ideologues or because they realize that a well educated public is less likely to vote for them in the future.

Bravo. The religious schools around here are just an excuse to reinstate segregation.