Education department budget slashes funds for poor students
Casey Quinlan
Policy reporter at ThinkProgress.
May 18
Education department budget slashes funds for poor students
Low-income and disadvantaged students would lose after-school funding and staff to investigate civil rights matters.
The White House is overwhelmed by leaks on the Russia investigation, but that hasn’t stopped it from conducting business as usual. For the Trump administration, that means reducing much needed resources for low-income people and their families.
The Washington Post obtained access to the full education budget proposed by the Trump administration and published many of its details on Wednesday. The budget prioritizes school choice and undermines or eliminates many of the funds poor students rely on to receive a high quality of education.
The budget would eliminate $1.2 billion for the the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which provides academic enrichment for kids during after-school programs and reaches 1.6 million kids. Many of the students who benefit from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program are poor and their families benefit from the economic stability that comes from an after-school program, as well as a safe place for children to stay after school.
Eight in 10 parents whose children are served by after-school programs say that those programs helped them keep their job. Low-income parents may not have the ability to pick a child up from school during their work day, and many low-wage workers don’t have a reliable work schedule at all.
According to the program’s 2014–2015 performance report, which included data from 30 states, 65.2 percent of teachers reported an improvement in homework completion and class participation for students served by the program. Fifty-six percent of teachers reported improvement in student behavior. Overall, the research on after-school programs’ effects on academic performance is mixed, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable to students, said Halley Potter, a fellow at The Century Foundation whose work focuses on educational inequality.
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https://thinkprogress.org/ed-budget-poor-students-91cbbdd71e30
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