Trump's Comments on Education Reveal Ill-Informed Opinion and Insider Dealing - Not Reality

When Donald Trump laid out his “law and order” agenda for reviving America’s inner cities this week, he spoke for 37 minutes from West Bend, Wisconsin, a county seat, population 30,000, with buildings reminiscent of a 1950s postcard—not from Milwaukee City Hall, which lies 40 miles away and where local officials have been facing riots after a black man was killed by police.

That incongruity, the distance between real-world troubles and staged theatrics, with Trump playing the tough guy speaking to communities he won’t actually go near, is typical for the Trump campaign. Trump is now reciting—from a teleprompter—right-wing fantasies and political cliches that bear little relation to the realities of those issues and challenges in real life.  

As expected in West Bend, Trump railed that Democrats such as Hillary Clinton have trashed America’s inner cities because they control local governments. Never mind the biggest employers abandoned city after city in the Midwest for decades, giving those left behind little revenue base for public services like schools. Never mind that Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who introduced Trump, was Milwaukee County’s top political boss for years and had a role in its ongoing problems.

“The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community,” Trump blared in typical fashion. “Democratic crime policies, education policies and economic policies have produced only more crime, more broken homes and more poverty.”

There is no such thing as a fact in Trump’s roadshow. Instead, as Trump lashes out at enemies, he glosses over major issues or utters ill-informed opinions. A telling example was his speech’s brief smear of traditional public schools and embrace of privatized K-12 education. He read lines that were little more than charter school marketing slogans.

“On education, it is time to have school choice, merit pay for teachers and to end the tenure policies that hurt good teachers and reward bad teachers. We are going to put students and parents first,” Trump said. “Hillary Clinton would rather deny opportunities to millions of young African-American children, just so she can curry favor with the education bureaucracy. I am going to allow charter schools to thrive, and help young kids get on the American ladder of success: a good education and a good-paying job.”

Trump is serving up some charter school Kool-Aid, suggesting, as the multi-billion-dollar charter industry reflexively does, that it offers one-size-fits-all solutions for educating America’s youths. The fact that charter schools, especially those run by branded corporate franchises, have a record of questionable academics, increasingly segregated schools and are structurally prone to fiscal self-dealing—all facts documented in recent years by investigative reporters nationwide—is irrelevant to Trump.

One of the fundamentals of mainstream journalism is having to report what public figures say. That tenet, however, lends them a credibility that may not be deserved. It can be knowingly manipulated, such as Trump’s timing of incitements and outrages that have netted billions in free coverage. In this case, when Trump clearly is reciting charter industry talking points about opening up K-12 public schools to privatization—after saying said next to nothing about public education during the past year—what are we to make of it?

One could try to parse it, which is to say take it seriously, even if it’s likely he is reading a script that was drafted with the help of Republican National Committee staffers. RNC Chair Reince Priebus was on stage at the West Bend speech. If that’s the case, it suggests a Trump presidency would do as told by that party’s Washington-based establishment on issues he cares little about.

Or one could try to second-guess what Trump knows about public education and charter schools. For example, Trump’s billionaire friend, Carl Icahn, has created a small charter chain in New York City with his name, suggesting that maybe he has some familiarity. But apart from Trump University, which ongoing federal court litigation has shown to be another profit center that preys on the public, there’s almost no evidence of Trump’s attention to education issues. He's only made sparse remarks on the topic in the past year, as noted by AlterNet. His historic comments are also thin, as Think Progress has noted, amounting to threats to cut the Department of Education. What he’s said in his books—like The America We Deserve from 2000—was written by a co-author (ghostwriter).

Going further, we know Trump doesn’t like labor unions, because he has been involved in labor disputes—and is still is in Las Vegas—so presumably he’d be fine with attacking the “education bureaucracy,” which is code for unions, as he did in the Wisconsin speech. But the bottom line is this: Trump is giving Americans another example of taking a stand on a big topic he knows little about, or what he knows is little more than the talking points of a business lobby eyeing billions in taxpayer funds as ripe for the taking.

Whether Trump is consciously or unconsciously carrying water for a K-12 privatization industry becomes almost irrelevant, because his point of departure on the future of K-12 public schools is not allied with the vast majority of educators, administrators and local school boards. Like the rest of his law-and-order speech in West Bend, it reflected ill-informed opinion and insider dealing, not the realities or facts on the ground.