Education

Education

Education

Overview


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HARRIS: Opponent of Charter Schools & Vouchers
Charter schools often serve as outstanding alternatives to failing, substandard public schools — particularly in poor urban areas. They operate as schools of choice and are exempt from many state or local regulations related to operation and management.

School voucher programs allow low-income, mostly-minority parents to take the taxpayer money that is normally allocated for their child’s education in a failing, substandard public school, and to use it instead to cover the cost of tuition at a private school of their choice.

Harris — in accord with the official Democrat Party position, opposes both charter schools and voucher programs. In 2020 she said she was “particularly concerned with [opposed to] expansions of for-profit charter schools,” and she criticized President Trump’s campaign promise to, as Harris put it, “divert public school funding to private school vouchers.”

HARRIS: Free College
When launching her 2020 presidential campaign on January 21, 2019, Harris said: “I am running to declare education is a fundamental right, and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-K and debt free college!”

Harris in 2020 promised that if she and Joe Biden were elected to the White House, they would make both a two- and four-year college education tuition-free for students from families earning less than $125,000 per year.

Analysis: As bestselling author Mark Levin points out, free-college proposals are highly unjust. Only about one-third of all Americans hold a college degree, and college graduates earn a great deal more than non-graduates. Thus, “free college” means that the lower-earning non-college-graduates would be required to subsidize, via their tax payments, the education of the higher-earning graduates.

HARRIS: Student-Loan Debt Forgiveness
The proposition of student-loan debt forgiveness is fundamentally unfair because the loans, under such an arrangement, would be paid off by taxpayers, many of whom chose not to attend college because they did not want to take on the enormous debt associated with it. Moreover, such debt forgiveness would not do much to help people in real economic need. As the Heritage Foundation notes: “Loan forgiveness would overwhelmingly benefit the already well-off. It’s projected that for every dollar of debt cancellation that would go to the lower middle class and impoverished student loan holders, seven times that would go to the top 20% of earners—the lawyers, accountants, and doctors who borrowed heavily for their degrees.”

In 2020, Harris promised that if she and Biden were elected to the White House, “for those students who come out [of college] and have jobs that pay less than $125,000, student-loan debt will also be forgiven.”

WALZ: Opponent of Vouchers
Walz believes that voucher programs designed to enable low-income parents to send their children to private schools rather than to failing public schools, constitute bad policy because they rob the public schools of vital resources.

In October 2015, Rep. Walz voted against the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, which sought to allow eligible students in Washington, D.C.’s abysmal public schools to enroll instead in private schools.

WALZ: Free College
In October 2018, Rep. Walz articulated his desire to provide 2 years of tuition-free education at Minnesota state colleges for all students hailing from families with annual incomes of $125,000 or less.

WALZ: Free College for Illegal Aliens
In May 2023, Governor Walz approved an education funding measure that authorized the use of state tax dollars to pay all public college and public university tuition costs for illegal-alien students from families with annual incomes below $80,000. In most states, such benefits are reserved only for legal immigrants and U.S. citizens.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Free College
The Democratic Party’s official 2024 platform calls for making “trade school and community college free for every American.”

DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Student Loan Debt Forgiveness
The Democratic Party’s official 2024 platform says: “A majority of college students graduate with student debt. It can be an overwhelming stress, as snowballing interest follows folks for decades, defining the choices they make and the jobs they take, and holding back our entire economy. Although Republican appointees on the Supreme Court blocked the President’s initial student debt relief plan for 40 million borrowers, he has not stopped using every available tool to provide relief.”

TRUMP: Supports Charter Schools & Vouchers
President Trump strongly supports charter schools, calling them “the ladder of opportunity for black and Hispanic children.” In July 2020, he signed an executive order to expand school choice for Hispanics and improve access to charter schools.

Trump also supports school vouchers. “We’re fighting for school choice, which really is the civil rights [issue] of all time in this country, frankly,” he says.

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