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Budget Cuts Series 2021: Deep Cuts to Education Spending For CHILDREN
The 2021 version of the Budget Cuts Series continues with another post that is utterly unbelievable. Cutting education funding for children should make these people unelectable. It seems no one is aware of it though and it'll stay that way with this sort of egregious action never showing up on televised news media. That's why it's here on Smart Dissent.
Similar to past years, the Trump administration has released a budget proposal that seeks deep cuts to federal spending on children. One area that routinely ends up on the chopping block is education, which yet again would experience drastic cuts under the President’s Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) budget proposal.
Trump requests $66.6 billion for the Department of Education for FY21. If enacted, this would be a $6.1 billion, or 8.4 percent, cut from the Department’s FY20 budget.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the cuts in this year’s proposal would come from K-12 education and would disproportionately impact low-income, high-need students.
The 2021 budget attempts to disguise this differently than in past years to make it seem as if it's being done in the name of efficiency when in fact, dozens of targeted programs to HELP OUR CHILDREN will be destroyed.
A large part of this administration’s education agenda is to divest federal funds away from K-12 education, thus leaving school districts to fend for themselves with vastly unequal funding primarily driven by local property taxes. This time around, the budget proposes to do so by eliminating 29 formula and competitive grant programs and consolidating them into a single block grant called the “Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged Block Grant” (ESED).
The block grant would eliminate funding for some of the nation’s most crucial K-12 education programs, including Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth, among many others, and replace them with a $19.4 billion block grant. In total, the block grant would cut funding across all 29 programs by $4.7 billion, or 19.5 percent, from FY20 numbers.
To summarize, the block grant would consolidate 29 formula and competitive grant programs—which cover everything from supporting teachers, to funding investments in low-income students, to addressing the needs of English language learners, to student supports like mental health services and college counseling—into a single grant program that would be allocated to school districts
In all, the Trump's FY21 budget proposal for the Department of Education makes only modest investments in K-12 education while simultaneously slashing spending for the vast majority of programs.
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