At the top of the education goals Donald Trump released during his 2016 campaign was a promise to add $20 billion in federal funding to school choice programs.
School choice programs direct public money to public charter schools and private school scholarships. Alternatives to public schools have grown more popular in the past 15 years, with charter school enrollment tripling between 2005 and 2016, and private school voucher programs now including 538,900 students nationwide.
Supporters of school choice programs say they give parents, including those whose children are zoned for poorly performing schools, more free options for their children. Critics of school choice say that the money should be directed instead toward improving local public schools and that some programs provide less transparency than government-run school districts.
Trump's administration has made small increases in funding for existing federal school choice programs, but it hasn't gotten any new legislation passed or significantly expanded funding.
Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have pushed for new federally funded school choice programs, but none of their programs have received enough support to pass in Congress.
The most recent large piece of legislation DeVos introduced was the Education Freedom Scholarships. DeVos announced on Feb 28, 2019, that the new legislation would provide $5 billion in annual tax credits for donors who gave to state-based scholarship programs.
The bill is meant to support school choice for individual families without taking away from federal or local funding for public schools. It was introduced in the House and the Senate in 2019 and is still being considered by the respective committees of both chambers.
Trump and DeVos have tried to add school choice programs to the budget but they have not been included in the final budgets approved by Congress.
The only increase in funding for non-public schools in the federal budget has been an increase of about $40 million in yearly grant money for the Charter School Program, which has existed since 2015. But Trump's 2021 budget proposal gets rid of funding for the program entirely.
Since 2004, the federal government has also funded the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only federally funded private-school voucher program. In 2019, the program got a $2.5 million increase in funding.
In June, DeVos issued a rule that forces school districts to share the CARES Act funding they are receiving for COVID-19 relief with private schools. There are two options for how school districts can decide to split the funds. A Learning Policy Institute analysis shows that under one option, private schools could receive $1.5 billion from the CARES Act.
Overall, no new major funding programs for school choice have been put in place during the Trump administration. There have been some minimal funding increases, but they add up to about $1 billion, not $20 billion. We rate this Promise Broken.