[alethea]

What are the principal reasons for not giving people great educations?

The main one that comes to my mind is so they can be propagandized to vote for the Democrats.

Weird, you believe that the Republicans create such bad education just to get the Democrats in. They are doing pretty well then, now you mention it.

In every speech she delivers she finds a way to promote school choice, sometimes saying things that aren’t true, as in February when she said that historically black colleges and universities were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” They weren’t. They were founded because blacks were barred from white colleges. Graduating students at a historically black university in Florida, Bethune-Cookman, protested the comments, booing and turning their back on her while she made a commencement speech in May.

What ‘school choice’ means in the era of Trump and DeVos]

What she doesn’t talk about are the challenges that school choice options have presented in many communities. Some states have scandal-ridden charter sectors, and studies show that voucher programs don’t help and often hurt student achievement. One such study was released this April, showing that students in the only federally funded voucher program, in Washington, D.C., performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate.
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Before her tenure began, DeVos was known as a reformer in the K-12 space, but her views on higher education were not well known. In her first six months, however, she has made a real mark in higher education, aggravating advocates of consumer protections and delighting the for-profit education industry. She and her staff moved swiftly to start to remake the student financial aid system by rolling back or rewriting regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration to protect student borrowers. For example:

DeVos’s department reinstated hefty collection fees for some borrowers who have defaulted.
The department started to take apart two major consumer protection rules. One of the rules is on gainful employment, which holds nondegree career education programs accountable when graduates have too much debt; the other is on borrower defense, which allows student borrowers defrauded by institutions to get loan forgiveness.
DeVos tapped the chief executive of a private student-loan company to run the federal government’s trillion-dollar financial aid operations.

But it is worth noting that the department also took quick action to implement a bipartisan initiative to help low- and moderate-income college students get year-round access to Pell grants, after Congress approved the measure.

In the K-12 space:

DeVos backed the administration’s decision to rescind guidance from the Obama administration that was aimed at protecting the rights of transgender students and directed the department’s Office for Civil Rights to consider transgender students’ discrimination complaints on a case-by-case basis.
She exercised some muscle in evaluating some state plans for compliance with the K-12 Every Student Succeeds Act, making “suggestions” about things they should fix and drawing complaints from Republicans.
She made science teachers shudder when she issued a statement praising President Trump for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

A crucial government function for K-12 and higher education is enforcing civil rights. DeVos hired Candice Jackson, who has made some controversial statements about sexual assault on campus, as acting head of the Office for Civil Rights. DeVos also held “hearings” at the Education Department about how to change Obama-era rules on how colleges should address sexual assault complaints. She made clear that she believes men accused of sexual assault have been improperly treated by institutions of higher education, and need more rights of their own. And when it became known that Trump’s Justice Department is launching a project to sue universities they deem to have affirmative action policies that discriminate against whites in admissions — rather than historically underserved populations — DeVos did not publicly protest.

Today, DeVos is the country’s top education official who no longer has to be careful about pushing her school reform vision. She is supportive of efforts by a conservative, pro-business group known as ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, to create model legislation for school vouchers and similar programs for states to pass in their legislatures. She spoke admiringly of ALEC at the group’s annual convention in July and took on the philosophy of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher as her own, saying that there is no “such thing as society,” an attack on social and other government programs. The support of a U.S. education secretary, even an unpopular one, for such thinking emboldens like-minded state legislators and lobbyists to push the agenda.

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DeVos and Trump have advanced a pro-school-choice 2018 budget, which seeks broad funding cuts while pushing proposals to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools and an additional $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies. It is also thought that they will push a federally funded tax credit program during any overhaul of the tax code.

Legislators have made clear that many of the proposed cuts won’t stand, especially in higher education. They don’t appear keen on approving money for a new voucher program, though a federal education tax credit program has some, though not overwhelming, support in Congress, and it could be slipped into a tax-overhaul bill.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ans ... 13ed34549c

Just on the issue of free schools, they have already been seen to fail in education. Even Sweden has fallen foul to this

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/e ... re-failing

and in England

Tens of millions wasted on free schools that closed or never opened amid 'unprecedented' funding crisis

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/educa ... 85256.html

Never mind all the rest.

So looks like the Republicans are working hard to get the Democrats in.

[Oxymoron]

Most people especially in lower economic classes would be better served with vocational training.