Dive Brief:

• On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump outlined a massive federal school choice program that would give money to students from low-income families to leave their public schools, and now that Trump is heading to the White House, California opponents are lining up.
• EdSource reports Californians rejected voucher proposals in 1993 and 2000, with the legislature welcoming charter schools, in part, as a way to appease those advocating for greater school choice — in 1992, the state legislature approved the nation’s second charter school law.
• At the federal level, even with Republican control of Congress, a federal voucher program is not expected to get an easy pass, with education policy experts predicting representatives on both sides of the aisle would come out against it.

Dive Insight:

Trump’s plan to come up with $20 billion for a private school voucher program is not very likely to become a reality. The Every Student Succeeds Act has already been passed with bipartisan approval, and Title I dollars, which Trump might otherwise target for his voucher plan, are already allocated. As Education Week’s Politics K-12 blogger Alyson Klein writes, the same is true for special education dollars. Trump is unlikely to get Congressional support for an amendment to ESSA or the Individuals with Disabilities Act.

Support for charters by former education secretary Arne Duncan certainly contributed to the growth of charter schools during the Obama administration, however. It is possible the U.S. Department of Education could find other ways to incentivize voucher programs at the state level or offer new grants to support them. These changes, though, would be small.