School Choice: PRESIDENT TRUMP'S 2020 EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

Executive Order on Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School Choice (paraphrased)

 Issued on: December 28, 2020 

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to ensure the education, health, safety, and well-being of America’s children, our most essential resource upon which the future of our great Nation depends, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Purpose.  As part of their efforts to address the public health challenges and uncertainties posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, State and local officials shut down in-person learning for the vast majority of our more than 56 million elementary and secondary school students beginning in late February and early March of this year.  Since then, however, our Nation has identified effective measures to facilitate the safe resumption of in-person learning, and the Federal Government has provided more than $13 billion to States and school districts to implement those measures.

The prolonged deprivation of in-person learning opportunities has produced undeniably dire consequences for the children of this country.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that school attendance is negatively correlated with a child’s risk of depression and various types of abuse...

School closures are especially difficult for families with children with special needs.  Schools provide not only academic supports for students with special needs, but they also provide much-needed in-person therapies and services, including physical and occupational therapies...

Low-income and minority children are also disproportionately affected by school closures.  In low-income zip codes, students’ math progress decreased by nearly 50 percent while school buildings were closed in the spring, and the math progress of students in middle-income zip codes fell by almost a third during the same period...

While some families, especially those with financial means, have been able to mitigate school disruptions through in person options such as homeschooling, private schools, charter schools, and innovative models like micro schools and “learning pods,” for many families, their children’s residentially assigned public school remains their only financially available option.  

Students whose families pay tuition for their education are also facing significant hardships due to the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic.  

I am committed to ensuring that all children of our great Nation have access to the educational resources they need to obtain a high-quality education and to improving students’ safety and well-being, including by empowering families with emergency learning scholarships.

Sec. 2.  Providing Emergency Learning Scholarships for Students.  The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall take steps, consistent with law, to allow funds available through the Community Services Block Grant program to be used by grantees and eligible entities to provide emergency learning scholarships to disadvantaged families for use by any child without access to in-person learning.  These scholarships may be used for:

(i)    tuition and fees for a private or parochial schoo