Teachers across the commonwealth are warning that President Donald Trump’s mass firings at the Department of Education will lead to larger class sizes and fewer resources for Pennsylvania’s poorest students. Up to $1.6 billion is at risk for the commonwealth.
Leaders from Pennsylvania’s two largest teachers unions warned residents on Wednesday about the reverberations President Donald Trump’s mass firings at the US Department of Education will have on students once they go into effect.
“This is just a continuing attempt by the Trump administration to defer taxpayer funds to billionaires,” Arthur Steinberg, President of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, told reporters at a press conference.
“ The Trump administration is really trying to keep people uneducated so they can have a poor, uneducated workforce that will just basically want to work in their assembly lines and factories. They don’t want people to critically think.”
More than $1.6 billion in federal funding is at risk for the commonwealth with the majority of that money helping some of Pennsylvania’s poorest students in urban, suburban and rural districts. Labor leaders also fear that close to 7,000 teachers and support staff would be affected by the cuts.
That funding includes $578 million for Title I programs, which helps close to 800,000 students, and $428 million for over 358,000 students with learning disabilities.
“The mass firing at the Department of Education has put $1.6 billion in federal education funding at risk in Pennsylvania,” Aaron Chapin, President of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said in a statement. “Losing that crucial funding would send class sizes soaring, jeopardize special education services, and put nearly 7,000 public school jobs at risk in Pennsylvania.”
The DOE is already one of the smallest federal government agencies that employs over 4,200 employees across the country, and Steinberg is skeptical that these layoffs would help the agency run more efficiently.
“I don’t believe it. There is waste and inefficiency everywhere, and we are not opposed to rooting that out so more money can flow and work its way down into the schools,” Steinberg said.
“However, you cannot convince me that everybody, all those jobs they’re cutting are duplicative. They’ve had to hire a lot of outside contractors to do their work already. If anything, they’re understaffed.”
