Betsy DeVos to Public Education: Drop Dead
By John
C. Fager
Does my headline about Trump’s pick to be the next education secretary
sound exaggerated, even hyperbolic? If
so you’re not paying attention, a cardinal sin in the Age of Trump. For starters, here’s a December 12, New York
Times headline "Education nominee bent Detroit to her will on charter
schools.” Betsy DeVos is a true believer
in a totally free-market approach to education reform.
And here’s a quote from the article about how DeVos would apply a
free-market approach to the Detroit Public Schools, a system that she has had
great impact on.
“Detroit
Public Schools, she argued, should simply be
shut down and the system turned over to
charters, or
the tax dollars given to parents in the form
of vouchers
to attend private schools.”
When we talk about Betsy DeVos, we’re not talking about the non-educator
corporate reformers that Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama
appointed. Rod Paige and Arne Duncan did
their share of damage to children, teachers, and education. But as misguided as they were at least they
were committed to improving public education.
DeVos is even more committed to public education, to its destruction.
The experimental weapons being used in the ongoing national education
war during the last 20 years were radical but seem almost tame compared to what
DeVos proposes to do. The ineffective
and damaging corporate reform weapons still in place include the Common
Core-aligned high stakes standardized testing,
Common Core State Standards, charter schools, zero-tolerance
discipline, and the value added method (VAM) for evaluating teachers and
principals.
These seem almost quaint (they’re not) like a M16 from the Vietnam
War. But now, unless the United States
Senate musters some courage and rejects her, we will have a billionaire
ideologue as the United States Secretary of Education who wants to go nuclear
on the public schools.
It’s in Michigan, where DeVos and her extended family money has been the
most powerful force in education for the last 20 years, where we can learn what
may be in store for the rest of the country.
And we can learn important lessons because the Detroit Free Press and
The New York Times have done extensive and deep reporting about Betsy DeVos and
her extended billionaire family.
Excellent journalism is another necessary survival tool for the next
four years.
The Michigan charter school law, originally passed in 1993, was woefully
short on accountability requirements. In
2001 the DeVos family spent $5.8 million to back an unsuccessful effort to
amend the Michigan constitution to allow the use of education vouchers even
though they have failed to improve student performance. In the same year Betsy DeVos founded the
Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) to support charter schools.
And in 2011 the DeVoses and the Great Lakes Education Project pushed the
legislature to “lift cap on the number of charter schools” . They are true believers in a totally
free-market and powerful enough to convince the legislature not only to eliminate
the cap but also to remove the part of the law that would prohibit failing schools from expanding or replicating.
Last year the Detroit Free Press reviewed two decades of charter school
records and in August printed a special report written by Jennifer Dixon, “Michigan spends $1B on charter schools but fails to hold them
accountable.” The
first paragraph stated, “state laws
regulating charters are among the nation’s weakest, and the state demands
little accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent and how well children
are educated.
The headings in the report speak volumes about the failure of the
program. They range from “Often no consequences for poor
performance,” “State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants,” “No
guidelines for when a charter should be revoked,” “Taxpayer money can be hidden
from public view,” “Mixed results academically, less spending in the
classroom,” and “Loopholes in Michigan law allow insider deals and nepotism,”
Choice in a market sounds attractive: people buy goods or services from
businesses that are of high quality and desert those of low quality. Charters and vouchers are part of the choice
movement where families will theoretically seek out the best schools. But often choice means picking among bad
schools and parents often lack necessary information. And the
national expert says that choice and totally free-markets don’t work in
schools (see below).
In New York State and others there are indications that the choice is
being exercised by the schools not the parents.
Proponents of charter schools says that the selection of students is
done by a blind lottery. But the parents
who search out and participate in a lottery usually are better educated and
their children are easier to educate.
And if a low performing student gets accepted some charter schools use
their behavior and discipline codes to pressure such students to transfer to a
public school that must take all students.
A form of choice did take place in the charter universe in Detroit;
almost all of the respected national charter chains refused to open schools in
Detroit because of the chaos. The New York Times also reported that even the Walton Foundation,
that pledged to invest $1billion in charter schools over the next five years,
withdrew from Detroit. The free-market
has spoken; it has forcefully condemned the charter morass in Detroit that
DeVos played such a prominent role in creating.
And more importantly if DeVos truly wanted to know what was going wrong
in Detroit she could have engaged Margaret Raymond director of Stanford
University’s highly respected CREDO (Center for Research of Educational
Outcomes) the gold standard for evaluating charter schools, to Detroit. But DeVos would not like what she would have
heard.
In December 2014 Raymond was addressing the Cleveland City Club across
Lake Erie from Michigan. She was there
to report on conditions in Ohio charter schools, then known as the “Wild,Wild
West of charter schools” according to the National Association of Charter
School Authorizers.
I watched a video of the webcast and Raymond stressed the need for
holding charter schools and their authorizers accountable. She said, “states with better authorizer
controls tend to have better charter schools.”
But DeVos believes in a pure free-market with hardly any state
regulations.
More importantly Raymond then surprised the audience. After saying that she had not only studied
markets most of her professional life and considered herself, “a market gal,”
she then said that she had come to the conclusion that "a totally free market is not appropriate for schools” Again the
expert in the nation on charter schools contradicts the free-market ideology of
DeVos.
Raymond went on, “It’s the only industry/sector where the market doesn’t
work.” And she explained why, “Parents
can’t be agents of quality assurance.”
There is a need for better information to be available to parents as
they pick schools. And, as she expressed
earlier, more government accountability measures.
Back in Michigan, the land of free-market charter schools where 80% are
for-profit, the highest percentage in the country, the problems had
metastasized. The 2015 special report by the Detroit Free Press also quoted a
former state schools superintendent Tom Watkins…“people are making a boatload of money” and the kids aren’t getting educated.” Ah,
the free-market in K-12 public education, it’s a con artist’s dream right up
there with for-profit higher education, private prisons, etc. A 2016 businessinsider.com article questioned
whether charter schools could become the new subprime mortgage crisis.
Last year, responding to the failure of many charter schools, a
coalition of Detroit residents and business, union, and parent leaders,
including the sons of two governors, came together with the Republican Governor
Rick Snyder and the Democratic mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan to fashion a
reform plan.
A bill that would place charter schools under the same authority as
public schools in the city, for quality control, and attention to population
need for schools and balance was passed by the state senate. But then the DeVos family’s money machine
came into play.
According to a September opinion column written by Stephen Henderson the
editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, the DeVos family, “has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations”
with…$1.45 million in June and July alone –over a seven-week period, an average
of $25,000 per day.” The reform legislation didn’t pass the
Michigan House of Representatives and “that preserved the free-for-all charter
environment that has locked Detroit in an educational morass for two decades.”
Henderson concluded on a prescient note.
“The polite term for this kind of reflexive giving is transactional
politics; it is the way things work not just in Lansing but in Washington, and
in political circles in all 50 states.”
But if you think that DeVos had any misgivings you would be wrong. Any doubts about being the biggest player in
the Lansing swamp and joining the nation’s capital apparently don’t exist. According to a November 23 article in The New
Yorker ”DeVos has been a major opponent of limits on campaign finance” and has
made substantial contributions to overturn them.
DeVos wrote the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call that she would no
longer feel defensive about her huge spending on candidates, her support of
pay-to-play in government, and “the suggestion that we are buying
influence. Now I simply concede the
point.” She continued,
“We do
expect something in return. We expect to
foster
a conservative governing
philosophy consisting of limited
government and respect
for traditional American virtues.
We expect a return on
our investment.”
Those words, “we expect a return on our investment,” could be a motto
for swamp dwellers everywhere. And it
raises the question of what kind of government does DeVos believe in? Does she
favor democracy or plutocracy, a government or state in which the wealthy class
rules?
But it is Betsy DeVos’ apparent disdain for the children "Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter
Schools” that is so striking. (DeVos attended a Christian academy as did her
children). For 20 years she and her extended family have spent millions of
dollars to shape the school systems in Detroit and Michigan yet she seldom
visited. Tonya Allen, president of the
Skillman Foundation that works with Detroit children and was head of the
commission that helped shape the reform legislation last spring, told Kate
Zernike of The New York Times about DeVos’ lack of involvement.
“If she was showing herself present in places and learning from
practitioners, that’s a fine combination, Ms. Allen said. “But Betsy never showed up in Detroit. She was very eager to impose experimentations
on students that she has not spent time with and children that she does not
have consequences for.”
DeVos, with her family fortune and her ideological commitment to a
free-market with its vouchers, religious schools, and charter schools, matches
Trump’s belief in free-markets and vouchers.
Therefore you would think that she is likely to be confirmed.
But DeVos has a serious problem; she is so divorced from the mainstream
that she alienates not only progressives and moderates but because of her past
support of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), she is also in
trouble with some, perhaps many, conservatives.
She now tries to deny her support for CCSS but the record is
substantial.
One Michigan organization that "opposes the Common Core and wants to stop DeVos" from becoming U.S. secretary of education is
Stop Common Core in Michigan. The
organization has more than one issue but it is DeVos’ past support of the
Common Core that mobilized it against her candidacy.
In its Nov. 28 blog Stop CC in MI reported that DeVos’ organization GLEP
has opposed the repeal of the CCSS and has a document titled, “The Conservative
Case for Common Core.” Members also
quoted a former state representative, Tom McMillin, who told them that DeVos
had told him that she supported the Common Core.
But their problems with DeVos are broader. They complain about the testing and tracking
of their children from cradle-to-career.
They also reject DeVos because:
“Local
and parent control do not exist in DeVos’ education
reform model.
Data and government funding drive the
decision. In a nutshell, school choice is centralized
control to
meet the
demands of the state and regional business not the
dreams
of the child.”
There is also the nationally disseminated blog Truth in American
Education most often written and edited by Shane Vander Hart a conservative
Christian from Iowa. The organization is
divided about whether to support or oppose DeVos. “Vander Hart, after expressing some serious doubts, gave her the
benefit of the doubt”
On the other side, Frank Cannon
president of the American Principles Project, a conservative and libertarian
organization according to Wikipedia opposes her confirmation. He ”accuses her of being a Jeb-like pick.”
In the Nov. 23 post Vander Hart questioned DeVos’ sudden opposition to
CCSS. He noted that she said she
supported “high standards” and he wanted to ask if she considered CCSS high
standards. He also wanted to know if she
supported federally mandated testing, parents’ rights to opt their students
out, and where she stood on data collection of students’ private information.
I would like to suggest to Vander Hart that he pressure his senators, as
all of us should be doing, to get answers to these questions and then make a
decision based on the information.
The moment of truth will arrive on Wednesday when the DeVos hearing will
be held. A good person to summarize who
Betsy DeVos is is Stephen Henderson, the Detroit Free Press editorial page
editor. He summed up his thoughts about
DeVos being U.S. secretary of education in a December 4 opinion column. Under the heading “Unqualified” he wrote, “DeVos isn’t an educator, or an education
leader. She’s not an expert in pedagogy
or curriculum or school governance. In
fact, she has no relevant credentials or experience.”
He continued, "She is, in essence, a lobbyist" –
someone who has used her extraordinary wealth to influence the conversation
about education reform, and to bend that conversation to her ideological
convictions despite the dearth of evidence supporting them.”
So the big question for the United States Senate
and for all Americans is: how much damage is this non-educator lobbyist going
to do to the American system of public education? She described American public education in
Aug. 2015, according to the Washington Post, as “a closed system, a closed industry,
a closed market. ”It’s a monopoly, a dead-end.”
John C. Fager, former education columnist for the New York Daily News, was a parent leader in the NYC public schools in the 1980s and
’90s and is currently a teacher. His work has also appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Monthly, Newsday and the New York Post.
’90s and is currently a teacher. His work has also appeared in the New
York Times, Washington Monthly, Newsday and the New York Post.
