On the Radio: What Damage Can Betsy DeVos Actually Do to the Public’s School?

If you’ve accepted my invitation to imagine a Secretary of Education for America’s  Children and a Secretary of Education for the Public’s Schools, you may wonder what led me to (perhaps somewhat wildly) fantasize a person holding that office who is moved by the gravity of the responsibility to act wisely and forcefully as the first and highest advocate for our children, their learning, and their well being.

The idea of imagining possibilities came to me as I prepared for a radio interview with Dan Angelo, whose Education Today has for 25 years provided a forum for in-depth conversations about critical issues in education.  Mr. Angelo asked me to speak about the implications for our schools should DeVos be able to enact her stated agenda of dismantling the public’s schools and shifting our tax dollars to private religious schools, corporate charters and online “education” companies.

Needless to say, doing my homework for the interview was not pleasant. The more I read about the damage DeVos left behind in Ohio (including having to pay fines for violations of campaign laws) and Michigan (charters with dismal records of student learning, in close proximity to the now closed or marginalized public schools), the more I feared for America’s children and for the future of the vital role our public education system has played in creating and, to now, sustaining our democracy.

I was dismayed to read the ways that DeVos and other privatizers trick the public by claiming that private schools that take our money (through direct tax dollars to charters or indirectly through vouchers) are “public schools.”  Nope and nope.  The obfuscating terminology, the wholesale attacks on all public schools, the blaming of teachers and schools that have been starved for resources – the DeVos record was painful for what it’s done and frankly terrifying for what she plans to do as a member of the Cabinet under a president who himself is hostile to public goods and public institutions of all kinds.  

You can read my interview that “homework” produced.  I talk with Dan Angelo, host of EducationToday on Quartermoon Radio, about what Betsy DeVos hopes to do to our public schools:

   

You’ll see why the more I learned about DeVos, the more I kept imagining what would someone do as Secretary of Education who had, to paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, a reverence for children’s lives, a weighty sense of obligation to their schools and to the democracy we’ve promised they’ll grow up in.  Imagining an alternative was an exercise in hope.

I hope you’ll add your own imaginings to my previous posts on such a Secretary of Education, and check back in a few days to see how I’m imagining a Secretary of Education for America’s teachers.

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DON’T LET VOUCHERS KILL THE PUBLIC’S SCHOOLS!

With Betsy DeVos in as US Secretary of Education, we know our public schools are not safe.  A new administration should have come in ready to do away with high-stakes testing and other punitive policies and jumped right in to use the Secretary’s power – and budget in the billions of dollars – as a force for the most academically rich, culturally grounded, child-centered and, of course, equitable schools we can as a nation imagine. 

Instead, we see a Secretary eager to use the power of her office to impoverish the public’s schools by robbing them of our tax dollars, giving them to private schools.  Betsy DeVos wants our public dollars to leave our children’s classrooms and fly across town into the pockets of people who run schools but for some reason can’t make them financially viable on their own.   Religious schools (in her case, Christian ones), corporate-run charter chains, independent private schools – these are the folks who want a handout from the government!   Education “welfare”?

We can call it theft, misappropriation, corporate welfare, or de-democratizing.  Betsy DeVos calls these cash transfers “vouchers,” “freedom scholarships,” “market payments.”

Vouchers by whatever name will take money out of our public schools, making them weaker and – surprise! – vulnerable to closure or take over by private interests.    The president’s proposed budget takes billions of federal dollars away from even basic services to put into vouchers – voucher programs that states may have to go along with to get other federal dollars they desperately need in such areas as special education.  And many Republican governors and state legislatures are voting on voucher bills this very month (including, my Texas neighbors, right now in Austin).

“Vouchers” sound neutral; “freedom scholarships” sound generous.  How can we explain to our friends, our legislators, and our members of Congress how dangerous vouchers are?

A teacher can tell us!  Mercedes K.Schneider is a public school teacher in Louisiana, a careful researcher, and writer who can explain the most complicated policies in clear prose even a legislator can understand!     Her new book is here just in time to give to your member of Congress or state representative before they get sucked into thinking vouchers are inevitable, vouchers “worked” in Michigan (they didn’t), vouchers help poor kids (no).  SchoolChoice:  The End of Public Education?(Teachers College Press, 2016) traces vouchers to their roots in Southern resistance to desegregation:  if white families could take their local school tax dollars to private schools not under the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, they could keep their kids in all-white schools – and at the public’s expense.  

Schneider shows vouchers to be fundamentally aimed at destroying democracy, starting with Milton Friedman’s goal of replacing public institutions (the public’s institutions) by private players in a market where “competition” would be the only form of regulation.  And private interests would have no obligation to collective governance.   Her section on “choice” is especially compelling: Schneider shows that when tax dollars – and kids – go to voucher and charter schools, it’s the schools, not the parents and children, who have the power of “choice”: to include, to exclude, to do less than advertised.  Not good for children, not good for the community, and definitely not consistent with our democracy.

Get Schneider’s book today – for you, your teachers and school board, your policy folks, your local library!  Keep our dollars in our classrooms.  Anyone who wants to start a private school should try it; but raise your own money.  The rest of us have already committed our tax dollars to the public’s schools.

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