No: Fierce hostility to public schools should be a disqualifier

In the United States, 90 percent of children attend public schools. These young people and their families rely on this system, which is funded by tax dollars and is answerable to democratically elected school boards. In many communities, the public school system is the glue that holds a diverse population together.

We therefore expect the men and women who set federal education policy to support public education.

Yet President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education in his administration. That’s a problem. DeVos isn’t just indifferent to public education; she’s hostile to it.

DeVos simply has no credentials to do this important job. Our country’s education secretary should focus on promoting and improving public education. Instead, DeVos wants to dismantle it.

She has spent most of her adult life promoting private school vouchers. A lobbying group she heads, the American Federation for Children, seeks to transfer tax funds from public schools to private ones.

DeVos has poured money into campaigns to create voucher plans in states all over the country. She managed to get the question on the ballot in her home state of Michigan in 2000.

Michigan voters weren’t fooled, however. They rejected DeVos’s voucher scheme 68 percent to 32 percent.

Vouchers have been on the ballot in numerous states over the years. Voters have rejected them every time — and often by large margins.

The people are sending a clear message: Americans want an adequately funded, high-functioning public school system that welcomes all children, not a network of taxpayer-funded private schools, many of which are religious.

DeVos and Trump are tone-deaf to this message. They continue to promote voucher plans that Americans don’t want.

Indeed, Trump has called for creating a nationwide school voucher program at a staggering price tag of $20 billion. His plan would divert money from existing federal programs to new choice block grants for states, which will, in part, fund private schools.

Americans should be wary. Private school vouchers are poor education policy.

Despite what DeVos and others claim about the virtues of the free market and competition, numerous studies have shown that voucher plans don’t boost student performance.

Furthermore, private schools lack accountability to taxpayers and deprive students of rights provided to public school students. They also divert desperately needed resources away from public schools, which serve all children, to fund the education of a few, select voucher students. Fly-bynight schools of questionable quality have also been a problem.

Voucher plans often lack basic curriculum requirements, which means that religious schools can use taxpayer-funded vouchers to teach creationism rather than evolution.

Private schools that accept vouchers also don’t provide the same fundamental civil rights protections that our public schools do, including those prohibiting discrimination based on gender and gender identity, national origin, and disability.

The U.S. Department of Education’s job is to ensure that our nation has a strong public school system and that all our children have access to meaningful educational opportunities. Because DeVos doesn’t support this goal, she is not qualified to be America’s secretary of education.