Educator-in-chief credentials

I get nervous whenever presidents talk about education. I realize a commanderin-chief can do a lot more damage with an army than he can with a busload of teachers. But presidents get to consult people who wear uniforms, and while generals can be wrong, they’re rarely inexperienced.

Education’s generals, in contrast, are almost never experienced. In fact, if you want to qualify as an education expert, especially if you want to command America’s public schools, never having taught in one is almost a requirement. Shirley Hufstedler, the nation’s first education secretary, was a federal judge. Her successor, Terrell Bell, taught science for a year before embarking on his career in school administration.

Secretary Bell was succeeded by William Bennett, a lawyer with a degree in philosophy, and Lauro Cavaszo, a physiologist. They were followed by two more lawyers. Rod Paige, the secretary who helped deliver No Child Left Behind, spent four years as head football coach at Texas Southern University before he became the dean of an education school and Houston’s superintendent. His successor had a degree in political science.

President Obama’s education guru, Arne Duncan, majored in sociology, chaired a nonprofit education foundation, played Australian professional basketball, and ran Chicago’s public schools. The administrative career of Mr. Duncan’s successor, John King, rested on three years of teaching in charter schools, a fleeting classroom stint that nonetheless renders him the most experienced teacher to ever hold the position of Secretary of Education.

Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s nominee, graduated from Calvin College with a degree in business and political science. In addition to never having attended a public school, she holds no education credentials, never taught in a public school classroom, and never served in public school governance. Her involvement in education consists of lobbying for and funding alternatives to public schools. Even compared to the modest education credentials of her predecessors, she appears uniquely unqualified to serve as Secretary of Education.

Her recent Senate testimony demonstrated her unfamiliarity with even the basics of public school administration. In her own words, her testimony revealed that she was “confused” about the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, the foundational federal civil rights law governing special education. This is the equivalent of becoming the chief of staff of the navy and being confused about what an aircraft carrier is.

She also demonstrated that she doesn’t understand how school failure and success are determined, a topic long debated among teachers and policymakers. Some propose that school and student success should mean “proficiency” in satisfying certain established standards. Others contend that schools should be judged based on “growth,” how much progress they’re making toward those standards.

Regardless of your position on this issue, you should at least have one if you’re planning to run America’s schools. You should at the very least know what “proficiency” and “growth” are, another matter about which Ms. DeVos was confused.

Her ignorance of these “accountability” fundamentals was stunning, especially given her lifelong campaign to hold public schools “accountable,” and her consequent efforts on behalf of alternatives to public education, a crusade on which her reputation rests. Equally troubling was her refusal to agree that alternative schools receiving public money should be held to the same accountability standards as public schools.

Ms. DeVos epitomizes the disconnect between policymakers and real public schools. Unfortunately, her inexperience and fatal distance from actual students and classrooms are catastrophically typical of the officials and experts who govern public education at every level.

In 1981 A Nation at Risk condemned the education reforms instituted in the 1970s. Risk found that we’d “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling” and that schools were being burdened with too many “social” responsibilities. Risk also faulted “excessive student choice” in determining coursework, “undemanding,” “diluted” curricula, a decline in disciplinary standards, a reduction in homework expectations, and watered-down grading standards that made inflated assessments of student achievement commonplace.

Check the annals of education reform. The “innovations” that precipitated our academic decline in the 1970s have never left us. The same experts and their successors have renamed and recycled them for 40 years. Until we recognize how wrong we’ve been for so long, all our efforts to “reform” schools will continue to bear the same rotten fruit.

Some critics have responded by championing alternatives to public education under the banners of school choice, vouchers, and charter schools. There’s nothing wrong with school choice, and we may want to consider publicly funding some of the alternative choices that parents have historically paid for out of their own pockets.

School choice advocates, however, disparage public schools as vestiges of a “public education monopoly.” It makes as much sense to condemn the army and navy as national defense monopolies.

Public education isn’t a service we provide parents or students, even though they individually benefit from it. It’s our common response to Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that no nation can endure both ignorant and free.

He believed in limited government, but he also believed that educating our people was the “duty” and “business of the state” and that public education was the surest means to the “preservation of our liberty.”

As we consider the recent follies and failings of public education, we shouldn’t forget the generations of successful students that public schools have produced.

And as we consider alternatives, we shouldn’t forget Mr. Jefferson’s advice.

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If you want to qualify as an education expert, especially if you want to command America’s public schools, never having taught in one is almost a requirement.

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