Union leader: School vouchers ‘polite cousins of segregation’
American Federation of Teachers president assails Betsy DeVos
“When a family chooses a private school, in reality it is the school and not the family that makes the choice.” Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers president, in draft remarks.
In a blistering speech slated to be delivered to more than 1,400 teachers here on Thursday, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten likens U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to a climate-change denier, saying DeVos refuses to acknowledge “the good in our public schools and their foundational place in our democracy.”
In her speech, to be delivered at the union’s traditional summer conference, Weingarten says the Trump administration’s school choice plans are secretly intended to starve funding from public schools. She called taxpayerfunded private school vouchers, tuition tax credits and the like “only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”
An advance draft copy of the speech was obtained by USA TODAY.
Vouchers, tax credits and private, for-profit charter schools, she alleges, “hide a dangerous ideological agenda” that destabilizes public schools. “And when a family chooses a private school, in reality it is the school and not the family that makes the choice.”
In addition, Weingarten says, many private schools can — and do — discriminate against students because they’re exempt from federal civil rights laws.
A longtime Michigan school choice advocate and GOP megadonor, DeVos has championed both public- and private-school choice, saying the ability of families to pick a school that suits their child is an elemental right.
During her Senate confirmation hearing last January, she asked lawmakers, “Why, in 2017, are we still questioning parents’ ability to exercise educational choice for their children?”
DeVos has trod a fine line on her judgments of public schools, saying that teachers “should be honored, celebrated, and freed up to do what they do best,” but also that the current public system “is outdated and ultimately is not geared toward what is right and best for students.”
The Trump administration’s proposals for school choice have rankled teachers’ unions, who say using public funds to send students to private schools — or to those in which large numbers of non-unionized teachers work — weakens the public system.
In her speech, Weingarten notes that school voucher plans in the South took root in the years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education decision, which struck down segregation. Rather than integrate schools, she points out, white officials in Prince Edward County, Va., closed the entire sys- tem and created whites-only private schools, paid for by taxpayer dollars.
The real pioneers of school choice, she says, are “the white politicians who resisted school integration.”
Weingarten also points out that recent research on vouchers, in particular, does not show promising results.
A June 2017 federally funded study on D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), a voucher that has been offered to families since 2012, found that it had a “statistically significant negative impact” on students’ math achievement and essentially no impact on reading after one year. Parents weren’t more satisfied with their children’s schools, but the program had a significant positive impact on parents’ perceptions of the safety of their child’s school.
The U.S. Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Weingarten’s remarks.