Trump choice is threat to public education
Since the November elections, my wife has been inconsolable about President- elect Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments. When she heard that Trump had chosen Betsy DeVos to be the next secretary of education, she moved from despair to outrage. My wife was a public school teacher for more than three decades, and she knows an existential threat to quality education when she sees it.
DeVos is at the forefront of a national movement to transform neighborhood schools into profit centers for investors with no experience or genuine interest in education. Quality education has never been the objective of the DeVos family fortune. It is motivated by a gospel of wealth accumulation and an ideological opposition to any form of public accountability. DeVos’ influence on public education was felt this past school year in Illinois when a special state commission blocked the City of Chicago from closing a poorly performing charter school. The state did nothing, however, to stop the city from shuttering 49 traditional public schools.
DeVos’ nomination signifies the next stage in a free- market takeover of the education industry by people who know nothing, for example, about reader- writer workshops, problem- based learning or what actually goes on in a classroom between a teacher and a student. Within the DeVos circle of school privatizers, teachers’ voices are marginalized at best and outright dismissed at worst.
Championed to varying degrees by Republican and Democratic party leaders and backed by billions of dollars in corporate and philanthropic funding, including in Chicago, an education marketplace has been under construction in which investors are supposed to make money on K- 12 education.
Their assault on the teaching profession has been particularly grotesque. Despite substantial educational research that shows otherwise, the group Trump is ushering through the schoolhouse door have accused teachers of be- ing unprepared, underworked and overpaid. Mostly, though, the uberrich enemies of public schools — who have never worked a day teaching a child how to construct a thesis statement or counseling a teenager away from suicide — demonized teacher unions. DeVos and her allies understand that the only real impediment to privatizing public education is teacher unions. Which is why in the midst of a seven- day school strike in 2012, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis correctly claimed that across the country, a fight was being waged for “the soul of public education.”
On one side of the fight was enormous amounts of private money, a shadow network of libertarian think tanks and self- described education “reformers,” and in many cases bipartisan political leaders, like big- city mayors and governors. On the other side were neighborhood education activists, a racially diverse coalition of working- class parents, and teacher unions.
As thousands of protesters jammed Chicago streets in 2012 in support of public schools, their children’s unionized teachers offered an alternative vision of education that has been replicated in countless school districts. Released in a seminal manifesto titled “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve,” it became and remains the most inspiring and democratic blueprint for educating our children.
The union called for reducing class size, ensuring that students have classes in art, theater, dance, music and world languages and access to a school library. It argued that wrap- around services including school counselors, nurses, social workers and psychologists were essential to creating healthy learning environments.
Criminalizing student misbehavior had to stop, so the union embraced restorative justice approaches to end “discipline policies with a disproportionate harm on students of color.” Access to full- day kindergarten, a robust program for “emergent bilingual students and services for students faced with a variety of special needs,” and zero tolerance was recommended for school buildings with “leaky roofs, asbestos- lined bathrooms or windows that refuse to shut.”
The union also called for respecting the teaching profession and ending the practice of paying people who educate the nation’s children a paltry fraction of what bankers, hedge fund managers and real estate moguls earn.
Confronting the inexplicable post- Great Recession trend of reduced state support for school funding, which has led to shameful disparities in per student spending based on a student’s ZIP code, the report declared that a country that can “afford to take care of its affluent citizens can afford to take care of those on the other end of the income scale.”
The Chicago Teachers Union and teacher unions everywhere offer America an alternative to the DeVos family dismantling of public education.