Miseducation secretary
Devos’ recent interview exposes the naivete of school choice as an education panacea.
During her Senate confirmation hearings in 2017, Betsy DeVos clearly demonstrated that she was unqualified to be U.S. Secretary of Education. In a recent interview with the CBS television program “60 Minutes,” DeVos showed that on the job training hasn’t helped.
At the root of DeVos’ shortcomings is a belief that the complex challenges facing our education system can be solved with some magic bullet. In her “60 Minutes” interview, DeVos repeated her mantra that school choice would fix what ails education, but she was woefully unprepared to make her case.
Before becoming education secretary, DeVos had used her immense family wealth to fund school choice initiatives particularly in her home state of Michigan. When “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked if Michigan schools had gotten better as a result, DeVos gave a stunning response.
“I don’t know. Overall, I, I can’t say overall that they have all gotten better,” she said.
Is this the best that school choice advocates have to offer?
DeVos promotes her charter and voucher plans as a panacea for the nation’s education woes, but doesn’t know if they’ve made a difference where she’s been most directly involved.
The secretary of education should know better than to show up for class unprepared.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. In her confirmation hearing after being nominated by President Trump, DeVos showed a woeful lack of understanding of education basics, such as whether testing should be used to measure student proficiency or growth.
The promotion of school competition as a cure-all for education struggles should be familiar to Texans. The state has expanded charter school offerings in recent years, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wanted to go even further in 2017, proposing that taxpayer money be diverted to private schools in the form of vouchers. DeVos also is a big fan of vouchers.
“I intend to fight for school choice session after session after session,” Patrick said in 2016. “And it's not going to hurt public schools. It’s going to make them better.”
The House blocked Patrick’s voucher plan in 2017, but he’ll undoubtedly be back with this dangerous idea in 2019.
In supporting school choice, DeVos and Patrick make the claim that taking money away from existing public schools will make them better because they’ll be forced to compete for students. At best, studies are quite mixed on whether diverting money from traditional public schools to charters or private schools can lead to improved overall student performance.
In the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman,” education reformer Geoffrey Canada talks about his realization that Superman was a fictional character and would not be coming to the rescue. In the years since, school choice itself has become something of a Superman for its advocates — a fictional character imbued with supernatural abilities.
Our nation’s education system has become more complex over time. It serves a student population today that is vastly different than that of 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago. Nowhere is that more clear than in Houston.
The district faces class and racial divides over resource allocation. It is hamstrung by an inequitable school finance system and a Legislature lacking the political will to fix it. Many Houston ISD campuses are struggling, prompting the threat of a state takeover. And Hurricane Harvey disrupted the education of tens of thousands of Houston students.
In the midst of this, Superintendent Richard Carranza resigned after 18 months on the job to become chancellor of New York City schools.
Much hope will be placed in the next superintendent to solve Houston ISD’s woes. The same happened with Carranza. But there is no Superman.
One person, or one plan, will not be enough to get the district on track. It will take the combined efforts of parents, teachers, students and other stakeholders. They should have a major voice in what comes next. That holds true in the rest of Texas and the rest of the nation. That’s not easy to do, but it’s the only realistic path.