Betsy DeVos vs. Public Education

Donald Trump is not like other Republicans. It’s why some people voted for him. It’s why some people refused to vote for him. It’s why one (Christian, conservative) Texas elector has resigned his post rather than have a hand in electing him. It’s why some people out there are writing melodramatic posts on social media about how “this time is different” (which are fascinating in how they manage to re-frame the hatred for George W. Bush and Barack Obama as mere “disagreement,” as if we didn’t call them Hitler, too.) It’s one of the few things we can agree on in these divided times: Trump is not going to be just another run-of-the-mill Republican president.

But in some ways, he might be.

In a couple of years, this will be a charter school.

Let’s consider his presumptive choice for Secretary of Education: Betsy DeVos (billionaire with four houses and a yacht; not an elitist.) It’s not much of a stretch to imagine DeVos being appointed by a President Cruz or a President Romney. According to the New York Times, she was a supporter of Marco Rubio in the primaries, and Jeb Bush has publicly called her “an outstanding pick.” More importantly, her views are very much in line with what most mainstream Republicans believe about education. She supports local control of education, school vouchers, and a proliferation of charter schools that would rival the frozen yogurt boom of 2012-2014.

What I really find interesting, though, is that - far more than any of Trump’s other presumptive cabinet members - it is not even that hard to imagine Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education under a President Clinton. Either President Clinton, actually. The historical or the hypothetical. (Not to mention President Chelsea Clinton, who, if the prophetic film Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century is to believed, will be elected in either 2044 or 2048. And Zenon has never steered me wrong before. And the idea of a 97-year-old HRC getting to watch her daughter become the nation’s first female president is kind of sweet, and possibly the only way for her story to have anything but a tragic ending. But I digress.)

No, I don’t think Hillary Clinton would have actually appointed DeVos. But I do think that whatever entrenched bureaucrat she did appoint would have borne some frightening similarities to Trump’s pick. Education is one of those issues where the mainstream Republican position and the mainstream Democratic position aren’t really that far apart. Both are certainly, on a global scale, right of center.

Pictured: our second female President and her Chief of Staff

Education expert and eccentric genius Alfie Kohn has a wonderful post that lists quotes about education that were said by either George W. Bush or Barack Obama and asks the reader to determine which president uttered each one. Try it. It’s damn near impossible. I’ve done it three times and I still can’t remember the right answers. Not only are the ideas similar, so is the language used to express them. I would honestly not be surprised to find out that all five quotes were penned by the same speechwriter.

And so it turns out that the second worst thing about our government is the fact that our two political parties cannot agree on anything or even work together long enough to hammer out a compromise. The first worst thing about our government is that the few things they do agree on are unequivocally terrible.

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Education is, of course, not a single issue, but the intersection of a great number of different issues. And on many of them, there is a distinct difference between the Democratic view and the Republican view. For one thing, Democrats tend to support the federal government’s being involved and Republicans tend to prefer state or local control. I want to focus right now, though, on the issue of “education reform.” Betsy DeVos supports it. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education from 2009 until early 2016, kind of supported it too.

Now, to be clear, using terms like “education reform” and “school reform” is a clever linguistic maneuver similar to that employed by those who first coined the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” (intended to brand one’s opponents as “anti-life” or “anti-choice,” respectively.) But in this case, it is even more subtle. By framing what they support as “education reform,” these politicians essentially put those who disagree with them in the position of having to argue that the American educational system is perfect the way that it is. Which, of course, nobody actually believes. Not anybody who has ever been inside of a school, at least. And certainly not anyone who works in one.

But “education reform” does not just mean reforming education. It means reforming education in a particular way, in accordance with a particular ideology and a particular way of understanding the roles of teachers, parents, and students.

It means: more tests, more choice, and more charter schools.

Pictured: someone educated in a madrassa

It means that parents would be able to pull their children out of public schools if they did not find them satisfactory and instead A) enroll them in a charter school of their choice or B) use the tax money that would normally go to the public school and apply it towards the tuition of a private school. Betsy DeVos believes that this should include private schools with a religious affiliation. (Side note: imagine the reaction of some Trump voters when they hear that their tax money is going to be used to pay for Islamic schools. It almost makes this all worth it.)

And as is always the case, this view of what education ought to look like is supported by a number of assumptions and axioms. I believe the most fundamental and important assumption to consider here is this: education is a service provided by teachers to parents.

Once you accept that premise, everything that DeVos supports follows from it. Of course parents should be able to choose which schools their children go to! Of course schools should be graded and compared based on the students’ performance on common assessments! Of course schools or individual teachers who are underperforming should be eliminated! It’s a basic capitalistic model. Providing greater choice to parents will promote competition, which will lead to greater quality across the board.

But there are some things I find deeply problematic about this way of looking at education. The first is that it’s sort of bizarre that we always assume it is parents who will be making these choices, that we still lump 17-year-olds in with 5-year olds, assuming that young people should be entirely at the mercy of their adult overlords until the moment they turn 18, rather than promoting a gradual transition of responsibility as the young person matures. Imagine a gay or transgender teenager sent by his or her parents to a private, religious school that teaches that anything outside of heterosexual monogamy is sinful and dirty. Publicly funded identity shaming! Or take an example from the other side of the culture wars: a teenager with a burgeoning interest in Jesus Christ sent by his or her atheist parents to Richard Dawkins High, a private school that teaches that science alone can provide answers to life’s questions. When presented with a phrase like “school choice,” our very first question should be: who gets to choose?

Pictured: the mascot of Dawkins High

The other problem is that there is no universal standard for quality education. Standardized tests do a pretty lousy job at measuring the achievement of individual students, and there’s no reason to believe they’d be any better at measuring the quality of teachers or entire schools. Also, there are massive differences among parents in terms of what they value in a school. Some like to see strict discipline and a focus on “the basics." Others want open-ended, student-centered, inquiry-based learning. Some parents out there (let’s face it) don’t care about any of that crap as long as their kid gets an A.

We make decisions in a capitalist structure based not on quality, but on the perception of quality. This is always the case, but we usually don’t think much of it. Let’s say there are two pizza places in town that I’ve never tried. When I am deciding which one to order from, I obviously do not know which one will actually be better, only which one I think will be better - based on advertisements, word of mouth, etc. But here’s the difference. Once I do order a pizza, I’ll know pretty quickly how good it is. And there’s nothing to stop me (besides self-control, I guess) from ordering from the other place the next night and comparing my two pizza experiences. Then, I’ll be able to make a more informed decision about which pizza I should order on the third night. That’s how the capitalist structure works.

But education is different than pizza in two key ways:

• It takes a lot longer to judge the quality of an education.

• Some of the effects of a quality education are far-reaching and hard to pinpoint. (For instance, we cannot really determine for certain how much of an effect twelve years of mathematical training has upon an adult’s ability to use deductive reasoning and solve problems in real-world situations. But I would be willing to guess that it is not none.)

But human beings (in this situation, parents) would still be making decisions based upon perceived quality of education. So, if the education market became more competitive, we would not necessarily see schools improve so much as we would see them try to appear better. For some schools, that would mean focusing exclusively on raising standardized test scores (even more than we already do.) For others, it would mean trying to appeal to a niche market of parents and catering to their desires, whatever those may be.

No more art and music? You got it. The customer is always right.

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I used to struggle with the concept of compulsory education. It seemed fundamentally incompatible with the idea of individual liberty, which I also believed in - and still do.

Despite having a degree in education, the person who really changed my thinking on this issue was young-adult author John Green. In his wonderful video, “An Open Letter to Students Returning to School,” Green says: 

Pictured: not John Green

“School doesn’t exist for your benefit or for the benefit of your parents . . . The reason I pay taxes for schools even though I don’t have a kid in school is that I am better off in a well-educated world.” 

And we all are. That’s the other meaning of the public in public education. Not just provided to the public, but for the benefit of the public.

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I had a sixth-grade student in my class last year who told me one day that he didn’t need to learn how to write an essay because, once he turns 18, he is going to get his GED, then a Commercial Driver's License, and become a truck driver. And from his perspective, he is absolutely right. He already could read and write well enough for that career. And he was sufficiently intelligent that I believe he could pick up any of the skills he would need for the job in the context of the job.

But education is not just job preparation. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I believe that that grown-up student, that truck driver, would have a richer and more fulfilling life if he spent a significant portion of his formative years exploring and examining rich literature and learning to articulate his ideas in writing than if he did not. I also believe that the people in his life would benefit from his being more thoughtful, more critical, more empathetic, more articulate. I have to believe that. Otherwise, my job would be to compel people to do things they don’t want to do in order to prepare them for more years of the same, and I would have an even harder time dragging myself out of bed in the morning.

But that sixth-grade student didn’t agree. Nor did his parents, whose only concern when I met with them was that he not be held back again. And people like our probable Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos believe that they should be free to pull him out of that class, out of that school, and send him to a school that provides the service that they want it to provide. Seven hours a day of test-prep? Glorified babysitting? Religious indoctrination? Political indoctrination?

The effects of such an approach to education, writ large, would be devastating. If you think we all live inside giant echo chambers now, imagine if every young person in the nation were exposed to twelve years inside the echo chamber of his or her parents’ choice. And not just in terms of what is taught at the school, but also the sort of people who attend the school. Public schools, despite all their problems, are places of great diversity - including diversity of thought. And even if there was no teaching or learning at all going on (which some days is certainly what it feels like), it is good for all of us to spend some time sitting next to someone who thinks differently than we do. And it is good for all of us that other people do, too.