State and local educators criticize Trump-DeVos education budget proposal

Jessie C. Smith
Aug 25, 2017 · 6 min read

The University of Oklahoma began its fall semester earlier this week, on August 21, 2017, so I felt compelled to revisit some work I researched and penned during late March of this same year. What follows is the full, unfiltered content from an article that I drafted for the Oklahoma Daily, which, for various reasons, never made it past the editors’ desks of the newsroom. Several interviews were conducted to compile this piece, so I thought it important for all of those who follow me to be privy to that information. And, as you read it, if you ask yourself, “Has half a year improved anything?” — well, the answer is, “No.” In fact, unless you’ve been living under a rock that whole time since, you already know that the situation has become even much more dire.


For four years now, Oklahoma has held the unfortunate title of having made the deepest cuts to education funding throughout the entire U.S. since the economic bust of 2008. Decisions from new secretary of education Betsy DeVos may sink the state into a deeper hole, and president Trump’s federal budget proposal may only exacerbate issues.

“Secretary DeVos is completely unprepared to serve in her capacity,” said David Duvall, executive director of the Oklahoma Education Association. “She has no qualifications. She did not attend public schools. She did not send her children to public schools. She certainly has never been a teacher, so she doesn’t understand the needs of the vast majority of American students that attend public institutions.”

The Senate confirmation hearing of DeVos for her current position in January birthed an unprecedented fury of disapproval from the public, with angry citizens swamping Senate offices with literally millions of phone calls, emails, and letters. The day before votes were cast on February 7, Democrats held the Senate floor overnight in protest, and two Republican senators even withdrew their former support of DeVos, but ultimately Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking (51–50) vote for DeVos’ confirmation.

During her confirmation hearing, DeVos made clear her intention to prioritize “school choice,” and to divert federal funding away from public education and into charter schools and private universities — all upon the basis, in her own words, “to empower parents to make the best decisions on behalf of their children, primarily low-income children.”

The latest concrete example of DeVos’ education policies is on display in Trump’s recent federal budget proposal, which will allocate $1.4 billion dollars into “school choice” policy programs. The proposal will also cut $9 billion overall from the Department of Education — a 13.5% cut to the entire public education budget, from $68 billion to $59 billion — with the Pell Grant program, in particular, losing $3.9 billion.

“That $4 billion cut to the Pell Grant program would really affect the students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford college,” said Gene Perry, policy director at the nonpartisan think tank Oklahoma Policy Institute. “I think something that you’re going to see with the state cuts to higher education is that a lot of universities like OU are going to be increasing tuition, and they’ve already done so.”

“At a time when college is becoming less affordable and more expensive, you’d also see a reduction in the scholarships that help those students who wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise to go to school,” Perry said. “And that would be obviously pretty bad for OU students, and pretty bad for our whole economy overall, because all of the evidence shows it is going to those higher education degrees that make the economy, that make people get higher earnings in the long run and pay higher taxes in the long run, so it’s bad all around.”

Gregg Garn, dean of the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at OU, said in an email that “Pell grants are cornerstone funding for many OU and college of education students. Cutting this source will make it more difficult for students to complete degrees and move into professional roles.”

Perry said “education is very heavily state-funded, so it’s really the responsibility of Oklahoma to fund education, and federal money is a pretty small slice of the overall funding picture for it, but where it does come into play is these schools that have the highest-needs students.”

The dichotomy between federal funding and privatized education was a frequent subject in DeVos’ confirmation hearing, and it was her response to a question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about the “gainful employment” rule at for-profit universities that especially worried the Oklahoma Education Association director.

“DeVos would not even commit that all schools should have to comply with the same compatibility standards, and the same standards of reporting on financial issues, or on the success of students, or fair lending — issues like that,” Duvall said. “This gives private institutions carte blanche to hide their success rates and their funding sources and finances from their students and the general public, whom she intends to have pay for many of those institutions.”

Matt Hamilton, vice president of enrollment and financial services at OU, said that, when looking from a historical perspective at the university’s federal Stafford and Perkins loan processes, “there’s actually been a public/private association” that goes back many years. Hamilton said that some of the individual banks involved “worked beautifully and provided wonderful services for students,” while other banks were “not in the loaning business to actually help students” and instead were motivated only by profit.

However, Hamilton said that, once Stafford loans were centralized underneath the federal umbrella, the system actually became much more streamlined and, in fact, “more efficiencies were realized,” which he says proves moot the frequent argument from detractors that the private system is always better.

“It’s a mixed bag”, Hamilton said, “but the systems that we have in place currently—such as our ability to draw down Pell Grant funds from the federal government — are certainly known processes that we can use to deal with issues much more quickly. But if the money for them gets diverted elsewhere, clearly that will hurt students, and hurt our ability to level the playing field for students that come from families that don’t have access to as much money.”

When asked by e-mail about the chances of private universities receiving diverted federal funds under DeVos, Garn said that “data on graduation rates of for-profit institutions are dismal. Conversely, […] OU made a huge leap in retaining over 90% of students from freshmen to sophomore year. By redirecting support away from public institutions, [it] will have a negative impact on many students.”

Trump’s budget plan also proposes to completely eliminate the Federal Supplemental Opportunity Grant fund for low-income students, and the Federal Work-Study program would be significantly cut as well.

“We need that student workforce at OU,” Hamilton said, explaining that “work-students do a great service to the university economically. There’s federal funds that help pay their wages, and those students, in turn, gain experience by serving other students, faculty, and staff. It’s a win across the board, but if the funds aren’t there, we’d certainly suffer a loss.”

None of the men interviewed denied that the current revenue crisis statewide across Oklahoma presented a serious challenge.

“Trump’s budget proposal would just be awful for the state,” Perry said, and would drain money out of OU. Duvall said that “the Oklahoma legislature has failed students, all the way from kindergarten through graduate school,” failing overall to supply funding, resources, and teachers.

However, the president’s current budget proposal is extremely unlikely to actually make it into law, because of just how much it cuts domestic programs and redistributes that funding to the military defense budget. The chances of Congress approving those cuts with majority rule are slim, and it falls primarily on the shoulders of the legislative branch to come up with the actual federal budget.

“It is too early in the [state capitol] session to speculate on what might be approved and what impact that legislation will have on higher education,” Garn said in an email, since “the process of approving legislation requires both house and senate approval and a signature by the governor. It is important to note that the higher education regents have initiated a new taskforce to make recommendations to improve and modernize the system.”

But Duvall said that Oklahoma needs “to find some ways to raise revenue for the state in order to more adequately fund our colleges and universities. There isn’t a bill out there right now that’s doing that.”

DeVos’ biases, regardless, are self-evident. And while even the current president (whose infamous “Trump University” fraud case resulted in a high-profile settlement) had proposed a plan for expansive student loan debt forgiveness out on the campaign trail, DeVos’ own evasive unwillingness to tackle profit-driven waste, predatory-debt abuse, and common-sector funding does not bode well for childhood schools and public universities that are already dealing with steep crises throughout Oklahoma.

[ © 2017 Jessie Smith ]

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