Betsy DeVos and the Short-Lived Future of Public Education
The education activist from Michigan who believes in school choice
By Emily Ficker
The Progressive Teen Staff Writer
WHEN BARACK OBAMA STEPPED UP TO THE OVAL OFFICE IN 2009, the United States was on the horizon of education reform. With bipartisan consensus in Congress and a top drawer education secretary, pushing the education reform needle wouldn’t be much of a “push”, after all. As Jeb Bush then declared, “I think for the first time in my political life, there seems to be more consensus than disagreement across the ideological spectrum about education reform.” Opposed to mere government spending, Obama championed to invest in education reform, and during his time as president, he set the stage for a record high school graduation rate (83%), charter school enrollment growth, and the heavily criticized common core initiative. As many pundits and politicians criticize Obama’s record on education, it is imperative that the education secretary who follows can assist Donald Trump in formulating a bipartisan education agenda.
On November 23, President-elect Donald Trump tapped billionaire philanthropist Betsy Devos as Secretary of Education. In this election cycle, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for conservative politicians to publicly condemn the Republican nominee, nor be tapped for a cabinet position afterward. Despite her denouncements and contributions to four alternative Republican candidates, Devos graciously accepted, and she joins the pool of cabinet positions eagerly awaiting nearly-guaranteed Senate confirmations.
DeVos’s father, Edgar Prince, largely contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council: a conservative Christian lobbying organization that has been deemed “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for it’s anti-LGBT rhetoric.
Ms. DeVos, a chip off the old block, has continued the tradition of funding the religious right through a network of family foundations. Similar to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Devos is a proponent for the school voucher programs that the Obama administration discontinued in 2009. Although DeVos claims vouchers are an asset to the public school system, allowing families a diversity of choice, in the 1960’s, vouchers were seen as a tool to perpetuate segregation.
So, if expanded, what could these voucher programs mean for public education?
At face value, providing private education to lower-income families whose children are enrolled in failing schools is laudable. But, when it comes to education, we need to look at the fine print.
In 2010, Ph.D. Patrick Wolf conducted an evaluation of the 2003 District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act. This act, passed by Congress, enabled the first federally funded private school voucher program in the United States. In his study, Wolf analyzed longer term effects of the program on families who applied and were given the option to move from a public school to a participating private school of their choice. The result? “No statistically significant impacts on overall student achievement in reading and math after at least four years,” as concluded by the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
As one might suspect, sending low-income families to top drawer parochial and private schools was financially unfeasible. In the D.C. School Choice Incentive, the voucher allotments of $7,500-$12,000 could not account for tuition at the highest-achieving private schools. As a result, students attended private schools that were marginally better than their initial public school — if not equivalent.
For students at the peripheral edge of society, the anxiety of attending a private school goes deeper than economic uncertainty. In a 2007 research paper, psychologists Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen studied the relation between social inclusion and academic performance: “We suggest that, in academic and professional settings, members of socially stigmatized groups are more uncertain of the quality of their social bonds and thus more sensitive to issues of social belonging. We call this state belonging uncertainty, and suggest that it contributes to racial disparities in achievement.”
DeVos will certainly attempt to funnel federal spending toward school choice vouchers, as it was delineated in the Trump campaign. To enact Trump’s voucher plan at the $20M scale he envisions, Congress would need to crack open the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which does not include school vouchers, and re-litigate it. It could be a political obstacle, but considering the measures’ overwhelming conservative support, it would be naïve to deem school vouchers “out of reach.”
