3 Reasons (Other than Bears) to Oppose Betsy DeVos

By Tamara Hiler

Like many others in the education community, I tuned in to C-SPAN last week to watch the confirmation hearing of Education Secretary-select Betsy DeVos. Given her lack of experience in the public education sector (she would be one of the only Secretaries of Education to hold no former role as a teacher, professor, superintendent, or college president), I was anxious to learn her views on a broad array of education topics — including how she plans to close achievement gaps and ensure that more students graduate from college with meaningful degrees.

But much to my dismay, DeVos’ nomination hearing included almost no policy specifics whatsoever. Instead, the hearing revealed a stunning dearth of knowledge about the programs and policies she would oversee through her role in the administration. And while many jaw-dropping statements — like her desire to allow guns in schools to protect against grizzly bear attacks or her inability to distinguish between proficiency and growth — dominated the post-hearing chatter, it was her lack of commitment to public schools, her clear distaste for any real accountability following federal dollars, and her inability to defend critical federal guardrails that have left me the most concerned about what a DeVos administration could bring.

First, it is unclear if DeVos is even interested in working to improve the public schools that more than 90% of American students attend every day. She evaded a question about not cutting public funding in order to privatize schools, opting instead to tout her desire to “empower parents to make choices on behalf of their children.” This notion of “parental choice” refers to DeVos’ belief that an increased use of school vouchers will serve as the panacea for rapidly improving student achievement — even though scant evidence exists to justify this claim. Instead, voucher programs that allow students to take taxpayer dollars to whichever school they like (including private schools) dilute critical federal resources — ultimately hurting the vast majority of American students who are left in public schools.

What is even more problematic is that her blind allegiance to the concept of “parental choice” appears to be driven more by ideology than a desire to provide alternative high-quality options to students. For example, DeVos played an active role in helping to rapidly grow Michigan’s charter sector with very little oversight, leaving the state with the highest percentage of for-profit charters in the country (80%), and twice as many of its charter schools designated as “bottom-tier” than the state average.

This aversion to accountability also doesn’t bode well for how she plans to ensure quality in our higher education system — a topic barely breached during the three-hour hearing. One of the only college-related answers by DeVos came when she sidestepped a question about enforcing the Gainful Employment rule, which recently cited over 800 career education programs for failing to equip students with the skills they need to get a job and pay down their loans. Considering that this rule is one of the only concrete accountability measures that exists in higher education today, her wishy-washy response about its enforcement leaves little hope that DeVos will do much to protect students from poor or even fraudulent postsecondary programs during her tenure.

Finally, another of the most worrisome aspects of DeVos’ hearing was her unfamiliarity of the Department of Education’s historic role in protecting the civil rights of all students. Her half-knowledge (at best) of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) made it clear that she is ill-prepared to provide the type of federal oversight needed to protect some of our most vulnerable students. She also refused to specify how her Department would make sure states are holding schools accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), even though Congress passed this bipartisan legislation last year with the clear intention of maintaining critical federal guardrails so that historically-marginalized students don’t once again fall through the cracks.

My concerns are not rooted in political opposition, but a desire to have a Secretary of Education in place who truly believes in the value of an education system that fully supports and acts in the interest of every student. At best, her statements during the hearing indicate that she has given little thought to the welfare of kids in our public schools; at worst, she wants to actively remove the civil rights protections currently covering millions of students. Let’s hope that if DeVos is ultimately confirmed, she will quickly realize that her role is about championing progress for all students rather than tearing down our public school system and remaking it in the image of her own long-held ideological beliefs.

Tamara Hiler is a Senior Policy Advisor for Education at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank in Washington, DC. Tamara authored a report last year, “The New Normal in K-12 Education,” calling on education advocates to shift the conversation from stale debates like whether charter schools should exist to more productive and needed policy discussions on how charters can best serve students.