Donald Trump has tapped conservative billionaire Betsy DeVos to serve as education secretary. DeVos is the former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a longtime backer of charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. In response, American Federations of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten said, “In nominating DeVos Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” If confirmed by the Senate, DeVos could become the most into public school education secretary since the Office of Education was established in 1867. The “New York Times” notes DeVos helped turn her home-state of Michigan into one of the nations biggest school choice laboratories, and the result was disastrous.
The DeVoses have bankrolled their school deregulation and privatization efforts through a dark money group called, American Federation for Children, a major contributor to the right-wing corporate education movement. They’ve also pushed controversial anti-union state legislation known as Right-to-Work, dealing a major blow to the labor movement, including the teachers unions, in Michigan. Since 1970, the DeVoses have invested at least $200 million in various right-wing causes. DeVos’ father-in-law is the co-founder of Amway and her brother is Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater.
Lisa Graves talking:
I think he chose, perhaps, the most unqualified person he could for this position. She’s an enemy of public schools. She is someone who has used her inherited wealth and the wealth that she has married into to try to distort and reshape our laws to advance her personal views, which are that we should basically redefine public education to mean our tax dollars should be going to fund private schools, religious schools that advance her worldview. And so, she’s someone who didn’t even send her kids to public schools. She someone who, basically, has devoted her wealth to attacking our campaign finance laws, to attacking labor laws, and to attacking the very idea of having universal public education for all students that’s truly public. So, she’s someone who is manifestly unqualified. I think it is going to be enormous battle nationally and in our states to protect our public schools, which is really one of the greatest innovations of America in the past century to have universal public education, truly public schools for all and to really invest in those schools. Putting her in charge of the Department of Education really is an insult to all of the many teachers and educators and principals and so many Americans who have come through our public schools, who have had a chance in this economy to make it in their lives in part due to this commitment of America to public schools which we need to invest more versus the sort of alternatives that Betsy DeVos has pushed, including charter schools that have sucked billions out of our public education system and that have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud.
Diane Ravitch talking:
They do enable choice, but they’re not necessarily better schools. What they, basically are, are privately managed, privately run and, in many cases, for-profit schools. Michigan has many charter schools and eighty percent of them are running for profit. So, these are privately owned schools. It’s the first step toward privatization. And they are schools that are open to students — which students can choose — but very often, they’re worse than the public school that they’re leaving. A voucher, on the other hand, is a plan to give the money directly to the family — although, they never see the money, they’re just told, you now have a voucher, it’s worth $5,000, $6,000, $8,000 — whatever the voucher is, you can go anywhere with it. You can go to a commercial school, you can go to a charter you can go to a religious school. So, this breaks the long history of a separation of church and state because most of the vouchers that are used in the states that now have vouchers are for religious schools. And most of them are not going to — it’s not enough money to go to an elite school or to the best school, it’s usually very, like in the South, it’s backward fundamentalist church schools that have uncertified staff.
she represents the religious right. She is unusual in that she is a representative of the religious right with billions of dollars behind her. So, her American Federation for Children has used its strategic giving to promote vouchers all over the country. And there are many states — about half the states now have some form of voucher. But the important thing to know about vouchers and charters is, neither of them has ever been approved popular vote. The DeVos family, Betsy DeVos in particular, launched a referendum in Michigan in the year 2000. It was rejected by sixty nine percent to thirty one percent. There have now been six or eight state elections since 1990. They have been turned down by seventy to thirty — sixty five, thirty five — overwhelmingly in every state where they have been tried, where the vouchers have been put forth they’ve been turned down. In this last election, this year, two states, Massachusetts and Georgia, overwhelming majorities opposed charter school expansion. So, there has never been a popular expression saying we want to get rid of our public schools and replace them with privately managed charters or vouchers that you can take to any place.
Tawanna Simpson talking:
I was very disappointed and disheartened, because we have worked so hard in the grassroots here in Detroit to save our traditional public schools. Under emergency management, we worked to ensure that the legislator accepted the debt that they created in our traditional public schools. We worked very hard in advocating and lobbied for them to appropriate money to our traditional public schools. And we stop the legislator from chartering our entire school district. So, I found it very disheartening just to find out after all of the hard work that we put into it, that you know, from the federal level, it can be changed.
her and her family provide lots of money to the legislator to make sure — to ensure laws go the way they wanted, to have mandated, unaccountable and corrupt charter schools in our city. But, listen to her statement. It’s actually the opposite. Charter schools come to our traditional public schools and cherry pick the best students. They don’t take the students who need the most help because it makes no economic sense for charter schools because it would cost more money to educate students that have other needs — additional educational needs.
Diane Ravitch talking;
I have to say, somewhat echoing a little bit of Cornel West that the Obama administration, in education laid the groundwork for Trump and Betsy DeVos because they were big supporters of charter schools. And I’ve been arguing for years that charter schools are the first step toward full privatization.
the charter school idea started in 1988. It was just an idea then. Then, in 1992, the first charter — 1990, the first charters opened in Wisconsin, the first one. And then they began slowly to spread. And at the time I thought, gee, that’s an interesting experiment. Al Shanker, who was — Albert Shanker — who was head of the AFT, was one of the original proponents of charters.
American Federation of Teachers. And in 1988, he said, this is a great idea, we should try this. But, by 1993, he said, charters are no different from vouchers because they both open the door to corporations coming in and running public schools. And what we have today — and I changed my mind and I wrote a book in 2010 saying charters, choice, and testing are killing education in this country. Which I still believe. But, when he renounced charters, he recognized that there was increasing corporate interest in moving into the schools. So, today we have corporate chains — and some of them are nonprofit, like KIPP — although they do taken a lot of money — and we also have for-profit charter chains run by non-educators. And we have people like Andre Agassi, who’s a high school dropout, creating a charter chain even though his own school is own Andre Agassi School is one of the lowest performing schools in the state of Nevada. We have a sector called the charter industry, which people invest — and there’re equity investors putting money into it. Wall Street is one of the biggest backers of charter schools these days because they are investing in — they make — there’s something called the new markets tax credit where they get — and Juan González wrote about this — they’re able to make a tremendous return on their investment in charters because of write offs on federal taxes by investing in charters. People from out of the country can get green cards by investing in charter school construction. There are all kinds of deals. And the biggest and sleaziest deal of all is the charter operators, the for-profit operators in particular, who buy a piece of property and then rent it to themselves at a rental that is 3, 4, 10 times the market rate. And they make tons of money, not on the school, but on the leasing.
it was Minnesota, not Wisconsin, the first one, and it’s still there. And at the time, the original idea was that they would take in kids that the public schools were not able to help. So, they were bringing in drop outs. They were bringing in kids who had lost motivation in school, and trying to find different ways. That was the Shanker idea, is that the charter schools would fill in a need that the public schools had and help the public schools, and whatever they learned, they would return to the public schools. He never conceived them as competition where they would cherry pick their students, as the board member from Detroit mentioned. They cherry pick the best students. They kick out kids who don’t have high scores. They exclude kids who are English language learners. And they exclude kids with disabilities. They take the mildest form of disabilities, like a learning disability, and the kids who have profound disabilities are left to the public schools, which now have less money to educate them.
Betsy DeVos is anti-union, and she sponsored and then active in the promoting right to work laws. And she was — she and her family helped to turn Michigan from being a very strong union state to being a right to work state. She also put money — she and her husband put money into right-wing groups like Focus on the Family, which believes in conversion therapy and sponsors anti-gay activities and legislation. Her mother put $500,000 into the ballot in California, which was an effort to remove protections for gay rights. So, all of these issues, which are kind of the right-wing catalog of horribles; of gay rights, of labor union protections, or destruction, are focused around her. But, her main focus is school privatization. And school privatization was tried — has been tried in Chile and Sweden and the results have been very clear — the first and most important product is hyper segregation. Because everybody goes off to be with people just like themselves.
_____
Diane Ravitch
Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush. She is a historian of education and best-selling author of over 20 books, including “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools,” and “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”
Lisa Graves
executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, and publisher of PRWatch.org and ExposedByCMD.org Her new piece is titled “5 Things to Know about Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump Education Choice.”
Tawanna Simpson
elected member of the Detroit Board of Education.
— source democracynow.org