What Has Betsy DeVos Accomplished? Part I

The other day I had the opportunity to talk with a U.S. senator’s staffer who told me that opposition to the appointment of Betsy DeVos early in 2017 was unprecedented as measured by the number of calls—tens of thousands against DeVos’s confirmation and only three or four thousand in favor.  Those of us who made those calls and marched in the streets and made formal visits to the offices of our U.S. senators were terrified about what it would mean if one of the biggest opponents of our society’s system of public schools were confirmed to be the U.S. Secretary of Education.

Of course, DeVos was confirmed, but only after the Vice President, for the first time in history, was called in to break a tie on the Senate’s confirmation of a President’s appointee.

Now two years have passed.  So… how’s it going?

On Tuesday, DeVos went before the House Appropriations Committee to defend her department’s request in the President’s recently proposed fiscal year 2020 federal budget. This is Trump’s third annual budget proposal, and it declares DeVos’s values and priorities for the third consecutive year.

This week DeVos defended an education budget proposal that is $8.5 billion lower than last year’s allocation. She made no attempt to justify freezes to Title I and IDEA funding, and the elimination of several programs including the popular the 21st Century Learning Centers after-school program, along with Title II and Title IV grants to support professional development for teachers, smaller class sizes, and curricular enrichment—and even her department’s contribution to the Special Olympics.

DeVos’s comments at the recent hearing betray her lack of concern for the kind of improved classroom conditions striking teachers  have been demanding all year and her failure to care deeply about long running programs that help schools serve the needs of poor children and students with special needs. The Detroit Free Press‘s Todd Spangler quotes DeVos’s reasoning: “We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results.”

But until now, even an all-Republican Congress has refused to capitulate to DeVos’s K-12 agenda. While important programs like Title I and the IDEA have not received budgetary increases during DeVos’s tenure, at least Congress has maintained key programs—refusing DeVos’s cuts year after year.  The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler adds that DeVos appeared relatively unfazed when the Democrats—now in the House majority—opposed her budget request.  Acknowledging that Congress has repeatedly repudiated her priorities, she told the House Appropriations Committee: “This reduction is similar to last year’s request, and the year before that, as well. I acknowledge that you rejected those recommendations.”

What about DeVos’s relentless attempts to privatize public education?

Every year, Trump’s budget has included DeVos’s idea for federal school vouchers. This this year the proposal is framed as a neo-voucher tuition tax credit. For two years, Republican-dominated Congresses refused to fund DeVos’s voucher requests for a federal school voucher program, and this year, with a Democratic House of Representatives, enactment of DeVos’s tuition tax credit is even less likely. Meckler quotes Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn) dismissing DeVos’s proposed tuition tax credit scheme as, “an ‘unregulated, unaccountable tax scheme” “to fund private school vouchers.”

At the hearing, DeVos was asked about a new report condemning the federal Charter Schools Program. In the report, the Network for Public Education slams the Charter Schools Program for poor oversight and the waste or $4 billion on schools that never opened or suddenly shut down. DeVos scoffed at Committee members’ concern with a standard market-based defense: “When you have experimentation, you’re always going to have schools that don’t make it and that’s what should happen.”

In reality the Charter Schools Program is the one exception to DeVos’s utter failure to impose her privatization agenda. Congress has funded the Charter Schools Program—adding $40 million last year to bring the program’s total funding to $440 million. This year the proposed 2020 budget adds another $60 million. We’ll have to wait to see what Congress does about adding money to this unregulated program in FY 2020.

Apart from maintaining support for the Charter Schools Program, Betsy DeVos has failed to confirm the fears of those who thought she might be able radically to adopt the privatization agenda of the organizations she has previously supported with her philanthropy, groups like the American Federation of Children, EdChoice, and the Mackinac Center.

DeVos has done her best to transform our society’s public schools according to her personal ideology. She outlined her priorities in a 2017 speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council: “Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them…“This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students. Not the other way around.”

Congress has chosen not to enact DeVos’s budgets that undermine our nation’s system of education by cutting key public school programs and priorities.  Neither has Congress adopted any of DeVos’s voucher schemes. While it is not a good thing for our public schools to be trapped in a mere holding pattern, Congress has at least protected the institution of public education for now.

Tomorrow in Part II of this report, we’ll examine the other part of DeVos’s record—on protecting students’ civil rights and the rights of students preyed on by for-profit colleges and trade schools.