What Has Betsy DeVos Accomplished? Part II

THIS BLOG WILL TAKE A SHORT SPRING BREAK.  LOOK FOR A NEW POST ON APRIL 9.

Yesterday’s post covered Betsy DeVos’s record as U.S. Secretary of Education—examining her failed quest to privatize the public schools and Congress’s success in blocking her K-12 agenda. But there are other important departmental responsibilities. DeVos has also turned her attention to deregulation.

DeVos has set out to expunge Obama-era rules and guidance protecting students’ civil rights in public schools. She has also quietly erased protection for college students in predatory for-profit colleges and trade schools whose operating budgets depend for their very survival on their ability to market themselves to students who will bring federal loans, grants, and Veterans’ program dollars.  However, again and again, her Department’s justification for cancelling or delaying Obama rules has been blocked by the courts.

Court challenges have forced DeVos’s staff to continue enforcing civil rights protections in public schools and to continue cracking down on predatory for-profit colleges. Politico‘s Michael Stratford describes a long list of failures by DeVos’s department to rescind Obama-era rules: “Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s attempts to swiftly roll back major Obama-era policies at her agency are hitting a roadblock: federal courts. Judges have rebuffed DeVos’ attempts to change Obama policies dealing with everything from student loan forgiveness to mandatory arbitration agreements to racial disparities in special education programs.  As a result, the Education Department is being forced to carry out Obama-era policies that the Trump administration had been fighting to stop—stymying DeVos’ efforts to quickly impose a conservative imprint on federal education policy over the past two years.”

In many cases, courts have blocked DeVos’s efforts to deregulate on procedural grounds. DeVos’s staff people are accused of failing to follow the requirements for changing federal rules and guidance.  Stratford summarizes Toby Merrill’s reaction to DeVos’s rule changes.  Merrill is the director of the Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, an organization that has challenged, along with the attorneys general of several states, several of DeVos’s attempts to rescind or delay Obama-era rules: “Every administration has wins and losses in court, Merrill said, but most have done better at making sure they follow the legal rules of the road for rulemaking.”  Merrill explains: “It speaks to the Department of Education’s unwillingness or inability to follow the basic law around how federal agencies conduct themselves… At the very least, they cross their Ts and dot their Is and therefore are less vulnerable to some of the procedural challenges that have been the undoing of so many of this Department of Education’s policies.”

Derek Black, a professor of education law at the University of South Carolina, adds that DeVos’s arrogance has undermined her own deregulatory agenda. In mid-March, after a judge struck down DeVos’s attempt to delay an Obama rule that requires the Department of Education to investigate schools which are tracking a disproportionate number of Black and Latino-Latina students into special education, Black condemned DeVos’s assumption that she can just undo Obama-era rules that had been carefully implemented: “For the second time this school year, Betsy DeVos got a judicial smack down for attempting to eliminate regulations from the prior administration.  In September, it was over protections for student loan borrowers. (More recently)… it was over racial disparities in special education.  In both cases, DeVos’s justifications for reversing Obama-era regulations amounted to little more than, ‘I’m in power now and I don’t like Obama’s regulations.’ The dressed up justification has been that the Department needs to pause the regulations so that it can ‘study’ the issues more. The problem, the federal courts have told the Department, is that it cannot just scrap regulations because it doesn’t like them, particularly when those regulations have already gone through a rigorous process of notice, comment, study, and justification.”

(Yesterday afternoon, the Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported that during Senate testimony yesterday morning, DeVos told Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) that her department has not yet begun investigating schools that are assigning disproportional numbers of Black and Brown students to special education.  On March 7, a federal judge ordered DeVos to begin  enforcing this Obama era civil rights rule.)

Those of us who support the Education Department’s mission to protect students’ civil rights and protect college student borrowers from from predatory for-profit colleges can relax at least a little bit. So far federal courts have blocked many of DeVos’s efforts to deregulate, although it is not clear that effective enforcement will follow.

But Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, who covers higher education and student loans for the Washington Post, identifies another departmental problem under DeVos’s leadership: understaffing and incompetence in the Education Department’s division that processes student loans. Douglas-Gabriel quotes Adam Minsky, a Boston attorney who represents college student borrowers who are behind on their federal loan repayments: “In eight years of representing borrowers and dealing with the Education Department, I have never seen this before… I have never seen such a widespread, long-running, systematic breakdown of the Education Department’s default servicing system.”

The problem is serious understaffing: “A backlog of security clearance reviews has left the Education Department units that handle defaulted federal student loans short-staffed. The delay has also disrupted staffing at some private collection agencies that recoup past-due debt for the department.  Employees are being cleared, but not enough to resolve the call center disruptions. This means people who are severely behind on their student loan payments may find it harder to reclaim their (tax) refunds or stop the federal  government from garnishing their wages or Social Security. What’s more, the disruptions could delay struggling borrowers from getting back on track through loan rehabilitation. As of September, an estimated 7 million people had not made a payment on federal student loans for nearly a year.  That amounted to $140 billion in unpaid loans—a 17 percent increase over the same period a year earlier… (T)he Education Department’s teams are the primary resource for people to dispute levies against their paychecks, Social Security or tax refunds. They also help some borrowers enroll in student loan rehabilitation, a federal program that erases a default from a person’s credit report after nine consecutive payments.”

Douglas-Gabriel profiles a 36-year-old single mother facing eviction, a woman who—again and again—waited on the phone for more than an hour and then had the call dropped from the Education Department’s call-in system. Her $9,500 tax refund had been seized to pay down her student loans, and she was trying to reach someone at the Department.  When she finally reached a staff person, “(T)he representative… suggested that she apply for a hardship refund.  But he warned that it would take at least a month for the case to be reviewed and an additional 45 days for a refund.”  The woman explains to Douglas-Gabriel: “I’m trying to work something out with my landlord… I know I owe the money.  I know I went to school.  I get it, but the entire refund?  Even if they’d taken some of it, I could have used the rest to pay my bills. I’m a single parent. This just messed me up a lot.”

Even though Betsy DeVos has not yet managed to privatize the public schools (apart from the Charter Schools Program), and even though the federal courts have blocked DeVos’s efforts to delete rules protecting the civil rights of students and regulating predatory colleges, there remain serious problems with staffing. While key programs are intact, things still aren’t so good in the U.S. Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, and there are nearly two more years to go.

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.