Senate Hearing on Betsy DeVos Delayed as Ethical Questions and Concerns about Ideology Persist

The confirmation hearing by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education has been delayed until next Tuesday, January 17 at 5:00 PM.  That hearing had been scheduled to begin this morning, but it was delayed after Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, demanded the postponement in hopes that the Office of Government Ethics can complete its review of the finances of Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Michigan-based philanthropist.

As the Congress and the press explore the complicated financial records of Betsy DeVos and her husband, it is becoming clear that the delay will make it possible not only for the Senators who are responsible for considering DeVos’s nomination but also for the public to learn more about the person Trump has nominated to oversee the nation’s public schools.

Several Senate Democrats including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown are using the postponement to renew their demand that, before her hearing, Betsy DeVos pay fines accruing from 2008 to the Ohio Elections Commission.  Her All Children Matter PAC, a group that has pretty much shut down, still owes the Ohio Elections Commission $5.3 million in unpaid fines imposed by the Commission when All Children Matter’s national PAC illegally laundered contributions from Ohioans that exceeded Ohio’s legal limits back through its Ohio affiliate to Ohio politicians.

Yesterday the editorial board of the NY Times raised serious ethical concerns: “As the Senate races forward with confirmation hearings this week, the spottiest disclosures have come from wealthy private-sector nominees with no governing experience and many potential conflicts. In other words, the people most in need of a complete ethics review. Exhibit A is Betsy DeVos, a billionaire and education lobbyist… Ms. DeVos’s finances are a tangle that could take weeks to investigate… People who have seen her financial disclosures so far say that Ms. DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, have investments in some 250 companies registered to a single Grand Rapids, Mich., address…. Already… there are reports that the DeVoses are indirect investors in Social Finance Inc., a private company that refinances student loans.  Private lenders like Social Finance are banned from most of the direct student lending market; their lobbyists have already written to the Trump transition team pitching to change that….”

The editorial continues: “Ms. De Vos also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter school advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else.  She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers…. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.”

Yesterday’s NY Times editorial followed reporter Noam Scheiber’s blockbuster exploration of not only the DeVos’s lavish and complicated financial and lobbying record but also their ruthless political tactics: “In announcing his intention to nominate Ms. DeVos, Mr. Trump described her as a ‘brilliant and passionate education advocate.’ Even critics characterized her as a dedicated, if misguided, activist for school reform. But that description understates both the breadth of Ms. DeVos’s political interests and the influence she wields as part of her powerful family. More than anyone else who has joined the incoming Trump administration, she represents the combination of wealth, free-market ideology and political hardball associated with a better-known family of billionaires: Charles and David Koch… Like the Kochs, the DeVoses are generous supporters of think tanks that evangelize for unrestrained capitalism, like Michigan’s Acton Institute, and that rail against unions and back privatizing public services, like the Mackinac Center. They have also funded national groups dedicated to cutting back the role of government, including the National Center for Policy Analysis (which has pushed for Social Security privatization and against environmental regulation) and the Institute for Justice (which challenges regulations in court and defends school vouchers.) Both organizations have also received money from the Koch family.”

Scheiber continues: “Indeed, the DeVoses’ education activism, which favors alternatives to traditional public schools, appears to derive from the same free-market views that inform their suspicion of government. And perhaps more than other right-wing billionaires the DeVoses couple their seeding of ideological causes with an aggressive brand of political spending. Half a dozen or more extended family members frequently coordinate contributions to maximize their impact. In the 2016 cycle alone, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, the family spent roughly $14 million on political contributions to state and national candidates, parties, PACs and super PACs.”

Scheiber quotes Jeffrey Winters, a Northwestern University political scientist, describing Betsy DeVos: “She is the most emblematic kind of oligarchic figure you can put in a cabinet position. What she and the Kochs have in common is the unbridled use of wealth power to achieve whatever political goals they have.”

Organizations that work on behalf of the public interest are also weighing in. On Monday of this week the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of 200 national organizations, wrote to members of the U.S. Senate to explain the concerns of its member organizations: “All parents… in this country—a majority of whom are of color or are low-income—want the best education, support and dignity for their own children. We stand with them and cannot support a nominee who has demonstrated that she seeks to undermine bedrock American principles of equal opportunity, nondiscrimination and public education itself… We reject the notion that children are well served by the dismantling of a public school system that serves 90 percent of all American students or by the elimination of civil rights protections that require the federal government to intervene when students are discriminated against.”

The Leadership Conference’s letter continues: “While parent frustration with schools failing to meet their child’s needs is real and parents have waited far too long for meaningful action by policy makers, the result of anti-public education agendas such as DeVos’ has often, as in Louisiana, been worse outcomes for vulnerable students. The Michigan example, where DeVos’ impact on education policy and the proliferation of unregulated and for-profit charter schools is considerable, demonstrates clearly that this agenda does not result in the improved outcomes students, parents, and communities deserve.”

The Leadership Conference concludes with a reminder that a primary responsibility of the U.S. Department of Education is through its Office of Civil Rights:  “While she (Betsy DeVos) is entitled to her personal views as a private citizen, government officials are charged with enforcing our laws equally… The U.S. Department of Education is responsible for implementing and enforcing laws protecting students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex and disability, and those laws that provide for educational opportunity from early childhood through graduate school. The person responsible for leading that department must absolutely be committed to respecting, valuing and protecting every single student in this country—without regard to LGBTQI status, family income, race, home language, gender, religion, disability, or immigration status.  Our nation’s laws, economy, future and children deserve no less.”

Education Law Center Report Defines Fairness in School Funding

On Sunday in Doonsbury, Gary Trudeau featured a Kansas schoolgirl—her school closed several weeks early this spring when the state education budget ran out of money due to Governor Sam Brownback’s tax cuts for the rich—being lectured about the virtues of supply-side economics by Trickle-Down Dick: “If we just give the rich enough money and time, sooner or later, less tax revenue will turn into more tax revenue!”

And last week in the NY Times, we read about the unmet needs of America’s public schools and the tax cuts at the state level that are exacerbating the problem: “The needs of the nation’s schools have grown since the recession began: There are now 458,000 more students enrolled in public schools than in the fall of 2007.  But while total state revenues have mostly rebounded to pre-recession levels, state education funding per pupil is still down 3.6 percent across the country, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.  At least 30 states spent less per student this school year than in the year before the economic downturn began, and 14 states, including Arizona, have cut per-pupil funding by more than 10 percent over that period.  The drop is not simply a reflection of state economies still struggling to recover… Of the seven states with the deepest cuts in education from kindergarten to 12th grade, six—Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Wisconsin—also cut income tax rates….”

On Monday, without commenting on the politics, the Education Law Center published a detailed report about the implications—its fourth annual national report card on school funding, Is School Funding Fair?—with research conducted by Bruce Baker, the school finance expert at Rutgers University.  Baker’s graphs and tables allow you to compare your state’s school funding trajectory (up or down), your state’s commitment to equity, and your state’s tax effort (compared to your state’s capacity) to the states that surround yours, and also to scan those factors for all the states.

But the greatest benefit of the report is its lucid explanation of the principles by which a good society ought to commit to funding its public schools: “In this report, ‘fair’ school funding is defined as a state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed to districts within the state to account for additional needs generated by student poverty.”  This is the principle defined eloquently by Benjamin Barber in his 1992 reflection on public education in America, An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America: “Equality is achieved not by handicapping the swiftest, but by assuring the less advantaged a comparable opportunity. ‘Comparable’ here does not mean identical.” (p. 13)

Here is how Baker and the Education Law Center define the principles of fairness in school finance:

• “Varying levels of funding are required to provide equal educational opportunities to children with different needs.
• “The costs of education vary based on geographic location, regional differences in teacher salaries, school district size, population density, and various student characteristics…
• “The level of funding should increase relative to the level of concentrated student poverty—that is, state finance systems should provide more funding to districts serving larger shares of students in poverty…
• “Student poverty—especially concentrated student poverty—is the most critical variable affecting funding levels. Student and school poverty correlates with, and is a proxy for, a multitude of factors that increase the costs of providing equal educational opportunity—most notably, gaps in educational achievement, school district racial composition, English-language proficiency, and student mobility. State finance systems should deliver greater levels of funding to higher-poverty versus lower-poverty settings, while controlling for differences in other cost factors.
• “While the distribution of funding to account for student need is crucial, the overall funding level in states is also a significant element to fair school funding. Without a sufficient base, even a progressively funded system will be unable to provide equitable educational opportunities.
• “The sufficiency of the overall level of funding in any state can be assessed based on comparisons to other states with similar conditions and similar characteristics…”

The Education Law Center’s report notes that across America student poverty remains at 21 percent, and that, “The uneven sorting of low-income students among districts compounds the already difficult task of providing educational opportunity amidst growing student poverty.  Low-income students are increasingly likely to be concentrated in districts with other low-income students.  In 2007, of the 8.5 million low-income students in the country, 1.7 million resided in districts with a poverty rate of over 30%.  In 2012, the number of low-income students in high-poverty districts more than doubled to 3.9 million.  The increasing isolation of low-income students in schools and districts presents challenges for teachers and administrators, especially when those students do not have access to the resources they need to be successful, both academically and socially.”  The report that follows explores the school finance climate across the states in our times when segregation by income is rapidly expanding across America’s metropolitan areas, with poor students increasingly segregated in under-resourced schools.

Interestingly in collaboration with the Education Law Center, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights released a companion report, Cheating our Future: How Decades of Disinvestment by States Jeopardizes Equal Educational Opportunity.  The Leadership Conference’s report is more narrative than statistical and includes profiles of the school funding crisis in Pennsylvania that has been undermining the School District of Philadelphia, in Mississippi, in South Carolina, and in Colorado.  The Leadership Conference has in the past fifteen years been a supporter of the test-based accountability regime imposed by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.  This new report is a significant development, as with its publication the Leadership Conference has gone on record to demand that states not only hold schools accountable for closing gaps in test score outcomes but also rectify the alarming opportunity gaps in school resources that contribute to the test-score achievement gaps.