Ted Eytan
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos addressed the members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, at the group’s forty-fourth annual conference in Denver on July 20.
ALEC is a “nonpartisan membership organization” known for crafting corporate-friendly, corporate-funded model legislation that is then often introduced in state legislatures “word for word.” We can thank ALEC for such things as Stand Your Ground and Voter ID laws, not to mention the pro-school privatization measures that DeVos has repeatedly championed, both in her home state of Michigan and at the federal level.
Standing in front of the legislators and corporate representatives gathered for ALEC’s conference, DeVos struck a gleeful, defiant tone. Her push for “state-based advocacy” has “led to some excitement on the left,” DeVos said with a smile. She described her work on behalf of school choice schemes as “the only way to help foster the fundamental—and necessary—shift in how we approach education in America.”
She said those who turned out to protest her appearance were nothing more than “defenders of the status quo,” bent on causing trouble for others—like ALEC members and DeVos—who are “capable of real change.” School choice efforts, such as the push for more charter schools and the expansion of voucher programs, have gained traction, DeVos said, thanks to ALEC’s “long game” of driving change from within states, and not through the federal government. She praised education policy “innovations” such as Arizona’s use of Education Savings Accounts, which allow public education dollars to be used for just about anything—from private school tuition (including religious schools) to online classes.
The goal, of course, is to create an “educational marketplace” where students and their families are consumers, ready to jump ship and find a new school when things don’t go well.
“Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy,” DeVos told ALEC members, before pinning the push for choice on “good” parents who want the best for their kids. DeVos went on to quote the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who maintained that individuals—and not society at large—are responsible for their own failure or success. The lofty praise for individuals, “human liberty,” and deregulation continued, with DeVos insisting that the “system” is “failing too many kids.”
The day after DeVos wowed the ALEC crowd with her embrace of free market ideals, an unfortunate—but not unusual—thing happened: A charter school in north Minneapolis—which opened to high hopes and bright promises just one year ago—suddenly closed its doors, leaving families and teachers racing to find a new school or job by August. The school, known as S.U.N. Academy, was designed to “eradicate the disparities between students of color and their white peers,” according to its website, by operating as a “high standards K-8 charter school.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Beena Raghavendran wrote about the collapse of S.U.N. The answers—that the school struggled with low enrollment, as well as “leadership turnover and financial problems”—poke holes in DeVos’s, and ALEC’s, ideological devotion to school choice schemes. They speak instead to the volatility associated with market-based reforms, especially for historically underserved populations.
Cases like that of S.U.N. Academy have compelled groups including the NAACP to call for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools. For the NAACP, which is expected to release a new report on “high quality education” in late July, the PR claims about charter schools should viewed skeptically, given the role these schools are playing in both higher suspension rates for students of color and the resegregation of schools across the United States.
Thus far, DeVos has not appeared interested in questions of quality control or civil rights when it comes to her advocacy. She has recently caught flak—and is being sued—for seeking to undo Obama-era protections for student loan borrowers, and famously appeared ignorant on the question of federal oversight for special education students. To many observers, DeVos’s brief time as Education Secretary has been accompanied by one jaw-dropping insult after another.
“My job is to get the federal government out of the way,” DeVos assured her supporters at the ALEC conference. The question yet to be answered, however, is who will protect those left behind when school choice and privatization schemes are given free reign?
Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer and former English instructor. She is the winner of a 2014 Nation Institute Investigate Fund grant, and blogs about education at “Bright Light Small City.”