Gage Skidmore
Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spoke at Jeb Bush’s Carnival of Reform, the tenth annual National Summit on Education Reform, put on by Bush’s group Foundation for Excellence in Education (currently transitioning to its new name, ExcelinEd). There’s nothing exceptional about her appearance—DeVos and Bush have run in the same reform circles for years, and he was enthusiastic about her appointment. But because her remarks in Nashville are for an exceptionally friendly crowd of reformers, privatizers, and profiteers, it’s worth our while to take a look at what she said.
News of Her Demise
After the customary greetings, DeVos started out by addressing a non-story story. A month ago, word spread that DeVos might be on her way out. This was based on a cherry-picked section of a profile of the secretary; anyone who kept reading the original piece saw confirmation of what DeVos-watchers would have guessed—she’s not going anywhere. But the combination of sloppy reporting and wishful thinking got the rumors off and running. In Nashville, DeVos addressed them, confirming that she has no intention of going anywhere.
This is interesting for two reasons. First, it shows that she is paying attention to her press, and not just the big gun mainstream press, which mostly didn’t run the “on her way out” story. Second, her denial included her version of her enemies list, the people who will consider it “bad news” that she’s staying. DeVos’s list-- the teacher union bosses, the defenders of the status quo, the "education-expert" bloggers and muckrakers and many of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress—is not surprising (though I wonder what she thinks a “muckraker” is), but it’s nice to know we’re all in her head.
Because her remarks in Nashville are for an exceptionally friendly crowd of reformers, privatizers, and profiteers, it’s worth our while to take a look at what she said.
Ed Reform’s Historical Perspective
DeVos marks the beginning of education reform in 380 BC. I’m not kidding. Plato to the Romans to Europe to America is the line of education debates, and if you’re a fan of the European cultures is the Only True Mercan Culture crowd, then this sounds mighty fine. In DeVos’s world, ed reform is mighty white. Do non-European people wonder about education, ever?
But it turns out that everything from Plato on has been leading us to A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report that warned that the educational sky was falling and any minute now, our nation would be crushed by it. Yes, 34 years ago, Nation at Risk warned that in no time at all, terrible things would happen, and 34 years later, they still haven’t happened, but we’re using that report to chicken little the living daylights out of ed.
Our Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores—which measures student performance internationally—have always been relatively low. We are being “outpaced and outperformed” by other countries. What remains unclear is what PISA scores have to do with anything. With what national achievements and success do the PISA scores correlate? One consistently high-scoring country is Estonia? Is there anything about Estonia that we, as a nation, envy or hope to emulate?
But throughout this speech, “Dead End” Betsy is back and in full voice, suggesting that public schools do nothing but fail the millions of students who are “trapped” there. At JebFest, there are no public school supporters in the crowd, and DeVos drops all pretense that, well, sure, maybe there are public schools that are swell.
Break from Reality
DeVos takes a side trip to say how great it is that Congress “with the President’s leadership” is poised to “do something” about America’s “broken” tax system. This is Betsy the Good Soldier, who backed Marco Rubio in the GOP Presidential primary while contributing to a few other non-Trump candidates.
But now Trump is her Beloved Leader, and she will back his play not just in terms of policy, but in claiming that he is somehow providing “leadership” for the current tax assault.
The Singular of Data
DeVos devotes a big chunk of her speech to heartwarming anecdotes, starting with the stories Trevor, a student with cerebral palsy who had a terrible time in public school and did better at a charter school, and Orlando, a student growing up in poverty with dreams of being an aviator that Floridian vouchers helped him achieve. And Shirley, who worked extra jobs to send her child to a “safe, Catholic school.” And a group of siblings with various medical conditions who used cyber school.
These are all great anecdotes. But argument by anecdote isn’t proof. We could tell the anecdotes of the many students with special needs denied entrance or support in charters. We could tell anecdotes about students in Florida who pursued their dreams to charter schools, only to discover the school was a fraud. We’ve all heard anecdotes about Catholic schools that turned out to be not so safe. Every classroom teacher can tell an anecdote about the kid who came back from cyberschool way behind.
But so what? I can tell an anecdote about a guy I graduated from high school with who survived a car crash only because his seat belt wasn’t fastened. Nevertheless, I still buckle my seatbelt because anecdotes are not data.
And the data is not on DeVos’s side. Charter schools serve fewer students with special needs. Unregulated charters are dashing student dreams with fraud and waste. Cyberschools are an unqualified disaster. Several studies now show vouchers may actually harm students who use them. And, for what it’s worth, school choice doesn’t help test scores.
Preach It, Sister
There are times when I can really feel DeVos’s church background, and this is one of them, as she winds up with an altar call for the faithful. “We are at a time of choosing,” she says. And she lays out what the faithful must choose.
She wants funding to follow students. And she wants “students before systems.” This is a repeated refrain, and it sounds so much more noble than “Let’s get rid of all rules and institutional guard rails that we’ve put in place to protect the powerless, the poor, and the underserved. “
What she wants, pure and simple, is a national system of private schools funded by vouchers, a system where caveat emptor rules for families and the real choice belongs to the operators of the schools, who are not answerable to any authority.
She points to more successes, like Illinois, which has made huge steps forward in dismantling and privatizing public education despite being in “the backyard of the Chicago Teachers Association, home of the infamous teacher strike.” And New Hampshire is also about to join the party, so yay!
DeVos evokes the reformsters of a few years ago, declaring that none of this can wait, that students need us to do all this tomorrow. She throws around some numbers—30 students have dropped out while she was talking, and two million will drop out during her term in office.
Bring It Home
The last portion of the speech is loaded with applause lines, some of them pretty good: “The rising generation represents 100 percent of our future; let's give them nothing less than 100 percent of our effort.”
Some of them are a bit confusing: “And I know many of you in this room take arrows in the back—and in the front!—on a daily basis.”
Which means . . . what? Reformsters are treacherous to each other?
But some lines are just lies: “I stand with you, and, together, we stand with America's kids – all of them.”
No. The system that DeVos stands behind is a privatized system that serves only those students it wants to serve. The other missing anecdotes? Those are the stories of students who stayed in public schools and watched as programs were stripped away and resources lost as tax dollars were diverted to charters, private schools funded with public money.
Bottom Line
The speech gives us DeVos Unfiltered, and what she wants, pure and simple, is a national system of private schools funded by vouchers, a system where caveat emptor rules for families and the real choice belongs to the operators of the schools, who are not answerable to any authority. It is a fundamental change in the whole purpose and structure of public education, and a complete desertion of the American commitment to educate every single child.
But among her better speechifying is this line from Reformaganza: “Or we can say: no more. No more empty rhetoric, no more folding to political pressure, no more accepting by inaction this fundamental injustice that stains the future of the greatest republic in the history of the world. No more.”
I would have been pleased to write that. Only, instead of meaning “no more” support for progressive public education, I would have been calling for an end to the empty rhetoric of education reform and the fundamental injustice of a system meant to enrich businesses and abandon students who are unprofitable to serve, a two-tiered system where only the privileged get a good education.
Peter Greene has been a classroom secondary English teacher for over thirty-five years. He lives and works in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, blogs at Curmudgucation, and is Midwest Regional Progressive Education Fellow.