Gage Skidmore
Trump’s move to further defund public education mirrors Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ privatization mission.
President Donald Trump just released his 2020 budget, and once again, education funding is on the chopping block. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has prioritized pumping more dollars into the Defense Department while cutting funds from the Department of Education as well as health and human services.
So far, Congress has refused to enact the large-scale cuts to education that Trump has proposed. For 2020, Trump is seeking a 10 percent cut in education spending, equaling just over $7 billion. Targeted programs include a student loan forgiveness program for those who take up public-service jobs, a professional development model for teachers , and funding for student enrichment opportunities.
There are a few education programs that the Trump Administration is eager to douse with resources, however. The 2020 budget calls for an increase of $60 million for federal charter school grants to facilitate the growth of the publicly funded yet privately managed schools. Similarly, Republican lawmakers have pushed a tax-credit scholarship program—worth $5 billion annually—that would divert resources from public education and promote access to private schools.
These priorities line up with those of Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos. In a statement regarding the 2020 budget, DeVos praised the Trump Administration for its “continued commitment to expanding education freedom,” and celebrated the many ways this “freedom” can be acted upon—including school choice, and a preference for “returning power education decisions to those closest to students.”
DeVos’s plans and the Trump Administration’s budget proposal reveal a solid commitment to market-based school privatization strategies as the way to manage public education in the United States. But as a recent case in Minnesota highlights, many of these plans may not work.
In Minnesota, a billionaire-funded, pro-education reform outfit, recently backed away from its behind-the-scenes effort to blame unionized teachers as the cause of unequal access to a high quality education.
The Partnership for Educational Justice has attempted to tackle teachers’ unions from a legal angle, primarily through a handful of lawsuits filed in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota. Updates for all three of these lawsuits can be found on the Partnership for Educational Justice website, under a “Teacher Quality Lawsuits” tab. All three target teacher tenure and seniority rights through litigation, under the claim that union policies keep bad teachers in the classroom while “forcing schools to fire some of the best.” (This notion was challenged in a 2016 study published by the Economic Policy Institute.)
The New York case, Wright v. New York, appears to be hung up in the courts, while the New Jersey Supreme Court recently dismissed the Partnership for Educational Justice’s case against that state’s teacher seniority laws, finding no solid basis for the plaintiffs’ claims. And now, the Minnesota case, Forslund v. Minnesota, has also hit a dead end.
The Partnership for Educational Justice has attempted to tackle teachers’ unions from a legal angle.
The Partnership for Educational Justice, founded in 2014 by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, popped up overnight with millions in funding thanks to deep-pocketed education reform supporters like the Walton and Broad family foundations. The Waltons amassed a fortune through Walmart, while the Broad Foundation owes its largesse to Eli Broad, a real estate developer who “made his money in the decidedly unglamorous businesses of tract housing and insurance,” according to a 2010 profile in the New Yorker.
Both foundations have supported a variety of market-based education reform strategies and organizations, including Teach for America and charter schools staffed with mostly nonunion teachers.
The debate over whether or not unions make better teachers is a barbed one. The Partnership for Educational Justice joins many elite reform interests throwing their financial and political weight behind the idea that unions protect “adult interests” at the expense of students’ academic needs.
Betsy DeVos, for example, recently claimed that “the public wants school choice and teachers’ unions are the only real impediment,” according to an article in Education Week. It is worth remembering that DeVos was a billionaire advocate for education reform long before she became Trump’s Secretary of Education.
It would be wrong, however, to cast this as a purely partisan issue; plenty of Democrats, including 2020 presidential hopeful Cory Booker, have aligned themselves with wealth-driven school choice movements rather than labor organizations.
In 2017, the Partnership for Educational Justice joined forces with 50CAN, another education reform organization started by wealthy funders, including OxyContin heir Jonathan Sackler. The connection to OxyContin has recently garnered negative headlines for the Sacklers and their penchant for funding charter schools.
In a February 28 statement posted to the Partnership for Educational Justice website, the group acknowledged that a Minnesota appeals court dismissed the Forslund case and, in response, the plaintiffs have declined to pursue any further legal action.
Previously, a Minnesota judge had ruled that the plaintiffs’ arguments against teacher tenure were misplaced, noting that it is school district personnel that make hiring and firing decisions. This means an “ineffective” teacher could be relieved of duty, whether or not he or she is a tenured teacher—provided the teacher was afforded due process rights.
Positioning unionized teachers as the cause of unequal access to a high-quality education, especially for marginalized student populations, is a key tactic of both the Partnership for Educational Justice and the billionaire-funded education reform movement overall. This singular focus ignores a whole host of other issues that impact student success rates, including the high rate of child poverty in the United States. Countries like Finland, for example, made a concerted effort to eliminate child poverty as a first step to building one of the world’s most widely celebrated public education systems.
Trump’s 2020 budget priorities are a clear rejection of such a strategy. Instead, with the encouragement of Betsy DeVos and groups like the Partnership for Educational Justice, the push for “reform” remains squarely focused on market-based efforts, including the dismantling of unions and the undermining of teaching as a profession.