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Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos managed to squeeze a lot of wrong into just five minutes in a rare television appearance on the administration-friendly Fox Business Network on Mornings With Maria.
Recently, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos managed to squeeze a lot of wrong into just five minutes in a rare television appearance on the administration-friendly Fox Business Network on Mornings With Maria. But while she came up with only vague ideas about what to do about the supposed failures of America’s public schools, she was most certain about who is to blame: teachers unions. After mass teacher walkouts shook up elections, and the first-ever strike by charter school teachers in Chicago, DeVos’s antagonism toward unions shows not only her disrespect for teachers but also how her animosity toward organized teachers warps her understanding of issues.
Maria Bartiromo set the whole discussion up by trotting out the old international comparison of test scores trope, claiming this ranking represents a drop in U.S. standings compared to some earlier golden age. It does not. But the international test score outrage was just to set up DeVos with the question, “Why is that?”
DeVos starts with her beloved, “we’ve been doing essentially the same thing for a hundred years”—except for, of course, the curriculum teaching techniques, class sizes, segregation, length of mandatory attendance, technology and teacher training—and the “we keep investing money in this system”—as if that’s an obvious mistake. She says we need to focus on individual student needs, as if we do no such thing in schools today.
Parts of the DeVos narrative no longer make sense. Schools have never changed, except they changed in ways that are terrible and need to be fixed.
But when Bartimoro tries to get DeVos to explain what to do to go up in the rankings, this friendly Fox interviewer will have no more luck getting specifics out of DeVos than the Senate committee did before her confirmation. DeVos says that maybe some students will need longer days or hands-on training. She calls for skills that students will need for life, like critical thinking, creativity and communication skills. And she decries the use of a top-down approach being imposed on everyone (a point which almost no one would disagree with).
But she is far more specific about who is at fault for the supposed sad state of affairs.
“Is it the teachers union,” Bartimoro prompts?
“The teachers union has a stranglehold on many of the politicians in this country, both on the federal level and at the state level and they are very resistant to the kinds of changes that need to happen,” DeVos responds with her patented smirk. They are very protective of what they know.”
Let’s break that down.
First of all, I would ask DeVos to list any accomplishment she might chalk up to this alleged stranglehold. The unions supposedly had a stranglehold on Barack Obama, and all that got us was Arne Duncan and Common Core. Please, Betsy, point to some strangleheld politicians and the teachers union-friendly policies they passed.
Second, can’t you hear the irony alarm whooping loudly here? This is a woman whose family has invested millions and millions of dollars on various elections, and who famously said,
“[M]y family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party…. I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point.”
Perhaps she is feeling a bit sore on this subject because so many of her investments in the last election cycle didn’t pay off.
Third, why would you not want trained and experienced professionals to be protective of what they know? Would you like your surgeon to tell you, “Yeah, I have years of education and training, but if my brother-in-law the accountant gets a new idea from something he saw on the Internet, I might try that out on you, too.”
Fourth, the “unions are strangling us” crowd now has a variety of right-to-work states as well as other states where the teachers union has been thoroughly stripped of power. So point to one of those states and show us how prosperity and educational excellence are blooming because you got the union out of the way. DeVos’s home state of Michigan has enjoyed nearly unchecked influence by the DeVos family for years; where are the signs that their educational system has thrived?
Fifth, the current status quo, particularly in states like Michigan, is a mass of top-down reforms imposed over the objections of teachers. We’ve been arguing for years that high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluation, narrowing of the curriculum, stripping of public resources to fund private schools and the rest of the reformy agenda were bad and destructive ideas. How can we also be cast as defenders of these policies? Twenty years ago DeVos and allies like Jeb Bush accused teachers of battling to preserve the status quo. Now that they’ve changed much of the status quo, they still want to accuse teachers of defending the status quo.
According to DeVos, teachers got in the way of changing the old status quo, but now they are getting in the way by protecting the new status quo.
Sixth, DeVos likes to toss in the “teachers care more about their jobs than children” line, one of the most insulting points reformsters use, as if teachers entered the profession strictly for the fame, glory, and riches. If it needs to be said again, I’ll do it: High stakes testing is bad for children. Bad teacher assessment systems are bad for children. Sending one child to a private school at taxpayer expense while simultaneously stripping resources from the school that nine other children still attend—that’s bad for children. Stripping teachers of job protections strips them of their ability to stand up for their students—and that’s bad for children. Teachers have opposed reformy policies because those policies are bad for children.
Bartimoro takes a page from the Campbell Brown playbook to ask if teachers who are guilty of sexual abuse still get to keep their jobs because—tenure. Will we consider student and parent needs? DeVos finishes with a blanket, “Well, some states are making progress and the feds need to talk about this stuff.”
Parts of the DeVos narrative no longer make sense. Schools have never changed, except they changed in ways that are terrible and need to be fixed. Teachers got in the way of changing the old status quo, but now they are getting in the way by protecting the new status quo. Either way, according to DeVos, teachers need to be broken so that education can proceed.