Ted Eytan
There is no end to what Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos could be investigated for, something several newly seated Democratic lawmakers have vowed to do. A recent petition created by the group Student Debt Crisis provides a laundry list of DeVos offenses.
The list includes the particularly controversial move by DeVos’s department to rewrite civil rights legislation concerning sexual assault and harassment on college campuses. Other items on the petition involve conflict of interest. In May 2018, the watchdog group Democracy Forward found that a former for-profit college executive, Robert Eitel, jumped directly into a senior role in DeVos’s Department of Education office where he reportedly had a direct hand in sweeping aside legislation intended to protect students from predatory, profit-minded colleges.
There is more—much more—of DeVos’s activities that various groups and watchdog organizations, including the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General, have found worthy of investigation. These should come as no surprise, given her background in influence peddling, honed during her years as a school choice advocate with very deep pockets in her home state of Michigan.
And that leads to what Democrats and other accountability-minded lawmakers could also investigate DeVos for: the impact of school choice schemes, including charter schools, on public school districts—especially at the outset of 2019, as the nation’s second-largest school district goes on strike.
On January 14, 35,000 Los Angeles teachers initiated their strike, citing boilerplate union issues like the need for smaller class sizes and higher wages. But the growth of charter schools has also been cited as a factor in the United Teachers Los Angeles strike. Los Angeles teachers have identified the spread of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, as a “central issue in the nation’s second-largest school district,” according to a report in Time.
Los Angeles has long been a school choice battleground, where another billionaire advocate—Eli Broad—pushed hard to turn the city’s school district into a marketplace of education options. Today, there are close to three hundred charter schools that operate alongside traditional public schools, all under the umbrella of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Los Angeles now has the highest concentration of charters of all types in the United States. Big school districts are often hit the hardest when charter schools expand, as they are left to do more with less resources, all while maintaining aging infrastructure.
When it appears politically expedient for top Democrats to openly support public education and teachers, lawmakers are well positioned to examine the impacts of DeVos’s pro-school choice policies.
In an October 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Daily News, union leader Alex Caputo-Pearl called the well-funded charter school movement in Los Angeles a battleground in the expanding push to privatize America’s public schools. “Billionaires across the country are looking at Los Angeles as the next and biggest opportunity to privatize and profit from the education of children,” he said. Despite this, there has been little widespread debate surrounding the consequences of having an increasingly privatized school system.
Some Democrats, including 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, are coming out in support of the Los Angeles teachers strike. This is an important shift for high-ranking party members, given the Democrats’ long-standing embrace—from Barack Obama on down—of school choice as a preferred approach to education reform, particularly in urban areas where racial and economic segregation and inequality are often painfully evident.
Now, when it appears politically expedient for top Democrats to openly support public education and teachers, lawmakers are well positioned to examine the impacts of DeVos’s pro-school choice policies. If they dig a little, and work to hold DeVos accountable for the policies she has helped enact, they would discover a landscape of increasingly segregated schools in both the charter and public sector. They would also discover a litany of charter school scandals in states like Arizona, where unregulated choice schemes have been allowed to flourish at student and taxpayer expense.
By holding DeVos’s feet to the fire, Democratic lawmakers could help usher in a new conversation about public education in the United States. This effort is much needed after decades of failed privatization and competition-fueled strategies have done little to make schools more equitably funded or racially integrated.