Secretary of Education, not business

Graphic+by+Eli+Saletan.+

Graphic by Eli Saletan.

By Emma Sorkin

In Bethesda it can be easy to take school’s abundance of resources and funding for granted. But with President-elect Trump’s current appointee for Secretary of Education, all public schools need to consider the possible consequences.

Trump appointed Betsy DeVos, former Chairperson of the Windquest group, an investment and management firm, to the position of Secretary of Education. Cabinet posts can often seem removed from students’ daily lives, but all students should be concerned with Trump’s choice for the education secretary.  

DeVos has a long history of supporting the school choice movement, which focuses on giving parents the right to choose which school their kids attend. This power to choose includes parents’ ability to send their kids to charter or private schools using government-funded vouchers and to transfer their children to higher-performing public schools, Education Week reports.

While it may seem innocuous on the surface, this system has proved disastrous for many public school systems in the past. Funding may be redirected from public programs to private vouchers. And vouchers often cover only a portion of tuition, meaning that lower income students will always be at a disadvantage, according to the Washington Post.

When education funding is diverted to charter schools, it frequently means fewer resources for public schools, Whitman special education teacher Ryan Mullin said. This can be especially challenging for the special education department as they rely on extra funding for teachers, services and therapists.

The kids in the special education program are also at a disadvantage for admission to charter schools. School choice opens the door to discrimination, the New York Times reported. This discrimination is part due to the fact that, unlike public schools, charter and private schools don’t have to accept every prospective student and aren’t obligated to accommodate students with disabilities or extra needs. Consequently, these schools often don’t have the same admission statistics as public schools. This is a national phenomenon; special education students make up eight percent of the charter school population, but are 11 percent of public school students according to the General Accountability Office. While it may not be entirely attributable to denying special education kids, the disparity is still significant.

The second issue with DeVos is that although she has an abundance of experience in business, but remarkably little in education. DeVos served as the Chair of the Michigan Republican Party four times and currently heads a private investment and management firm. In terms of education, she has had very little exposure to day-to-day school procedures. Devos has served on the boards of education advocacy groups and is the Chairperson for the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children—organizations focusing on the expansion of public policy to include school choice programs. While this might sound like qualifications, none of these board positions provided direct experience with the administrative or in-school side of education.

In contrast, current Secretary of Education John King Jr. served as the New York Commissioner of Education for three years before taking office. Earlier in the Obama administration, Arne Duncan served as education secretary following eight years as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools.

This is a problem because top-level employees who haven’t spent time in schools don’t know what works best for the students and what is feasible, math teacher David Paulson said.

Many, including President-elect Donald Trump, argue that DeVos fights against “cookie-cutter” education through her promotion of school choice and vouchers. DeVos’ policies will help “reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families,” Trump said in November. In theory, charter schools sound like the perfect individualized education reform that the country needs, but in reality, they are not.

The bottom line is this: with DeVos’s support of charter schools on top of her lack of experience in school systems, students should be concerned with this appointment, future funding and resources, and the direction of public education.