Betsy DeVos on Education: Voucherize, Privatize and Segregate

By DON ROLLINS

“I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.” – Betsy DeVos, from a 60 Minutes interview, 2018

As with multiple institutions to the greater good, Trump is on track to become the president who dismantled public education as we have known it. Indeed, as engineered by Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, efforts to “voucherize,” privatize and academically segregate high-scoring students are well ahead of the timeline announced in scripted speeches DeVoss delivered two months into the new administration.

This faster than expected pace is in part a consequence of the daily outrages emanating from Trump’s twitter account – the unrelenting, sleight-of-hand lunacies that provide cover for his cabinet’s most elitist agendas. But led by DeVos, the Department of Education (in league with a number of state departments of education) has shown itself particularly adept at imposing Trump’s arcane, exclusionist worldview without regard.

Case in point, for the past 40-plus years, America’s public school students have been assessed according to academic performance on standardized tests – most of that time without significant allowance for “environmental” influences such as racism, cultural bigotry, sexism, trauma or economic stressors. Only recently have educational policymakers taken into account the extra-academic assumptions behind those tests.

Enter DeVos. While before her tenure there had been steady progress toward weighing these and other factors when designing standardized exams, the current estimate of educators from historically marginalized populations consulting on test (and testing) biases is half that of the Obama administration. By declaring for a significantly whiter brain trust, she has created an echo chamber at the highest level of her department.

Even DeVos’s admittedly radical alternative dismisses the need for change, reducing her plan to a band-aid solution for a gaping wound. She has of late: called for an end to standardized testing altogether; proposed tasking state and local district officials with measuring students’ progress; and doubled down on diverting public funds for private schools (vouchers).

Yet DeVos has remained stone silent when it comes to her commitment to an educational system reflective of today and tomorrow’s America. When challenged on the white supremacy baked into education in general, and testing in particular, she gives a stock response chillingly familiar to any student of American history: leave it to the states to decide.

DeVos is by no means the only government operative with an elitist lens. Despite a string of its own studies linking subsidized meals for disadvantaged students and better grades, the Department of Agriculture rarely trumpets those inconvenient findings. And name a Republican majority chamber or president from Nixon forward whose annual budget significantly increased funding for Head Start.

But even if Trump and DeVos were right in declaring public schools dead, they offer nothing of substance to take their place. Worse yet, their solutions only further preserve a society made by and for the few.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister and substance abuse counselor. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019

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