The spectrum of opinions on Betsy DeVos presented in corporate media range from skepticism to enthusiasm, but school choice itself is unquestioned.
The nomination of billionaire voucher enthusiast Betsy DeVos for secretary of Education comes after nearly two decades of a largely bipartisan consensus around “education reform.” That consensus, repeated for years in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, posits, first and foremost, that public schools are failing.
They are, the narrative goes, especially failing the nation’s most vulnerable students. That failure is presented, by education reformers and corporate media pundits alike, not as a result of inequality or poverty or resource scarcity, but of public education itself. The solution, pioneered by pro-privatization reformers and repeated by newspapers since the George W. Bush years, sounds both innocuous and innovative: school choice.
As a result of the uncritical consensus around school choice, major papers like the Times and the Post are unable to report on an extremist figure like DeVos—whose pro-voucher and pro-charter advocacy fits comfortably within the school-choice ethos—without ceding even more ground to the corporate education reform movement. “School choice” is not as value-neutral as it sounds: It is a buzzword not only for the expansion of charter schools and vouchers, but for the divestment of public funds away from public education and into the private sector.
The spectrum of opinions on DeVos presented in corporate media range from skepticism to enthusiasm, but school choice itself is unquestioned. The basic premise of education reform—that privatization is the solution—is taken as a given when papers repeatedly use the language of corporate reform. This leaves them questioning only the extent of that privatization, by way of charters or vouchers or both.
Even where coverage of DeVos has been critical—and much of it has, especially since her confirmation hearing—major papers parrot the language of corporate ed reformers. From the New York Times (1/12/17):
But school choice means different things to different people. Many educators and groups that support charter schools—which are public—do not support vouchers, which steer public money away from public schools by giving families money to spend on private school tuition.
That charter schools are “public” is a talking point put forward by the charter sector. Oversight of charter school performance varies widely state by state. They are run by non-profit organizations and sometimes for-profit companies. Their employees do not have the same rights as public-sector employees. They do not serve proportionate numbers of students with disabilities. They suspend black students at four times the rate of white students, and suspend students with disabilities at rates 2–3 times higher than their non-disabled peers, as the Times itself reported last year (3/16/16).
For the Times to repeat the claim that charter schools are public is an ideological choice, one that erases what makes public schools “public”—particularly, their requirement to serve all students. So-called “public charter schools” may be free, but they aren’t public institutions in terms of funding, employment, regulation or the populations they serve.
Fred Hiatt offers the scandal-ridden tenure of DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee as a model Trump should try to replicate.
Ed reformers and their mouthpieces in corporate media present school choice as the great equalizer. “The only people who do not enjoy this right are those who are too poor to move out of neighborhoods where public schools are failing,” wrote Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (1/1/17). He suggested that the federal government should “encourage choice for the children who today have none,” and that DeVos could do this by offering “one or two cities the chance to become laboratories of choice.” He added, without specifics, “Any city where schools are struggling would be eligible to volunteer. (That is a big pool.)” He doesn’t name a single city as an example of the “big pool” where “schools are struggling.”
Hiatt continued:
The system would then stop funding schools and begin funding families. Every child would be given an annual scholarship. Poor children, who often enter school needing extra attention, would get bigger scholarships. Children with disabilities would get more, too.
Every school would then have to compete for students. Principals would be allowed to hire the teachers they wanted. In exchange, every school would have to measure its children’s progress with identical tests, so that parents could compare.
Hiatt cited Washington, DC, itself as a successful model for his vision, praising former chancellor Michelle Rhee as having done the “slow, tough work of improving the traditional public schools, the charters have gotten better, too.” Hiatt seems to have forgotten Rhee’s deeply unpopular closure of 23 public schools in 2008—at a cost of $40 million—and the standardized-test cheating scandal that defined her tenure. He sees “identical tests” as a reliable and just way to measure student achievement, despite the powerful resistance to testing that parents, students and teachers have mounted in recent years.
In another Post column (1/19/17), Connor P. Williams takes a more liberal but still pro-reform stance, arguing that “school choice programs can be much brighter, better and bolder than DeVos’s limited vision.” He also cites DC, along with Newark, Boston and New York City—all sites of growing resistance to charters—as models that “have used school choice policies to give low and middle-income families more educational options.”
According to Williams, those cities “incorporate significant public oversight to ensure that these options are high-quality. That helps their school choice programs support integration and equity alike.” In fact, charter schools in Newark are far more segregated than public schools. New York City schools remain the most segregated in the country, with charters as a contributing factor.
A USA Today column says Betsy DeVos (net worth: $0.6-1.5 billion) will stand up to “the powerful monied special interests.”
Corporate media and ed reformers alike paint public education as as a bastion of power, and charters and vouchers as the underdogs. An op-ed at USA Today (1/18/17) endorses DeVos for her promise to “challenge the status quo interests in American education,” with school choice as her primary tool. “She intends to prioritize the needs of parents, providing them unfettered school choice options — including vouchers, educational savings accounts, homeschooling, etc.” DeVos, the authors write:
will disrupt business-as-usual—with an intensified focus on the rights of parents to choose the right school for their children, no longer being subservient to their neighborhood zip code-mandated school or some anonymous education bureaucrat assigning kids to a school based on arbitrary laws irrespective if that school is failing.
The language of “school choice” turns students into customers and schools into the marketplace. It turns public education into an oppressive, vaguely Soviet bureaucracy. In this framing, charters and vouchers represent freedom from oppression.
The papers that print these arguments don’t provide a definition of what they mean by “failing” schools—they don’t need to. Years of amplifying the pro-reform movements rhetoric has made “public schools” synonymous with “failing schools” when poor students of color are the subject. The words “failing schools” appeared in the New York Times 611 times between 2002 and 2014.
The rhetorical work of delegitimizing public education has already been done. While DeVos may be far to the right of the bipartisan vision of corporate education reform, the path towards privatization has already been paved.
Molly Knefel is a journalist and co-host of the daily political podcast Radio Dispatch. She is also an elementary and middle school teacher at a public school in the Bronx.
A matter of decree, not kind
It is about time the status quo in education is challenged. Socialist schools now exist to serve the state and not the student. That being the case, there is little incentive for parental involvement. All will be taken care of by the nanny state.
Don’t cofuse good public education with a “Nanny” state. I have watched a number of charter schools start up and then fail. Poorly operated, education with a religious bias does not necessaliy equate to a good education. I was taught in a catholic grade school, yet I saw less bias in religious matters than I do from so-called Christian schools. NO ONE gave public money to the Catholic schools, nor should they. Dumping support for public shools and handing out vouchers wouls be a windfall for the for-profit school industry. Small wonder Wall Street thinks the voucher idea is good.
Who decides what is good public education? The socialist school decides. The nanny state decides. But the individual parent does not decide. The infantilized individual parent is not qualified to choose an alternative school. The individual parent is trumped by the nanny state.
What’s your definition of “nanny state?”
Thank you for bringing up the religious element. I suppose it’s not politically correct to ask openly how it can be that a family like that of Betsy De Vos could produce a sociopath like Eric Prince? This is an individual so thoroughly convinced that killing those of a different faith someone comports with “God’s will” that he doesn’t even recognize the cognitive dissonance bordering on religious schizophrenia expressed in, by, and through commanding armies of murderers while calling himself a Christian.
The type of religious education being fostered today is one that is antithetical to the ACTUAL teachings of Christ.
Would Christ build a wall against poor neighbors? Would Christ ask that entire nations be bludgeoned with bombs?
Dr. Martin Luther King got it right especially when he explained that all of the money wasted on wars meant deprivations for the homeland and its most vulnerable citizens.
If the spirit of Christ were to appear–in a manner similar to the witness of those 3 ghosts from Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”–to apprise all these alleged followers of their vast moral folly, the strain would prove too great to bear.
Nonetheless, a nation where one third of its children are raised to see Other as ENEMY is not a prescription for mental health OR education. But it definitely guarantees the M.I.C. its continued bounty for the purposes of sustaining and spreading wars.
Then to see a fool like Trump condemn the Arab world as if NATO & the U.S. MIC bombing 6 nations back to the Stone Age is irrelevant or not worthy of mention… while followers of this same Christian Right persuasion lay hosannas at the Great Fool’s feet? The term surreal is too kind and doesn’t do the great deception justice.
One last thing, from my limited knowledge of Scripture, I do recall it being said that DECEPTION was the greatest tool of evil. And who wields greater deception than the expert salesman?
Tragically, those insistent on outside enemies are the ones most likely not to recognize the EVIL that’s proliferated within themselves and their own far too empowered political circles.
Well said, Rose!
Usually, F.A.I.R can be counted on to give voice to what’s missing in public debates and conspicuously absent from policy decision-making. However, Ms. Knefel never once mentions the role of the CHRISTIAN Right in her article about the deliberate decimation of public schools. This is not just a corporate campaign hiding behind the marketplace trick of alleged “choice.” A good deal of PUBLIC money is being funneled into supporting RELIGIOUS schools. When church and state unite, there’s no limit to what can and will be done in the “name of God.”
Perhaps Ms. Knefel should read Barry W. Lynn’s book, “God and Government” as a refresher course; nor is she alone in apparently taking pains to avoid mention of this political third rail. In a recent piece by Robert Weissman (from Public Citizen) on the existential threat to Democracy posed by “President” Trump’s chosen department heads, he, too, leaves out the deliberate inclusion of rabid Religious Right types who fully intend to use their version of muscular Christianity to tell others how they MUST live as if this ilk alone owns the power to make such anti-Democratic determinations.
Not calling The Beast by its name allows it to thrive in the underbrush.
School ‘choice’ and ‘charter schools’ are nothing more than greed-based, elitist tools that say “We KNOW we have some disparity problems in US education and we’re NOT going to fix them.”
School Choice? How would this work? Say there is a poor community bordering a wealthy community with up-to-date facilities nearby. Would a parent in the poor community be able to chose the nearby up-to-date facility? If so, wouldn’t the new school become crowded? And how would the parents of the wealthy community react? That’s not difficult to answer. So where would “choice” enter here?
Joseph: I live in MN, in the Minneapolis-St.Paul region. We have charter schools, and we also have school choice, which forces schools to accept a limited number of students from outside of their district boundaries. I don’t know how many, to be fair, but some schools take quite a few kids from outside their boundaries. Minnetonka HS is a mega-campus: class sizes are over 1100, with over 100 students/class from outside the district.
I don’t know how charter schools are run in other states, but in MN, they have to have teachers on the board of the school, our school is not allowed to own its buildings (for some reason?), but we have to do the same accountability & reporting stuff as any other public school. From these articles, that doesn’t sound true of other states.
One thing that annoys me about the criticisms of segregation, is that charter schools that are even remotely popular, have to do lotteries. Well, how the heck can we do ANYTHING to balance out social & racial diversity, if we can’t control which students come in? We can’t.
Our school advertises, and shows up at tons of different poor & under-served communities to try to recruit students, but if parents don’t show effort on their kids’ behalf, we cannot force them to do so. This is the “big secret” of why traditional public schools really hate the charters. It isn’t that we take “the best kids, and kick out the worst”. It is that we get the kids with the most passionate & involved parents.
I don’t know how to get all parents active & involved, but it would fix many things at many schools. Right now, it is just a method of blaming the activist parents for picking a school for their kids.
My kids’ charter school has about 25% of the students receiving free/reduced lunch. I’m proud of that. We have mostly asian-descent children (it is a Chinese immersion charter school), followed by white, black, hispanic, Indian sub-continent, the last time I looked. We seem to be doing better than the above reporting suggests, but I think my point stands: it is up to engaged parents to make these choices, and some of them are choosing segregation.
It’s pretty presumptuous for you to think “active and engaged parents” would choose a charter over a public school, as if charters are somehow better. Funny how we hear so much about failing public schools, but the media is tight-lipped about all the charters that have failed over the years. Hmm, wonder why that is.
TeeJae: not presumptuous in the slightest. I talk to regular public school teachers that mainly complain that parents just don’t get involved, or they only get involved to protect their children from consequences.
Are you saying they are lying to me? They might be, but I can’t think why they would about this.
Active & engaged parents have choices in MN, and some choose regular, some choose charter, some choose private schools. You are assuming that when they make these choices, they somehow are being confused. MN Dept Education will tell you dang near anything you want to know about testing, demographics, etc.
However, you will get whatever you get if you don’t pay attention and look into the choices. A person who isn’t paying attention to their kid’s schooling is automatically not going to be a good partner in the education of that child. And that is what all teachers need to succeed. Teachers can’t do everything required to teach a child. The old saying about “it takes a village to raise a child” isn’t just some sort of feel-good thing.
As for “the media never talk about charters that fail”, pretty sure our local media didn’t have too much trouble with that when the madrassa failed. They reported on what had happened, then provided data on success/fail rate of the charter schools.
Here is an article from the local paper that brings many of the concerns up, from both sides:
http://www.startribune.com/charter-schools-struggling-to-meet-academic-growth/292139891/
A madrasa, really? That’s the example you’re singling out, when it’s widely known how our mainstream media continually pushes an anti-Islam narrative? Not very intellectually honest on your part.
I also find it disingenuous of you to decry parents’ noninvolvement, while completely ignoring any of the myriad reasons why that may be; for instance, being a single parent, or working two jobs to make ends meet, or having other children to care for.
And then you have the nerve to shift focus to the much-needed village, while (again disingenuously) ignoring the huge role that a failed economic system plays in this problem… much like the media does. Hmm, wonder why. You Reformers are so transparent, always seeking to turn education into a commodity. Sorry but, as the article pointed out, more and more parents aren’t buying what you or Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee or Betsy DeVos are selling.
TeeJae: To be fair, I brought up the madrassa because of its literally over-the-top religious instruction, which the state gave them 2 years to fix before shutting them down. I few other Christian-oriented schools were also closed, and I think there were a handful that fired top staff, and changed curriculum. The anti-charter folks used the madrassa to argue that public funding was being pushed into religious charter schools. MN charter school laws shut that down, along with the Christian ones, but that got the most press because of the anti-charter folks attack. If you don’t like that it was using fear of Muslims to shut down charter schools, you might want to take it up with them.
I have NEVER ignored the reasons for lack of involvement. All I have said is that involvement is key for most kids success. Sure, some kids are self-starters, or highly motivated, but most kids hit stumbling blocks along the way and need a good partner to move forward.
There are a myriad of reasons parents have a hard time being involved, but canceling charter schools won’t fix any of that, which I am sure you know.
A couple of thoughts on things that could help:
1) $15/hour minimum wage
2) treating all work, including staying at home with kids, as valuable.
3)State supported parental leave for having kids in the first place
4) State funded childcare
There is literally nothing disingenuous about doing any of that. However, your attack on charter schools and school choice doesn’t fix any of the predominantly economic problems you just Identified (and I completely concur with).
I am not seeking to turn education into a commodity, nor has my school ever sought to “patent our success” by preventing ANY institution that wants to see what we are doing, to come & see what we are doing. By the way, that is completely the reverse of the private, corporate charters in MI and NY. We send our head of curriculum all around the country, and the world, to other language immersion schools to share what we have learned. This has also helped out ELL schools in our area.
My only reason for posting out here is to point out that charter school systems are not all the same, and one has to look to the state rules established for them. I don’t think its right to tar everybody with the same brush.
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As for the public “losing faith in charters”, speak for your own experience. They are doing fine in MN. My child will leave her k-8 Chinese immersion school, and may well get thru the lottery to go to another charter that runs k-12. If she doesn’t, she will be going to regular public high school, that is working with our charter to build a curriculum sufficient to keep expanding her Chinese.
@ Joshua Irish- Shutting down charters COULD help, by diverting public funds from them into resolving the many economic problems, including those you listed.
For the record, public schools only started “failing” after profiteers set their sights on the public education system. Enter NCLB and the farcical standardized testing to convince people of this “failure” so they would then “choose” these much *better* new schools, where businessmen get rich off taxpayers, yet aren’t accountable to them. It’s just not right.
@TeeJae: um, no, there would be little to no money gained by shuttering these schools, as most of the money for them comes from per-pupil funds from the state, which follow the student wherever they go except private schools..
Some public schools have been “failing” for decades. Charters in MN started in 1992, not 2002 with NCLB.
I don’t subscribe to the “charters uber alles” mentality, as I see a wide variety of successful schools in my area, some charters, some traditional, some private. There are also failures in my area: some charters, some traditional, some private.
You are totally correct that if charters aren’t accountable, that they are a good way to hide corruption/graft, but as I have been pointing out since the beginning, the way the different states implemented charter systems is the determining factor, not charters in and of themselves.
I’m not sure anyone has all the ideas to get parents “active and involved,” but here’s one to chew on:
Make sure that they all have access to jobs that pay their rent/mortgage, food, medical care, transportation, utilities, all their other bills and some left over for retirement and college with 40 hours of work a week, instead of 2, 3, or 4 jobs that, when stitched together for 70 or 80 hours a week, still land their families near the poverty threshold and far below what it actually takes to raise a family.
It’s kind of tough to help your kids with their homework or make PTA meetings when you’re on the goddamned bus from your day job cleaning an apartment building to your night shift as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home, all so you can string together 75 hours at $12 bucks an hour to feed those kids.
Charter schools are a scam with two goals — stroking the egos of the tough-love liberal fantasists who start the non-profit ones, and lining the pockets of the Wall Street billionaires who fund the for-profit ones at the expense of poor people.
If you want to see how false the ideas of “failing schools” and “choice” are, we should establish a moratorium on “school choice” — for the next five years, no one is allowed to offer “choice” except in districts in which the median income exceeds the national median, and in which the percentage of white students is no less than 90% of the national median.
Ain’t gonna be a whole lotta choice going around.
WHAT IS SCHOOL FOR?
This is the question that goes unasked by so many of the articles cited here. A lot of this “failing schools” narrative goes back to the Nation At Risk study, and has more to do with the obsession we’ve developed over the past half-century for metrics, efficiency, and growth plans (and big paychecks to experts and consultants). If the purpose of school is to prepare students for adult life, we’re coming up short, but in many ways this is BECAUSE of the monomaniacal focus on test scores and targets set by people who wouldn’t be employed if they couldn’t constantly point to all the ways kids are coming up short.
The underlying assumptions one has about the purpose of education can’t help but inform one’s feelings about this issue. There are ideological/moral components, as much as we might like to pretend otherwise.
Also, and this might seem like a quibble, from the article: “The language of ‘school choice’ turns students into customers and schools into the marketplace.”
I’ve always seen it as treating *parents* as customers. This is not a minor distinction.
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