This article was a collaboration between a number of Michigan Student Power Network organizers and activists.
In the wake of the election, in addition to a torrent of executive actions, Donald Trump has been assembling a presidential cabinet that bears a striking resemblance to the Legion of Doom. If his picks are confirmed we will have climate change skeptics running the EPA, a fast food CEO heading the Department of Labor, and an Exxon Mobile CEO as our secretary of state. In amidst this torrent of candidates, some have overlooked Betsy DeVos, the proposed Secretary of Education.
Here in Michigan we know the DeVos’s, and we know what their policies have meant for our state. As students, we have experienced first hand what DeVos backed legislation has done to our education system, not to mention labor laws or LGBTQ justice. Let us be 100% clear; Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education is exactly the same as a climate change skeptic as head of the EPA. DeVos would be in charge of running a public education system that she has opposed for decades and actively sought to dismantle, with horrendous consequences here in Michigan.
The DeVos Family is the first family of the Republican party in Michigan. The majority of their family fortune came from Amway, a multi-level marketing company based in West Michigan that definitely isn’t a pyramid scheme. They have been the GOP’s biggest donors for decades, funding the party, front groups, legislators, and lobbying efforts to push an array of conservative policies. Highlights from their payroll include: Young Americans for Freedom, a right wing org often accused of racist and xenophobic views; Tom Casperson, a conservative legislator who introduced a transphobic bathroom bill in the Michigan legislature; Lobbying efforts to destroy unions AND public sector pensions in Michigan, and last but certainly not least, a variety of efforts to privatize public education and funnel public money into private and specifically religious schools.
While the DeVos family stands on the wrongs side of each of these issues, it is Betsy DeVos’ personal crusade (including the original religious connotations of that word) to transform education in Michigan that most disqualifies her for her new appointment to Secretary of Education. Even setting aside the fact that Betsy DeVos has never attended public school, never sent her children to a public school, and has never spent a day in her life teaching, (which are in many ways troubling enough issues) Betsy DeVos has spent decades campaigning to “reform” public education, by pushing privatization, attacks on unions, and the funneling of public money into private education.
Betsy DeVos and her allies have pushed their agenda under the banner of ‘offering choice” to Michigan families. “Offering Choice,” obviously sounds a lot better than, “creating a segregated classist school system that pushes millions into an inferior education,” but fundamentally this is what their plan has entailed. Betsy DeVos’ vision is one in which education is opened up to the market, with public schools entering into competition with private ones, thereby allowing public money to be used to support both. To achieve this goal she and her allies have followed three key strategies: school vouchers, school of choice, and characterization. Others have detailed the exact history of these movements in greater detail (see here and here among others) but a quick run down of each is as follows.
School of Choice: decouples students from their local school districts, allowing families to apply their children to any school in their area.
Charterization: is a movement to create alternative schools separate from the public school system with the possibility of experimenting with alternative curriculum, requirements, fees, and teaching style sponsored by another institution (usually a university).
School Voucher Programs: allow families to shop around their child’s state education allocation, using it to pay part of the tuition on a more expensive charter or private school.
These three policies create the basis for a subsidized marketplace for education at the k-12 level. Families no longer are tied to their districts, or to public schools, and can use their money to seek out alternative schools, theoretically creating a demand for quality schools. Simultaneously charterization allows for an increasing number of accredited options for families to consider, adding additional supply to more traditional public school options.
Betsy Devos and her allies embrace this model because they claim it will bring healthy market competition to the education sector: disrupting the near monopoly the state had exercised in the education sector previously, and challenging “bad” schools with new ideas and institutions in the market. The idea is that ultimately all children will benefit as bad schools are forced out of the marketplace and standards are raised by capitalist competition. In particular these policies are often pushed as a solution for low income families living in struggling underfunded school districts, theoretically offering them the chance to send their children to better schools outside of the state system.
Like many capitalist fever dreams however, the reality these policies have enacted has been less than utopian. Roughly 20 years into the experiment launched by Betsy DeVos and her allies, many of Michigan’s urban school districts are sinking into ever deepening crisis. The crown jewel of the DeVos program has been Detroit, a city with a nearly totally deregulated education market, which by almost every measurable standard fails the vast majority of its students.
In Detroit, The explosion of charters, accompanied by little oversight (and cuts to government regulation) has created dozens of options that accept school vouchers and give apparently little in return. While some charters test above state averages, the majority in the city of Detroit actually fall well below the average. Furthermore these charters operate independently both from each other and the public school system. This creates ridiculous imbalances in school coverage: creating areas of intense competition with multiple schools within blocks of each other in areas like Southwest Detroit, and vast underserved areas in others like the East side. Students face challenges further challenges reaching schools thanks to a dearth of school busing and a poorly funded public transportation system.
The only people who have benefited from these policies are those who have the time and resources to seek out superior schools, pay additional fees beyond what the state voucher covers, and transport their children to and from school every day; not to mention the assistance needed to help their children test into higher performing schools to begin with.
Rather than the utopian marketplace envisioned by Betsy DeVos, Michigan’s experience of her reforms has resulted in a market based nightmare for low income families. Wealthier public school districts in predominantly white neighborhoods continue to perform well and are largely unchallenged by charters- at times even benefiting from additional students choosing their school through the school of choice policy. Wealthier private school students have benefited by being able to use state money to subsidize their often exorbitant tuition. However because of the limits of state vouchers and institutional disadvantages faced by poor communities and communities of color, these schools remain out of reach for low income Michiganders. Those living in poor communities now have even more money funneled away from their public school system either into charters that compete for students in the same neighborhoods, or into schools in other areas, as those who are able to send their children to a better performing school elsewhere.
The result is a stratified education system, that through choice and the free market, creates winners and losers in our society before students even start kindergarten. This system has been a disaster for Michigan, and would be a disaster for our Nation. DeVos appears to feel entitled to shape our nation’s education laws based purely on two points- that she has a lot of money, and that she abstractly cares about children. While each of these points may be true and each certainly give her far more influence than most people have, neither confers upon her the knowledge, views, or capacity to make education better for our nation. Being wealthy doesn’t mean your ideas are better, it means you can make them louder; Caring about children is an almost universal human trait, that must be balanced against what she has actually done and which children she seems to care about. What she has done is cripple the education of thousands of students in Michigan, disproportionately targeting communities of color, while funneling millions in public money to support the education of wealthier and whiter students in deregulated charter and private schools.
To confirm Betsy DeVos for the Secretary of education position would be to confirm someone actively opposed to the mission of the department of education, and public schools in general. This appointment would have devastating effects on the young people of our nation akin to the damage we are likely to face under an EPA led by climate skeptics or a neurosurgeon running the department of Housing and Urban development. If you want proof, come to Michigan, we’ll show you around, you can see what happens when rich donors make the rules.
A Different Kind of Red State 