Over the past 6 months we have watched Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos launch an all out attack on students and young people in our country. She has fought to cut aid from school programs benefiting working class students, reduced oversight on for-profit colleges, hindered loan forgiveness programs, and reinforced corroded guidance on the rights of LGBTQ students. During Congressional Testimony to Congresswoman Katherine Clark (MA), Ms. DeVos asserted that she remained open to federal dollars flowing to states that legalized discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or disability status, saying that such issues would be dealt with by the states or by other federal agencies.
And now this week, we’ve received word that she is rolling back Title IX protections for students across the country.
For those who aren’t familiar, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is an essential guideline that works to protect each student’s right to equal access to education and an educational experience free from violence. One of its most important roles has been to force schools to reform their policies around sexual assault and harassment, pushing back against the epidemic of assaults taking place on college campuses. Under Obama, Title IX was more broadly enforced, and the number of complaints drastically increased. Now, Betsy Devos’s plan would cut funding for enforcement and more narrowly define the role of Title IX, effectively declaring that the best way to solve gendered violence is to bureaucratically declare that it isn’t really happening.
While these positions are at face value heinous, it begs the question, why is Betsy DeVos taking and defending such obviously horrendous stances?
The reality is that discrimination and inequality within education flow logically from Betsy DeVos’s free market approach to education, and society more broadly.
The reality is that discrimination and inequality within education flow logically from Betsy DeVos’s free market approach to education and society. It is impossible to separate her embrace of market-based education from her refusal to halt discriminatory practices and rollback of protections for students. It is because of the needs of the budding privatized education marketplace, that she is forced to publicly defend discrimination. Freedom to discriminate is a crucial source of profit in the private education industry, and investors need to know that the framework DeVos is enacting will protect that freedom.
In DeVos’s case it’s also important to recognize the role that religion and race play within her policies. Practically her entire career has been about allowing public money to flow into private religious schools, subsidizing upper class conservative institutions. There is a clear religious motivation in much of her work, as she sees education as an important site of ideological conversion. Less easy to prove, but no less present is the racial discrimination in that work. Though the sacrifice of a generation of Detroit’s school children to free market experimentation may be damning enough evidence.
Let’s be clear about something: privatizing/marketizing education has never been about improving outcomes.
DeVos has historically cast charter schools and school of choice policies as a salvation for communities of color and low income students. While there’s little evidence that these policies have done anything but hurt these communities, this stance at least is in keeping with the general trend outlined above- a lie to make the exploitation go down easier. Regardless of her private views, the structural demands of the system she is advocating demand that she supports discrimination and inequality within education.
Let’s be clear about something: privatizing/marketizing education has never been about improving outcomes. There is at best inconclusive evidence that privatization efforts have kept pace with public choices, and specific test cases such as Detroit have shown disastrous results. Privatization has always been about creating a profitable industry in a space or market that has long been kept out of the direct control of the wealthy. There is huge money to be made if even a fraction of the public school industry can be privatized, and this has led to a massive investment in lobbying efforts to turn education into a commodity; lobbying efforts like the one DeVos led before her nomination as Secretary of Education.
Markets are inherently unequal spaces, where the an individual or group’s importance is judged by their purchasing power. Those with more wealth are able to shape market spaces to their needs, be it through their purchasing power or their ability to influence the rules of the market place. Those with less wealth are left in an inherently weakened position, that tends to become weaker as the wealthy reshape the marketplace and its institutions.
So when we hear DeVos advocating for school of choice, voucher programs, and deregulation as solutions to the inequality endemic in our education system, we should recognize that children’s futures have become instrumental in a free market project, and not the other way around.
This brings us to the market’s need for discrimination, and by extension the need for DeVos to defund title 9 and defend a state’s right to segregate schools. The specter of government intervention looms over the growing privatized school market. Be it in the form of labor regulations, standardized achievement goals, guaranteed rights to students, or a mandate to educate all children, federal intervention could slash profit margins by disrupting some of the key tools privatized schools use to pump up their achievements and profits.
Privatized education effectively operates on a subsidy model. The money that was going to public schools is broken up into a voucher system where each student has x amount of money to shop around for schools. Some schools offer tuition that equals the value of the voucher, others may charge a little extra above this amount, and in more extreme cases, others may simply use the voucher to defray a small part of an elite private school tuition.
Maximizing profits within a fixed marketplace such as a school of choice/vouchers program means limiting expenses. Some expenses are required for the productive functioning of the school such as buildings, teachers, and textbooks (though all of these can certainly be cut down on- see the attacks on teachers’ unions). Other expenses are the students themselves; not all students cost the same amount to educate. Students from lower income families, students that need additional language support to learn in English, students with special needs, students that face trauma, all of these students cost more to educate than the median student. Furthermore, giving students rights, like title IX does, gives students tools that they can use to force a school to do things that might go against the bottom line. A quest to maximize profitability would naturally lead to gradually seeking to limit these costs- choosing lower cost text books, teachers, and yes students.
While public school system has a mandate to educate all students within a given geographic area, charter schools do not. This has allowed them to artificially inflate test scores by only accepting already high achieving students, and has the potential to allow them to discriminate against students that cost more to educate. To allow the federal government to force charter or private schools to accept all students would be to threaten the profitability of these institutions.
Furthermore, in a school of choice framework, appreciable difference between educational outcomes actually become part of the “incentives” pushing parents to pay more for education. What would be the point of paying additional money for a privatized school in your area, if that school actually has the same outcomes as the public school across the street? To actually improve outcomes for all students would undermine the very marketplace that Betsy Devos and her neophytes are trying to build: one in which those who can afford to pay more gain access to a better education, while those who cannot are trapped in failing institutions with little investment.
We also have to recognize the reality that many parents are looking for a more segregated, more wealthy, more “traditional values focused” education for their children. This already is a quiet selling point for many private institutions and more than a few exclusive charters. Within the marketplace homophobia and white supremacy become niche consumer groups, and potentially very lucrative ones given the amount of wealth held by bigoted individuals.
But why be so open about it?
Why not just lie about wanting to discriminate? Though she does dance around the issue, but at the end of the day Betsy DeVos has allowed it to be know that she will defend a state’s right to segregate their schools, and defund programs like Title 9 and debt relief; but why not just claim, as she had for years, that she wasn’t for segregation and that these programs would help low income communities of color?
The answer has two parts:
First, ironically enough, is Wall Street. Investors need to know that the new secretary of education is going to protect the profit margins of their companies. Public statements matter in this arena, as the president’s tweets have shown us. If DeVos publicly endorses the idea that education must remain de-segregated and accessible to all students, these companies and her dream of a privatized educational system take a hit.
But we also have to look at the constituents that DeVos and Trump’s administration in general are serving. Their brand, the brand that was electing in November, is that of open, brutal exploitation and free market expertise. Hillary could have easily allayed the fears of Wall Street behind closed doors, (taking a private stance in addition to her public one), but this approach doesn’t yield the type of broad radical change that Trump and DeVos’s supporters have demanded.
While we don’t have space to do a full analysis of the demographics and dynamic of the Trump coalition, a key commonality was the ideology of individuality and individual responsibility. The idea that each of us is ultimately responsible for how our lives turn out. While there are obviously huge flaws in this logic when one recognizes the structural nature of oppression and exploitation, it has remained a powerful message with the potential to unite low income workers, and small business owners in coalition with the wealthy individuals that actually benefit from this ideology. Why should wealthy conservatives subsidize the education of the people they exploit? If none of their kids have a genetic disorder, Ptsd, or a learning disability, why should they be responsible for paying for other’s who do?
This voting base has demanded change, a shift away from normal policy “solutions” that they now see as half measures, and toward a more naked form of oppression. Trump’s ability to craft this coalition, and continue to follow through on his promises of radical change, is what has held his core constituency together. It is this constituency that demands an acceleration of the shift away from public schools, and the diminution of student rights. It is not enough to quietly transition funding toward small charter programs, and gradually roll back protections for students through budgetary adjustments: this constituency demands public and radical change.
Thus we have the spectacle of Betsy DeVos endorsing separate and unequal before a congressional committee last month, and openly cutting funding for enforcement of Title IX this week. Inequality is an inherent and central part of the marketized educational system that she seeks to create. To ensure profitability, these schools seek the ability to deny students access to one of the most basic rights of our nation: an education. In the name of choice, but in reality at the behest of Wall Street and a core radical constituency within the Trump coalition, they are working to segregate and stratify our education system nationally, just as they have already started to locally.
Unprofitable students be warned.
A Different Kind of Red State 