Privatization and Deregulation: DeVos Sacrifices Students to the Market.

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.

DeVos, Education, and Capitalist Fever Dreams: a Michigan Perspective on the DeVos Appointment

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.

Business as Usual: Flint and the Failure of Corporatized Government

A crowd of hundreds chants outside the Michigan Capitol building, demanding the resignation of Governor Snyder as he steps up to the microphone to deliver his sixth state of the state address. In past years he has stood with some certainty amidst a hall of gerrymandered cronies, this year is different.

Flint Michigan has been poisoned. The past few months have seen an explosion of rage roll over Michigan, prompting petitions, protests, and backpedaling from the governor. After months of public denials, FOIA requests, and independent testing, Governor Rick Snyder has been dragged into the public eye. Now he stands before us: his jaw set, face blank, his voice tight with the quiet desperation of a sinking politician. Thousands of people, many of them children, will suffer with the results of his governance for the rest of their lives.

But the tragedy of Flint is not just that this tragedy was avoidable; it’s that this crisis was the predictable result of an ideology and a system that value private profitability more than the people of Michigan.

In 2009 Snyder, an Ann Arbor businessman, campaigned as a moderate Republican who would pursue common sense solutions to the huge problems facing Michigan. At the time this message certainly resonated with millions of Michiganders. Our shrinking state revenues, a declining jobs market, and struggling cities did not offer much in the way of hope.

And so, many of us put our trust in a man who promised to, “Run Michigan like a business,” through, “Relentless positive action.” Since his election he certainly has been relentless, though positive has been debatable. However, unlike many politicians,  Governor Snyder has followed through on his campaign promises. He has run Michigan as though our state were a business.

For more than 60 years, but particularly since the start of the 1980’s, businesses and the free market have been held up as the keys to progress, while the wealthy have been honored as job creating leaders of our nation. While there are many flaws to this ideology (both theoretically and historically), its modern political expression can be found in Snyder’s promise of, “Running the state like a business.”

Businesses are concerned, above all else, with the maximization of profit. They generally focus on limiting costs, while offering the maximum utility to consumers, thereby trying to sell the most goods/services for the cheapest price. They are not concerned with fighting racism, sexism, or homophobia, in fact many businesses have profited for years by manipulating these tendencies within our white dominated society. Decision making power in a business is limited to owners or investors, generally based on how much money they invest; democracy is a limited and expensive commodity.

In many ways these are the values that Governor Snyder has brought to Michigan’s government. However this analogy isn’t perfect. As a rule businesses constantly seek to increase their bottom line, in contrast Snyder’s government has consistently cut state revenue. Slashing the tax burden of the rich, while certainly popular with political donors, seems antithetical both to the idea of “running the state like a business,” and the need for balanced budgets.

This contradiction reveals the true nature of Snyder and his ideology: Michigan’s government is not just being run “like” a business, it’s being run for businesses.

Or to be precise it’s being run in the interests of massive wealthy corporate and private entities. People like Dick Devos, Dan Gilbert, and the Illitch family, who want a safe profitable business environment, and if at all possible for the people of Michigan to subsidize their expanding profits.

From a business perspective, the government of Michigan is in competition with other states to offer the most attractive place for the wealthy to invest their money at the lowest cost/risk. As a result of this, investors, the individuals with the most weight in a market economy, are valued more than other citizens (not to mention they make slightly larger campaign contributions).The mission of the state becomes to reduce barriers to investment, offer tax breaks to businesses, and cut programs that spend tax revenue while not contributing directly to private sector profitability, all of which create a more profitable space for investors. This logic has been applied throughout the Snyder years, and has radically transformed Michigan to benefit a few wealthy individuals.

You’ll notice that nowhere in this is the wellbeing of the vast majority of the population considered. There is an implicit assumption in capitalism that greater investment and expanding profit margins will translate to improved living standards, but not only is this assumption frequently false, but popular concerns are repeatedly swept aside in the name of protecting a few individuals private wealth. The economy, rather than being a tool for human development becomes a justification for subjugation and oppression; an altar upon which Michigan’s health, education, and security are sacrificed.

One of the central campaigns of Snyder’s tenure has been a sustained attack on organized labor. The passage of Right to Work, attacks on public sector unions, and moves to outlaw local prevailing wage laws, have all put workers on the defensive. To potential investors this shows the government’s dedication to ensuring low labor costs and a willingness to place private profitability over Michigan residents’ well-being.

Michigan cities have long been a source of working class and black power, both of  which have helped check corporate influence, and so we have seen a wave of state actions against urban centers. The Emergency Financial Managers’ reorganization of Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor, and other Michigan cities along neoliberal lines has been a hallmark of the Snyder years. In the name of budgetary balance EFM’s have worked to break the power of residents in these black urban centers: through expulsion, degradation, or impoverishment. Pensions are lowered, services cut, and houses repossessed, not because this is in the best interests of the people of these cities, but to prepare the ground for a new wave of “development” free from the threat of collective resistance.
Democracy in general has been reduced to a thin veil in Michigan, to be pushed aside when it threatens the profitability of business interests. In addition to EFM’s at work in our cities, we have seen a wave of gerrymandering and laws to make voting more unnecessarily complicated and difficult. These measures disproportionally affect low income communities of color, driving turnout and access for some of the most progressive voters and traditionally marginalized communities. Statewide ballot initiatives and petitioning  drives, have also been repeatedly subverted or ignored by the administration. Snyder’s government employs the language of democracy in a piecemeal fashion when it serves the wealthy, but otherwise seeks to limit popular participation.
All of this has been accompanied by ongoing cuts to state sponsored education, transportation, and services like municipal water treatment. Many of these collective issues are recast as private concerns: to be paid out of pocket by individuals. When they can’t be cut entirely, programs are often re-organized and “made more efficient”, as the Financial Manager of Flint did when he attempted to save the money by drawing water from their river. In either case the justifications are budgetary, but the beneficiaries are the wealthy taxpayers and business interests in Michigan.

However while the Snyder administration and its legislative supporters have slashed the budget, and cut services, there is still an important role for the state is supporting businesses. From the perspective of the wealthy it is not enough for the state to negate it’s social mission, it must also subsidize and provide services for the needs of private businesses. Large public costs like road infrastructure or prisons, that would be too expensive for businesses to fund privately must be supported. Furthermore the state becomes a tool for wealth redistribution, forcibly removing resources and property from the poor and redistributing them to wealthy private interests. The Detroit Bankruptcy while billed as a grand bargain functioned very much like this, protecting the investments of already wealthy companies and stripping many poor citizens of their pensions, homes and voice.

Flint’s water crisis stands out as a heinous crime and a botched attempted cover up. However, a crisis like this was always at the end of the road Snyder’s government put us on: when our government is run, “like a business,” and in the interests of the wealthy, the actual people of Michigan get sold out.

Today there are millions of poor and working people in our state who have suffered at the hands of Snyder’s government. For some it comes in the shape of declining wages, for others a stolen pension or home; in the form of a lost sense of security or in the long economic strain that can break apart families. Things just like the Flint crisis continue to happen now, in Detroit with the pollution of the Marathon Oil refinery, and a collapsing school system; or lay waiting in our future: like the 65 year oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinaw.

Arresting Governor Snyder would be a step in the right direction, and certainly seems justified after all he has done to our state. However as long as his ideology persists, and our system continues to facilitate the domination of rich and corporate interests, we remain threatened.

If we’re going to fight back and win we need to mobilize and push for greater control over our state, both at the ballot box and in the streets. Our government needs leadership that sees their role as a servant to the people of Michigan, regardless of campaign donations, and uses our collective wealth to help everyone. We need to submit the economy and the wealth of our society to the needs of the people.