By Frederick M. Hess
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Next month, Betsy DeVos will close out her run as the
nation’s eleventh secretary of education. DeVos’s tenure has been unprecedented
in many ways, from her outsider status to her contentious confirmation to the
devastating pandemic that upended American education over the last year. I
recently had the chance to chat with her about what she’s taken from the
experience.
DeVos, a longtime champion of school choice and critic of
traditional public-school systems, was greeted by an unrelenting fusillade of
criticism from the very beginning. Most who’ve previously filled her office
have been treated gently by the press and politicians. But her nomination had
barely been announced before the New York Times ran a scathing
critique blaming her for the state of Detroit’s schools, even though she’d
never held any position with power over education in the city (or Michigan, for
that matter).
In many ways, the Times story was a harbinger of
what DeVos would face during her time in President Trump’s cabinet. Asked what
she learned from her confirmation process, when the educational establishment
came after her, late-night comedians mocked her, and Democrats voted unanimously
to oppose her appointment, DeVos says, “It confirmed my belief that entrenched
interests were going to do their best to protect the status quo, their power,
and their jobs no matter what.”
While most who’ve served as secretary of education came
to the role after careers in school systems, higher education, or state
government, DeVos entered as an unapologetic outsider. She believes this had
its benefits. “I didn’t know all the things you ‘can’t do,’ so I came in with
fresh eyes and a laser focus on rethinking the way we approach all aspects of
work at the Department,” she says. This was needed, she adds, because “the
bureaucracy is even more bureaucratic than any of us could have ever imagined,
and it takes longer to get anything done than I could have ever imagined.”
DeVos says, “It’s been truly disheartening to see just
how far some people in Washington and elsewhere will go to distract from the
abysmal results of ‘the system’ and protect their power.” But she says she
tuned out the vitriol: “I focused on doing what’s best for students and didn’t allow
baseless, and at times disgusting, attacks to distract me or take me off
course.”
Perhaps the most heated disputes of DeVos’s tenure
revolved around her energetic support for school choice, on which she speaks in
passionate, personal terms. She offers up an anecdote as a distillation of her
time in office. “I remember talking with a group of young African-American
students in a school where they were benefiting from the Milwaukee voucher
program and looking outside at a sea of middle-aged white protesters who
apparently thought those students didn’t deserve that opportunity,” she says. “I
think that’s a pretty good microcosm of what my experience in office was like.”
When asked what data point best illuminates the
challenges facing American education, DeVos notes that, “Half of lower-income
fourth graders are below basic readers, according to the most recent Nation’s
Report Card.” And “worse yet, for the past quarter century, there has been no
meaningful change in test scores, yet as taxpayers, we spend more and more for
education each year. And by too many measures, these gaps are even widening.
Perhaps the largest gap is between American students and their international
peers. We’re not in the top ten — in anything.”
DeVos believes her most significant accomplishment has
been “changing the national conversation around what K–12 education can and
should be.” She says that, “The concept of school choice is more popular across
racial, ethnic, and political lines than ever before. . . . Consider the bold
expansions in North Carolina, Florida, West Virginia, Tennessee, and even in
Illinois. Right here in D.C., participation in the school-choice program is now
50 percent higher than it was four years ago, and there is still massive unmet
demand.”
When conversation turns to the pandemic, DeVos says
there’s been enormous variation in how effectively schools have responded. She
observes, “[It] depends on where the schools are located and on school
leadership. I’ve toured public, private, and parochial schools across the
country that have safely reopened for in-person learning. Their leaders have can-do,
get-it-done attitudes and they put doing what’s best for students ahead of any
other interests. At the same time, we’ve seen some of America’s largest
districts refuse to open, not based on the recommendation of scientists, but
because of political interests.”
DeVos adds that, due to the pandemic, “Parents today are
more aware of what their children are — or are not — learning. And they’re more
aware of who’s standing in the way. More than ever before, they are raising
their voices for more options, for more choices, for freedom. The need for
education freedom is especially acute for kids whose government-assigned
schools are refusing to open — and those families should be able to take their
education dollars to schools that will.”
Placing unabashed outsiders in charge of the U.S.
Department of Education is unlikely to be the new norm. And perhaps it
shouldn’t be. But it’s hard to argue with the notion that, at least every 30 or
40 years, it’s probably a good idea to have someone from outside the club shake
up the federal education bureaucracy. And DeVos regards the fierce backlash she
encountered as evidence that she did just that.
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