Thursday, December 17, 2020

Betsy DeVos Speaks Out on Four Years of ‘Truly Disheartening’ Attacks

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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