Jeff Bryant pulls together persuasive evidence that Betsy DeVos energized a movement that was previously scattered and disconnected. People who had no idea that the privatization of public schools is a genuine threat became informed. Groups began forming at the grassroots level to defend their community’s public schools. Supposedly “progressive” Democrats supported privatization by charters because they were hoodwinked by fake reformers promising fake miracles. For those of us fighting privatization, DeVos clarified what is at stake: the survival of democratically-controlled, community-based public schools, responsible for all children.
Even Senators like Michael Bennett and Corey Booker voted against DeVos, even though they fundamentally agree with her view of school reform by school choice.
Make no mistake: School choice was born in racism and it promotes racism.
Jeff Bryant writes:
“Betsy DeVos may have won her contest in the Senate to become the new U.S. Secretary of Education, but her opposition wasn’t the only thing that went down to defeat that day.
“For decades, federal education policies have been governed by a “Washington Consensus” that public schools are effectively broken, especially in low-income communities of color, and the only way to fix them is to apply a dose of tough love and a business philosophy of competition from charter schools and performance measurements based on standardized tests.
“Since the 1990s, this consensus among Democrats and Republicans has enforced all kinds of unproven “reform” mandates on schools, and by 2012, as veteran education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post noted that year, the two parties were “happily copying each other” on education.
“Democrats have in recent years sounded – and acted – a lot like Republicans in advancing corporate education reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses, not civic institutions,” writes Valerie Strauss, the veteran education journalist who blogs for the Washington Post. “By embracing many of the tenets of corporate reform — including the notion of ‘school choice’ and the targeting of teachers and their unions as being blind to the needs of children – they helped make DeVos’s education views, once seen as extreme, seem less so.”
“But with the election of President Donald Trump and the ascension of DeVos to secretary, that consensus appears dead.
“She would start her job with no credibility,” Education Week quotes Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington. “A vote for Betsy DeVos is a vote for a secretary of education who is likely to succeed only in further dividing us on education issues.”
“The DeVos vote reflected the tribal, dysfunctional, polarized nature of our politics,” writes Woodrow Wilson Center senior scholar Linda Killian in USA Today. “It is a harbinger of things to come.”
“But what looks like the death of a political consensus on education could be the beginning of something else: an opportunity for progressives to press a new education agenda. Here’s what should they do.”
He proceeds to write about next steps. Read them.
Here is one you can take right now. Join the Network for Public Education. DeVos caused a huge spike in our membership. She has made parents and educators and graduates of public schools aware that they must stand together and fight the DeVos-Trump agenda of charters, vouchers, cybercharters, for-profit schools, homeschooling. Just remember when she speaks soothing words about public schools, she wants to take funding away from them to share with all those private choices.
When Eli Broad talks about charters, he is endorsing the DeVos agenda. When Democrats for Education Reform, Families for Excellent Schools, Stand for Children, Bill Gates, and other billionaires sing the praises of charter schools, they are singing from the DeVos privatization hymnal.
When Anthony Cody and I started the Network
