A Teacher’s Defense of Betsy DeVos

R ead the news and reporters will tell you that every single teacher in the nation is breathing a sigh of relief at the impending end of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s tenure. In reality, after a quick review of the legacy she leaves behind, this teacher thinks lamentation, not celebration, is in order.

DeVos’s decision to roll back Obama administration regulations draws the most ire from journalistic outlets. For example, she revoked guidance from the Department of Education that encouraged individual schools to dole out student consequences in proportion to a school’s racial demographics. Her move prompted accusations of an infringement on civil rights.

There are countless reasons for racial disparities in putative punishments: historical injustices, cultural conflict, trauma, poverty, ineffectual instruction, and the like. These issues warrant consideration. However, a top-down mandate does little to address them. The Obama administration mandate effectively plastered over a rotting wall and called it fixed. But if anything, it only worsened the rot within.

Consider my own school. Because of Obama’s guidance, it adopted a popular alternative system of discipline called restorative justice, which recommends a softer response to student behavior — a “conversation” in place of a detention. Unsurprisingly, studies of restorative justice find that, while suspension rates do decrease and disparities do shrink under restorative structures, the system brings with it an uptick in bullying and classroom misbehavior. In my own school, this system meant that a fight might result in a conversation instead of a suspension.

Our data improved; our classroom culture didn’t. Students crawled around under desks, letting expletives fly with impunity. While typical punishments rarely improve their recipient’s behavior, they do signal to other students that learning is important and that disruptive behavior is unacceptable. To allow such behavior benefits the offender while harming everyone else. Many schools had to do just that in an effort to adhere to the administrative mandates.

Obama’s guidelines were an executive-level virtue signal. Betsy DeVos reversed these superficial declarations and sought to actually address structural issues. Her first priority was school choice. To those unfamiliar, DeVos often analogizes this policy to a kid’s backpack filled with per-pupil funding. Wherever that kid goes, that school gets the money. In our current system, school funding comes largely from property taxes, meaning districts in affluent neighborhoods stay affluent and schools in poor neighborhoods stay poor. School choice is a reasonable answer to the progressive call for school-funding equity.

The history of school choice, moreover, advances its reputation as the next “civil rights issue.” In their book School Choice Myths, Corey DeAngelis and Neal McCluskey note that segregationists often relied upon school-admission caps and neighborhood zoning laws to advance their racist agenda. Modern education policies are contemporary cousins of injustices such as redlining, wherein neighborhood zoning encouraged banks to reject mortgages to African Americans, keeping them from amassing capital via property. Modern school-zoning laws limit their ability to amass intellectual capital.

Those interested can find further evidence that confirms the policy’s academic and social benefits. But to really understand the effect of school choice, it helps to look at its actual results. A few years ago, a student of mine found herself regularly in the office for one or another altercation with teachers or students. Seeing their daughter suffer, her parents used the local open-enrollment system to win a spot at a charter school within our district. A year later, I crossed paths with her and she effusively praised her new teachers and the self-directed learning style that better suited her needs. School choice helped a troubled student going down a dangerous path onto a better one instead. Expanding these laws would make this opportunity available to more student nationwide, improving standardized test results and, more important, saving individual students from the failures of our system.

For these and other reasons, school choice has been Devos’s focus at the department for most of her tenure. However, COVID-19 has created a new challenge for her. Fortunately, she rose to this challenge. When pressed again and again for some kind of comprehensive, nationwide “plan” — as though the secretary of education controlled every school in the country — her response has always been that she would leave it up to states and local districts to make the final choice. This strategy is not only constitutional but also advisable, as it allows schools to respond to their local situation, closing or opening as the pandemic requires. Nonetheless, she has used her bully pulpit to encourage in-person learning.

While school closures remain controversial, experience and studies are on DeVos’s side. The American Academy of Pediatrics advised schools open where possible, noting the academic, social, and psychiatric benefits of in-person learning. In an unfortunate demonstration of the truth of this, schools that opted to remain closed have shown an increase in the already concerning achievement gaps between racial groups. School closures look even less attractive as evidence emerges that schools are not, in fact, “super spreaders.”

While other students are struggling with online learning because they’re stuck staying at 19-inch screens, my own school opted to open. I see the benefits every day. At every recess, kids laugh together over a game of four-square, and during class, they pick apart poetry in groups, learn their grammar, and excitedly discuss books. To choose closure over this is to abandon any reasonable calculation of the trade-offs involved, particularly as we learn more about the safety of opened schools. Secretary Devos deserves credit for supporting them.

Other achievements mark Devos’s tenure. She has taken on the thankless albeit necessary task of reviewing and slashing the needless minutiae on the regulatory books. She has advocated on behalf of charter schools, yet another reform that disproportionately benefits students of color, English learners, and students with special needs. And she has reinstated a deference to due process on college campuses.

The secretary of education only has so much power at her disposal. Previous secretaries have spearheaded sweeping reforms that increased budgets but left students no better off. In my English classes, I don’t grade my students based upon who they are but the work they perform, and often on a curve. All things considered, DeVos passes with high marks.

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