Imagine you said to me, “Children should be allowed to play all kinds of youth sports: football, baseball, soccer, basketball, hockey, karate, rugby, cricket — whatever works best for them.”
If I responded with “Why do you hate football?” you’d think I was crazy.
In a way, that’s a simplified version of the case that Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., makes against President Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. Hassan wrote that DeVos has shown a “complete lack of … support for public education.”
DeVos supports the idea of school choice, that children and their families should be able to choose whatever school works best for them. That might be a public school, a private school, a public charter school, a magnet school, a cyber school, home schooling, or any combination of all of the above.
Not only that, but DeVos so thoroughly understands why school choice is important: because the people that know a student best, their family, are the ones that can make the best decisions for them, not some bureaucrat. DeVos applies the same logic to school choice: the people that know a school system or community best should make decisions for those areas, not the federal Education Department.
That’s why she doesn’t want to force school choice down the throats of any state or community. “As a strong proponent of local control, I believe a decision to provide vouchers, scholarships or other public support for students who choose to attend a nonpublic school should not be mandated by the federal government,” DeVos wrote in a letter to Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb. Soon after receiving the letter, Fischer announced she would vote for DeVos, likely securing the 50 votes she needs to get confirmed.
Hassan claims that school voucher “programs also leave behind students with disabilities because the schools do not accommodate their complex needs.” To the contrary, rather than pigeonholing special education students into the one-size-fits-all public school system, school choice ensures that students with disabilities, or anyone else, can escape a school that doesn’t fit their needs.
The point of public education is to serve students. Sometimes it accomplishes that goal, but often times it doesn’t. If there are other options that would better serve students, they should be allowed to fluorish. Supporting other options doesn’t mean it comes at the expense of public schools.
Jason Russell is the contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
