Classroom disruption: Betsy DeVos crusades against Blaine laws, shares vision of education freedom

DeVos envisions an educational landscape that forgets no child and strands none in schools that do not perform and treats students with dignity, whether they are headed for Harvard, trade school, or a job at the market down the street.

In her freedom quest, DeVos rails against Blaine amendments on the books in Colorado and 37 other states. She considers Blaine laws, which sequester state funds from sectarian schools, to be harmful remnants of historical bigotry directed at children who are disproportionately ethnic and racial minorities. In her view, they represent state-sanctioned opposition to her vision of education freedom.

Despite a ritualistic demonization of DeVos by the mainstream national media pack and other left-wing factions — they go as far as aligning her with “racists” — the secretary sounds like a civil rights crusader of the 1960s. If there is one thing she cannot stand, it is low-income households living with fewer educational options than their high-income counterparts enjoy.

I met with DeVos at a celebration of the 20th year of Parents Challenge, a Colorado Springs-based national nonprofit that helps low-income families find and afford the right schools for their kids. Most Parents Challenge families are non-white, which was obvious as families stood to introduce themselves to DeVos at a June luncheon that attracted more than 400 attendees. Most earn far below Colorado’s “living wage” or the nationwide median household income.

“It really offends me when people who defend the traditional education system, and this has been said to me many times, say low-income parents don’t know what’s best for their children,” DeVos said. “Or, they imply low-income parents don’t really care. That is to me, so offensive to low-income families. I have talked with thousands of parents over the years, and most of them only want something better for their children.”

She blasts Blaine amendments because they use the force of law to interfere with her vision of “total education freedom” for children of all economic, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

“If I could wave a magic wand as secretary of education, I would love to see all parents empowered with education freedom,” she said.

That would include the opportunity for kids to attend their choices of private schools. It could be a game changer in terms of expanding school competition. Private schools comprise 25% of K-12 attendance centers in the United States. Most affiliate with religious institutions.

“Blaine amendments are the biggest bigoted issue we have, to my knowledge, existing in our country today,” DeVos told The Gazette. “They were designed basically as an attack on the Catholic Church and Catholic schools.”

By challenging sectarian schools in the late 1800s, Blaine law supporters reduced education options for students excluded by traditional public schools in the days of flagrant, government-sponsored school segregation. They were disproportionately minorities and immigrants from low-income households.

DeVos predicts the U.S. Supreme Court will not tolerate the continued enforcement of Blaine laws.

“We’re hopeful in the not-too-distant future it will be taken up by the Supreme Court,” she said during our June 26 discussion.

DeVos was prophetic. Exactly two days later on the morning of June 28, well within the “not-too-distant-future,” the Supreme Court voted to hear Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. With a conservative majority on the court, the outcome poses the likely rescission of all 38 Blaine amendments by means of a precedent-setting ruling. If that happens, DeVos believes a world of options will open for children nationwide.

At issue is Montana’s tax-credit scholarship program, which raises a classic First Amendment conflict that pits the separation clause against the free exercise clause.

Montana gives state tax credits for donations to scholarship funds that assist with private school tuition. Of schools accepting the scholarships, more than 90% affiliate with religious denominations.

The Montana Department of Revenue claims the scholarships violate the state constitution. Montana’s Blaine amendment means state law prohibits tax revenue — in this case, tax-exempt donations to help families with tuition — from going to any institution with a nexus to religion.

The Montana program is similar to a $5 billion federal scholarship tax-credit program DeVos hopes Congress will pass, titled the Education Freedom Scholarship and Opportunity Act. She claims to have the full support of President Trump, whom she predicts will sign the bill into law if it passes with final details that suit him.

The Montana Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Department of Revenue and against the state scholarship fund. Recent court precedent indicates that the U.S. Supreme Court will not concur. It will more likely determine Montana’s Blaine amendment violates the First Amendment’s overarching intention of keeping government neutral on matters of religion.

Just two years ago, the court ruled in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer that Missouri could no longer preclude a sectarian school from receiving state grants for upgrades to the playground surface. The ruling explained that the state violated the school’s freedom of religion by excluding it from the grant program.

Though it seems like a common-sense outcome to defenders of religious liberty, others believe anything less than the full “separation” of church and state amounts to the government making laws “regarding an establishment of religion,” which the First Amendment forbids.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris blasted a hole in the cause of hard-core church-state separationists. The decision says government vouchers for sectarian tuition in Ohio do not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The ruling left opponents of school choice with unseemly Blaine amendments, and their prejudiced history, as the only legal basis on which to oppose tax credits for sectarian school tuition.

Advocates of overturning Blaine argue the laws violate the equal protection of individuals on a basis of their religious practices, expressly protected by the First Amendment. Attend a secular school, get a scholarship. Attend a Lutheran school, scholarship declined.

Even before Trump’s judicial appointments, the U.S. Supreme Court showed an early 21st-century penchant for toppling state laws that conflict with civil rights — which include freedom of religion — protected by the federal U.S. Constitution.

Until the court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, for example, California, Colorado and 24 other states enforced state laws that forbade same-sex marriage. The court ruled the laws contradicted the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection.

Likewise, in Heller v. District of Columbia (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the court said local and state laws could not interfere with the Second Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.”

Bottom line: The court reliably strikes down state and local laws that interfere with civil rights spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, regardless of “states’ rights” objections to federal intervention. Nothing in the Constitution, as routinely determined by the court, allows a state or local government to discriminate against individuals and institutions on a basis of race or religion.

Rewind to the early 1950s, and the board of education in Topeka, Kan., forced Linda Brown and other black children to attend an all-black school. “School choice” or “education freedom” were not part of the American vernacular. Unlike today’s veiled and de facto segregation, no one hid the practice behind tortured interpretations of the establishment clause and fabrications of a constitutional mandate for “separation of church and state.”

Black children had educations deemed “separate but equal,” a now-obsolete doctrine resulting from the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The ruling in Brown negated “separate but equal” and gave black children what DeVos calls “education freedom.” For the first time, the court said black students were free to attend their neighborhood schools — not just whatever schools local governments forced them to attend.

Sixty-five years after Brown, few Americans have heard about “Blaine” amendments. Even fewer understand the relationship between Blaine laws and a historic legacy of segregation that continues in K-12 education.

The Ku Klux Klan promoted Blaine amendments in the 19th century for the same reason Topeka and other cities segregated schools. The Klan and other white supremacists opposed education freedom for non-Protestant immigrant children who were mostly Irish, Italian, non-European or non-white.

As public schools turned away the children of immigrants, Catholic and other sectarian schools welcomed them. That offended Klan members, including Hugo Black.

As a 1940s Supreme Court justice and “former” Klan member who accepted the organization’s “Grand Passport” — declaring the membership’s “sacred and unfailing bond” — Black used the bench to block government funding of sectarian schools. After writing the majority opinion upholding Japanese internment, Black wrote the 5-4 majority opinion in Emerson v. Board of Education. In it, he defined the establishment clause as a “wall of separation between church and state” that precluded sectarian schools from sharing state funds with secular schools.

The National Education Association likewise opposes all tax policies proposed to help low-income children attend high-end schools. The union’s Colorado chapter used the state’s Blaine amendment in a legal battle that successfully killed a voucher program of the Douglas County School District that included Christian and non-Christian religious schools. The union supports Blaine, despite its ugly history, because the law restricts school choice and protects the business-as-usual model of one-size-fits-all attendance centers. It reduces the need for schools and teachers to compete with private schools, protecting comfort zones of the educational establishment.

“There are vested interests that have such a resistance to any kind of change that their reflexive reaction is to fight anything that allows some people out of a system that too many are chained into, essentially,” DeVos said. “It is inconceivable to me that people can be so adamantly opposed to what is so obviously the right thing for kids.”

In the view of DeVos, the government should have no concern with the religious affiliation of any accredited school. A poor child needing a Jewish day school, Catholic high school or an Islamic madrasa should not face state-sponsored religious discrimination when negotiating a scholarship funded by tax-exempt contributions. The government should not favor secular over religious curricula or vice versa.

Regardless of Blaine laws, and the pending court battle, history may look back at the “school choice” and “education freedom” trend as a soft civil rights movement that nudged the trajectory of 21st- century politics. DeVos contends Republicans have barely exploited the political potential of education freedom, which could be their greatest means of earning new constituents. They should explain the liberating effect of school choice policies and the oppressive nature of laws that dictate and restrict where and how children learn.

“Democrats have a real problem coming up,” DeVos said. “Their natural constituency supports empowering parents and empowering students. The people in elective office are beholden to the noisy special interests — the teachers union. They are unaligned with the base of their party.”

Her contention that Democrats oppose school choice holds up in Colorado, where liberal Democratic Gov. Jared Polis supports education freedom as the founder and funder of multiple charter schools. His party, for this reason, nearly kept him off the ballot at the 2018 state Democratic convention. At the same event, Democrats shouted down the leader of Colorado Democrats for Education Reform for supporting education freedom.

And DeVos points to the election of Republican Flordia Gov. Ron DeSantis as a classic example of Republicans beating Democrats on education freedom.

More than 100,000 low-income Florida students use the state’s Step Up For Students program. It pays private tuition with tax-funded scholarships, with a program nearly identical to Montana’s and the federal plan DeVos advocates.

“Ron DeSantis basically owes his election to African American women who support education freedom for their children,” DeVos explained. “They supported him at twice the percentage he otherwise would have gotten if it were not for this issue. He was openly supportive of Florida’s existing education freedom programs and committed to expanding them.”

Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, the African American mayor of Tallahassee, supported the teachers union’s opposition to more school choice. “He was adamantly opposed to expanding education freedom and wanted to roll back measures Florida had already taken,” DeVos said. “Parents voted for their children over a system so bent on saving itself that it has a continued stranglehold over a lot of elected officials.”

DeSantis, who is white, won 44% of the Latino vote and 18% of black female voters — almost unprecedented for a modern Republican.

The challenge for DeVos may be getting the support of rural Republicans throughout the Bible Belt, the Midwest and the South. They do not generally oppose more school choice, but they might wonder how it serves tiny rural communities that can barely afford a few teachers for schools with 100 students or less, let alone a market of private schools and charters.

“There are many ways to access and make available choices to families, without disrupting what you have going,” DeVos said. “If your rural community school is serving all of your students well, nobody would make another choice. But I would wager that for every rural community school there is probably at least a handful in that school who really learn differently than however the curriculum is being provided. Why not be able to take those kids and start a micro school, even co-located in the school, with 15 or 20 kids with a different approach to learning. It would not take away from the community aspect, and it would add to the prospects for kids who otherwise might … who knows what happens with their trajectory if they’re stuck in a place that simply is not working for them.”

In her grand view of disrupting education, DeVos envisions schools that do not stigmatize students more interested in vocations than the traditional professions, such as administration, medicine, accounting or law.

“Society has suggested that the only path, that the measure for your success, has got to be a four-year university,” she said. “We need to break down this perception that choosing a career in technical education is somehow lesser. That is absolutely false.

“We can talk about the fact that welders today are making a whole lot of money, going into high-paying jobs, and they have not taken on a whole lot of debt to get there. And you can be a welder for five or 10 years and go back and get whatever appropriate education for what you want to do next. We should not look at a career path as a static situation.”

She wants more apprenticeships, for vocations and professions, to compete with the standard model of a teacher at the chalkboard in a room full of students.

“Why shouldn’t doctors essentially apprentice at a much earlier stage?” she asks. “That whole process is so protracted, and it doesn’t need to be, but it’s all based on history and tradition and people who don’t want to change things because it is working for them the way it is going now. The world changes and we can’t keep doing everything in education the way we have always done it.”

She hopes her boss, Trump, takes the message of “education freedom” to the masses in his quest for a second term. She pledges to keep pointing him in the direction of making education a cornerstone of his campaign.

“In coming months, we will be having a much broader conversation about this nationally,” DeVos assured us. “The president is very supportive of parents having more choices … He is increasingly aware of this as an issue that connects with the parents he champions: the forgotten man and woman, and their forgotten children.”

Wayne Laugesen is the editorial page editor of The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.