At her confirmation hearing Tuesday, Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos fought back against allegations that her school reform efforts in Detroit were a failure.
Colorado senator Michael Bennet asked DeVos what lessons she had gleaned from school reform failures in Detroit, and DeVos refused to accept the premise:
“I believe there is a lot that has gone right in Detroit and Michigan with regard to charter schools. The notion that there has not been accountability is wrong. It is false news,” DeVos said.
“The reality,” she went on, is that “charter schools in Michigan have been accountable, fully accountable to their overseeing bodies and the state.”
The “false news” she set out to unspin gained credibility in a New York Times article last month. To show how DeVos seized an opportunity to weaken charter school oversight during negotiations over last year’s school reform package—how she “bent Detroit to her will“—the narrative hinges on DeVos’s opposition to the Detroit Education Commission (DEC), a proposed charter oversight body.
The Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), founded and supported by DeVos, did lobby against the proposed education commission. But the underreported reason for their objection was that DEC would have been directed by the mayor and his appointees—and too easily tied up in political interests.
The reported downshift in accountability was really a guard against the uncertain authority of politically-loyal city officials—accompanied by a standard oversight mechanism. (To those disinclined to trust the impartiality of politicians, this would seem a higher standard.)
DeVos’s GLEP meanwhile supported accreditation for charter authorizers, the sometimes mysterious agencies that allow innovative schools to operate. And, as her spokesman pointed out when the “false news” first ran, she supported an accountability system to grade school performance that requires low-scoring schools close or restructure after three years’ underperformance.
But that’s not all on the “false news” front. An editorial last week, also in the Times, reupped the claim that DeVos sought “legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability” and added that charter schools in Detroit “often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.”
This doomy mischaracterization has been debunked by attention to data. Cato’s Jason Bedrick and Max Eden of the Manhattan Institute dish out the facts in a post for Education Next. (Eden also tackled the “reduced oversight” claim in an analytical piece for The 74, a website keen on education reform run by retired journalist Campbell Brown.)
Bedrick and Eden give top billing to the same study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) that provided the factual basis for the editorial board’s characterization—a study which itself drew a positive conclusion about charter schools in Detroit.
“Based on the findings presented here, the typical student in Michigan charter schools gains more learning in a year than his [traditional public school (TPS)] counterparts, amounting to about two months of additional gains in reading and math,” the Stanford study concluded. “These positive patterns are even more pronounced in Detroit, where historically student academic performance has been poor.”
Bedrick and Eden use the CREDO numbers, combined with separate analyses from Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy and a local nonprofit, Excellent Schools Detroit, to show that the charters DeVos supports “significantly outperform” traditional Detroit Public Schools. There are still those charter schools that come up short—hence the Times‘s “and sometimes worse.” But thanks to stable accountability measures, failing charters schools in Michigan are not allowed to fail for long.
And Betsy DeVos didn’t let senators forget it.
