When Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s excellent choice for secretary of education, sits at her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, she will take fire from Democratic senators armed by teachers unions with talking points defending public education’s calamitous status quo.
The unions and their elected allies still man the barricades against educational freedom, determined to prevent steps that improve children’s education while undermining labor’s collective power to persist in its abuses.
But labor’s battle is, in truth, already lost. With almost 400,000 students in private school choice programs and 2.7 million more in public charter schools, debate over parental and student freedom during the administration of President Trump won’t be a question of if but of how.
It will focus on the question of what role Washington should play in expanding and improving the choices available to students and their parents.
He who pays the piper has the power to call the tune. But even if Washington continues to fund states’ education systems, it should allow states to use that money for programs that give more choice to the end users of education, not to officials who administer it. If Trump and DeVos intend to use the federal government to expand choice, they will need to tread carefully to avoid making matters worse.
They must heed the lessons of Common Core and No Child Left Behind. Both began as well-intentioned efforts to increase accountability and raise academic standards. But they mutated into top-down, one-size-fits-all policies, federal boondoggles. Local education activists quickly identified major problems such as too much testing, redundant programs and the crowding out of successful curricula or standards. But they faced an unstoppable federal juggernaut when they pushed back.
The key lesson is that the best kind of school choice is whatever works in that state.
DeVos’ Education Department should recognize the success of state school choice and allow states, rather than her own agency, to shape and administer the programs.
That might mean vouchers, education savings accounts, or simply allowing federal money to follow students to any public school they choose. States could focus on giving poor students more money, or make eligibility universal and give less. Or they could choose something in between. States could even use federal dollars to supplement existing school choice programs.
Federalism allows different states to meet different needs, and it also allows for experimentation.
Maximum state-level flexibility may result in blue states opting out of school choice. That’s undesirable, but giving Washington more power over local schools is worse. And when voters in blue states know that their awful schools are due not to the failures of a remote authority in Washington but to the selfishness and incompetence of their own local teaching establishment and politicians, they will demand change or impose change at the ballot box.
Washington is more bogged down with bureaucracy and more prone to takeover by liberal ideologues. A centralized school choice program is far riskier. If a federal school choice program ran into trouble — what Washington program hasn’t run into trouble? — Democrats will seek to repeal the program the next time they control government, possibly wiping out school choice nationwide.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who was governor in the 1980s and secretary of education for two years in the early 1990s, will be a key figure in this fight. He chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which will oversee DeVos’ nomination and handles education bills.
Thankfully, Alexander is perhaps the Senate’s best proponent for state and local control of education. When Congress finally replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015, he made sure states had wide flexibility to design their own educational accountability systems. On Common Core, he made sure the new law prevented the Education Department from setting academic standards. When Obama’s Education Secretary John King Jr. ignored the law, Alexander dragged him in front of the committee and demanded an explanation.
After meeting with DeVos on Tuesday, Alexander said she would make an “excellent” secretary of education, adding that he is “fully confident that she will be swiftly confirmed by the full Senate.”
While they have her before the committee, senators should ask DeVos for details on what type of federal school choice she would push for as secretary. She, and the rest of Trump’s Cabinet, needs to stay humble and acknowledge that federal overreach isn’t okay just because a Republican is doing it.
