In the run-up to and immediate aftermath of Betsy DeVos’ confirmation as secretary of education on Tuesday, you’d have been hard-pressed to avoid the belief that the thriving public education system had just been given a death sentence.
With Vice President Mike Pence’s tiebreaking 51st vote, the embattled DeVos pulled through a difficult confirmation process in which her pedagogical knowledge was challenged and her wealth was made into a scarlet letter. Most importantly, however, her championing of school choice was demonized by Democrats across the board.
While an at-times difficult confirmation hearing bolstered the case against DeVos specifically, the underlying reality about the campaign against her was that the pro-school choice position, espoused by many conservatives, would have made any of the president’s choices for education secretary unpalatable to Democrats.
School choice, primarily encompassing voucher programs and public charter schools, has long been a dead end for the Democratic Party and liberals. That’s because the concept and its application pose a direct threat to the education status quo and one of the Left’s strongest political constituencies: teachers unions.
Although the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has tallied that the United States spends a larger share of its gross domestic product on education than any other country in the world, test scores for students are declining across the board.
Moreover, while teachers in the U.S. remain 49 percent unionized, competitively-compensated, and employed at an average or higher rate with respect to other professions, the restriction of school choice measures has left our education system now, alarmingly, re-segregating. American workers are less qualified when they ultimately enter the workforce, which is the most damning indictment of an educational system that is ostensibly well-capitalized and subsidized.
Democratic opposition to school choice initiatives isn’t even politically advantageous, either. As Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie wrote before the Senate vote, “A recent poll found that 68 percent of Americans favor expanding school choice, including 55 percent of self-described Democrats, 75 percent among Latinos, 75 percent among millennials and 72 percent among blacks.”
Robby Soave, Reason’s associate editor, added that: “Vouchers, one of the most important school choice reforms, allow disadvantaged minority students to take the money that would have gone toward their obligatory, failing school and spend it somewhere else. It’s the public education system that creates de facto segregation: by forcing students to attend the school assigned to them.”
If DeVos isn’t the policy wonk career politicians and bureaucrats preferred, she also represents an almost Platonic ideal of the Trumpian political movement, just as school choice embodies President Trump’s core message: Career politicians have continued to perpetuate and expand failed programs for their own expediency and self-preservation, at the expense of average people and their families.
The education system is an abject failure at every level, unable to meet the basic requirement of adequately equipping students with the skills they need upon entering the workforce and declining in objective, standardized measurements.
Here’s hoping DeVos and the Trump administration usher in a much-needed semester of change.
Tamer Abouras (@iamtamerabouras) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer and editor from Williamstown, N.J.
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