As Sen. Cory Gardner and his colleagues approach what is likely to be a historic confirmation vote for Betsy DeVos this week, I offer this message: it is possible to be both a fierce advocate for school choice and to fundamentally oppose DeVos for secretary of education.
I am a Colorado native who works on education in Detroit and can attest firsthand that Colorado, not Michigan, provides an educational system worthy of national replication.
In 1993, my father, David S. D’Evelyn, a Colorado Department of Education official, died in a plane crash, while helping lead the campaign for Colorado’s charter school law. I am a proud graduate of D’Evelyn Jr./Sr. High School, named in his honor, which is consistently rated among Colorado’s top high schools.
Now, I seek to continue this legacy through my work improving outcomes for Detroit students, where only 4 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in math and only 7 percent in reading. Detroit’s average ACT score is 15.9, which is just slightly higher than someone’s score if they guessed on every answer. So, for those of us living and working in this crisis, this upcoming confirmation vote is less of a political question and more of a moral one.
Sen. Gardner, whose political career started as a student in Yuma, threatening mass walkouts due to school funding inequities, cares deeply about America’s kids. He now has the opportunity and responsibility to join his colleagues in taking a stand on their behalf.
I offer three reasons why choice has not worked in Michigan under the DeVos model, each of which get to the heart of why the Senate should reject DeVos’ appointment:
● School choice is no benefit when all available choices are bad. DeVos champions school choice — whether through charter schools, tax credit scholarships or voucher programs — as the ultimate fix, but choice is merely the means to an end, not the end itself. Even though the number of students attending Detroit charter schools over the last 10 years has tripled, they are no better off by having this so-called choice for choice’s sake.
● Quality schools depend on accountability. The system DeVos helped devise in Michigan resembles a kind of “Wild West” of loose authorizing and accountability for charter schools. Because Michigan law allows multiple entities to authorize schools, failing schools facing the threat of closure by one entity, can simply “shop” around to find another sponsoring authorizer, while the state has only limited tools with which to intervene. Similarly, authorizers, which recoup fees from the schools they charter, have perverse incentives for keeping failing schools open.
● Education is not an ordinary marketplace. Treating education like a business pits competing priorities against one another: profit and quality. Michigan leads the nation in the number of for-profit management organizations running public charter schools (this is not permitted in Colorado), and Michigan’s school funding mechanism allows dollars to follow students, which DeVos believes is essential for competition. But the result is that Detroit students are caught in a constant tug-of-war, in which schools have taken to offering iPads and other incentives to lure students and to boost profit.
The past two years offer a particularly tragic morality tale of DeVos’ impact on the educational landscape in Detroit. Despite DeVos’ opposition, a coalition of historically disparate interests — including local business executives, government officials, teachers unions, philanthropic leaders, ministers, parents and students — united to develop a common vision for how to improve Detroit schools. This Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren worked with lawmakers to develop legislation to implement best practice oversight measures that thriving choice cities such as Denver, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, have all adopted.
Interestingly, while many Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed on the merit of this legislation, the continuing influx of DeVos money shifted the momentum away from the Coalition’s recommendations. During the critical period before and after the eventual defeat of this legislation, Betsy DeVos and her family poured over $1.45 million of donations into Republican legislators and organizations, averaging an unprecedented $25,000 per day over a seven week period. In the end, DeVos and political allies effectively stymied the campaign to make school choice in Detroit be more than just a political slogan. The status quo of having the worst-performing schools in the country persists to this day.
To be fair, no single person or family can be blamed for the deficiencies in Michigan’s educational system, but DeVos’ contribution to this state has been devastating. I urge Sen. Gardner to learn from what we’ve seen in Michigan and vote against DeVos for secretary of education.
Melanie D’Evelyn is an education policy expert from Detroit and a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
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