DeVos doesn’t get it

Betsy DeVos just doesn’t seem to get it.

It’s been nearly 17 months since Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote to shut the door on a confirmation process that was significantly more contentious than it ever should have been. If you had removed DeVos from the equation and substituted her with a different billionaire with no education degree, no work experience – teaching or otherwise – in the public schools, no personal experience attending public schools, no parental experience sending children to public schools, and a seemingly unquenchable thirst to take federal dollars and infuse them into alternative education systems, the Senate confirmation hearings might have been half as much of a head-shaking, meme-generating circus as DeVos’ was. Half – at most.

DeVos’ shallow resume was more enlightening at the time than it was outright disqualifying. To be sure, many of DeVos’ predecessors also lacked a background in education or personal experience in the public school setting. But DeVos’ utter inability to answer basic questions in coherent fashion, coupled with her utter inability to draw from personal experience in articulating her professional objectives, was a shot across the bow from the Trump administration: Get a load of this one, public schools – the battle is on.

And the battle has raged. No one can credibly argue that our public schools and the teachers who drive them are on solid financial footing – not with teachers buying their own classroom supplies and taking Uber shifts in the evening to make ends meet. Yet an anti-education sentiment nevertheless seems to linger in the halls of government.

The distaste is palpable. Prior to becoming Secretary of Education, DeVos referred to public education as a “dead end.”

The cold reality is that our future workers have a well-educated international workforce to deal with – competition that continues to move in as the generations roll by. A skilled workforce is the key to innovation, and DeVos is not helping. Perhaps she doesn’t get it.

China gets it. The world’s most populated nation has been working for decades to improve the quality of education and increase access throughout the entire country. Its plan is working – by 2015, China’s literacy rate for those 15 and older was an impressive 96.4 percent. Meanwhile, the most recent study by the U.S. Department of Education reflects that 32 million adults in America – roughly 14 percent – exhibit a “below basic” reading level.

DeVos does not shy away from the data – she embraces it, and it serves as ammunition for her anti-public school rhetoric. In a March interview with “60 Minutes,” she declared: “We have invested billions and billions of dollars from the federal level, and we have seen zero results.”

According to DeVos, our nationwide test scores cannot get much worse, and she acknowledges, rightfully, that our scores remain stagnant vis-à-vis our competitors across the world.

Her foot is on the gas, but DeVos is stuck in one gear: charter, private and parochial schools. It should be clear to all of us by now: She just doesn’t get it.

There are two things, specifically, that DeVos doesn’t get. The first is that jettisoning our public school system is not the right thing to do – and even if it were, she’s not the right person to do it.

Why would we want to privatize a system in which children – not sophisticated adults – are the core consumers, and when a managerial approach centered on bottom-line figures would be utterly devastating to its key objectives? And why should a billionaire with no public school exposure convince us otherwise?

The second is that her attack on public education undermines the nationalistic rhetoric emanating from the White House. What could be more patriotic than having our government train our youth to go out and fight on their own soil for the same jobs as our international competitors? Other countries across the world seem to grasp this concept, but DeVos – and President Trump by association – seem oblivious to the paradox.

Then again, perhaps they’re not oblivious at all. Maybe DeVos does get it, and the rest of us are being played. We must keep watch.