The night before Betsy DeVos was confirmed as United States Secretary of Education, Democratic Senators took shifts speaking nonstop for 24 hours in protest. The Minority Leader, New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer, stated, “The Senate has the responsibility to reject the nomination because she is so uniquely unqualified.” The next day, two Republican Senators voted against DeVos for the position. Citing conversations with numerous constituents, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski stated, “I have serious concerns about this nominee to be Secretary of Education, who has been so involved in one side of the equation, so immersed in the push for vouchers, that she may be unaware of what is successful in the public schools, and also what is broken and how to fix them.” The Senate was in a stalemate, and when Mike Pence was called in to cast the tie-breaking vote (which he did in favor of DeVos), it was the first time in history that a Vice President was needed to cast a tie-breaking vote for a Cabinet nominee.
Both two previous education secretaries under President Obama, Arne Duncan and John King, were moving in a pro-charter school, pro-voucher direction. However, DeVos is seen by those in education as more extreme. Her confirmation was contentious because of her background. A professional lobbyist in her home state of Michigan, she and her husband successfully worked to pass legislation in 1993 to welcome and direct public money toward charter schools. Eighty percent of the ensuing flood was found to be run by for-profit management companies unbound by financial transparency requirements, and the charter schools were performing little better on standardized tests than public schools. Yet DeVos continued to push for privatization, this time encouraging Michigan voters to amend the state constitution and adopt a voucher system. When the ballot measure failed, DeVos established the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), an advocacy organization for school choice, which helped the legislature lift the cap on charter schools in Michigan, reducing restrictions on their numbers and locations.
Charter schools are K-12 educational institutions, which are funded by taxpayers but managed privately. They operate independent of the nation’s public school system and aren’t beholden to the same standards. They don’t have school report cards or state testing. Their teachers don’t have to be state certified or union represented. They can select students for enrollment, unlike public schools, which must serve every student in their district. Last summer, DeVos and her husband spent $1.45 million to defeat legislation that would provide oversight of charter schools, allowing them to operate regardless of performance or student success.
The Rationale for an Outsider
“Charter schools in New York are basically funded by the local school district,” explains Kingston City School District (KCSD) Superintendent Paul Padalino. “When the student goes to a charter school, there’s a dollar figure attached by the State Education Department, and we give that money to the charter school on an appropriate per-pupil basis.” With charter and Catholic schools, the school district is required to provide transportation, textbooks, and services like special education and ESL, and health services.
The money, however, doesn’t always reflect the true cost of education. Certain students, such as those with disabilities, require services other students might not, and so could cost significantly more to educate. “When we calculate our per-pupil expenditures, it’s about the plant, the custodial staff, the health services—all these other things that we do,” Padalino clarifies, pointing out that infrastructure expenses remain when students matriculate elsewhere. “The charter school movement actually sometimes draws so much money out of the public system—this has happened in the city of Detroit—and the kids who are left in the public district are the kids who are at-risk or are receiving special ed services and then you’re comparing apples and oranges. Because we’re not talking about the same public school we would have.”
The rationale for an outsider heading the nation’s education system is that public schools are failing. “[DeVos has] been very critical of public schools,” agrees KCSD Board of Education (BOE) President Nora Scherer. “We have to be a little more vocal about the good things that are happening in schools, because there is a negative counter message and we have to act to refute that.”
Five years ago, when Padalino took his desk in the corner office, KCSD was facing a continued loss of school aid and a 2012-13 budget crunched by a new tax levy cap law, which required local governments and school districts to limit tax increases. Duncan was Secretary of Education and pushed states to adopt Common Core standards by threatened by funding cuts. KCSD hired teachers and consultants during that implementation to rewrite all the curricula so it aligned with the Common Core. The governor was pushing to consolidate services and merge districts. It all came to a head in Kingston. Under capacity in several buildings and with projected student populations in decline, post the 9/11-baby boom, Padalino made the painful choice to close four elementary schools and move fifth graders into the middle schools. The numbers in Kingston were serendipitous, in that the whole community of one school could be picked up and moved into another. For example, the remaining students and teachers at Sophie Finn fit neatly into the under-capacity Edson. Now, those downtown kids ride their school buses uptown, and many of their teachers moved with them.
As a result, the district consolidated resources, reduced expenses relating to traveling specialty teachers, and realized significant savings. “Most of our money is spent because we are obligated, based on regulations and legislation that we must follow as public schools,” Padalino says. “If you look at the changes that have come down over the last seven to 10 years, and how quickly we’ve adapted and still found success, we’re surprisingly nimble for the size of our organizations.”
At KCSD, graduation rates have increased. They’re currently considering ways to implement restorative justice practices, and a proposition to reopen one elementary school as a universal pre-kindergarten is on the ballot for this month’s school budget vote. Padalino would like to see the Secretary of Education properly fund and lead public education at the federal level. “And use that position as a vehicle to do something within an institution that already exists,” he says.
A Failing School Is Easy to Find
In January, the KCSD BOE passed a resolution expressing opposition to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos. “In writing the resolution,” says Board Member Robin Jacobowitz, “I wanted the KCSD community to be aware that the officials they have entrusted to oversee their public schools are deeply committed to that purpose, and that we oppose efforts that threaten the vibrancy of the public education system.” They weren’t alone. School boards in 25 districts around New York State were doing the same thing—nine of them in the Hudson Valley.
The New Paltz Central School District was one of them. “The opposition had to do with the feeling that there’s been a huge assault on public education throughout this country,” says Superintendent Maria Rice, intimating that the DeVos confirmation flies in the face of public education.
“A lot of people say the system is failing,” says NPCSD BOE Vice President Michael O’Donnell. “It’s fairly easy to make that argument because you can always find a failing school, and there’s always a belief that the free market could fix it. It’s a perfect relationship between poverty and outcome. There is nothing different in the overall system between that affluent area and the area in poverty. What is failing is the community that the school is located in. It’s the context in which those kids go to school, where they have a great deal of food insecurity, insecurity in the stability of their household. Many pervasive problems find their way into the classroom.”
Her first day on the job, DeVos made a joke on Twitter: “Day 1 on the job is done, but we’re only getting started. Now where do I find the pencils? :)” Public school teachers responded with a Twitter storm, listing the classroom supplies they buy out of pocket and letting her know that working all day without pencils is a materials infraction at many schools. “I see it as a social justice issue,” says Cynthia Clisort, a teacher’s union rep and reading teacher for KCSD. “We shouldn’t be making fun. We see kids every day who need free lunch. I spend a lot of money on my classroom. To be joking about where the pencils are seems callous and enormously out of touch.”
During her confirmation hearing, DeVos revealed a lack of understanding about issues in education, for instance, confusing the terms growth and proficiency in a conversation around measuring student progress. In discussing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which ensures the equality of those students, DeVos was apparently unaware that it was a federal law. “The complete and total disregard for the conversation around public education, and the thought, or the lack of thought, that she should be prepared to discuss and know it is most telling,” says NPCSD BOE President Aimee Hemminger. “She has a motive and a clear idea of what she thinks should happen.”
A Federal Voucher Program
It’s anticipated that DeVos has the intention of implementing a federal voucher program, so parents can subsidize private and religious school tuition. There are two common ways that can be done: state-funded scholarships withdrawn from public school budgets would offer tuition assistance; tax credits would allow families to write off tuition expenses on their personal taxes.
In New Paltz, about three-quarters of the budget is funded through local property taxes. Title I funds, a federal program that subsidizes support for students at risk, offset their elementary remedial reading programs. Even the NPCSD, which doesn’t have any Title I schools, meaning a certain percentage of students are deemed low income, feels concern. “Even though others may lose half or three-quarters of their funding, even losing a quarter would be devastating,” explains Hemminger.
However they’re funded, vouchers pose problems for the low-income families they promise to serve. They won’t cover private school tuition 100 percent, so for families who can’t make up whatever the difference, their choices are limited. “If you wanted to really invest money in improving education,” says O’Donnell, “there are a lot of other areas which would come well ahead of a voucher program. Some of those, ironically, like teacher training, early childhood education, preschool, and afterschool activities (the things that have been researched and do have real effects), are those that are getting cut by the proposed budget.”
But the good news is that funding our local public schools is predominantly the responsibility of the states. According to the US Department of Education, only eight percent of elementary and secondary school budgets come from federal sources. “The great thing for us in New York State is that we’re a little bit insulated. We tend to be more progressive and more aggressive. We tend to spend more on education, and we tend to be on the cutting edge,” muses Padalino. “Education is expensive, but not educating kids is a lot more expensive.”
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This article appears in May 2017.
