Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Betsy DeVos for U.S. Education Secretary. Given that Trump (like Hillary Clinton) said very little about public education policy on the campaign trail, the pick offers more of a window into how a Trump administration might treat public education. DeVos has never attended or taught at a public school nor have her own children attended public schools. That’s a big concern for me—the person proposing and directing federal policy has no experience in the arena in which she’d be placed in charge. Maybe that would result in a move to reduce some of aspects of governmental bureaucracy that can hamstring schools, which could be a good thing. Or, it might lead to a plan to give parents more choice in their kids schooling through vouchers for private schools, which would likely be a bad–possibly very bad–thing (DeVos and Trump have both touted educational vouchers as a way to “shake up the status quo” in public schools, but the largest and longest running such program in Wisconsin has had very mixed results, so the complications of trying something similar on a national scale is not wise, in my opinion).
Admittedly, I knew nothing about DeVos a week ago, so the nomination process may reveal more that might change my (and your) opinion of DeVos and her ideas. We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, here are the words of DeVos herself on education:
- The Betsy DeVos website offers some of her thoughts about public education
- Here’s a collection of quotes about education from DeVos from over the past several years