Betsy DeVos v the bitter status quo: Column

Betsy DeVos will become our new secretary of Education. Nonetheless, the process has been one of the rockiest for a Trump nominee.

Her detractors have been doing everything they can to smear the prominent reformer from Michigan. Teachers’ union leaders have been especially vitriolic in their opposition to the appointment. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said, “In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” Lily Eskelsen García, her counterpart at the National Education Association, claims that DeVos “…is an actual danger to our students…and has made a career trying to destroy neighborhood public schools.” Others who criticize her complain that she is a billionaire, never attended a public school and has no teaching experience.

Even in the school choice movement, many are not yet ready to support her. The only nationally recognized parent group backing DeVos is the New York City Parents Union, attributed to, in part, lingering concerns about being caught in a confirmation crossfire directed by powerful special interests and efforts to marginalize supportive parents. Certainly, there is a disconnect that DeVos, if confirmed, will have to overcome.

DeVos, in our opinion, should be confirmed — and should look to partner with real world parents, in leading the path for change.

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DeVos has pledged to challenge the status quo interests in American education, where students are of the least concern to the adults who flourish under the current system. She intends to prioritize the needs of parents, providing them unfettered school choice options — including vouchers, educational savings accounts, homeschooling, etc. She understands that education succeeds when parents, not the state are the education architects of their own children’s futures.

The naysayers like to portray DeVos’ views on school choice as out of the American mainstream, but nothing could be further from the truth. A recent national EdChoice survey revealed that most American parents are not getting the educational options they want. When asked about their preferences, 41% of school parents prefer a private school; 28%, a public district school; 17%, a charter school; 11%, home school. But as things stand now, 83% of students attend traditional public schools.

It’s about time we had a secretary of Education who truly maximized the educational opportunities of all children — including those living in poverty who are frequently forced to attend their all-too-often failing local school. While President Obama’s secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, challenged the entrenched interests in education, he didn’t go far enough. DeVos will disrupt business-as-usual — with an intensified focus on the rights of parents to choose the right school for their children, no longer being subservient to their neighborhood zip code-mandated school or some anonymous education bureaucrat assigning kids to a school based on arbitrary laws irrespective if that school is failing.

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American schools are still too separate and still too unequal and are in dire need of restructuring. With DeVos at the helm, and flanked by parents from New York to California who have the audacity to stand up against the powerful monied special interests which seek to put their jobs and contracts before the needs of kids, we just might see the dawn of a new era of hope in America — a new era founded upon the most essential of cornerstones: education.

Gloria Romero is the retired Democratic California senate majority leader, author of the Parent Empowerment Act of 2010 and executive director of Scholarship Prep Charter School. Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network.

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