The committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday, January 31 [DeVos passed by 1 vote], on the nomination. So far there’s not much sign of Republican defections, even though DeVos' appearance before it was a disaster. The chairman, Lamar Alexander, desperately tried to throw himself in front of the train wreck. But it was hopeless, even before DeVos said that guns in school might be necessary “to protect from potential grizzlies.”
Poor Senator Alexander, who was once secretary of education himself, has an excellent reputation for bipartisanship. But there he was, limiting his members to five minutes worth of questions each and refusing to allow a second round.
In the short time allotted, the committee did manage to learn that DeVos doesn’t understand federal laws on educating disabled students and that in all her years working on school reform in Detroit, she has never asked any public school principals whether they had enough resources.
We have two problems here. One is that DeVos is obviously unqualified. While it was nice to learn that she “mentors students,” that’s not really a great preparation for running a 4,400-employee organization with a $68 billion budget. She has never actually worked in a school system or managed a large institution — she and her husband became billionaires through the old-fashioned strategy of having stupendously rich parents.
DeVos’ big selling point for Republicans is her manic devotion to charter schools. There are, of course, some great charters around the country. But there are also some terrible ones, and she is deeply unenthusiastic about any system that would weed out the losers.
This would be the second problem.
DeVos seems to be a particularly big fan of for-profit schools. There’s nothing more disturbing about the school-choice movement than its infatuation with private enterprise. Running schools like a business (and, of course, driving away the teachers unions) is supposed to create more efficiency. But mainly, it creates more income for management. About 80 percent of the charters in the Michigan system are for-profit, and The Free Press investigation found that the charters were generally spending more on administration and less on the classroom than traditional districts.
The DeVos family has invested in a company called K12, which runs online charters and has a history of wooing urban parents by suggesting that their kids will be safer going to school in the living room. The Walton Family Foundation, a huge supporter of school choice in general, funded a recent study which determined that if the virtual charters were grouped together as a single school district, “it would be the ninth-largest in the country and among the worst performing.”
At the hearing, Senator Tim Kaine (wow, seems like a long time since we were thinking about Tim Kaine) asked whether DeVos would insist upon “equal accountability” for all schools that receive federal funding “whether public, public charter or private.”
“I support accountability,” said the nominee. This went on for some time, but she just would not go for that “equal.”
Finally, Kaine volunteered that he thought all schools that receive taxpayer funding should be equally accountable, and he asked if DeVos agreed.
“Well, no,” she replied.
