INDIANAPOLIS – Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told a friendly crowd that President Trump will release a spending plan today to support “the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation’s history.”
But a lot of questions remain about how the federal government might achieve that expansion.
Speaking Monday at the American Federation for Children’s annual policy summit, DeVos offered few details about what a national plan would look like. But she outlined a series of principles.
School choice options would have to be accountable to parents, not officials in Washington. The new administration would avoid “creating a new federal bureaucracy or … bribing states with their own taxpayers’ money” — a subtle jab at Obama-era initiatives like Race to the Top.
States would decide whether to participate in the new federal push. DeVos said declining to create new options for their residents would be a “terrible mistake,” but one for which state-level politicians would have to defend.
“The future is bleak for millions of students if we only continue to tinker around the edges of education reform,” she said. “The time has expired for ‘reform.’ We need a transformation — a transformation that will open up America’s closed and antiquated education system.”
Outlines of the president’s proposed budget released earlier this year and new details reported by outlets like the Washington Post show the Trump Administration wants to push a $1 billion competitive program encouraging school systems to embrace weighted student funding. An amount of money, calculated based on needs and characteristics, would follow each child to whatever school he or she attends. Trump also wants to boost spending on charter school grants and back other school choice initiatives.
Advocates gathered in Indianapolis are interested in another potential piece of the federal school choice agenda: A tax credit to fund private school scholarships. That concept is likely to emerge later this year, as part of a tax reform plan. And school choice advocates remain divided over whether and how to pursue it.
“I liked what I heard last night,” Joe McTighe of the Council for American Private Education said this morning. He praised the secretary for using the federal “bully pulpit” to expand options for students in states like Texas or New York — where private school choice programs don’t currently exist — while preserving an “element of subsidiarity” that allows states to set their own policies.
DeVos was introduced by school choice alum Denisha Meriwether and greeted with roaring applause by supporters of the organization she previously chaired.
Outside, however, protesters aligned with Indiana teachers unions and the Democratic Party had other ideas. Kristina Frey, the parent of the third-grader, said she sent her child to a public school rated a D by the state. Many students leave with the help of Indiana’s robust school choice options. Yet she called out recent studies that show declining test scores among students who enroll in private schools with the help of school vouchers.
“It’s unconscionable to spend public dollars on programs with those kinds of results,” she said.
At the same time, Frey worried school choice creates “small bubbles of carefully curated students” that exclude vulnerable groups.
Public education, she said, is “about keeping all of our schools strong, for all of our students, so the community that we all live in, that we all call home, stays strong,” she said.
In her remarks, DeVos advocated an all-of-the-above approach in which public schools play an essential role.
And she referenced the story of a student named Michael, whom she met at Valencia Community College in Orlando. He was passed on to from one grade to the next without making academic progress. She used his story to drive home the point that a system that allows some students to slip like the cracks can’t possibly serve all children well — and those students need more options.
“As long as there is one student who is being failed, one student denied access to the education that works for him or her, one student, like Michael, forced into a ‘dangerous daycare,’ then our work is not done,” she said. “We cannot settle when a child’s needs are not being met in the classroom.”
