In an interview once with a local school board candidate, I asked about charter schools. The candidate said he hadn’t researched charter schools. Or vouchers. Or Common Core. Wasteful spending in the schools drove him to run, but he couldn’t cite specifics. He also opposed teachers inserting personal opinion into their instruction, although he couldn’t provide any examples.
Why should voters elect him given how little he knew about education? Because, he said, he’d bring a fresh perspective and learn on the job.
Maybe, that’s Betsy DeVos’ defense, although it was unclear from her recent “60 Minutes” appearance how much she learned in her year leading the U.S. Department of Education.
A relentless proponent of providing parents with alternatives to traditional public schools, Secretary of Education DeVos frustrated even supporters with her vague responses and shallow rebuttals.
Eva Moskowitz, founder of New York's Success Academy charter school, supports DeVos but commented at a press conference the interview showed the secretary was not “ready for primetime in terms of answering all of the complex questions that need to be answered on the topic of public education and choice.”
DeVos arrived in Washington without the gilded resume of her predecessor John King, a graduate of Harvard, Columbia University’s Teachers College and Yale Law School who had been commissioner of education for New York state, managing director with Uncommon Schools, which operates some of the country’s highest-performing urban public schools, and founder of a vaunted charter in Boston.
Born into great wealth and marrying into even greater, DeVos never worked in public schools, and nether she nor her children attended them. Her experience in education was as an ardent advocate of choice and vouchers in her home state of Michigan.
Journalist Lesley Stahl questioned DeVos on whether choice had improved schools in Michigan. This should have been the ideal moment for DeVos to extol the programs she helped create through large investments of time and money. But instead of crowing, she crashed.
Lesley Stahl: Have the public schools in Michigan gotten better?
Betsy DeVos: I don't know. Overall, I— I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.
Lesley Stahl: The whole state is not doing well.
Betsy DeVos: Well, there are certainly lots of pockets where this— the students are doing well and—
Lesley Stahl: No, but your argument that if you take funds away that the schools will get better, is not working in Michigan where you had a huge impact and influence over the direction of the school system here.
Betsy DeVos: I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.
The problem is DeVos hasn’t demonstrated a similar reluctance to speak in general about traditional public schools, decrying them as one-size-fits-all, antiquated and Blockbusters in the age of Netflix.
A potentially positive outcome of the damning “60 Minutes” segment could be DeVos’ admission she's yet to visit any of the struggling schools she’s criticized. On Tuesday, after references to the interview, DeVos told the House Appropriations Committee, “I think it would be important to visit some poor performing schools, I think the question is: will they let me in?”
They may -- if she condemns less and listens more.
DeVos recently tweeted a historic photo of a teacher lecturing to rows of students alongside a similar photo of what she said was a modern classroom, writing: “Sit down; don’t talk; eyes up front. Wait for the bell. Walk to the next class. Everything about our lives has moved beyond the industrial era. But American education largely hasn’t.”
However, DeVos’ so-called present-day classroom was not a real class, but a stock photo, and teachers were quick to point out few classrooms today are that static. Teachers shared lively photos of their kids collaborating in small groups, designing on whiteboards, sitting on the floor, building models and working on labs.
A fifth grade teacher in Texas who is Google certified, Coding Club Coach and Quizlet Ambassador, tweeted: “Don’t you know that stock photos aren’t real? How many classrooms have you visited in the past year? Classrooms don’t look like that anymore. Students don’t work like that anymore. I would think that as Sec of Edu you would be celebrating us, not putting us down.”
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