Betsy DeVos’s Education Reform Agenda: What Principals—and Their Publics

Abstract

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. Secretary of Education, has a reform agenda to advance school choice. Her track record includes enabling charter school growth in Michigan at taxpayers’ expense with little oversight or accountability. Although an effective advocate, DeVos represents a broader policy movement to privatize American education, much of it happening beneath public awareness. Understanding Ms. DeVos’s policy goals, how the President and Congress are supporting these, and how privatization is occurring in states can help principals and education leaders recognize the stakes, learn what to watch for, and take appropriate actions to preserve and strengthen America’s public schools.

Keywords

DeVos school choice privatization vouchers charter schools American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

Introduction

On February 7, 2017, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist, businesswoman, Republican megadonor, and long-time school choice advocate, became steward of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. A controversial nominee, Ms. DeVos is the first education secretary in our history who has not been a government official, school administrator or teacher, or public school parent or student. During her confirmation hearings, she expressed confusion over federal law and education policy, refused to commit to maintaining funding for public schools, and would not agree with the need for equity and accountability for all federally funded schools (Levy, 2017a; Strauss, 2017). Vice President Mike Pence had to cast the historic tie-breaking vote. Critics of her confirmation cited her active leadership favoring school choice, charter schools, private and religious schools, and taxpayer-funded vouchers as signs of her deep disaffection with public schools. They also noted her extensive conflict of interests and expressed concern that she would divert money away from vulnerable students and to the wealthy for-profit school owners (Stratford, 2017; Strauss, 2016).

The U.S. Department of Education has a $70 billion budget and federal oversight of the nation’s 98,000 public schools that educate around 90% of America’s children (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). The Department plays an important role in implementing federal education laws. It coordinates federal assistance to education and enforces legal obligations in student aid, equal access to educational opportunity, and civil rights protections. It also brings national attention to education issues.

Over the past decades, conservative think tanks and foundations’ well resourced, skillful, and persistent criticisms of “big government” and the public schools’ “establishment” in Op-ed columns and research reports that champion school choice have persuaded many citizens, editorial boards, citizens and policy makers of school choice’s benefits (Boyd, 2007). Increasingly, federal, state, and local dollars are going to educational entrepreneurs and private citizens to foster private gain at public expense. Ms. DeVos has been a major player in these efforts. But most Americans do not want taxpayer dollars funding private education. By a 13-point gap, a 2017 Phi Delta Kappan ([PDK], “The 49th Annual PDK,” 2017) poll finds that most Americans continue to oppose, rather than favor, using public funds to send students to private schools (52%-39%). The better they understand how voucher programs work, the higher their opposition (“The 49th Annual PDK,” 2017, K12).

Given the uproar surrounding her confirmation and the implications for public schools, it is essential to ask: Who is Betsy DeVos? What are her education reform goals? What is her track record in the education arena? How are President Trump, the U.S. Congress, conservative policy organizations, and state legislatures positioning our country to advance education privatization? And how are these actions likely to affect school districts and schools? This article provides a closer look, possible answers, and the implications for principals, professors, and education leaders.

Betsy DeVos: A Brief Political and Policy Biography

Elisabeth “Betsy” Prince DeVos was born in Grand Rapids, MI in 1958. Her father, an innovator and entrepreneur, made a fortune in the auto parts trade. Her husband, Dick DeVos, is son of Amway founder, Richard DeVos, Sr. They have four children. Neither Betsy nor her children ever attended public schools (Richmond, 2017).

With assets reported between $583 million and $1.5 billion, Betsy and Dick DeVos are longtime Michigan Republican Party activists and donors (Toppo, 2017). Ms. DeVos is a four-time former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Husband Dick, a former Michigan Board of Education member, was the 2006 Republican candidate for Michigan governor. During her Education Secretary nomination process, Ms. DeVos revealed that she, personally, had given $5.3 million in political donations over the past 5 years, including nearly $2 million in contributions to 2016 presidential candidates and GOP groups (Toppo, 2017). According to Ms. DeVos, she left politics to focus on her “real passion”—“education and learning” (DeVos, 2015).

In education circles, Ms. DeVos champions school choice, a market-based privatization of public education using charter schools and vouchers. She and her husband were politically instrumental in passing Michigan’s first charter-school bill (1993), using their own and their family’s extraordinary wealth to shape education reform. Her pro–school choice advocacy group, the American Federation for Children (2017), works to create programs and pass laws that require using public funds to pay for private school tuition via vouchers and similar programs. Notably, her success in spreading charter schools in Michigan has not been matched by student achievement; most Michigan charters have recorded student achievement test scores in reading and math below the state average (Emma, Wermund, & Hefling, 2016; Joy & Arellano, 2016; Lenhoff, Arellano, & Zeman, 2013).

Ms. DeVos on Education Privatization

Ms. DeVos’s desire to “revolutionize” the education delivery system, her preference for limited government, her plan to use federal dollars to follow each child, and her careful language anchor her “reform” agenda.

A “Revolutionized” Education Delivery System

Calling the American education delivery system “antiquated” and “frankly embarrassing” (DeVos, 2015), Ms. DeVos compares it to Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line 90 years ago. She calls the traditional education system a “monopoly” and a “dead end” (Wermund, 2016). She commented, “We must revolutionize our education delivery system in America . . . [to] allow for choice, innovation, and freedom” (DeVos, 2015). Her means of accomplishing this is to increase parental choice of schools for their children—at taxpayers’ expense (Boston, 2010; Brown, 2017; Klein, 2017b).

Limited Government

DeVos prefers limited government that allows individuals maximum freedom to pursue their own values and interests. As she stressed in her 2015 SXSW Education speech, “Government really sucks. And it doesn’t matter which party is in power” (DeVos, 2015). She claims that she accepted the Secretary of Education position “because I want to return power in education back to where it belongs: with parents, communities, and states” (Camera, 2017a). In fact, DeVos wants to shrink the federal role in local schools, reduce the U.S. Department of Education’s size and scope, and favors states taking the policy initiative on education (Ujifusa, 2017a).

Education Dollars Should Follow Each Child

As expressed in her 2015 SXSW speech, Ms. DeVos advocates for education dollars to follow each child “instead of forcing the child to follow the dollars” (DeVos, 2015). She proposes several ways to make this happen: vouchers, portability of federal funds, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts (ESA).

Vouchers are state education dollars used to pay tuition at private or home schools. Frequently, voucher programs face legal challenges when they direct public money to religiously based organizations in states where this practice violates the state’s constitution.

Portability is the federal policy that allows states to use federal Title I or IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) dollars to follow eligible low-income or special-needs students, respectively, to be used as vouchers to their choice of charter school or for-profit private or religious school (Gordon, 2017; Ushomirsky & Williams, 2015). Portability would switch the focus of federal dollars from what the schools receive to what the individual students receive. While this idea may be intuitively appealing, the results typically take Title I and IDEA funds away from the highest needs districts and give the money to more affluent and lower need districts and schools (Ushomirsky & Williams, 2015), causing both fiscal and educational problems. Plus, under current law, special-needs students attending private schools are not guaranteed the full range of legal protections and services that they have in public schools (Benner & Ulrich, 2017; Goldstein, 2017a).

Tax credit scholarship programs allow corporations or individuals to offset state tax liability by donating to a private, nonprofit scholarship organization. In turn, the money from this fund goes to families to pay for private school tuition, redirecting potential taxpayer dollars and completely bypassing state coffers that pay for education and other services. Seventeen states now have such programs (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017). In 2015-2016, 92,000 students received tax credit scholarships; recipients were overwhelmingly African American and Hispanic, with over 70% of the scholarship directed at religious, primarily Christian schools (Kamenetz, 2017b).

Education savings accounts (ESA), also known as Education Scholarship Accounts or Individualized Education Accounts, are fiscal programs into which the state sets aside money, usually based on a per-pupil funding formula, into individual bank accounts for participating K-12 students. Parents or guardians manage and withdraw those dollars to spend on approved educational expenses, including private school tuition, home schooling, curriculum materials, and standardized test fees (ExcelinEd, 2014, 2017; Prothero, 2016). Parents can save unused ESA funds for future K-12 and higher education expenses. Five states have enacted ESA programs: Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada (ExcelinEd, 2017). Additional states are interested in similar legislation (Peshek, 2017).

Careful Language

To make her privatizing vision more widely acceptable, DeVos relies on market research for selecting her language about school choice (Tabachnick, 2012). Polls by the American Federation for Children, a pro–voucher lobbying group (that Ms. DeVos founded and once led), show that American voters are significantly less likely to support “vouchers” than “choice” (American Federation for Children, 2016; Brown, 2016). Similarly, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, has counseled choice advocates to use the term, opportunity scholarships instead of vouchers (Brown, 2016).

For instance, instead of openly expressing a desire to dismantle public schools, Ms. DeVos says her priority is to bring market incentives and competition to education to give families more educational options, like those she and other wealthy families have for their children. She promotes vouchers that go largely to low-income African American and Hispanic communities so they need not attend “failing schools” (Tabachnick, 2012). In a 2017 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ms. DeVos (2017) claimed that to increase educational innovation, she wants to “provide students, parents, and teachers with more flexibility about how education is delivered and … experienced and to protect and preserve personal freedoms.”

Advancing Privatization Through School Choice

According to school choice theory, when public schools compete for students, they will either improve their educational quality and student achievement outcomes and promote better matches between students and schools—or shut down (Friedman, 1962; Hoxby, 2003). Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have enacted a range of public and private school choice programs (Robinson, 2016). As of the 2015-2016 school year, charter school enrollment accounts for 6% of the 50 million public school students in the United States, and more than 400,000 children attended public-funded private school programs (Robinson, 2016).

Since the 1990s, Ms. DeVos’s influence is visible in almost every major piece of education-related legislation in Michigan. Given states’ traditional role in driving education policy, Every Student Succeeds Act’s (ESSA, 2015) reliance on states’ discretion in making educational decisions, and Ms. DeVos antipathy toward federalism, understanding what Ms. DeVos accomplished in Michigan politics and education give insights into what may occur in other states.

Charter Schools

Charter schools—public or privately managed public schools that claim to offer students more innovation and higher performance than available in traditional public schools (TPSs) in exchange for taxpayer dollars, greater flexibility, and less oversight—are a DeVos priority. Gatekeepers for charter schools operate at the state and local levels.

Charter Authorizers

State laws differ on the charter authorizers’ roles and responsibilities regarding charter approval, renewal, and revocation of a charter.

To foster competition, the Michigan legislators wrote their laws to permit any public higher education institution, TPS district, or intermediate district the right to authorize charters. Currently, Michigan has about 40 charter authorizers, one of the highest numbers in the country (Joy & Arellano, 2016). The state’s three largest authorizers (Central Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, and Bay Mills Community College) oversee the education of approximately 85,000 of the nearly 145,000 charter students statewide. Approximately one quarter of the charter schools they authorize rank among the worst performing 10% of Michigan schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016). Although charter schools are included in the state school accountability system, their authorizers are not. This means that although Michigan teachers working in poorly performing charters can lose their tenure, their Michigan charter authorizers can continue to collect $1 billion taxpayer dollars annually without improving or closing their charter schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016).

As sole state gatekeepers, Michigan charter authorizers decide the standards by which charter schools will open, where they will operate, and for how long. Authorizers determine academic progress goals, whether schools are meeting them, and whether to intervene or close schools when students’ academic performance falls short. According to Education Trust-Midwest, Michigan legislators wrote the charter school law without meaningful regulations and accountability (Joy & Arellano, 2016). Moreover, in Michigan, charter authorizers are allowed to receive up to 3% of the total state school aid that their charter schools will receive, perhaps reducing their willingness to close chronically underperformers (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2017).

As a result, only charter authorizers—not the governor, state commissioner, or board of education—can shutter failing schools (Zernike, 2016). By comparison, other states have tighter regulations on when charter schools must close (Tatter, 2017).

Charter School Operators

Typically, charter authorizers can select and approve charter operators to manage the schools’ major functions and daily operations. These charter management organizations (CMOs) or educational management organizations (EMOs) can be either nonprofit or for-profit. In rare cases, schools may be self-managed. CMOs and EMOs may perform administrative, financial, compliance, human resources, professional development, instructional, and facilities management functions. They hire teachers, determine curriculum, and purchase materials. Michigan has approximately 90 for-profit operators who run an estimated 80% of Michigan charter schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016; Zernike, 2016). Michigan does not require charter authorizers to have CMOs and EMOs disclose conflicts of interest in their charter application (Emma et al., 2016; U.S. Department of Education, 2016). By comparison, other states have moved to curb the expansion of for-profit charters or banned them outright (Henderson, 2016); for-profit CMOs and EMOs represent only 13% of charter schools nationwide (Tatter, 2017).

To their backers, CMOs and EMOs bring an important entrepreneurial spirit and a competitive environment to public education. Critics see them differently. Lack of tracking, oversight, and accountability for Michigan’s CMOs and EMOs brings substantial risk of fiscal misconduct. A Detroit Free Press investigation found that Michigan’s CMOs and EMOs receive most of the money going to charter schools and have little accountability or transparency. The results include “Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders, and employees steering lucrative contracts to themselves or insiders” (Dixon, 2017).

Additionally, charter schools often misuse federal funds under Title I and IDEA formula grants and other grants. A 2016 federal audit of CMOs/EMOs in six states, including Michigan, found high risks of financial mismanagement (from waste, fraud, and abuse, including conflicts of interest, related-party transactions, and insufficient segregation of duties), lack of accountability over federal funds (from charter boards ceding authority to CMOs/EMOs, jeopardizing compliance with federal requirements), and performance risk (by ceding authority to CMOs/EMOs, charter stakeholders may not have sufficient assurance that charters are servicing students in accord with federal program requirements, risking program integrity and K-12 education (U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

Michigan Charter School Academic Performance

Despite two decades of charter school growth, Michigan ranks near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, a nationally representative test. The state’s charter schools scored worse on that test than their TPS peers (Emma et al., 2016). Although slightly more than 10% of the charter schools perform in the top tier academically for 2013-2014, nearly half of all charters ranked in the bottom quarter of all schools statewide (Henderson, 2016). Approximately 75% of all Michigan public schools, both charters and traditional, performed better than private charters; 67% of Michigan’s charter schools performed worse than Detroit Public Schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016; Lenhoff et al., 2013).

Likewise, a 2013 Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) report found that 8 in 10 Michigan charters, Grades 3 to 8, have academic achievement in reading and math below the state average. Although the study found that charter school students showed academic progress at a significantly faster rate than their matched TPS counterparts, the effect size for student growth and achievement in all cases ranged from 2.5% to 8.8% of one standard deviation difference (CREDO, 2013). That is, students with consistently positive effect sizes will eventually close the achievement gap if given enough time, but they may leave the school before reducing the gap. Nonetheless, advocates for unrestricted charter school growth argue that learning gains alone—not absolute achievement—should matter when assessing school performance. By contrast, critics contend that although academic growth is important, in the end, high schools, colleges, and employers will hold children accountable for their overall competencies and achievement (Joy & Arellano, 2016).

National Charter School Academic Performance

Nationally, research finds mixed results about how well charter schools are educating their students. In 2009, in the first national assessment of charter school impacts on students’ academic performance (academic growth), CREDO looked at 16 states that educated more than 70% of charter school students in the United States and found wide state-by-state variations in performance. The findings: 17% of charters provided superior educational opportunities, nearly 50% had results no different from the local public school options, and 37% generated learning results that were significantly worse than had students remained in TPS (CREDO, 2009). CREDO concluded, in general, charter students were not achieving as well as their TPS peers.

In a 2013 follow-up study of charter school performance in 27 states, including over 95% of all U.S. charter school students, CREDO found “overall improvement on learning gains” in reading and math for charter students in nearly half of charter schools relative to students in TPS. Importantly, investigators attributed the positive findings not to the charters themselves, but rather to the closure of many “severely underperforming” charter schools since 2009 and to their baseline comparisons with TPS that showed slower growth—and a lower standard for appraisal—in 2013. Researchers also found that charters across states and schools varied significantly in performance, a reflection of unequal quality (CREDO, 2013).

A 2015 CREDO study on urban charter schools in 41 regions in 22 states found, in aggregate, higher levels of student annual growth in math and reading over time, as compared to their TPS peers, with more better performing charter schools (than TPS) and fewer underperforming charter schools than in their earlier studies. In some urban areas, however, no charter schools were performing better than their TPS alternatives, and more than half were significantly worse (CREDO, 2015b). Results from these studies suggest that states with a strong commitment to quality by school and authorizers, and the capacity to deliver it, account for the improvements (Cremata et al., 2013).

Weak Accountability

To a large degree, charter effectiveness depends on state charter laws and local environments having a strong commitment to academic quality, sound fiscal stewardship, and the practices to enact them. State legislatures establish the regulatory frameworks that define academic and fiscal performance standards for charter authorizers and the penalties for not meeting them. Ideally, states also set the tracking, monitoring, and accountability practices they will use to enforce these expectations, and legislators address in state budgets the costs of adequately staffing those who monitor and enforce these regulations. When these do not happen—when charter schools and their authorizers face little tracking and oversight and few adverse consequences for their poor decisions—they have little incentive to improve their procedures and close poorly performing schools (Joy & Arellano, 2016).

In Michigan, the legislators wrote their charter school laws without a clear regulatory framework that defines performance standards for charter authorizers and the consequences for not meeting them. Many failing charter schools—where students are performing at lower levels than comparable students in TPSs—continue to operate for years. Yet despite academic and financial data showing the need for change, in 2011, in response to intensive procharter lobbying from the largely DeVos-funded Mackinac Center and the Ms. DeVos–founded Great Lakes Education Project, the Michigan legislature voted to lift the cap on the number of charter schools without designating performance standards, stronger oversight, or other regulations to guide the sector to best serve children (Binelli, 2017; Joy & Arellano, 2016; Michigan Legislature, 2011). The 2011 law also repealed longstanding requirement that the State Department of Education issue annual reports monitoring charter school performance (Zernike, 2016). In 2014, when the Michigan Department of Education and state superintendent tried to use their limited authority to hold charter authorizers accountable for their fiscal and academic performance, Michigan charter school organizations strongly objected; and the public universities retorted that they were constitutionally autonomous from state oversight and accountability. As recently as 2016, the state only had the ability to suspend authorizers for not engaging in “appropriate continuing oversight.” Neither the governor nor the state superintendent has the formal authority to revoke a chronically low-performing authorizer’s ability to open and expand Michigan charter schools, despite receiving more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars annually (Dixon, 2017; Joy & Arellano, 2016).

When it comes to Michigan’s charter accountability, Ms. DeVos appears to have hedged her bets. In 2016, she and other Michigan school choice supporters backed some level of accountability standards, including requiring automatic closure of charters that rank in the bottom 5% of schools for three consecutive years. Authorizers who want to open a new charter school in Detroit must be accredited, and failing charters can no longer “shop” for a new authorizer (Emma et al., 2016). At the same time, DeVos’s advocacy group, the Great Lakes Education Project, vigorously resisted a proposed Detroit commission focused on improving both charters and traditional schools, arguing it would be obligated to the city’s mayor and school district officials (Emma et al., 2016). The DeVoses gave $1.45 million to state Republicans immediately after lawmakers removed the Detroit commission section of the bill that DeVoses opposed (Emma et al., 2016). During her U.S. Senate confirmation testimony, DeVos refused to commit to the same accountability standards for charter and private schools as those in place for taxpayer-funded TPSs (Pallas, 2017).

Vouchers, Schools of Choice, and Virtual Schools

In Michigan, Ms. DeVos also advocated for other school choice options, including school vouchers, schools of choice, and virtual schools. School vouchers—a certificate for a fixed amount of public funding that parents can use to enroll their child in any school the parent chooses that accepts vouchers (Carnoy, 2017), including private, religious, and home schools—are an essential means by which Ms. DeVos expects to enact her school choice agenda. In 2015-2016, 153,000 students nationally attended school on state-sponsored vouchers, a 148% increase since 2008-2009 (Trilling, 2016). Voucher regulations vary from plan to plan. Currently, 16 states and the District of Columbia operate one or more voucher programs (EdChoice, 2017b). Typically, voucher amounts are capped at a particular threshold, which may or may not cover tuition costs at private schools, and vouchers often target low-income or disabled students. In 2000, Michigan’s voters overwhelmingly rejected vouchers, in spite of the DeVos’s family’s more than $5 million spending on a provoucher campaign (Emma et al., 2016). By contrast, at least 37 states have provisions in their constitutions forbidding public aid for religious schools (Brown, 2017).

Disagreement exists about whether vouchers save taxpayer dollars, as proponents claim. Advocates assert that the voucher is smaller than per-pupil spending. According to their argument, if a state sends $5,000 per student annually to public schools and offers a $4,000 voucher for a student to leave public school to attend private school, the state saves $1,000 per year for each participating student (Costrell, 2009; EdChoice, 2017a). In response, voucher critics contend that it is difficult to specify the amount of savings from vouchers because some students would have attended private schools anyway (Sherman, 2014). Some note that in voucher programs, students who leave public schools for private schools are spread throughout the district, making the reduction in students per school negligible. At the same time, the district’s fixed operating costs compel some to reduce available resources, run multimillion dollar deficits, and increase local taxes (National Coalition for Public Education, 2017). For instance, Indiana ran a $53 million deficit during the 2015-2016 school year to support its voucher program, and Milwaukee’s voucher program obliged the city to raise property taxes several times to ensure adequate funding for the city’s schools (National Coalition for Public Education, 2017).

Over the past 25 years, extensive research on educational vouchers in the United States shows little evidence that vouchers improve educational outcomes. Benefits to student achievement and school district performance are mixed or limited (Carey, 2017; Carnoy, 2009, 2017; Dynarski, 2016; Epple, Romano, & Urquiola, 2015; Krueger & Zhu, 2004; Wolf et al., 2013). In the few instances in which test scores increased, other factors such as increased public accountability—not private school competition—appeared the likely reason (Witte, Carlson, Cowen, Fleming, & Wolf, 2012). Studies do show some evidence of small improvements in high school graduation and college enrollment rates; but this has been a 10-year national trend, and studies provide no data to show whether the improvements came from charters dropping lower performing students or using effective instructional practices. Moreover, high dropout rates from private schools among voucher users in several studies raise concerns (Carnoy, 2017). Finally, scholars have criticized voucher advocates for misrepresenting empirical results that actually show little consensus or consistency across the reported findings; and the positive effects do not translate to different contexts, populations, programs, grade levels, or subjects (Lubienski & Brewer, 2016).

Schools of choice, another DeVos favorite—are schools in nearby districts that have opened their doors to children who live outside district boundaries. To Ms. DeVos, schools of choice are a great equalizer, giving children from poor districts the chance to attend schools with many more resources. In concept, perhaps this could occur. In fact, investigations find that Michigan’s schools of choice are increasing school segregation and financially strapping TPSs (Henderson, 2016; Wilkinson, 2016).

Tens of thousands of Michigan parents use the state’s schools of choice program, and 70% of choice students across the state move to a less diverse district (Wilkinson, 2016). Writing in the Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson (2016) observed that most high-achieving school districts—such as Grosse Pointe and Dearborn—do not participate in the schools of choice program. In instances where wealthy districts do participate, the result is often fewer enrollees and more racially segregated schools as White students leave, often for less diverse districts. For example, in 2000, Holland, MI, had 15 school buildings; it now has 8; and about one-in-three students living within the district now receives his or her education in another district or charter school, sometimes located just a mile away (Wilkinson, 2016). At the same time, African American families are using this law to send their children to predominantly Black charter schools. These practices disregard the education research findings of academic and social benefits of an integrated education environment to both disadvantaged minority students (Mickelson, Bottia, & Lambert, 2013; Wells, Fox, & Cordova-Cobo, 2016) and all students (Kamenetz, 2015a; Wells et al., 2016).

Virtual (online) charter schools—educational programs that attempt to educate full-time students through the computer via the Internet, with synchronous or asynchronous lessons using varied means of electronic communications—are another DeVos option. Online schools are intended to serve an atypical student population: those far behind academically who want credit recovery to earn their diplomas on time, those with severe health problems, others who are sports or music prodigies, students in unstable households, and rural students who want to take AP or foreign language courses not available in their schools. Ideally, all these youngsters could benefit from the highly elastic and student-centered schedule that permits attention to other needs or interests. Most virtual schools are charter schools (Prothero, 2016), and 45% of online charters contract with for-profit EMOs, accounting for 73% of all enrollments (Miron & Gulosino, 2016). Approximately 262,000 K-12 students are enrolled in full-time online charter schools in at least 33 states, and the average student-teacher ratio in virtual schools operated by EMOs is 44 students per teacher (Kamenetz, 2015b; Miron & Gulosino, 2016). Twenty-two percent of online charter-school students eventually return to TPS (CREDO, 2015a).

Although virtual charter schools vary in effectiveness, most are not performing well (CREDO, 2011; Miron & Gulosino, 2016). Academic achievement is poor, and dropout rates are high (CREDO, 2015a). Thirty-three percent of online charter schools offer only self-paced, independent study instruction; students typically have less live-teacher-contact time in a week than peers in TPS have in a day (Gill et al., 2015). A 2015 national study by Stanford University’s CREDO found that math scores for online charter school students were very low, so far below their TPS peers, it was almost as if the students did not attend school (CREDO, 2015a). Reading scores were not much better. Academic growth in reading and math for students in poverty, student with disabilities, and English language learners was especially weak (CREDO, 2015a). A 2016 study of virtual schools found that although they represented only 1% of U.S. high schools, their graduation rates were 67% or less (Gerwertz, 2016). The on-time graduation rate for full-time virtual schools is half the national average, 40.6% (and falling) as compared with 81% for the nation as a whole (Miron & Gulosino, 2016).

Even with their poor performance and more than 10 years of state investigations, news media reports, and research that document full-time online schools’ failures and mismanagement, the sector, dominated by two for-profit companies, continues to expand. Virtual charter proponents contend that parents have the right to choose where their child goes to school, and online charters provide an important option, even if the school performs poorly by state education officials’ criteria (Prothero, 2016). Meanwhile, weak state regulations, millions spent on lobbying and political contributions, and support from well-connected advocates and handfuls of enthusiastic parents of online students allow virtual charters to collectively receive more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars annually and stay open regardless of how well they educate children (Fang, 2014; Goldstein, 2011; Pazhouh, Lake, & Miller, 2015; Prothero, 2016).

Charters’ Effect on Public Schools and Parents

A high percentage of charters in Michigan have had a harmful fiscal, instructional, and governnance effects on their public schools. A 2015 study from Michigan State University’s Education Policy Center found that under the state’s school choice and finance laws, districts have a difficult time keeping TPSs solvent when charters reached 20% or more of enrollment. Although per-student public funds follow children to charters or other educational deliverers, TPS still have to cover fixed costs, such as teacher salaries, curricular materials, and building expenses, with fewer dollars (Arsen, DeLuca, Ni, & Bates, 2015).

Looking beyond Michigan, several studies have looked at how TPSs adjusted to these lost monies (Bifulco & Reback, 2014; Schafft et al., 2014). These effects include losing enrollments and closing schools to reduce excess capacity, reducing administrative and teaching staff levels, and addressing requirements in teacher employment and tenure contracts (often specifying that layoffs must occur in reverse order of seniority) without the same proportion of reduced salary costs (because longer tenured staff have higher salaries than less senior staff). While managing these fiscal impacts, TPS administrators try to maintain or increase their schools’ education quality to avoid losing more students. Additionally, charters drawing students from several schools results in declining class sizes in multiple schools and often incurs reassigning students from classrooms and schools closed due to excess capacity. Students forced to change schools are more likely to consider enrolling in nondistrict schools than had they not been required to relocate (Epple, Jha, & Sieg, 2017). Moreover, a charter school’s abrupt closing creates immediate fiscal, logistical, and educational challenges as the TPS district school must accept and transition these students into new classrooms or schools. Charter growth also increases the share of special-needs students remaining in traditional schools and the extra costs required to educate them, an expense that the state does not adequately reimburse (Arsen et al., 2015).

Since TPS have fixed costs for salaries, curriculum materials, and facilities’ maintenance—even though they are sending taxpayer dollars after students who leave for charter schools—costs per student remaining rise. This makes per student payments to charters also increase because states typically tie charter funding per student to district per student funding. This may spur a downward cycle in which the TPS feels the urgency to cut costs in response to enrollment losses (Epple, Romano, & Zimmer, 2015). The district’s credit worthiness may also come into question, especially in urban areas (Moody’s, 2013).

Given these outcomes, some believe that increasing money transfers from public schools to public charters risks “radically destabilizing school governance . . . by super-sizing an already broken funding system to a scale that would have a disastrous impact on students, their schools, and the cities and towns that fund them” (Walsh, 2016).

Charter critics also argue that outsourcing to CMOs and EMOs redirects already limited school resources intended for the delivery of direct educational services to children into management fees, rent extractions, profits, or inefficiencies while limiting transparency, creating an additional layer of administration, and jeopardizing the future ability to provide “public” education (Baker & Miron, 2015; U.S. Department of Education, 2016).

Increased parent influence in their children’s education is also in question. Although Ms. DeVos insists that school choice laws empower parents, the reality is different. In a 2016 investigation, the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative nonprofit public policies think tank, found that school choice laws have “fallen far short of what is necessary for creating schools that foster true parental empowerment” (Robinson, 2016, p. 1). In a review of over 100 school choice laws, parent references to rights and responsibilities in choice statutes are merely legalities, defining the parent-school choice relationship, and feel-good window dressing, more aspirational than specific (Robinson, 2016). American Enterprise Institute concludes that many parents feel like school choice advocates are less interested in empowering them and more interested in changing the system from the top down (Robinson, 2016).

DeVos, D.C., and the States: Advancing School Privatization

Even though President Trump’s 2018 budget blueprint may have been political theatre, it still clarifies the direction in which he and Secretary DeVos want to take public education. But after 8 months as U.S. Secretary of Education, Ms. DeVos stepped back from her intention to lead the school choice movement from Washington DC. In a speech at Harvard University, she asserted that choice should be a state and local issue. Her about-face came after months of Democratic and Republican pushback to directing any new federal dollars toward private school choice, conservative education policy experts stating their worries about opening private schools to federal oversight, and a more realistic view about what is politically possible (Camera, 2017d).

2018 Federal Budget Blueprint

President Trump’s initial budget blueprint actively supported Ms. DeVos’s school choice education agenda and her desire to downsize the Department of Education. The proposal would slice the Department of Education’s approximately $68 billion budget by $9.2 billion, or 13.5% in the coming fiscal year—the steepest cut the agency has ever sustained (Bendix, 2017). The budget proposal also asked for a $1.4 billion federal initiative to expand vouchers in public and private schools, leading up to an eventual $20 billion annual funding. A new $250 million of these funds would go toward a private school choice initiative that could provide vouchers for use at private or parochial schools, and $168 million would be reserved for charter schools to help states and charter organizations with a successful track record start up, replicate, and expand schools (Bendix, 2017; Klein & Ujifusa, 2017b). The blueprint also proposed a $1 billion increase for Title I grants for low-income students with encouragement to states and districts to use the funds for a system of “student-based budgeting and open enrollment that enables federal, state, and local funding to follow the student to the public school or his or her choice” (Brown & Douglas-Gabriel, 2017; Klein & Ujifusa, 2017a). Title II funds that help states and local districts hire and provide professional development to improve teacher and school leader quality were completely removed from the proposed budget.

Congress members from both parties declared Trump’s budget blueprint “DOA” (dead on arrival; Levy, 2017b). They were correct. It was.

Congressional and Department of Education Actions

Nonetheless, Congress and the Department of Education actions are paving the way for Trump’s and DeVos’s school choice agenda. The most relevant issues for principals to watch for include the following.

ESSA and School Choice

Signed into law, December 2015, the bipartisan ESSA includes grants for “high quality charter schools” and states that the Secretary of Education must prioritize giving them to states that draft an ambitious plan for their charter sector and provide charters with equitable funding (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). In a 2017 talk at the Brookings Institution, DeVos suggested that ESSA could be a lever to prod states to enact a school choice agenda (Camera, 2017b). Department of Education would consider rejecting states’ proposals for new accountability systems if they do not include options that provide parents with additional educational choices for their children. Peer review and final approval of state plans would give Department of Education the chance to weigh in on what states propose to do (Camera, 2017b).

In addition, ESSA requires states to begin reporting per-pupil spending for all their schools, presented in a comparable way, starting in 2017-2018. This financial transparency may generate political shockwaves, prompting discussions about spending inequities between schools or how districts distribute experienced teachers. These data may also generate false conclusions if presented without proper context (Burnette, 2017). Per-pupil spending data also prepare the fiscal groundwork for states determining future voucher dollars or federal grant portability. But lacking specific guidance about which factors to include—such as textbooks, transportation, and school lunch—the exact dollar amount may be elusive (Burnette, 2017).

Weakening ESSA Accountability

As with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ESSA requires school children to take standardized tests in math, reading, and science, and schools must disaggregate test data to report on progress of at-risk groups. But as compared with NCLB, ESSA assigns schools fewer consequences for students’ low test scores and asks states to design their own accountability systems and plans for how to intervene in failing schools (Goldstein, 2017b). April 2017 and September 2017 were deadlines for finalizing the state accountability proposals with Secretary DeVos’s Department of Education. Implementation starts in the 2018-2019 school year.

After ESSA’s passage, the Obama administration’s Department of Education staff wrote detailed regulations to help states put the new law into effect (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). But in early 2017, Senate Republicans called these Obama-era accountability rules an example of “executive overreach” that went beyond the scope of Congressional intent and would limit local decision making (Emma & Stratford, 2017). Using the Congressional Review Act in March 2017, Congress repealed these accountability rules, reducing the requirements around the data that schools must report for varied indicators of student performance, giving states more leeway on identifying “dropout factories,” and cancelling the ESSA regulations that required states to consult with parents and community members in developing plans for holding schools accountable for results (Emma & Stratford, 2017; Gerwertz, 2017; Ujifusa, 2017b). Around the same time, the DeVos Department of Education reduced what states must report to the federal government about their plans for holding schools accountable. Taken together, these actions reduce the law’s federal influence and oversight that many saw returning more control to states and districts (Ujifusa, 2017b).

Critics of the ESSA rules express the need for robust federal oversight of schools’ accountability to close achievement gaps between low-income and minority students and their White, more affluent classmates. They also point to possible confusion in the states that were midway through writing their accountability plans. Likewise, critics claim that allowing Education Secretary DeVos to write new regulations for the states could weaken school accountability requirements, give her more flexibility in applying the law (Goldstein, 2017b), and strengthen her influence over states’ education policy (Emma & Stratford, 2017). For her part, Ms. DeVos says that she would use the state ESSA accountability plans to “encourage”—not compel—school choice (Camera, 2017c). Moreover, although Secretary DeVos responded that though states may ask parents for input, federal law mandates that states consult only with the governor (Brown, 2017), critics say this approach would impair schools’ accountability to their local school board and parents, the very folks Ms. DeVos claims to champion.

Since vouchers are politically fraught if directed to a religiously based organization, Congress might find a tax credit proposal more popular (Camera, 2017a). In February 2017, Department of Education officials announced that Trump and Secretary DeVos wanted to create a federal school choice program that would offer tax credit scholarships to students (Alcindor, 2017). As discussed, unlike traditional school vouchers that can face state constitutional challenges if they allocate public money to religiously based organizations, tax credit scholarships avoid going into government hands altogether (Kamenetz, 2017a). Nonetheless, changing the tax code in Congress could create a fund of money to be used for vouchers (Ujifusa, 2016). And it did. In what some call 2017’s “biggest win for school choice advocates” (Ujifusa, 2017c) and “thinly veiled vouchers” (Garcia, 2017), the December 2017’s “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” expanded tax-advantaged 529 account plans, originally designed as a means to save for tax-exempt college expenses, to become a vehicle to use for K-12 school expenses, including use at private and religious schools.

Education Privatization Actions at the State Level

Since our nation’s start, state legislatures have driven education policies and regulatory frameworks. Legislators, state-by-state, will decide whether or not to endorse and support—in rules and dollars—school choice options, their funding, academic standards, and accountability. What actually happens in state legislatures to advance education privatization too often occurs beyond public awareness (Burch, 2009). Informed principals wanting a closer look can begin with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Since 1973, the ALEC, an influential “right of center” national policy organization, has worked to advance free-market policies, such as education privatization, that limit government’s role in national life. Largely corporately funded and composed of approximately 2,000 state legislator members (mostly Republican) and nearly 300 corporate and other stakeholders, ALEC drafts “model legislation” that its members then introduce—often verbatim—and guide through their state legislatures (ALEC, 2016; Jackman, 2013; McIntire, 2012). Annually, ALEC members introduce nearly 1,000 bills based on its model legislation, and on average, about 20% become law (Ujifusa, 2012). In 2016, state legislators in 42 states introduced at least 172 measures reflecting ALEC’s model bills to advance education privatization, and 13 states and the District of Columbia have adopted ALEC’s basic voucher plan (Fischer & Peters, 2016). Over the years, ALEC has shaped legislation on polices including charter schools, tuition tax credits, ESA, alternative certification for teachers, parent-trigger bills, and vouchers for children with special needs (Ujifusa, 2012). Usually, the public has no knowledge of ALEC’s role in generating and promoting these bills (Riestenberg, 2017).

ALEC educates legislative members through its annual meetings, state and national policy summits, spring task force summits, and publications. At meetings closed to the public and the press (Riestenberg, 2017), members learn how to be effective legislators, have opportunities to share ideas about what works in state legislatures, and receive resources to help them shape their own bills and measure their state’s education reform. Often, ALEC and its member corporations sponsor legislators’ travel to ALEC conferences and hotel expenses with “scholarships” or states pay legislators’ expenses as professional development (Lowry, 2015; Riestenberg, 2017).

Gradually, ALEC increases the degree of education privatization in successive bills over consecutive years. For instance, the 2015 “Great Schools Tax Credit Act” amended its previous model legislation to increase available tax credit for corporations making “scholarship donations” from 50% to 100% of their tax liability (Fischer & Peters, 2016).

Of particular interest to principals, ALEC also tries to help private education entrepreneurs make more money (i.e., run schools less expensively) by attacking teachers, their credentials, their unions, and local accountability. Four states introduced versions of ALEC’s “Alternative Certification Act” that offers teaching credentials to individuals with subject content experience but not the appropriate professional education preparation. ALEC’s model “Right to Work Act” would make organizing and sustaining unions difficult by making “fair share” fees optional. Their “Public Employees Freedom Act” bans payroll deductions for union dues. ALEC uses these strategies to undermine the education workforce that often supports Democrats. Similarly, ALEC’s “Innovation Schools and School District Act” protects charter schools from public accountability by giving state-level officials (rather than local ones) chartering authority for schools that do not follow public schools’ legal obligations (Fischer & Peters, 2016).

Critics call ALEC “a stealth business lobbyist” (McIntire, 2012) that undermines states’ democratic processes by allowing corporate representatives to shape and vote on model legislation that democratically elected representatives then present as their own ideas (Ujifusa, 2012). Since individual states adopt ALEC-inspired (and often written) education privatization laws, by the time national policy makers become aware of them, these policies have become “the conventional wisdom” (Scola, 2012).

Implications for School Leaders

Secretary DeVos probably cannot change education as we know it, but each state’s legislators can. Since our nation’s start, state legislatures have driven their education policies. ESSA re-empowers states to control their school policies and prohibits the education secretary from forcing states to change their standards or adopt new ones. Rather, legislators, state-by-state, will decide whether or not to endorse and support—in rules and dollars—school choice options, their funding, academic standards, and accountability.

Staying abreast of national education issues and trends is a school leadership responsibility. Although Ms. DeVos is spearheading the Trump administration’s education privatization agenda, she represents the larger privatization movement occurring in Washington DC but especially in state legislatures. Taking the lead, principals and superintendents can respond to the education privatization challenge to public schools in three ways. First, they can show “street cred” with actual data of their school’s academic improvements and successes. Second, they can work with state and national professional associations and other allies to monitor events in Congress and in their state legislatures and respond to events in appropriate and timely ways. Third, they can educate their publics—lawmakers, policy makers, community members, and parents—about how to separate the school choice rhetoric from the facts.

Use “Street Cred”

Since its inception in 2002, NCLB has changed the culture around schools’ accountability for educating every child to meaningful standards. Today’s school leaders fully accept this responsibility and have the relevant data and success stories to prove it. For more than a decade, educators have monitored achievement data by grade, subject, and student subgroup, making countless adjustments in teaching and assessing to foster each student’s academic growth and content mastery. Educators regularly connect with their communities about each school and district’s academic progress and challenges. Having the credibility of leading schools and districts where teaching and learning outcomes have measurably improved makes challenging the Secretary’s “reform-sounding” rhetoric about school choice more convincing. In our so-called “post-evidence” era, having principals challenge education privatization policy in their own localities makes good sense. In addition to their empirical data, their own personages, individually known and respected by their communities, brings extra credibility and heft to their argument.

Work With Allies

Education leaders multiply their influence when they join with state and national professional associations, collegial networks, and other allies for common ends. Together, they have the resources and experiences to develop an action plan, monitor state and national legislation, decide strategy and tactics, and take appropriate actions that are in the best interests of children, families, and the larger community.

To enact “reform”, Secretary DeVos will use her bully pulpit to shape the national education conversation around her preferred agenda. She must garner state-level support if her school choice program is to go forward. ALEC will also continue their work with state legislators. By collaborating with state and national professional associations, collegial networks, and allies, educators gain the high-profile influence and agency needed to counter actions that may hurt public schools and their students.

Educate Public Officials and Community

Together, professional associations, allies, and networks can create or adapt written, video, and digital materials about the educational outcomes and fiscal realities of school choice, vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and “portability” laws. Teams of educators and community members can meet with key legislators, media editorial staffs, community groups, and other influence leaders to discuss improved local education outcomes and the research evidence showing that school choice programs do not guarantee improved academic outcomes or fiscal savings to states. Rather, they can harm.

Secretary DeVos’s and ALEC’s effectiveness will rest on their ability to convince lawmakers and the American public that large amounts of taxpayer dollars should go to education options other than TPSs. Education leaders who have their communities’ confidence and trust, who know the issues, who can point to their own schools’ improvements on meaningful metrics for all students, who have valid and reliable data about charter and virtual schools’ impact on student learning and achievement, and who can clearly explain the limitations in having taxpayer dollars follow children to schools can help state and local decision makers and parents build the cognitive framework to assess fairly and fully education privatization proposals and make informed decisions.

Conclusions

Increasing education delivery options and privatization—not successful student learning—appears to be Secretary DeVos’s primary focus. In her Senate hearings, Ms. DeVos compared school choice to taking Uber or Lyft over a taxi, portraying education as a business responsive to market forces of consumer choice and innovation through competition (Brookings Institution, 2017; Weller, 2017). But education is not a business or a private good. Rather, it is a public good with high stakes. An ideological preference for seeing education as markets and discounting the public goals of shared civic experience, equity, and public accountability for every student’s learning that are central to public school education drives her school choice impetus. Innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, and more school choices—with little to no oversight, performance standards, or fiscal accountability—do not justify American children receiving an education that is frequently inferior to their peers in TPSs. Ms. DeVos’s policy views and sway on how states craft their school choice options remain a cautionary tale of how persistent lobbying, often beneath public awareness, can undermine children’s education at taxpayers’ expense.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Leslie S. Kaplan is a retired secondary school administrator and is a former Virginia NASSP Assistant Prinicpal of the Year. She currently researches and writes books and articles about school leadership and principal and teacher quality, often in association with Old Dominion University.

William A. Owings is a professor of educational leadership at Old Dominion University. A former elementary and high school principal, assistant superitendent and district superintendent, his research agenda includes education finance and principal and teacher quality.

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Betsy DeVos’s Education Reform Agenda: What Principals—and Their Publics—Need to Know

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Betsy DeVos: A Brief Political and Policy Biography

Ms. DeVos on Education Privatization

A “Revolutionized” Education Delivery System

Limited Government

Education Dollars Should Follow Each Child

Careful Language

Advancing Privatization Through School Choice

Charter Schools

Charter Authorizers

Charter School Operators

Michigan Charter School Academic Performance

National Charter School Academic Performance

Weak Accountability

Vouchers, Schools of Choice, and Virtual Schools

Charters’ Effect on Public Schools and Parents

DeVos, D.C., and the States: Advancing School Privatization

2018 Federal Budget Blueprint

Congressional and Department of Education Actions

ESSA and School Choice

Weakening ESSA Accountability

Education Privatization Actions at the State Level

Implications for School Leaders

Use “Street Cred”

Work With Allies

Educate Public Officials and Community

Conclusions

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Author Biographies

References