Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may destroy America’s education system through a combination of underfunding, privatization, and discrimination. But if we can get through the Trump-DeVos years, the rebuilding process may be easier because the politics of education privatization will have become a lot clearer for Democrats.
The NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives have already called for a moratorium on charter schools, and a new NAACP report is sharply critical of privatization in the name of choice. That puts a real dent in the DeVos camp’s claim that they are taking a stand for civil rights.
“I think the civil rights community standing up to that narrative—that charter schools equal civil rights—has now become problematic for the people making that argument,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, and an NAACP delegate. “I think what’s happening is there’s really an awakening in communities that school choice isn’t as promised—that when charter schools and private schools are able to make decisions about kids without any recourse for families, communities are discovering that they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
And DeVos and Trump’s loud claims make the danger even more acute for groups like Democrats for Education Reform that have been trying to dress corporate education policy up in civil rights clothes. It’s important to seize that moment and stomp on this narrative until it’s broken into too many pieces to rise as a zombie under the next Democratic president.
That is, if we have a public education system left to save by that point.