Mr. Trump has just set another precedent: For the first time
in
American history, Vice President Pence had to cast the tie-breaking
vote
to confirm Betsy DeVos' nomination to be Secretary of Education in
President Trump's cabinet. Never before has a cabinet
appointment confirmation ended in a tie; only a handful of appointments
have been voted down.
This is yet another sign of just how utterly polarized our
politics is. No Senate Democrat voted for Secretary DeVos,
and teachers' unions persuaded two Republican Senators to vote
against her.
What horrors did Secretary DeVos represent to inspire
such efforts? Simple: She represents the idea that America's
children
deserve better than to be trapped in a bureaucrat-assigned public
school that takes no responsibility for imparting knowledge and cares
nothing for what the parents might prefer for their children.
If a top-down monopoly school system were effective in
educating children, this might be tolerable, but it's more
or less universally recognized that American public education is
failing. It fails most obviously
in poverty-stricken ghetto areas, but even in wealthy areas if you
measure by international standards of effectiveness and
cost-efficiency.
After decades of fruitless argument and
fitful experiment, people are finally beginning to
admit
that Something Must Be Done. The question is, what?
Contrary to Democrat rhetoric, money is not the problem, as President
Trump pointed out in his inaugural address. For example, the
Baltimore public school system spends more than $18,000 per student
per year. Assuming 25 kids per class,
that's $450,000 per classroom per year, and
teachers complain that most classes are larger than
that. New York City
spends more, or $20600 per pupil per year.
The
teacher
doesn't cost $100,000 per year, nor does the room. The other
$250,000+ in Baltimore
goes up in
bureaucratic
bloat. Unionized government employees let the
roofs leak and the buildings fall
apart while
claiming lack of money and criticizing taxpayers for being
cheapskates!
Their worries about losing control of the miseducation of black
children
in
failing urban school systems drove the Democrats' bitter battle
against Secretary
DeVos. The
Democrat's
urban base of unionized school teachers and black parents is slowly
dying, leaving the remaining Democrat office
holders desperate to hang
on to what's left. This confirmation battle was especially
bitter because Secretary
DeVos is a billionairess who has spent years successfully promoting
parents' right
to choose where to send their children to school - a choice that leads
directly to fewer union employees, fewer union dues, and fewer
donations to Democrats.
A Choice, Not An Echo
Ironically, a black Democrat activist named Polly Williams wrote the nation's
first school-choice law in 1989, in Wisconsin - which shortly
thereafter included religious schools, now the kiss of death for
voucher arguments. The first charter
school emerged in 1991.
By the time Harvard Prof. Elizabeth
Warren wrote
her book The Two-Income Trap
in 2003,
school choice had so
visibly improved educational prospects for poor students that
she praised parental school choice and urged that it be supported by
taxpayer-funded
vouchers:
A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill
neatly. A
taxpayer-funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child
(not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to
all children... Fully-funded vouchers would relieve parents
from the
terrible choice of leaving their kids lousy schools or bankrupting
themselves to escape those schools.
In spite of recognizing the obvious success of the voucher movement,
now-Sen. Warren let teachers' unions persuade her to help torpedo a
Massachusetts voter initiative that
would have allowed more charter schools, and argued as vehemently as
she
could against letting DeVos "destroy our public education
system" by supporting more charter schools. If Ms.DeVos had
been quicker on her toes, she might have thrown Sen. Warren's
pre-political-career words back at her.
The Wall Street Journal put numbers on the issue.
According to a 2016 study by the National Alliance for
Public
Charter Schools,
using state databases, these are the percentages of students now
enrolled in
public charters only:
In now-famous Flint, Mich.: 53%. Kansas City: 40%; Philadelphia: 32%;
the District of Columbia: 45%; Detroit: 53%.
In Louisiana, which essentially abandoned its failed
central-administration
model after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans charters are at 92%.
The 45% of students who have escaped the awful schools in the District
of Columbia is particularly remarkable given that one of the Obama
administration's first acts on taking
power was killing a voucher system that had
shown great
improvement in educating inner city kids at less cost than the public
schools.
It's Not About Education, It's About Power
The unions understood perfectly well what was at stake. In
Wisconsin,
where Governor Scott Walker changed the law so that unions
could not
force
teachers to pay dues, unions lost so many members that they had to lay
off staff and couldn't donate nearly as much to Democrats seeking
public office. Property taxes went down, and for the first
time in decades, Wisconsin's
electoral votes went to a Republican.
The state-funded colleges are not at all happy with Governor Walker's
programs, and he's returning the favor: He froze tuition in state
colleges in 2013, and
he's
proposing a 5% tuition cut for the 2018-19 school
year. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The UW Board of Regents has been in open revolt against the
tuition freeze
for years, viewing Mr. Walker’s concession prices as beneath
the
school’s
reputation and dignity. “I don’t want to diminish the
importance of
tuition, but let’s not get tuition tunnel vision,” UW-System President
Ray Cross warned last October. By the way, the new Walker budget brings
need-based financial aid to an all-time state high. [emphasis added]
Cutting tuition reduces the Regents' bragging rights! Who
cares
about the students?
Nationwide, Hillary received far fewer black votes than
Mr. Obama,
partly because of her race, but partly because Mr. Trump pointed out
the transparently obvious but unspeakable truth about how
ill-served blacks had been by voting for Democrats. As he
boldly put it,
What the hell do you have to lose?
Democrats
rightly saw
Mrs. DeVos' history of successes in cutting their power by promoting
non-union schools as an existential threat. The fact that
union-supported schools do a terrible job in cities where Democrats
rule mattered not one whit to the Democrat Senators, who all choose to
send their kids to expensive private schools, of
course.
This is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago,
meant when he warned Harvard graduates of:
"...an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's
noblest
impulses" and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil ... evidently
born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to
which there is no evil inherent in human nature."
He also said, "In order for men to commit great evil, they must first
be convinced that they are doing good." We don't see how
Democrats
can convince themselves that they're doing good by supporting
high-cost, failed educational models which trap kids into lives of
ignorance, welfare, and crime, but they manage.
We've pointed out that, having
experienced evil up close
and personal, Mr. Solzhenitsyn knew evil when he saw it even when
cloaked in mannered urbanity as at Harvard.
Evil Works Both Ways
So
shouldn't we all be celebrating Ms. DeVos' elevation to leadership of
American education, over the shrill but ultimately ineffective protests
of the massed chorus of leftists? Not really, because in the
long
term,
Secretary DeVos' actions will almost certainly grant the left the
total power over
education that they've craved for well over a century.
Consider DeVos' great goal in life - to see parents
granted the
ability to select which school their child attends without having to
move into another district or pay twice by patronizing a private
school. The only way to accomplish this is for
voucher programs, or
at
the least public charter schools, to become commonplace.
The
advantage to the students of a wider array of options has been obvious
for many years; the dire threat to teachers' union dues and Democrat
power has been equally as obvious, which is why voucher programs
and charter schools are still as rare as they are. The courts
having long since ruled that both vouchers and charter schools are
perfectly Constitutional, the only reason any given locality or state
doesn't have them is because its politicians, and ultimately its
voters, have decided they don't care enough to make them happen over
union objections.
How
can Mrs. DeVos change their minds, now that she's been demonized so
thoroughly by the leftist media? The same way the Federal
government bends smaller governments to its will on everything else:
with the almighty power of the checkbook. Mrs. DeVos can
target
Federal education funds to districts who choose to see things her
way, which will persuade many of them.
Mrs. DeVos' hope is that,
by the time her tenure in office ends, the vouchers and charter schools
will be too well established to be uprooted. That's entirely
possible, but something far more pernicious will be equally firmly
enrooted: the idea that the Federal government ought to strong-arm
local school boards.
Haven't we seen the dire consequences of this, with the Obama
administration having attempted to crowbar boys into girls' locker rooms
all across the fruited land using nothing more than a threatening
letter? Some school districts knuckled under, some ignored
the
directive, and only a handful openly flouted the command of Big Brother
regardless of parental outrage. And there wasn't even a check
attached to the missive.
Donald Trump may be in office, with
luck, for eight years. With good luck, Mike Pence might
possibly
be elected, but we haven't had four Presidential terms from the same
political party since FDR and Harry Truman. Odds are, at most
twelve years from now there will be a Democrat sitting in the White
House.
Given all the "Resistance" rhetoric, this Democrat
president will be a standard
elitist totalitarian, cast into office atop a wave of raving
lefty lunatics demanding that the Trump/Pence years be
erased in toto. This applies to
everything
from the environment to taxes, but
most of all, the left has always kept a focus on education because they
know that whoever controls the kids' education controls the future.
Up until
now, the existence of private schools and homeschooling has provided
something of a check on the debauchery of the American public education
system; it can only get so bad because parents do have options if they
care enough.
Globally, though, this freedom is rare. In
Germany, for instance, homeschooling is outlawed entirely and the
handful of extremely costly private
schools generally have to use the same curriculum as the government
schools. Indeed, some German families have been granted asylum in the United States
because their own government planned to remove their kids because of
their
desire to homeschool them.
If
Mrs. DeVos once establishes genuine Federal control of education,
though, that's the future we can look forward to here.
Homeschool
and private school families in all 50 states have to forcefully defend
their rights in their local legislatures. It's a lot harder
for
them to do that against the Federal government. If we
couldn't keep the Obama administration from ramming men into women's
bathrooms, can we be confident of keeping a future far-left
administration out of our homes? Hardly.
Would a
nationwide voucher program be a good thing for America's
children as Professor Warren argued? Yes - for twelve
years, max. Thereafter, it would
mean the
end of educational freedom, and the ultimate victory of the left's long
march through the institutions.
Be careful what you wish for, Secretary DeVos!