SCOTT SHACKFORD: Hey Progressives: You Can Fight DeVos, but You Can’t Stop School Choice: Ignoring this populist movement does not help the left with families.
Progressives depend on teachers’ unions, and giving parents choice will speed up the K-12 Implosion.
It’s telling that a lot of criticism of Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Education are about things like the fact that she didn’t send her children to public schools and that she’s not terribly familiar with the vast federal legal bureaucracy overseeing public education.
These are critiques that come also entirely from those who are embedded within the entrenched public education system and who have a stake in maintaining and expanding the status quo. Some senators seem aghast at the idea that DeVos was unfamiliar with all sorts of federal laws about how local schools are required to behave in order to receive federal funding.
But this just puts DeVos on the same footing as everybody outside the education system who have to interact with it and feel little control. While there are indeed parents who are familiar with these federal regulations because they have kids with special needs, this approach on DeVos feels very much like an attempt to keep the Department of Education under the control of insiders.
In reality, many, many parents want to make the same choices for their children as DeVos did, and it has nothing to do with them being rich or overly Christian. School unions and the politicians they bankroll may be able to stop DeVos’ nomination, but they can’t stop the growth of school choice and what it means, because parents love it.
And we’ve got the numbers to show it. The Reason Foundation’s report on school choice and privatization for 2016 shows yet another major increase in the number of families sending their kids into charter school programs.
Progressives depend on teachers’ unions, and giving parents choice will speed up the K-12 Implosion.
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