President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to run the country like a business. If his early choices for key cabinet positions are any indication, he plans to make good on that claim — at least in regard to education.
Trump announced last Wednesday that conservative billionaire and activist Betsy DeVos would be his pick for Secretary of Education. DeVos is a staunch advocate of school choice, specifically supporting programs that channel funding from public schools into private and charter school voucher systems.
Under these school choice programs, the government takes money that would normally fund public schools and instead covers the tuition of a student attending a private school. These vouchers are distributed to parents, often through random lotteries, giving them more options for where their children attend school. Supporters like DeVos argue that parents should have the choice to remove kids from unsatisfactory public school systems and that through private schools, these children will have a better shot at future success. The increased competition for government funding would drive up the quality of public institutions, benefiting even those who don’t secure a voucher of their own.
DeVos’ appointment clearly signals that Trump meant his campaign promises to break up the “government-run monopoly” on education. But the potential downsides of focusing on private schools at the cost of public ones will leave many students underserved and their schools even more starved for funds than they already are. The consequences of ignoring the problems with public education will disproportionately affect children from minority and low-income households, the very people who would benefit the most from a well-funded public system.
To state the obvious, taking money from a public school program means that it has a smaller pool of resources. Public schools are not businesses and have few means of building profit to recoup those losses because their money comes almost entirely from the government. The only way to maintain the money that schools would lose if students move to private education is to improve standards enough to make these students stay.
But this difficult task becomes even harder once already barren budgets drain further, making the conservative-favored “competition builds strength” argument largely baseless.
Furthermore, the public schools most in need of additional funding are in areas stricken by poverty. While sending certain students off to special institutions may be helpful on a low level, it leaves larger communities without a comprehensive solution to underfunding.
Even that qualification about individual benefits doesn’t present a full picture. There is no conclusive evidence that student achievement increases among voucher users compared to demographically similar public students. The only studies that do show improvement fail to account for race, gender or socioeconomic background — all relevant factors to any evaluation of educational advancement.
And while supporters like DeVos cite studies claiming that the government spends less money on students using vouchers for private schools than on students in public ones, a key reason for this is the lack of services for developmentally challenged students.
Public schools are required to provide educational services for students regardless of intellectual disabilities, but private schools often lack comparable levels of support. These parents often have no real choice between schools if they want their children to get the support they require. Taking from one, larger pool of federal money to expand smaller, less regulated ones does not automatically level the scales.
On a moral level, parents do deserve some say in how and where their children learn. But the practical benefits of a mass school choice initiative could leave the public system, which still accommodates about 90 percent of American students, with an unacceptable loss of funding.
These institutions need help, not competition. Attempting to masquerade boilerplate free market philosophy as educational progress may be the change Trump and his newest pick want, but it’s not the one Americans need.