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In
its first eight days, the Biden-Harris administration has moved
quickly to undo some of the damage inflicted by the Trump
administration upon the nation in its mishandling of the pandemic
crisis, assaults on civil rights and racial justice, and a host of
other civil and governmental institutions. But no societal foundation
has
suffered more than K-12 public education at the hands of Trump’s
one woman wrecking crew, Department of Education (DOE) Secretary,
Betsy DeVos.
As
a private citizen, prior to taking the reins of the department, she
used her personal fortune as a billionaire to implement her belief
that private, religious, and charter schools are the best methods of
educating our nation’s children. She strategically deployed her
wealth to fund local, state, and federal elected officials to carry
out her agenda.
Using
the state of Michigan as her base of operations, she established
educational non-profits and political action committees to advance
attacks against public education throughout the nation and become the
leading female member of the informal corporate Cartel of Advocates
and Funders for the Privatization of Public Education.
She
has worked with the Koch Bros. (now just Charles Koch since the death
of his brother, David), Eli Broad, Suzy Walton and the Walton
Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Gates Foundation on
charter schools, vouchers, and teacher evaluation. At the national
level, she collected an array of Democratic and Republican elected
officials in the House and Senate.
Sens.
Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), two African Americans,
carried her privatization water on key Senate committees, and she
funded a bevy of majority and minority Democrats and Republicans in
the House to advance her programs for private and religious schools.
It was out of that background that she came to know Donald Trump, who
further empowered her to do with a federal budget what she had been
doing for years with her own wealth.
With
surgeon-like precision, she carefully examined every DOE budget line
and other government programs and directed funding away from K-12
public education. When the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country,
she took full advantage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic
Security (CARES) Act which allocated $13.2 billion for K-12
education.
These
funds were earmarked for distribution across the nation’s
100,000 public schools, 7,000 charter schools, and many private
schools based on the number of low-income students they enrolled. But
DeVos went further and demanded that states share that money with
middle-income students as well. After several states and civil rights
organizations sued her, she recanted and followed the rules outlined.
Not
giving up easily, DeVos worked with Trump’s economic team to
raid the CARES Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for which public
schools were ineligible. She encouraged private, charter, and
religious schools, along with their lobbyists, to apply for PPP as
nonprofits. As a result, they received hundreds of millions of
dollars to fatten their coffers.
Although
Biden has promised substantially more money for the nation’s
poor children in public schools, the coronavirus pandemic and the
remnants of the Race To The Top (RTTT) legislation - which
exponentially increased the number of charter schools - that he
championed during the Obama-Biden administration will continue to
undermine such efforts.
Most
troubling is that he has also committed to reopening schools as soon
as possible and has appointed Connecticut’s
education
commissioner
Dr. Miguel Cardona, whose calling card is that he was aggressive and
successful in reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, as his
Education Secretary.
That will not be enough to address the urgent needs of the nation’s
poorest students.
Even
if Cardona reopens schools and stanches the flow of public school
dollars to private, religious, and charter schools, he has not
grasped or formulated a response to the most urgent difficulties
facing public schools today. The lack of access to remote learning
among the poorest students, who have mushroomed in number during the
pandemic, is a challenge that has not yet effectively been dealt
with.
As
previously noted, lead poisoning remains a largely hidden problem in
urban communities and is worsening at a rapid rate in decaying older
cities where poor children in families of color remain
disproportionately huddled in rental properties that have residuals
of lead-based paint and who drink from lead-infected lateral lines
which deliver water to their homes.
Since
March of 2020, children with special needs (those on the autism
spectrum, those with cognitive and/or emotional dysfunction, and
those with learning disabilities, etc.) have been left largely bereft
of quality educational services, and the mental health needs of
low-income students, who have historically been underserved, remain
unmet.
Even
more disturbing is that subsequent education appointments by the
Biden-Harris team do not appear to be attentive to the aforementioned
issues. In the wake of Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond’s withdrawal
from consideration as DOE Secretary, no one with her comprehensive
skill set of teacher advocacy, research understandings of problems
facing our contemporary low-income majority-minority public school
student population, and education policy analyses, has emerged.
Public
education is at a crossroads as it grapples with the most urgent
problems confronting K-12 education, and it is not at all clear that
the Biden-Harris administration has charted a path for success in the
post-DeVos era.
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