Betsy Devos - arrogance and privilege
My take on her recent video
Recent Video by Betsy DeVos
Recently, Jess Piper @piper4missouri from Missouri shared a video of the former education secretary Betsy Devos as she outlined her vision for public education and you talk about a vison of economic privilege! DeVos just does not spell it out any better than this.
In her words paraphrased:
Johnny, a young man in say North Dakota, gets up and heads out to the field to work the fields on his tractor. While working he is able to listen to a course from a top university say, Columbia, on the great books. After his morning work, he goes off to do an apprenticeship at the nearby John Deere factory working with a master tradesman, then he is off to a charter school where he can work with other students on core subjects.
Wow. Just wow. This needs a lot of unpacking. First and foremost, this is one of the most disconnected visions of education I have ever seen. It is absolutely coming from a person that has no sense of reality in the most fundamental sense of time and or geography or technology or economics. Let’s just pose a list of questions. No need to answer, we are just going to do what the conservative advocates do.
1. How long will Johnny need to work in the fields?
2. What will he glean from the audible course without notes?
3. Listening to the course may well require internet access out in the middle of??
4. How far out in the field is he to be able to timely travel to the field and from the field?
5. Will there be any need to prep the farm machinery for the task?
6. How long will that prep take?
7. That John Deere factory is just down the road from every farm, right?
8. How many factories are in North Dakota?
9. How much time will he need to travel to the field and then to the factory?
10. How far will Johnny need to travel to the charter school?
11. How many hours will each of these segments take?
This is just for starters there are a lot more questions. Notice, there is no telling, just asking. Conservatives never like to be in situations where questions such as these are asked, but liberals need to be asking them. If we cannot be there, we need to be writing these folks, posting on their social media pages and writing the media to ask these questions.
I do have some theory about why people like nine yacht owner, Devos, advocate such bizarre thinking. The wealthy for a long time were against pubic universities and education. They tolerated paying taxes to provide education for all as it would make society better. That is until the Brown v. Board decision was handed down and the federal government began to dismantle the “separate but equal” system. The wealthy, with people like James Buchanan advising, pushed back against this pursuit because the money was being used to help “those people” that did not look like them. Once the money stopped being used exclusively for white people, the wealthy began to rebel.
This concern was always an underlying concern as the public money was used to provide quality education to the lower economic whites at both the k-12 and then the university system. Top public schools and universities climbed to the top of the educational tier using public money that opened doors for the lowest of the socioeconomic classes to rise and compete with the children like the DeVos families. The wealthy began to see that as a problem with much more concern once the Supreme Court stated ruling that access to these former “privileged” schools should be accessible to all.
Additionally, with the passing of the educational bills in the Johnson administration, Head Start mainly, conservatives revolted and sought to limit the program’s implementation as they saw it as using “other people’s money” (one of their favorite terms about taxes) to help “undeserving” people. Never mind that the program would benefit society over all because educated people tend to be more productive as members of society which in turn would help lessen the need for welfare programs. Conservatives think that the free markets would provide better educational opportunities. If that was the case, then why hadn’t it done so? DeVos’s privileged life prevents her from seeing the real facts. Free markets go where the profit is, and when unregulated, is predatory and subject to abuse through unaccountability. Pubic schools are subject to accountability since they are regulated by state legislatures and local school boards. Private schools and now many charter schools have neither and many now are receiving public money with no oversight. If you read Democracy in Chains by Nany MacLeod, you will find this was one of the strategies of James Buchanan and then free marketer Milton Friedman pushed.
Many of the top state universities can boast some of the best professors and programs in the country on the level with many to the legacy Ivy League schools. The wealthy in this country, like Devos, realized this was a result of the tax dollars provided by state legislatures. Since the money was tax money, of which they were paying in as well as everyone else, they pushed to make the state universities subject to market conditions. This came from the Milton Friedman vision of economics. The idea that the public universities should have to compete like the private schools that enjoyed the perks of selectivity and legacy admissions to raise funds for their endowments became a norm and driving force with the conservatives in America. This has led to public universities costs to soar once the public support was weakened. (Now would be a good time to point out that America is the only advanced country where college students are expected to pay enormous amounts of money for college.) Another difference between the private schools and public universities revolves around selectivity of admissions. Private schools could cap admissions, public not so much. If you qualified to attend a public university, they admitted you. Private schools could use various methods to limit their admissions like only allowing a certain number of students to enter each year thus making admission more selective. Not saying this is a bad thing, but public universities were opening doors for more and more students and that lead to a building boom in the late 1960s into the 1970s.
The conservatives began to see their growth as a threat as students were being encouraged to examine everything economically, politically, and socially. Wealthy families that chose to send their kids to public universities began to see that “those” kids where there as well unlike if they were in one of the elite private schools where “those” kids could not typically get in. Professors began to encourage students to examine the differences of the various economic and political systems. Conservatives felt this was a danger to the American system which Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell documented in his confidential memo for the Chamber of Commerce. If you have not read it, I encourage you to do so.
Public education k-college is a threat to the wealthy in any country. DeVos knows this. That is why she is against any organized public system that the government may run. She intends, and has done so in Michigan, to give public dollars back to parents to “go find” the best educational system for your child. Sounds good until you can’t find a place for your kid or in her example, a nearby factory for an apprenticeship, or have a stable, fast internet connection, or the access to a tractor to do your chores or a vehicle to make the journey in between your farm, factory and charter school. Just face it Secretary, you do not want any of your wealth to be used in a manner of which you do not approve. I can see your point, you got yours and you will share it on your terms and only to those you choose. (https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/)