How Betsy DeVos Does
the Koch Brothers’ Bidding
Jeff Bryant
While the serial outrages of the
Trump administration continue to make headlines, the more mundane activities of
his cabinet officials and their underlings often fly under the radar.
Take U.S. Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos, for instance, whose nomination drew a history-making opposition and set off an avalanche of ridicule in social media
and late-night comedy, but who now operates largely out of public view, behind a
security screen that is projected to cost the taxpayers nearly $8 million over the next year.
What’s largely been overlooked
behind all the lurid headlines and endless insults are all the ways in which
officials like DeVos are quietly at work continuing to use our tax money to
advance a deeply troubling agenda.
Now that Congress is poised to turn
from Red to Blue, DeVos’s activities – such as rolling back regulation of
for-profit colleges, stalling the forgiveness of student loans and rewriting
rules for the treatment of campus sexual assault – are getting increased scrutiny from House Democrats.
Doing the Koch Brothers’
Bidding
In a recent low-profile appearance,
DeVos and her high-priced security detail paid a friendly visit to Koch Industries in
Wichita, Kansas without telling local officials, the media, or any other public
outlet. The purpose of her stopover was to meet with a select group of
representatives of Youth Entrepreneurs, a Wichita-based non-profit group
founded by Charles and Liz Koch.
Youth Entrepreneurs, according to an investigative report by the
Huffington Post, provides high school curriculum designed to inculcate students
in the blessings of unfettered capitalism and libertarian ideology.
Among the teachings included in the program’s lesson plans and classroom materials are that “the minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.
Among the teachings included in the program’s lesson plans and classroom materials are that “the minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.
“Charles Koch had a hands-on role in
the design of the high school curriculum,” the reporter reveals, based on
leaked emails from a Google group left open to the public. “The goal … was to
turn young people into ‘liberty-advancing agents’ before they went to college,
where they might learn ‘harmful’ liberal ideas.”
While the purpose of DeVos’s trip to
Youth Entrepreneurs remains unclear, it fits a pattern of DeVos using her
visits to select education programs in order to feed her propaganda campaign
for market-based education reform and privatizing public schools.
Selling the Education
‘Reform’ Lie
Another recent trip brought the
DeVos caravan to New Orleans to drop in on two charter schools – nearly all
taxpayer-supported schools in New Orleans are charter schools – and praise the
district for being “a great example of what can be if people embrace change.”
The schools were carefully selected
to build her narrative of market-based reform, the ideology that remade New Orleans schools after the devastation
wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
But as Louisiana-based public-school
teacher Mercedes Schneider explains on her personal blog,
the charter schools DeVos chose to visit are hardly representative of the
conditions of New Orleans public schools under the reform regime.
First, both schools are among the
few A-rated schools, based on state rankings, in a sea of D- and F-rated
schools. Further, the two schools have much higher percentages of white
students than is typical in a district that is overwhelmingly populated by
black and brown students.
So what DeVos really illustrates by
her visits to these New Orleans schools isn’t how reform produces what works
but how reform creates “incredible racial inequity” Schneider correctly
concludes.
Stoking the Charter
School Industry
It’s important to note how the
rhetoric DeVos employs in her propaganda campaign for market-based education
reform gets reflected in the policy decisions made by her department.
As Politico reports, USDoE recently awarded $399
million in federal grants to expand and support charter schools across the
country.
The grants, made through the Charter
Schools Program, which has enjoyed a $40 million boost under the Trump
administration, went to individual charter school operators and various state
education agencies and nonprofit groups that either help secure funding for
charters, push for their expansions, or advocate for the charter cause.
Even a cursory scan of some of the
recipients warrants deeper scrutiny.
For instance, among three Alabama
charter schools that received $1 million each in grant money, two have
already been the subjects of multiple lawsuits.
Birmingham charter Legacy Prep –
which recently changed its name, postponed its opening date, and has yet to
find a building – just settled a messy court case with its founder – a
Baptist church pastor – over who had authority over the school’s operations and
whether the school’s governing board was properly constituted.
The court settlement follows closely
after the Alabama Public Charter School Commission won its effort to overturn
the Birmingham district school board’s original denial of the charter’s
application.
The district board had ruled last year that the school’s application did not meet the requirements of the district’s request for charter proposals.
The district board had ruled last year that the school’s application did not meet the requirements of the district’s request for charter proposals.
So now, thanks to DeVos and her
department, federal funds are going to a charter school under suspect
leadership, with no building, that the district doesn’t want.
Similarly, another Alabama charter
with a million dollar grant, University Charter School in Livingston, had
to hurdle a lawsuit to open its doors.
In May, the county board that
oversees the district filed suit to prohibit the charter’s authorizer
from operating the school in a former high school that the district sold to the
authorizer with the specific condition not to open a
charter school in the building.
Here again, federal dollars are
funding a charter startup in a local community that does not want it. So much
for DeVos’s promises to curb the “overreach” of the federal government in
education.
Supporting Rightwing
Cronies
Another charter school grant winner
on the list that deserves a closer look is the American Heritage Academy in
Idaho.
The school’s founder, Frank
Vandersloot, is a conservative billionaire, with a net worth of $1.9
billion, who was a finance co-chair of Mitt Romney’s 2012 failed presidential
campaign and has given money to Florida Republican US Senator Marco Rubio,
former Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina, the Republican
National Committee, and state Republican parties across the US, according to a report in Forbes.
Vandersloot made national headlines
in 2015 when he sued Mother Jones magazine for defamation after
the news outlet published an article detailing his efforts to oppose gay
rights.
Vandersloot has hosted a closed door meeting with President Trump
at the headquarters of his company, Melaleuca. The company – which sells diet,
personal care, home cleaning, and cosmetic products – has been compared to Amway, the mega-company DeVos
is heiress to, in that it employs a multi-level marketing strategy.
Vandersloot and DeVos are, in
fact, connected through their participation in a
multi-level marketing trade group that has been active in promoting legislation
that attempts to limit the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to investigate
and prosecute multi-level marketing scam operations.
All the Things We
Don’t Know
None of this is to consider whether
Vandersloot’s charter school, or any of the other charter school grantees, may
or may not be worthy institutions, but shouldn’t taxpayers know more about why
the school deserves our money?
Should we know, for instance, why
grant money will go to a North Carolina charter, the Charlotte Lab School,
that touts racial diversity in its mission, yet has a
student population that is two-thirds white in a district where only 30
percent of the students are white?
Should we know more about why a
federal grant is going to a Kansas City charter school, Scuola Vita Nuova
Charter School, that is located at an Italian Cultural Center and had
to pay $30,000 to former principal who filed lawsuit
claiming the school’s founder made her fire her same-sex partner who also
worked at the school?
Because of DeVos’s general lack of
transparency, what we’re left with, instead of answers, are more questions and
a well-founded suspicion that her purpose in office is to purloin as much
public money as she can into the hands of private interests while justifying it
as a much-needed reform.
Come January, when there’s a
Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, there will be inquiries to reveal the inner machinations of
DeVos’s department. But in the meantime, she and her associates toil
away behind a shroud of scary headlines, and that’s just the way they want it.
