Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education today, and several people wrote me shortly after to effectively ask “what’s the likely harm?” It is hard to tell in the short run, but in the long term it could be significant. It is very  likely that DeVos is in this job with the expressed intent, both by her and the President, to dismantle the Education Department, and to significantly weaken public education in the process.

These have both been long-term goals of the GOP since the Reagan years. Since “government can’t do education well,” we should take it apart at the Federal level, and leave it to the states. Having seen both state and federal governments in action, this argument is prima facie ludicrous to me. Modern federalism, bringing the government “closer to the people,” is NOT a recipe for success! In fact, the closer you get to the people, the less they know about their government. How many people in the US know who their Senator is? Now how many know who their STATE senator is? Congressman vs. State Rep? Alderman (or similar)? We don’t elect these people for their knowledge on big picture issues, and we barely know them at all. But let’s put that aside for the moment. Educationally, if responsibility for public education is moved completely away from the Feds and to the States, the worst case is that we could get several more states that look like Kansas — you know, our national embarrassment as an education “system,” where funding is awful, and every few years they vote to teach creationism in science classes.

Moving back to DeVos though, where is she likely to focus? There is every reason to believe she wants to weaken our public schools even more, so what will we see. Less focus on standards, and more allowing states to set their own. This is a recipe to take already poorly funded states and make their schools worse off, as standards are set to the low levels of funding that exist now, and children (and our future society) suffer for it.

And then there are Charter Schools and vouchers. Many local governments push for Charter Schools to get away from the pull of teachers’ unions, and if they really worked as advertised and significantly improved education, we might have a different conversation. But we now have enough data in, including from DeVos’ preferred programs in Michigan, to say that Charter schools simply don’t improve education, especially in the aggregate. There are certainly some well run Charters out there, but there are also well run public schools. More often than not, Charter schools in practice take money out of the education system and send it to private companies, while taking power away from teachers and accountability away from students/parents. Transparency goes away, as do standards. And success measures don’t improve anywhere near enough to justify this.

Oh yes, and the vouchers. Please note that I am not automatically opposed to a voucher program. If you showed me a voucher that covered ALL educational costs for the lowest end students to attend the best schools available, I might be a fan. There are still issues, but that could work. Instead, we have vouchers that keep poverty stricken kids in poverty, only with less funding for their already poorly funded schools. Poor kids can’t afford the “choice” they are given, because in reality vouchers only pay a part of the cost. Middle class and rich parents kick in the rest, and poor kids stay in the worst performing schools. Thus in America, “education vouchers” is really just code for “transfer of education dollars away from the poor and toward others.”

Finally, the place where DeVos can do the most damage the most quickly is on rights issues. Her Charter/voucher plans completely ignore special needs kids and programs, which are ONLY successful at public schools. Other schools ignore these, because they are too costly and too hard to implement. And the enormous advances in LGBTQ rights for students can be quickly undermined if the Education Department joins with other in the Federal government and changes directions to public schools. This is a place where DeVos is a culture warrior for Christian zealots who believe that LGBTQ people are an affront to their g*d, and she brings these beliefs into public policy.

There are two points of good/hopeful news here though. First, the Federal education department is a really big ship, and it doesn’t have enormous control over most of these issues (except for rights questions). Second, and more importantly, some of us will be able to fight this on a State level. Illinois is an example where there is a reasonable change that State and local government can be pushed to make decisions that don’t move schools away from accountability and human rights. With a few state exceptions though, don’t look for any help with funding issues in this administration (not that they were coming anyway, but still…) But there are also many states that will take the new directives from education as carte blanche to move in the direction of Kansas. And that would be particularly bad for our kids and our society in the future.

Public education isn’t going to go away under Betsy DeVos. But it will likely get worse, especially for those currently in the worst schools. And there is pretty much no chance it will improve. And if you can make it bad enough, then you have a self-fulfilling prophecy of “can’t you see how bad public education is? We need to trash it!”