The troubling stories about Betsy DeVos keep coming. DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary nominee, has no educational experience beyond spending her massive wealth to undermine public schools by sending public education money to private schools in the form of vouchers and to charter schools. She and her family are major driving forces in Michigan’s laxness on “school choice,” and it’s been a disaster. Bridge Magazine recently looked at how “choice” has spelled segregation in DeVos’s hometown of Holland, Michigan:
In the two decades since Michigan adopted school choice, Holland’s white enrollment has plummeted 60 percent, with 2,100 fewer white students. Today, whites comprise 49 percent of school-age children living in the district, but only 38 percent the school population (Hispanics make up 47 percent of Holland schools). [...]
Many of those who left Holland’s schools didn’t go far. More than 400 students who live in the district now attend Black River Public School, a charter where 74 percent of students are white. Black River is just over a mile from Holland High School.
Another 255 Holland students drive east to the Zeeland Public Schools, which are 77 percent white.
This is a direct result of policies pushed by the person Donald Trump wants to put in charge of education at the federal level. Another reason for the white supremacists to love him, I guess. And it’s not like all that segregation and privatization has helped even on the limited measure of test scores:
… after more than a decade of Ms. DeVos’s getting her way on a host of statewide education policies, Michigan has the dubious distinction of being one of five states with declining reading scores.
Is this really the model we want the nation to follow?