As Michele Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow searingly documented, during the 1980s and 1990s the “war on drugs” enabled the rise of a mass incarceration-driven racist caste system that targets and strips millions of African-American men charged with felony crimes of basic rights enjoyed by other American citizens.
But there’s another “New Jim Crow” on the rise.
In the 1950s, as an outgrowth of the rising civil rights movement, the overthrow of school segregation had helped establish quality education as a basic right of citizenship for Americans of any skin color.
Now, a school privatization push led by the Michigan-based DeVos clan and spearheaded by Betsy DeVos is quickly imposing another inadvertent, separate and unequal “New Jim Crow” regime — inflicted by multimillionaire and billionaire activist dilettantes who have little actual expertise in education — upon those with the least political clout, especially African-American children in the inner cities.
What would Betsy DeVos do if nominated for secretary of Education ? Look to Michigan, suggests author and researcher Russ Bellant, whose prophetic 1996 book The Religious Right In Michigan Politics described the rise of the movement which, via Trump and the takeover of Congress and the Senate, has seized the federal government.
In Michigan, and especially Detroit, the DeVos-led school privatization push is, according to Bellant, “accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan”.
Over the last two decades DeVos political donations have encouraged Michigan legislation that has opened up an unaccountable “wild west” proliferation of for-profit, unaccountable Detroit-area charter schools.
In stark contrast to the names of DeVos-funded front organizations created to champion privatization — groups like “The American Federation For Children” and “All Children Matter” — some children seem to matter less in Betsy DeVos’ brave new charter school regime and many, even most, of those children happen to be African-American.
Anecdotal evidence that DeVos-style school privatization promotes a new, ugly form of structural racism comes from the personal testimony of, for example, Detroit mother of eight Michele Phillips who writes, of her experience with Detroit charters,
“choice” meant dragging my kids out of bed at 5 a.m. each morning and paying to put them on the city bus. The bus could be an hour, even two hours late, but the school would lock its doors 45 minutes after the opening bell. If my kids were late, the school would make them go home and miss the entire school day.
I later realized that it’s not an accident that charter schools don’t offer buses, or that many are downtown, far from the neighborhoods where families like ours live. These schools don’t want low-income kids like minention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.”
Is the real DeVos agenda about quality education, or simply about tearing down secular education in order to advance a theocratic religious agenda in which public money increasingly flows to private religious schools ?
A number of recent data points support that conjecture. One is Betsy DeVos’ recently exposed 2001 statement that she considers public education a means to “advance God’s kingdom”. More recently, in 2015, DeVos called public education “a dead end”. ‘Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America's Schools to Build "God's Kingdom’, argues a major Mother Jones story. DeVos “Used God and Amway to Take Over Michigan Politics” charged a Politico story.
Writing for The Atlantic, Allie Gross covers the DeVos family’s key role in tearing down Michigan educational regulations that enforce minimal standards and ensure accountability.
And in a well-supported New York Times op-ed from author Katherine Stewart — whose book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children exposed a massive fundamentalist push to infiltrate public schools with proselytizing bible clubs — argues that Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education is merely one part of a broader, dominionist agenda now being inflicted upon America by the Christian right through the Trump administration.
Stewart’s accusation has some strong backing evidence — in the early 1990s the recently incorporated Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation began funding a new Christian right “family values” Michigan nonprofit called the Foundation For Traditional Values.
The DeVos’ foundation continuously funded FTV for almost two decades. Betsy DeVos was honorary co-chair of FTV’s first major fundraising event, actively participated in FTV, and was listed on its advisory board into 2015.
FTV’s sole program is a Michigan fundamentalist summer camp that indoctrinates teens who are from homsechooled and from Christian private schools in the “biblical worldview” and trains them to become political activists.
FTV head James Muffett has stated his hope to see “thousands of Rick Santorums in the next generation”.
FTV, and its camp, embodies the true DeVos project — not better education for poor inner city kids but, rather, reclaiming America for Christ or, at least, the DeVos version of Christ, a stern, punitive “biblical capitalist” Christ who will rule with a rod of iron, through his chosen elect. Such as Betsy DeVos.