Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is pushing back on one of the major embarrassments in an interview filled with embarrassments: her seeming ignorance about whether Michigan public schools have gotten better since she used her family’s billions to push a privatization agenda. Of course, her pushback takes the form of a whine about the media and some misleading data.
So … Michigan used to be average or above average, and now it’s below average, and this shows that the problem is with schools nationwide? That’s her defense?
Here's the reality of Michigan education:
For years, the Free Press has written extensively about how Michigan’s performance on a national student assessment exam has declined dramatically while other states have shown improvement. A report released last week raised concerns about large drops in student proficiency among third graders in the state and found that Michigan had the biggest declines compared to 11 other states that use a similar exam.
"The biggest declines compared to 11 other states.” That’s saying something, given that Michigan has been the experimental lab for DeVos’ preferred education policies. You can find a lot more data to back up this point—Michigan is falling behind. And whether DeVos really didn’t know the story in Michigan when she responded to Lesley Stahl’s question about it by saying “I don’t know,” or whether she didn’t want to admit what she knew, it’s unacceptable that she is in a position to do this to the rest of the country.
Here, from before DeVos became secretary of education, is more reality:
Largely as a result of the DeVos’ lobbying, Michigan tolerates more low-performing charter schools than just about any other state. And it lacks any effective mechanism for shutting down, or even improving, failing charters. [...]
The results of this free-for-all have been tragic for Michigan children, and especially for those in Detroit, where 79% of the state’s charters are located.
A yearlong Free Press investigation found that 20 years after Michigan’s charter school experiment began, Detroit’s charter schools have shown themselves to be only incrementally stronger, on average, than traditional public schools. They have admirable graduation rates, but test scores that look nearly identical to those of public schools.
The most accurate assessment is that charter schools have simply created a second, privately managed failing system. Yes, there are high-performing outliers — a little more than 10% of the charter schools perform in the top tier. But in Detroit, the best schools are as likely to be traditional public schools.
Unacceptable.