Education Secretary Betsy DeVos showed just how much she hates the very idea of public education in a major speech on “school choice” at the Brookings Institution. DeVos either doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that if the United States is going to educate all of its kids, not just the lucky ones, we need to think about education as a public good, not a series of fragmented, privatized pieces. DeVos drew a comparison that tells us a lot about how she sees education—and what she doesn’t want to see:
How many of you got here today in an Uber, or Lyft, or another ridesharing service? Did you choose that because it was more convenient than hoping a taxi would drive by? Even if you didn’t use a ridesharing service, I’m sure most of you at least have the app on your phone.
Just as the traditional taxi system revolted against ridesharing, so too does the education establishment feel threatened by the rise of school choice. In both cases, the entrenched status quo has resisted models that empower individuals.
Notice what’s missing there? Any form of transportation that isn’t for profit. Call it … public transit. DeVos sees education as each of us hiring a private service and getting into an individual car to get where we’re going. That may work on an individual level for a billionaire like DeVos—her parents had no problem paying for her to go to private school and she had no problem paying for her kids to do the same—but it doesn’t work for the United States as a whole, and it certainly doesn’t work on the level of government funding Donald Trump, DeVos, and other Republicans envision for education.
This is a vision of education that would leave millions of kids out in the cold, and it’s coming from the person in charge of federal public education.