Tag Archives: betsy devos

School Privatization Lobby Places Fake News on Local Stations

Originally published in The Intercept on June 16.
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ON A WEEKLY basis over the last three years, an arm of the national school privatization lobbying group the American Federation for Children has been producing fake news segments and distributing them to local news stations. The stations often air the segments just as they receive them, allowing anchors to recite accompanying scripts word for word. The aired content includes no disclosure that it was produced by the education advocacy group.

The little-known project, known as “Ed Newsfeed,” has “distributed hundreds of stories in dozens of states,” said Walter Blanks Jr., a press secretary for the American Federation for Children, in response to questions from The Intercept. The Ed Newsfeed staff sends out a weekly email to producers nationwide with their new video content, including recommended scripts, available to them free of charge, and where “courtesy is optional.” The news producers can also access a full library of current and previous stories by creating an account on the nondescript site EdNewsfeed.com.

Founded in 1999 as the American Education Reform Council, and long funded by billionaire and top Republican Party donor Betsy DeVos, the since-renamed American Federation for Children pursues policies that redirect public education funding to parents to spend how they see fit. “We believe choice, innovation and entrepreneurism will revolutionize an antiquated K-12 system into a 21st century mode,” states the website for the lobby’s 501(c)(3) partner, the American Federation for Children Growth Fund, which sponsors the videos. DeVos was the group’s chair when she was tapped in 2016 to serve as secretary of education under President Donald Trump.

The news broadcasts are mostly cheerful and positive, focused on students who overcome long odds, transformative educators, and “inspiring schools.” Ed Newsfeed segments have featured organizations, apps, schools, and services that have political and/or financial connections to both the American Federation for Children and the DeVos family. Such relationships are not disclosed in the videos, which are marketed as straight news clips.

Multiple stories produced over the last year feature officials from K12 Inc., a publicly traded company founded in 2000 and the nation’s largest supplier of management services and curriculum for virtual charter schools. Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick were early investors in K12 Inc., and the company has sponsored the American Federation for Children’s annual policy conferences. One segment, produced in late November 2020, touts the growth in student enrollment at K12 schools during the pandemic. The video features Kevin Chavous, who the producers identify as the president of academics, policy, and schools at K12 Inc.

“Covid has been, I think, in many ways an opportunity to excite what is possible in education,” Chavous says. “But it’s also been a challenge because for a lot of families who have really trusted the public school system to educate their children, they now have to be more involved, and we try to take that load off with the way we offer our educational support.” The clip makes no mention that Chavous also sits on the American Federation for Children’s board. In its recommended script, Ed Newsfeed encourages stations to tell viewers how to learn more about K12 Inc.’s offerings. Another segment produced in late January, titled “How Covid has Changed U.S. Education,” features Jeanna Pignatiello, K12 Inc.’s senior vice president and chief academic officer.

Emily Riordan, a spokesperson for the company (which renamed itself “Stride” in November but is retaining the K12 brand) told The Intercept that “we have responded to [Ed Newsfeed’s] inquiries for stories about Stride K12-powered schools and online learning as we do for any other news organization or outlet, connecting them with enrolled families, teachers and school leaders, and Stride executives for interviews as appropriate.”

Ed Newsfeed stories also featured Connections Academy, another for-profit virtual charter school that has donated to the American Federation for Children. “Ed Newsfeed takes a closer look at the world of online learning and why it is successfully allowing students to be in charge of when and how they learn,” says the group’s fake anchor in one such 2019 segment, highlighting a student named Tyler enrolled in a virtual Connections Academy school. “And while there isn’t a brick-and-mortar building for Tyler to go to, online schools offer plenty of support. … Online instructors also say teaching kids virtually does away with the distractions that come with a typical classroom setting.”

Many segments are seemingly apolitical and feel-good, spotlighting things like successful tutoring programs, new research on early autism, or a local barber who gives back-to-school haircuts. But many more clips feature schools, programs, and leaders affiliated with the school choice movement. In October 2019, Ed Newsfeed produced a two-part program on homeschooling, an advocacy priority of the national lobbying group. “Homeschooling puts the curriculum completely in the parents hands,” reads the suggested script. “Find out why some say they’ve chosen homeschooling, how these clever and creative parents approach it, and the rewards.”

The Intercept reached out to several television stations that it could identify as having run Ed Newsfeed stories, including KPVM and KLAS-TV in Nevada, KTVK in Arizona, and Fox34 (KJTV) in Texas. No representative returned request for comment.

Blanks Jr. confirmed that “there are no requirements for TV news stations as far as attributing the content to Ed Newsfeed” and described the program as a “free service, run by a network of seasoned broadcast professionals, [and] offered to stations to be able to use video and interviews in any manner they see fit.” Pointing to budget cuts in the struggling news industry, he added: “The majority of news stations do not have an education reporter, so the goal is to help them bring innovative education stories, as well as heart-warming people stories, tied to education topics to their viewers.”

CORPORATIONS AND EVEN U.S. government entities have been producing deceptive audiovisual content designed to look like real news broadcasts since at least the early 1990s. In 1992, a TV Guide cover story titled “Fake News” admonished the media and PR industry’s practice of using so-called video news releases, or VNRs. The journalist, David Lieberman, warned that media outlets risked ruining their credibility with viewers if they did not label the footage clearly as the public relations content it is.

A front-page New York Times exposé in 2005 detailed the George W. Bush administration’s penchant for producing hundreds of fake news segments for television stations. At least 20 federal agencies, including the State Department, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Defense Department, produced pre-packaged content ready to air, narrated by “reporters” who were actually former journalists now working full time in public relations. While companies and government agencies told news stations they were free to edit or choose which parts of the segment or script they’d like to use, the stations often aired the footage and script in their original form.

Jon Stauber, the founder of the progressive watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, told Democracy Now! that the New York Times’s 2005 report marked the first mainstream media exposé of the “billion dollar sub-industry of the P.R. industry” that he had been tracking for over a decade.

“First of all, we’re talking about fake news,” Stauber said in the interview, years before the term would become a household slogan popularized by Trump. “And what this is, actually, is propaganda, because these are not news stories. They look like news stories, but they have a bias in favor of a political program or an ideology or a product. And the networks and stations that air these, and we’re talking about thousands of these produced a year, are engaging simply in plagiarism and fraud, fraud perpetrated on their viewers.”

Allison Perlman, a historian of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, told The Intercept that prior to the 1980s, broadcast stations had much greater concern about providing reputable news coverage to their communities. “There were public interest obligations when you were up for [broadcast] license renewal, and there was also a sense at the national level that high-quality journalism was good branding for stations and networks,” Perlman said. That started to change when the Federal Communications Commission began deregulating broadcasting in 1981 and as major broadcast networks were bought out by companies less committed to producing original journalism.

“The local stations still typically air local news in the evenings, but it’s really expensive to produce that content, and I’d imagine many would welcome some free stories,” Perlman said. “The FCC does have news distortion rules, but those have not been enforced.”

The Ed Newsfeed project works to obfuscate its ties to the school privatization lobbying group, perhaps to make laundering content easier. The vast majority of news segments are narrated by a “reporter” named Kim Martinez, a former TV news anchor who is now a spokesperson for the American Federation for Children’s Arizona chapter. Nowhere on the script segments or website does Ed Newsfeed identify Martinez as a spokesperson. Neither Martinez nor Margaret Beardsley, an executive producer for Ed Newsfeed who is also an Emmy Award-winning former TV news producer, returned The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Blanks Jr., of the American Federation for Children, told The Intercept that Ed Newsfeed was launched in response to the overall dearth of education coverage. “So our team had the vision of providing a service to the industry given AFC Growth Fund’s network of relationships in K-12 education across the country,” he said in an email. Asked about conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, Blanks Jr. said, “Ed Newsfeed is not paid for our coverage by any of the schools, programs, or educators featured in the pieces so there are no sponsorship attributions.” He declined to provide details on the number of stations that have aired their video press releases.

The group’s goal, Blanks Jr. said, is for coverage “to be timely, positive, and helpful” and to produce stories covering “all types of intriguing and uplifting K-12 schools and individuals … with no bias — a good education story is a good education story.”

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As the Education Department Strips Away Civil Rights Protections, New Coalition Aims to Fight for Students

Originally published in The Intercept on November 10, 2017.
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The Department of Education has become a civil rights nightmare. During her Senate confirmation hearing, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos admitted she didn’t know that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was federal law and suggested perhaps states should decide how to educate students with disabilities. A month later, the Trump administration rescinded protections that allowed transgender students to use whichever bathroom they felt most comfortable in; while DeVos reportedly objected at first, she ultimately green-lit the move. By June, the Education Department had announced it would be scaling back on civil rights investigations and proposed cutting more than 40 positions from its Office for Civil Rights.

Since then, the Education Department has decided to postpone protections for student loan borrowers and withdraw Obama-era protections for survivors of campus sexual assault. When a reporter explicitly asked DeVos if she would support increasing federal funding for IDEA, she wouldn’t say yes.

All this and more has prompted the start of a new coalition – the Education Civil Rights Alliance – to pool time, skills, and resources to defend students’ civil rights. It launched last week, and members say they’re aiming to fill a void the Trump administration has helped create.

ECRA is comprised of national legal and education groups, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Disability Rights Network, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

ECRA members emphasize they have never seen an Education Department disregard civil rights in this way. Speaking on a panel last week at the National Press Club, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said even when her union has had disagreements with Republican and Democratic administrations, they’ve “always been able to count on the Education Department’s Civil Rights Office.”

These concerns were elevated further last month when the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services sent out a newsletter announcing it had eliminated 72 special education guidance documents related to IDEA enforcement. The department gave no explanation beyond saying the documents were “outdated, unnecessary or ineffective.”

Advocates felt confused and blindsided. After further investigation, they discovered the Education Department had quietly scrapped the documents over two weeks earlier. Parents of students with disabilities took to social media in protest – the hashtag #ThisIsMyChild became their rallying cry.

Several days later, the Education Department released a revised list of the rescinded documents, including brief explanations for why each one was cut. Some were scrapped because of updated versions also on the books, others because they had been applicable to programs that no longer exist. A spokesperson for the department stressed that “there are absolutely no policy implications” to their actions, and that students with disabilities would not be affected.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities are not convinced.

Amy Woolard, an attorney and policy coordinator for the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia, told The Intercept that for families and students with disabilities, advocating for rights under IDEA means “near-constant vigilance” throughout a student’s school career.

“Guidance may not have the force of law, but it’s certainly a critical advocacy tool and helps states and families steer a very large ship in a consistently choppy sea,” said Woolard. “To revoke dozens of guidance documents so quickly and without much notice — even if outdated or redundant, as the department claims — is going to create a great deal of uncertainty and concern, both for states and for a community that has only had the protections of IDEA itself for a few decades.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Liz King, education policy director for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said, “We do not believe that the decision to rescind the guidance was in response to confusion in the field.”

The Education Department did not return multiple requests for comment on whether it acted in response to complaints or requests from the public.

Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national group that defends the legal and civil rights of students with disabilities, told The Intercept that while her organization’s initial analysis indicates students will not be impacted by the department’s rescinded documents, it is disappointed by the way the Education Department made its announcement, which led to real chaos for many people.

“We know this is just the first step in the process, yet we continue to lack any information from the department on next steps, so it’s premature to know what the full impact will be or if substantive feedback provided by stakeholders will be considered,” said Marshall.  “Suffice it to say, we remain very concerned.”

Some national Democratic leaders spoke out against the department’s move.

“There isn’t a basic protection for students that Secretary DeVos hasn’t tried to undermine, and I fear this issue will be no different,” said Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn., in a statement to The Intercept. “[She] is turning the Department of Education into some far-right experiment that does the bidding of special interests in Washington.”

Kamala Harris, a senator from California and potential 2020 presidential candidate, took to Twitter to blast the Education Department’s actions.

 

Going forward, the new Education Civil Rights Alliance says it will focus on protecting students – especially students with disabilities, students dealing with sexual assault, and transgender, immigrant, and Muslim students. The alliance says it is hearing lots of anecdotal reports about increases in school bullying and harassment and wants to help push for better data collection on these trends.

“What we’re hoping is by putting all this power together, we’re going to make sure that we have the biggest bang for the buck,” said Miriam Rollin, ECRA director.

Rollin told the Intercept that the new coalition has not yet talked to the Education Department, but “they’re hopefully on notice now.” The Education Department did not return multiple requests for comment on the ECRA or its own commitment to upholding civil rights law.

The Obama administration regularly consulted with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said King, the group’s education policy director, but Trump’s Education Department has rarely ever contacted them for feedback. “Their work has not been sufficiently transparent, it has not been guided by a commitment to protecting students from discrimination, and it has been reckless and irresponsible,” she said.

In October, the White House announced its nomination of Kenneth L. Marcus to lead the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, replacing Candice Jackson, who has served as acting assistant secretary since April. Marcus worked as the staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for four years under George W. Bush and before that, worked in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Many civil rights groups are waiting to cast judgment on Marcus. “He’s familiar with the law, with the work, so hopefully the Senate will fully explore how he intends to fulfill his duties,” said Rollin.

But, as The Intercept previously reported, Marcus has a history of campaigning for laws to punish people who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which encourages economic pressure against Israel for its violation of Palestinian human rights. Advocates worry that if Marcus is confirmed, he will push for similar measures in his new role, silencing pro-Palestinian voices. That would have a chilling effect on free speech — yet another attack on students’ civil rights.

The Rift Among Charter Schools

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 20, 2017.
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It’s a surprisingly challenging moment for the charter school movement. In August, Education Next—an education policy journal published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford—released its 11th annual public opinion poll examining Americans’ views on K-12 education. They reported a stunning 12-percentage-point drop in support for charters from spring 2016 to spring 2017—from 51 percent to 39 percent. African-American support fell from 46 percent to 37 percent, and Hispanic support fell from 44 percent to 39 percent.

A Gallup survey released a week later found growing partisan divides on charters, with Democratic support standing at 48 percent, down from 61 percent in 2012. Republican support, by contrast, has remained steady over the five years at 62 percent. While Gallup’s senior editor, Lydia Saad, suggested that Democratic support may have declined because chartering has become more closely tied to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, the Education Next staff said they found little evidence of a “Trump effect” because in their survey, support from both parties fell.

“If the decline in support were related to Trump’s support of the concept, I would have expected it to occur primarily among Democrats, and that’s not what we see,” Martin West, Education Next’s editor-in-chief told Education Week. “I would also expect there to be similar changes in opinion about other policies that the president has embraced, especially other school choice policies, which is not what we see.”

How much stock should charter advocates (and politicians) put in one or two national surveys? Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, published a provocative essay this month entitled, “The charter-schools movement needs to stop alienating Republicans.” Citing the new Education Next results, Petrilli argues that charter advocates should focus on regaining GOP support, and suggests doing so by tamping down social justice rhetoric (such as closing achievement gaps and alleviating systemic inequalities), by emphasizing parental choice and personal freedom (i.e., that charters liberate families from their government-assigned schools), and by touting that most charters are non-union. “If we charter advocates want to maintain conservative and Republican support for these life-changing schools, we need to remember who our friends are—and help them remember why they liked us in the first place,” he writes.

Others have looked at wavering public support and pointed to for-profit charters as a model that may be hurting the reputation of the broader movement. “I would distinguish between the role that high-performing public charters can play in a strong public education system as opposed to vouchers and for-profit charters,” John King, the former secretary of education under Obama told Chalkbeat this past summer. Others have suggested that virtual charters—known for producing notably low academic outcomes—could be hurting public opinion. “It’s not fair to the charter school community to have these [test score] anomalies in the mix,” Nina Rees, the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools told The 74. “In a lot of states the performance of the virtual charter schools are considered outliers when you compare them to the average brick and mortar school.”

And now, in a surprising new development, so-called “independent charters”—freestanding schools not run by networked chains— have also begun to organize collectively. They’re saying their interests and reputations can suffer when they’re lumped in with the rest of the charter movement.

According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 60 percent of the nation’s charters are independent, down from 69 percent in 2011. Well-known nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs)—which make up 24 percent of the sector—include Success Academy, KIPP, and Achievement First. For-profit networks (called education management organizations, or EMOs) make up the rest, and include networks such as K12 Inc. and Academica.

Despite comprising more than half of all charters, independent charter schools rarely dominate the press narratives, and seldom attract the same level of enthusiasm from philanthropists and advocacy groups. Independent charter supporters say it’s because their schools aren’t focused on growth, scale, and replication—priorities among mainstream education reformers.

Last week, leaders of independent charter schools gathered together in New York City for the first-ever Independent Charter School Symposium. Amy Shore, of the Center for Educational Innovation, which co-sponsored the conference, emphasized that her group is not anti-CMO, but wants to focus on helping “the mom-and-pop store survive next to Walmart.” Part of the challenge, she explains, is advancing a different idea about what constitutes meaningful reform. “I’d say a lot of the big foundations are looking at how to achieve scale,” she says. “There’s an argument that if it cannot expand, then why would we invest money in it?” But Shore stresses that “there’s a whole other theory of social change” that says if a majority of charters are independent, and there are all kinds of different flowers growing, “why are we trying to make them all roses?”

Steve Zimmerman, founder of the Coalition of Community Charter Schools, an organization representing New York City’s independent charters and the conference’s other co-sponsor, says he started his group in response to what he saw as too much focus on standardized testing—a trend he believes stifles innovation, collaboration, and charters’ original promise.

Zimmerman says a turning point for independent charters came with the election of Donald Trump. “Some things became more clear for us, and one of them was that we saw too much coziness between major players in the charter world and the incoming administration,” he says.

At the conference, held at a hotel in Queens late last week, attendees discussed forming their own national organization of independent charters, to advocate for their interests and challenge the prevailing narrative around education reform. When this group would launch, and what it would actually look like, is not entirely clear. As Zimmerman admits, they’d face an uphill battle for funding, as the major financial backers of the movement prefer supporting charter networks that can grow. “They want to see replication, they want to see leverage,” he says. “We understand that the likelihood is that we will never, ever get money from those guys because we do not represent scale. We represent the kinds of schools that people want to send their kids to.”

As an example, Zimmerman points to Sidwell Friends, the renowned private school in Washington, D.C., that boasts such alumni as Malia Obama and Chelsea Clinton. “We want our schools to be like where the Obamas sent their kids to,” he says. “There is no Sidwell Friends 2, Sidwell Friends 3. They don’t do that. You grow a great school culture, one at a time, and it takes years.”

This year Florida legislators passed a controversial omnibus bill—HB 7069—which revamps many aspects of chartering across the state. One of its most significant provisions involved making it easier for national CMOs to enter communities with low-performing traditional public schools.

At the Independent Charter School Symposium, Christopher Norwood, founder of the Florida Association of Independent Schools—which represents freestanding charters, not CMOs or EMOs—explained how the legislative debates around HB 7069 highlighted problems independent charters face in his state. While Norwood estimates that 80 percent of what his group supports aligns with the Florida Charter School Alliance—the state’s dominant charter advocacy organization—he believes “it’s that 20 percent” that will make or break independent charters. “The way [HB 7069] was written, it was written for outside companies to come in,” he says. “If we had more power in that decision-making, we would not have wanted that to happen.”

Norwood and Zimmerman anticipate pushback to their efforts to form their own organization, but say they have little choice but to push forward.

“The National Alliance truly believes they act in the interest of all charter schools…but the truth is they can’t really represent interests of independent charters because their funders really believe in the network model,” Zimmerman says.

Nonetheless, in a statement provided to The American Prospect, Vanessa Descalzi, a spokesperson for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says that the organizers of the Independent Charter Schools Symposium have their full support. “The National Alliance represents all public charter schools—including those which belong to a network or function as independent single sites—and we appreciate when any of our constituents take proactive steps to identify areas of need and provide resources to their communities,” she says. The new group of independent schools “will be a welcomed voice” in the charter movement, she says, while adding that “advocating for independent, community-based schools is in the National Alliance’s DNA.”

Ultimately, leaders of independent charters are trying to figure out how to save, or redefine, the brand of the charter school movement, much as Michael Petrilli is when he talks about winning back GOP support, or John King is when he tries to distance the movement from for-profit networks.

In Norwood and Zimmerman’s eyes, extricating independent charters from what they describe as “corporate aspects” of the movement could help restore progressive support for charter schooling. The networked chains and their advocates “win battles but they’re losing the war—if the war is hearts and minds of people, and the war of ideas,” says Zimmerman. Though he acknowledges independent charters align with CMOs on many issues, and cites equitable funding as an example, he says for now that independent charters have to carve out their own space, and create their own national voice.

Norwood expects CMO leaders to push back on their efforts to organize independently. “If you take away independently operated charter schools from a certain organization [like the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools], what are they left with?” he asks. “Now they’re exposed. Now they’re all management companies. Now they can’t hide behind [us].”

Under Trump, Liberals Rediscover School Segregation

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 11, 2017.
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At the American Federation of Teachers’ biannual TEACH conference in July, union president Randi Weingarten gave a provocative speech about school choice, privatization, and Donald Trump’s secretary of education. “Betsy DeVos is a public school denier, denying the good in our public schools and their foundational place in our democracy,” Weingarten declared. “Her record back in Michigan, and now in Washington, makes it clear that she is the most anti–public education secretary of education ever.”

But it was Weingarten’s remarks about choice and segregation that ultimately drew the most fire: She highlighted politicians who had used school choice as a way to resist integration following Brown v. Board of Education; she argued that the use of private school vouchers increases racial and economic segregation; and she emphasized that privatization, “coupled with disinvestment, are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”

Her speech came on the heels of a new Center for American Progress report, entitled “The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers,” which presented similar historical arguments. CAP and the AFT—liberal institutions that sparred over education reform during the Obama years—held a joint event on the report the week before, emphasizing that voucher programs generally benefit the most advantaged students, lead to increasingly economically segregated schools, and divert needed resources from public education. With Trump in the White House, teachers unions and the influential liberal think tank have apparently found some common ground.

The backlash from conservatives and education reformers was swift and fierce. TheWall Street Journal editorial board argued that Weingarten’s speech demonstrated that she “recognizes that the public-school monopoly her union backs is now under siege, morally and politically, for its failure to educate children, especially minority children.” Rick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, called CAP’s report “misguided, misleading and historically inaccurate.” And Peter Cunningham, who runs an education reform advocacy group, wrote in response that Weingarten was just projecting the flaws of traditional public schools and unions onto her opponents.

While many of these critics have long championed dismantling much of the public sector, there is something conspicuous about American liberalism’s newfound focus on school segregation.

Though CAP and teachers unions regularly speak about educational “equity,” it’s no secret that neither have been very vocal about school segregation in the past few decades. CAP, which strongly touted charter schools during the Obama years, had nary a word to say then about charters’ impact on racial and economic isolation. Even now, as CAP takes a new outspoken stand on private school choice and segregation, it has stayed silent on the segregative risks of chartering.

The relationship between teachers unions and desegregation efforts has been complicated, too.

In some respects, teachers unions served as leaders for the pro-integration liberal establishment during the years following Brown v. Board. Historian Jonna Pereillo traces these dynamics in her book Uncivil Rights. Teachers unions joined forces with civil rights activists to push for integrated schools, reduced class sizes, increased health and social services, and improved school facilities. Charles Cogen, who served as the president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers between 1960 and 1964, and then as AFT president from 1964 to 1968, took strong stances in support of rezoning and school integration. Pereillo notes that Cogen pushed his union “to fight the tendency of many Northern liberals to see both sides of the integration debate,” emphasizing that liberal teachers should “stand by a forthright and consistent decision” to push for integrated schools. The UFT’s highest ranking black officer, Richard Parrish, also filed an amicus curiae in the Brown case, and the AFT later expelled some Southern locals that refused to cooperate with the Supreme Court’s decision.

But while unions backed efforts to integrate and equalize public schools, they generally opposed initiatives that would have required transferring educators into schools they didn’t want to work in. Focused on the unequal work environments between black and white schools, unions argued that to transfer teachers against their will would represent yet another example of teachers’ lack of agency over their professional lives.

Put differently, the AFT and its affiliates played an important role pushing for integration, but when teachers were asked to make the same sacrifices as bused students, unions pushed back, firmly asserting that working conditions in black schools would have to be improved first.

By the late 1960s, many black parents grew increasingly frustrated with the teachers unions’ stance—one they felt was cowardly and racist, and an excuse to avoid serving their children. Many also grew increasingly disillusioned that public schools would ever actually integrate, and, as part of an ideological and strategic shift away from integration to black power, they began pushing for greater decision-making power over their local segregated schools, including who should be allowed to teach, and what subjects educators should be allowed to teach. Teachers, in turn, balked at having their job requirements dictated to them by non-educators, internalizing it as yet another sign that they lacked agency over their professional lives.

And as the teachers-union movement grew—UFT membership, for instance, soared 66 percent between 1965 and 1968—thousands of the newer members proved to be more conservative in political orientation. “Unionists who had once enacted progressive social and political works through their unions now found themselves at odds with a growing number of new members who wanted little to do with civil rights projects,” Pereillo writes about the period.

In the 1970s and 1980s, court decisions that mandated busing for integrational purposes became an explosive issue for many white parents of school-age children. In such presumably liberal bastions as Boston and Los Angeles, busing opponents won elections to school boards and other public offices, at times shifting public discourse and policy well to the right, and not only on education issues. The fierce political opposition to so-called “forced busing” led much of the liberal community, including teachers unions, to turn its attention, resources, and political capital elsewhere. Activists within the African-American community also began to focus less on integration and more on issues such as funding disparities and school discipline. While school desegregation had always been controversial, the busing backlash transformed it into a third-rail issue.

But beginning in 2014, issues of racial justice began to re-enter liberal rhetoric in a more overt way. Following a wave of high-profile police shootings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the public started to grapple more openly with the legacies and realities of American racism. Teachers unions were not immune to this reckoning.

In the summer of 2015, at the National Education Association’s annual meeting, members voted on a historic new resolution to fight institutional racism, which they defined as “the societal patterns and practices that have the net effect of imposing oppressive conditions and denying rights, opportunity and equality based on race.” That same summer, the AFT formed its own Task Force on Racial Equity to outline how the union could move schools away from zero-tolerance policies, reform discipline practices, and create more supportive environments for young black men.

Yet despite powerful new cases against segregation from a diverse set of thinkers—including writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and researchers like Raj Chetty—neither the AFT nor the NEA had yet to tackle segregation head on, even with their increased focus on issues of race and discrimination. And elsewhere in the liberal community, fears of provoking more white backlash in a nation where white nationalism was on the rise put a damper still on discussions of desegregation.

This tension was illustrated last summer, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I had the opportunity to interview NEA President Lily Garciaabout her views on education policy.

Rachel Cohen: There’s been a renewed national discussion around school integration since the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education two years ago. School segregation was notably absent from the Democratic Party’s K–12 platform. Why isn’t school segregation getting more attention, and do you think the NEA could play a bigger role in pushing desegregation forward?

Lily Garcia: If you take a look at the most highly segregated schools, if you’re looking at all Latino kids, or all African American kids, then you’re mostly looking at charter schools. Poor communities usually end up being described as “poor, minority” communities. Why do those words go together? Why do those two adjectives have to describe the same communities? You can’t just treat the school. You have to treat the entire community. You have to treat poverty.

Integrating schools will not cure the poverty that affects those students. What they’ve done to integrate schools in some places where I’ve been is that they’ve closed down the school in the black neighborhood, and put those kids on a bus, and shipped them for an hour to the white school. They usually broke up the community so that you wouldn’t have a majority-minority school. We’ve seen [integration] done so poorly. What we really want to focus on is equity.

Cohen: Do you draw a distinction between the movement to integrate schools and equity?

Garcia: When you talk about school integration, there’s so much more than let’s just have black, brown, and white children sit together in the same classroom. You can do that simply by assigning kids to different schools. But why are there deep pockets of poverty where black and brown children live? You have to be talking about the roots of what’s going on.

Garcia’s responses were emblematic of the union’s fraught position. They expressed an obvious concern with questions of racial justice, broadly defined, but a resistance to engaging the specific, narrower question of racial segregation. Indeed, Garcia’s criticism of busing, and especially her dismissal of integration as “hav[ing] black, brown, and white children sit together in the same classroom,” might strike civil rights advocates as akin to the talking points deployed by conservative defenders of segregation. This language is not unusual in certain education reform circles, but less common coming from a more progressive organization. And while AFT President Randi Weingarten had spoken more supportively about integration efforts than her NEA counterpart, she too had avoided directly answering questions about her union’s role in addressing segregation, and acknowledged that busing opposition has made integration advocacy difficult. As recently as last year, almost no one in the liberal establishment seemed inclined to tackle school segregation head on

Until now.

There is no question that the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education has created a new political landscape for liberal organizations, including on the issue of school integration. The attacks on the Trump administration’s school choice agenda as segregationist have both reflected and led to a wave of liberal concern over segregation.

Over the past six months, the focus of liberals’ education policies has changed. DeVos was rightly skewered in February when she praised leaders of historically black colleges and universities for being the “real pioneers of school choice,” failing to recognize that HBCUs were created as a response to unabashed racial discrimination. Critics seized upon this blunder as evidence that the school choice movement does not care about or understand segregation.

Liberals and teachers unions have also jumped at the opportunity to assail school privatization as racist, a perspective many had long believed but far fewer had verbalized. Now, when attacking DeVos’s enthusiasm for tax credit scholarships and private school vouchers, progressives point to Trump’s support for such racist policies as immigrant deportations and police brutality; his administration’s enthusiasm for vouchers and charters, they say, must be understood as yet another extension of the president’s discriminatory agenda.

“Racism is unfortunately and undeniably part of the context through which policy proposals emerging from this administration must be considered,” wrote Catherine Brown, CAP’s vice president of education policy.

The Century Foundation, another influential liberal think tank, published research in March that emphasized the risks that private school vouchers pose for integration efforts. (CAP and the AFT relied on this research when crafting their recent talking points on school choice.) Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg wrote in The Atlantic that policies to promote school integration took “a significant hit” from the Trump administration when it recently killed a $12 million grant program to support local districts boosting socioeconomic diversity.

While these critiques are overdue and welcome, the timing sometimes seems politically convenient. For instance, the grant program Kahlenberg lamented was only months old at its time of death, established in the final days of Obama’s eight-year presidency. Prior to that, his administration by and large refused to promote desegregation in the bulk of its major education initiatives. In some instances, Obama’s education team even incentivized policies that exacerbated racial and economic isolation, in part by treating competitive grant applicants who served segregated populations more favorably than those targeting diverse ones.

Many liberal institutions have modified their rhetoric on issues of segregation since Donald Trump came to power, but some still only invoke it when referring to vouchers. CAP and the Century Foundation, for example, have directed their focus on the segregative effects of vouchers, but much less so on charters.

Political tribalism plays a role here.There was great pressure, both explicitly and implicitly, for progressive organizations to defer to the charter-friendly agenda of the Obama administration. And it’s simply easier for labor to politically oppose Trump and DeVos than to fight Obama and Arne Duncan (Obama’s education secretary), even when the latter could be relatively cold to teachers unions (and they to him).

But now, with Trump in office, the NEA has adopted its first new policy position on charter schools since 2001—and it’s far more harsh than its old one. Among other things, the new policy blasts charters for helping to create “separate and unequal education systems” that harm communities of color, language that clearly harkens back to the Brown decision. The AFT has long been more generally critical of charters than the NEA, in part because charters are more heavily concentrated in cities where AFT locals dominate. But now with Trump, the AFT has also begun incorporating sharper critiques of segregation into its criticism of school choice. (The latest comes this week in a Dissent article by Leo Casey, the executive director of the AFT’s Albert Shanker Institute.)

A longtime NEA staffer has noticed “a real uptick in interest” in discussions of segregation at union headquarters over the last year. For a very long time, the staffer said, unions have been influenced by the same political climate that affected other liberal institutions, viewing many earlier desegregation efforts as either abject failures or politically toxic. In recent years, though, as the union-friendly Economic Policy Institute has published more and more on the harm caused by racial and economic segregation, the NEA staffer says they can tell it’s having an impact internally within their union. “Having an organization like EPI, with its stature in the labor movement, focusing on this issue really does change the dynamics,” the staffer said. While for decades progressives have looked at desegregation as a political dead end, the calculus—at least in some ways—appears to be changing.

If unions and think tanks are recent arrivals to the reinvigorated movement to promote school integration, they’re still ahead of much of the country, and civil rights advocates will surely welcome their help. But they may also have an opportunity to learn from organizations that have been fighting these battles far longer. Notable among these is the NAACP, which has long focused on the intersections of school choice and racial segregation. Partly due to concerns about segregation, the organization approved resolutions in 2010 and 2014 raising issues about charter schools. This was followed by a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on new charters until more research could be done, and last month the civil rights group published a new report outlining policy improvements they plan to push for in the charter sector going forward. The NAACP’s campaign against segregation more broadly has been central to its mission since its founding over a century ago.

It’s important to recognize the complicated factors that bring groups to the 21st century’s burgeoning civil rights movement, because right-wing critics will certainly not hesitate to cry hypocrisy or opportunism. But there’s opportunity here too: opportunity for labor and policy organizations to develop a stronger commitment to school integration, learning from the experience of civil rights veterans; and opportunity for those veterans, who need allies now more than ever, to hold newly vocal advocates accountable for long-professed commitments to integration and justice. Political coalitions are always imperfect at their start, but that’s never meant a powerful movement couldn’t be forged from them in the end.

 

DeVos Might Not Force Private School Vouchers on States — But She Could Promote Them

Originally published in The American Prospect on February 6, 2017.
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In 1997, when Arizona launched the nation’s first tax-credit scholarship program, allowing individuals to receive tax credits for donating to nonprofits offering private school tuition grants, legislative aides estimated it would cost the state $4.5 million annually. By the 2015-16 school year, the yearly cost of the program had grown to more than $140 million, even though private school enrollment was actually below its 1997 levels.

Florida launched the nation’s second tax-credit private school voucher program in 2001, with a cap of $50 million. Today the program tops out at $559,000,000 annually, and will increase to $699,000,000 in the next fiscal year.

Pennsylvania’s tax-credit school voucher program, also launched in 2001, was originally capped at $30 million. Designed to provide tuition assistance to private schools, pre-K programs, and “innovative” public school initiatives, it now hits $175 million annually.

Tomorrow the Senate will hold its final vote on Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the federal education department, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor who has spent decades advocating for charter schools, private schools, and virtual education. No other Trump appointee has faced the same magnitude of opposition, with hundreds of thousands of Americans calling, emailing, and faxing their senators in protest.

Though it’s widely expected that she’ll be confirmed on Tuesday, the past few months of anti-DeVos campaigning have created some new fault lines within education reform coalitions. In addition to labor unions and civil rights groups, more liberal school choice organizations, like Democrats for Education Reform and Education Trust, have lined up against DeVos’s nomination. Billionaire Eli Broad, who funds charter schools in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and other cities, penned a letter last week against his fellow billionaire education reform champion. On the other hand, Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City, has emerged as one of DeVos’s most ardent supporters.

One major concern critics have voiced about DeVos is whether she will use her federal perch to push school privatization. She’s referred to the public education system as a “dead end” and has neither attended a public school, nor worked in one. In her home state of Michigan, DeVos has spent years (unsuccessfully) pushing private school vouchers, and has funded voucher efforts in other states.

Though DeVos has promised she would not “force” voucher programs on states, there are other ways she could support their growth if she’s confirmed as education secretary. She might get behind what’s known as “Title I portability”—a policy that would allow states to use federal dollars earmarked for low-income students to follow them to the public or private school of their choice. At $14.5 billion annually, Title I is the federal government’s largest program for K-12 students. Some congressional Republicans tried to include Title I portability in the federal education law that passed in 2015, but Barack Obama said he’d veto any bill that contained it. Democrats and Obama’s administration maintained that such a policy would significantly harm poor students by directing federal funds away from high-poverty school districts.

Title I is likely to come up again, given that in early January Donald Trump tapped Rob Goad, a senior education adviser to Representative Luke Messer of Indiana, to join his administration. Messer is known as one of the most vocal Congressional advocates for Title I portability, and Goad will serve as the key education expert on Trump’s White House Domestic Policy Council. A DeVos-backed Title I portability amendment to the Every Student Succeeds Act could win congressional approval unless Senate Democrats successfully filibuster it.

DeVos is also likely to support states establishing education savings accounts, which are voucher-esque subsidies that can go toward expenses like tutoring and homeschooling, as well as private school tuition. In December, right-leaning education reformers gathered together in Washington, D.C., for a conference hosted by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, an education advocacy group on whose board Betsy DeVos served until recently. At the conference leaders spoke animatedly about setting up vouchers or education savings accounts in every state across the country.

Noting the liberal opposition to DeVos’s nomination, some education analysts have suggested that private school vouchers are unlikely to expand beyond conservative legislators and red states. However, the reality is that private school voucher programs are often pushed in blue cities and purple suburbs—where a plethora of religious schools are located. In fact, it’s Republican-leaning rural areas that tend to have some of the greatest opposition to private school vouchers, given their scant school options.

Indeed Maryland, a blue state that went for Hillary Clinton by 26 points, established its first private school voucher program last year, appropriating $5 million to the effort. While school voucher initiatives are often pitched as vehicles to help poor, black students escape their local public schools, data from the first year of Maryland’s program reveal that more private school vouchers went to white students than black students, and 78 percent of the 2,464 vouchers issued went to students who were already enrolled in private schools. Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan says he wants to double the funding for the voucher program over the next three years.

“In Maryland, no one has lobbied harder or been more excited about Governor Hogan’s voucher program than religious schools,” says Sean Johnson, the legislative and political director for the Maryland State Education Association. “Despite the rhetoric you hear on vouchers from President Trump, Governor Hogan, and Betsy DeVos, vouchers are less about moving kids from public schools and more about moving taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. We can’t afford to fund two different school systems—public taxpayer dollars should be spent improving our public schools, not subsidizing expensive private schools.”

Meredith Curtis of the Maryland ACLU says what’s happening in Maryland is similar to what’s happened in other states, where private school voucher programs start out small, but continue to steadily grow, even as public school budgets are cut.

“Maryland public schools have tremendous needs that need to be addressed by the state, but we have no promises from the governor to meet those urgent needs, and yet he proposes increasing funding to religious schools,” Curtis says. “What we’ve seen in other states is that once allocations for vouchers are set in place, they just continue to increase, but there’s no accountability for benchmarks to compare the quality of education. We support [the right of] private schools to set their own curriculums, but we object to publicly funding [them].”

Assessing the educational value of private school voucher programs has been difficult. As Erin Richards details in The American Prospect’s most recent issue, Wisconsin, which launched the nation’s first private school voucher program 27 years ago, still lacks high-quality data for assessing performance, and still lacks robust mechanisms to hold private schools that receive public dollars accountable.

DeVos, congressional Republicans, and a host of GOP governors around the country may be enthusiastic about increasing the number of students enrolled in private schools, but public support for such policies is actually falling. According to an annual poll conducted by Harvard’s Education Next journal, nationwide support for vouchers targeted at low-income students fell from 55 percent to 43 percent between 2012 and 2016, and support for universal vouchers fell from 56 percent to 50 percent.

If private school vouchers become increasingly associated with Donald Trump, the nation’s staggeringly unpopular new president, then public support for vouchers may fall further yet.

 

Betsy DeVos Alarms Special Education Advocates, Parents

Originally published in The American Prospect on January 18, 2017.
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At an hour when most parents were headed home for the evening, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos sat down to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The unusual evening hearing raised a number of red flags before it even began: Five Republicans on the committee together had received more than $250,000 in campaign donations from the billionaire Republican donor and her family, and the Office of Government and Ethics still had not signed off on DeVos’s financial disclosures.

So perhaps it was not surprising that the roughly three-hour hearing included several bizarre episodes. DeVos cited grizzly bears as a justification for states determining whether firearms should be allowed in schools. The nominee also insisted that student debt rose 980 percent since 2008, when it only rose 124 percent. But the most shocking moment unfolded when DeVos admitted “she may have been confused” about the 42-year-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), one of the nation’s most fundamental civil rights laws.

Enacted in 1975, IDEA provides nearly seven million children in the U.S. with special education services. Special education oversight is one of the most significant responsibilities of the education department that DeVos has been nominated to lead. “The fact that she doesn’t understand the basics about federal education law is just appalling,” says Denise Marshall, the executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), a national organization that defends the legal and civil rights of students with disabilities. “It was pretty clear to us that she is not, and never has been, an advocate for students with disabilities.”

“Even around vouchers, which she supposedly does have a lot of experience with, she just talked about them writ large, as if they could solve every family’s dilemma,” Marshall adds. “She gave no indication that she understands that students with disabilities very often have to give up their legal and civil rights to use vouchers.”

One of DeVos’s most stunning blunders came when she challenged the very notion of federal disability mandates, suggesting that it’s best for individual states to decide how to educate students with special needs. “That would turn back the clock by 40 years,” Marshall says. “IDEA was passed out of the recognition that students with disabilities are a group that requires greater protections. If states want to receive those federal funds, then they have to accept higher responsibilities, and provide those necessary supports.”

Thena Robinson Mock, director of the Opportunity to Learn Program at Advancement Project, a national civil rights group, says that an education secretary nominee who does not understand how IDEA benefits children of color is especially alarming. “If we know nothing else about the school-to-prison pipeline, we know that black and brown students with disabilities are the most vulnerable to punitive discipline policies that push them out of school and into the criminal-justice system,” she says. “These students still need the protections of IDEA because they are more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions, more likely to be referred to law enforcement and more likely to be arrested in school.”

Parents of students with disabilities also had strong reservations about DeVos’s performance, saying that her lack of rudimentary knowledge and experience should disqualify her from the position.

Dustin Park, who lives in Tennessee with his six-year-old diagnosed with Downs syndrome, told The American Prospect that DeVos’s testimony troubled him. “At best, she doesn’t know about the laws protecting students with disabilities, and at worst she doesn’t care,” he says. Park has been organizing and educating other parents about state and federal special education laws and noted that the Supreme Court heard a case just last week that will have massive implications for students with disabilities across the United States.

David Perry, a parent living in Chicago with a disabled child could not understand why a nominee did not have a good answer for such a softball question. “It’s either ignorance, or arrogance, or apathy,” he says. “Either way, I’m even more concerned about her nomination.”

Edward Fuller, a Penn State University education policy professor, told The American Prospect about his experience living in Texas, where his daughter, Jade, diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and ADHD, had been routinely denied special education services. In 2016, The Houston Chronicle reported that Texas had arbitrarily decided that only a certain percentage of students would get special education, while denying thousands of other children their lawful services. The newspaper’s investigation has since prompted federal intervention.

“The debacle in Texas is a perfect example of what could happen if states are allowed control over special education and are allowed to interpret the laws around IDEA from their own perspective,” says Fuller. “States can adopt policies that leave huge swaths of kids without access to a free and appropriate education [and] many southern states would adopt the same strategy as Texas in order to reduce education spending.”

Tom Wellborn, a south Jersey parent of two children with special needs, says he can’t imagine how miserably his kids would be doing without the techniques they’ve learned from specialists in their schools. “DeVos is obviously unqualified; painfully so,” he says. Citing the grizzly bear comment, Wellborn says he can’t even fathom “whether she’s serious or thinks we’re all idiots.”

Freshman Senator Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, and a parent of a son with cerebral palsy, challenged DeVos last night on the federal disability statute. In a statement provided to The American Prospect, Hassan said, “The fact that a nominee to lead the Department of Education seemed unfamiliar with the federal law to protect students with disabilities—a law that she would have a major responsibility in enforcing—is unacceptable. I will review Mrs. DeVos’s written responses but at this point she has done nothing to convince me that she’s a suitable choice to serve as secretary of education.”

Public Education under Trump

Originally published in The American Prospect winter 2017 issue.
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On November 8, 2016, the man who vowed to be “the nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice” won the presidential contest. About two weeks later he announced that Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor who has aggressively lobbied for private-school vouchers, online education, and for-profit charter schools, would serve as his education secretary. In early December, Jeb Bush told an audience of more than 1,000 education reformers in Washington, D.C., that he hoped “there’s an earthquake” in the next few years with respect to education funding and policy. “Be big, be bold, or go home,” he urged the crowd.

To say education conservatives are ecstatic about their new political opportunities would be an understatement. With Republicans controlling the House and Senate, a politically savvy conservative ideologue leading the federal education department, a vice president who earned notoriety in his home state for expanding vouchers, charters, and battling teacher unions, not to mention a president-elect who initially asked creationist Jerry Falwell Jr. to head up his Department of Education, the stars have aligned for market-driven education advocates.

Donald Trump neither prioritized education on the campaign trail, nor unveiled detailed policy proposals, but the ideas he did put forth, in addition to his selection of Betsy DeVos, make clear where public education may be headed on his watch. And with a GOP Congress freed from a Democratic presidential veto, conservative lawmakers have already begun eyeing new legislation that just a few months ago seemed like political pipedreams.

Many aspects of education policy are handled at the state and local level, of course, but Republicans will govern in 33 states, and Trump will have substantial latitude to influence their agenda. The next few years may well bring about radical change to education.

School Choice

“President-elect Trump is going to be the best thing that ever happened for school choice and the charter school movement,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has proclaimed. “Donald is going to create incentives that promote and open more charter schools. It’s a priority.”

Giuliani’s comments reflect the enthusiasm that Trump expressed about choice and charters while campaigning for president. During a March primary debate, Trump said charters were “terrific” and affirmed they “work and they work very well.” A few months later he traveled to a low-performing for-profit charter school in Cleveland to say he’d invest $20 billion in federal money to expand charters and private-school vouchers as president. His campaign has not outlined where the money would come from, but suggests it will be accomplished by “reprioritizing existing federal dollars.”

Trump’s ambitions will likely be aided by his vice president-elect, Mike Pence, who worked vigorously to expand charter schools and vouchers while serving as Indiana’s governor. Pence loosened the eligibility requirements for students to obtain vouchers, and eliminated the cap on voucher recipients. Today, more than 30,000 Indiana students—including middle-class students—attend private and parochial schools with public funds, making it the largest single voucher program in the country. Pence also helped double the number of charter schools in his state; he increased their funding and gave charter operators access to low-interest state loans for facilities.

In the House and Senate, Republicans are eager to expand Washington, D.C.’s private-school voucher program, which has paid for about 6,500 students to attend mostly religious schools since the program launched in 2004. “I think [the Republican Congress and new administration] could eventually turn D.C. into an all-choice district like we see in New Orleans,” says Lindsey Burke, an education policy analyst at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Congress also allocates $333 million per year to the federal charter school program, and groups like the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools are calling for that number to rise to $1 billion annually. Martin West, an education policy professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, noted that to the extent the federal charter school program is well funded, states will continue to feel pressure to position themselves competitively for those dollars.

Conservative leaders at the state level are also looking to expand private-school vouchers and so-called education savings accounts, which are voucher-esque subsidies that can go toward expenses like tutoring and homeschooling, in addition to private-school tuition. At the Washington conference where Jeb Bush keynoted, panelists spoke enthusiastically about setting up vouchers or education savings accounts in all 50 states. On the campaign trail, Trump called for expanding private-school vouchers for low-income students, but his vice president-elect and his nominee for education secretary both support giving vouchers to middle-class families, too.

Congressional Republicans may also try to establish federal tax-savings accounts for K–12, which are similar to the 529 plans that already exist for higher education, and which mainly benefit well-off families. They also may push for federal tax credit scholarships, which would provide tax relief to individuals and businesses that help low-income children pay for private school.

In a sense, the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations softened the ground for a federally incentivized expansion of vouchers and other forms of privatization. In the bipartisan deal that led to the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, Bush and Democrats led by Senator Edward Kennedy traded federal standards for more federal funding. The subtext was the Republican narrative that public schools were failing. This in turn led to the era of standardized testing and punitive measures against “failing” schools. Later, by appointing former Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan to lead the Education Department, and passing over such progressive reformers as Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama sided with those who sought measures like the nationalization of academic standards. The new backlash from conservatives against testing and the Common Core should not be interpreted as a rejection of a federal role. The right loves it when Washington intervenes—if it serves the right’s purposes.

The Department of Education

Trump has boasted that he would reduce the size of the federal government, and his DeVos-led Department of Education is one likely place he’ll start. Though threatening to dismantle that federal agency is a long-standing Republican tradition, surrogates say it is more likely that Trump will try and “starve” the department, and downsize its responsibilities, rather than kill it outright.

In October, Carl P. Paladino, a New York real-estate developer who was briefly considered for education secretary, took to the stage on Trump’s behalf at a national urban education conference and said the department’s Office for Civil Rights—which oversees initiatives like tackling college sexual assault and reforming school discipline—was spewing “absolute nonsense.”

Obama’s Education Department has given unprecedented attention to reducing racial disparities in school discipline, issuing the first set of national guidelines in 2014 and making clear that it would hold districts accountable for discriminatory practices. Policy experts think these efforts will fall quickly by the wayside in the coming years.

In a press conference following Trump’s victory, David Cleary, the chief of staff for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said his boss believes the Office for Civil Rights should be reined in. “There will be aggressive oversight from Congress to make sure it shrinks back to its statutory authority and responsibilities,” Cleary said.

Another major threat to the Education Department is a significant loss of institutional knowledge. Politico reported that the agency is already experiencing a loss of morale since the election, and bracing for a serious brain drain: Many veteran employees who have served for decades, in addition to younger staff who entered government under Obama, are considering leaving because they don’t want to work for a President Trump.

Common Core

One crowd-pleasing element of candidate Trump’s stump speech was his promise to “kill” Common Core—the standards launched in 2009 that lay out what all K–12 students are expected to learn in English and math. The standards, which were created by a coalition of state governors, and incentivized by the Obama administration through the federal Race to the Top program, have been a flashpoint for conservatives, who see them as a threat to “local control.” Trump vowed to eliminate Common Core through the so-called School Choice and Education Opportunity Act—part of the legislative agenda he says he’ll focus on during his first 100 days. DeVos now stresses that she does not support Common Core, although an organization she founded—the Great Lakes Education Project, which she also funded and served as a board member for—strongly backed the standards in 2013.

While there are limits to what Trump and DeVos could do to end the Common Core standards (they are state standards, after all), Trump’s executive bully pulpit could certainly help embolden Common Core opponents on the local level.

Still, Catherine Brown, vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress, is not so worried about the future of the national education standards. “I don’t even think Donald Trump knows what the Common Core is,” she says. And despite candidate Trump’s demagoguery, Brown points out that states haven’t really abandoned them, even in more conservative parts of the country. “To the extent that states have changed their standards, they basically renamed them and kept the basic content,” she says.

Teachers Unions

This past year, public-sector unions faced an existential threat from Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a Supreme Court case seeking to overturn a 40-year-old ruling that required public employees represented by a union to pay fees to cover the union’s bargaining and representation costs, even if they do not pay full membership dues. Five of the nine justices were clearly primed to rule against the so-called “agency fees” and upend decades of legal precedent, but Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died in February, before the Court could rule. The case ended up in a 4–4 tie, leaving the law, and collective bargaining, in place.

Now that the Republican Senate has refused to hold a vote on Obama’s appointment of Judge Merrick Garland, Trump will nominate a conservative Scalia successor to the Court. With a number of Friedrichs look-alike cases headed to the Supreme Court, it’s a near certainty that a reconstituted majority of five conservative justices will strike down agency fees, which could considerably reduce the resources available to the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—two of the nation’s largest unions. Were that not trouble enough, the massive support that the AFT and NEA gave to Hillary Clinton’s campaign is not likely to endear them to a president with a well-known penchant for revenge.

Every Student Succeeds Act

At the end of 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the successor to the controversial Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, which tied federal funding to school performance. The new law is set to take full effect during the 2017–2018 school year. While there was broad recognition that ESSA marked a positive step forward from the test-and-punish regime that had reigned for 13 years under No Child Left Behind, a diverse coalition of civil-rights groups has worried that its replacement, which substantially reduced the federal government’s role in public education, will not do enough to hold states accountable for the success of racial minorities, students with disabilities, and English language–learners. “The hard-learned lesson of the civil rights community over decades has shown that a strong federal role is crucial to protecting the interests of educationally underserved students,” wrote the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in a letter to Capitol Hill during the ESSA negotiations.

For the past year, the Obama administration worked to draft regulations that would help maintain some level of federal accountability for student learning and funding equity, particularly for disadvantaged students. These executive-level regulations, which have been controversial among congressional Republicans, are likely to be abandoned, or weakened, under President Trump.

One policy that congressional Republicans might push for under a President Trump is known as “Title I portability,” which would allow states to use federal dollars earmarked for low-income students to follow students to the public or private school of their choice. While still a candidate, Trump brought in Rob Goad, a senior adviser to Representative Luke Messer, an Indiana Republican, to help him flesh out some school-choice ideas. Messer co-sponsored a bill during the ESSA negotiations that would have launched Title I portability, but Obama threatened to veto any version of the law that contained it. A White House report issued in 2015 said that Title I portability would direct significant amounts of federal aid away from high-poverty districts toward low-poverty ones, impacting such districts as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia particularly hard. Conservatives may see a more politically viable route to push this policy under Trump.

Brown of the Center for American Progress doesn’t think Congress will likely pursue Title I portability, however, in part because it has a lot of other legislative priorities to attend to. “The ink is barely dry on ESSA; states haven’t yet submitted their plans. I think [portability] is probably dead on arrival, but maybe six years from now,” she says. Even then, Brown thinks the policy will never be all that popular, since huge swaths of the country lack many school options, making them poor candidates for private-school vouchers.

But other education experts say that the lack of brick-and-mortar schools in rural communities just means that the door could open more widely for for-profit virtual schools, which DeVos has strongly supported. In 2006, Richard DeVos, her husband, disclosed that he was an investor in K12 Inc., a national for-profit virtual charter school company that has since gone public. As of mid-December, Betsy DeVos had not clarified whether her family still holds a financial stake in the for-profit education sector.

Higher Education

Trump, who founded the now defunct for-profit college Trump University, recently agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits alleging fraud. Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociologist at Temple University who studies college affordability, predicts America will be “open for business” under President Trump when it comes to promoting for-profit colleges. “This means cutting regulation and oversight, and defunding public higher education so that students view for-profits as a good deal,” she wrote on her blog following the election. The Higher Education Act, which governs the administration of federal student aid programs, is also up for reauthorization in 2017.

Trump didn’t devote much time while campaigning to talking about colleges and universities, but he did say in an October speech that he’d look to address college affordability by supporting income-based repayment plans, going against many Republicans who say such initiatives are fiscally reckless and create incentives to acquire too much higher education. Conservatives have also proposed rolling back Obama administration reforms that federalized all new student loans and applied stricter regulations, particularly to for-profit institutions. If President Trump does ultimately re-privatize student loans, consumer protections would likely disappear, and the cost of borrowing would rise.

University leaders are also worrying about what a Trump administration could mean for research funding. The government is likely to cut back on investments on budgetary grounds, but also on ideological grounds, since universities tend to be seen as liberal enclaves. Experts say that non-ideological scientific research is particularly vulnerable. House Republicans, led by Representative Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, have tried before to cut federal funding for social sciences and climate and energy research, and having a president who refers to global warming as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese” doesn’t augur well for federal research investments.

Moreover, as the president-elect frequently rails about political correctness, higher education leaders worry that a Trump administration will not look kindly on student free speech and protest. Ben Carson, who was briefly considered for Trump’s education secretary, said that if he were in control he would repurpose the department to monitor colleges and universities for “extreme bias” and deny federal funding to those judged to have it. Decrying alleged campus bias is a staple of “alt-right” (read: white nationalist) media outlets like Breitbart, whose chief, Steve Bannon, will be Trump’s strategic adviser and senior counselor.

The Path Forward for Progressives

For a week following the election, it wasn’t clear how exactly the liberal groups that backed Obama’s education reform agenda—Common Core standards, test-based accountability, and charter schools—would respond to their new choice-friendly president. The fact that the school reform agenda has long had bipartisan backing has always been one of its strongest political assets.

As pundits tried to guess whom Trump would pick for various cabinet-level positions, rumors started to float that Trump might be eyeing Michelle Rhee, the controversial former D.C. Public Schools chancellor, or Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, for education secretary. Both women back the Common Core standards, and are broadly revered among Democratic school reformers.

But on November 17, just over a week after the election, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, Shavar Jeffries, issued a strongly worded statement urging Democrats to refuse to accept an appointment to be Trump’s secretary of education. “In so doing, that individual would become an agent for an agenda that both contradicts progressive values and threatens grave harm to our nation’s most vulnerable kids,” Jeffries said. He condemned Trump for his plans to eliminate accountability standards, to cut Title I funding, to reduce support for social services, and for giving “tacit and express endorsement” to racial, ethnic, religious, and gender stereotypes, and he called on the president-elect to disavow his past statements.

Shortly thereafter, Moskowitz announced that she would “not be entertaining any prospective opportunities” in the administration, but defended the president-elect, saying there are “many positive signs” that President Trump will be different than candidate Trump. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, took a tour of a Success Academy charter in Harlem later that week. Rhee, following a meeting with Trump a few days later, issued a statement saying she would not pursue a job in Trump’s administration but that “[w]ishing for his failure” would amount to “wanting the failure of our millions of American children who desperately need a better education.”

The equivocating didn’t end there. Democrats for Education Reform soon walked back their original declaration of opposition to Trump. In a statement sent to the group’s supporters, Jeffries wrote that DFER was not saying Democrats should not work with Trump on education, but just that no Democrat should work for him as secretary of education. “[W]e draw a distinction between working with and working for Trump,” Jeffries wrote. “Where appropriate, we will work with the Administration to pursue policies that expand opportunity for kids, and we will vocally oppose rhetoric or policies that undermine those opportunities.”

In a political climate where teachers-union strength may dramatically diminish, opposition to Trump’s agenda from liberals who supported Obama’s education reforms could be an important deterrent to Trump’s rightward march on education. But with DFER already signaling that it’s open to working with Trump, with high-profile reformers like Moskowitz and Rhee also giving him a public nod of approval, and since some of the same billionaires who fund the charter school movement also back the president-elect, the chances aren’t great that Democratic education reformers will staunchly oppose Trump’s school reform agenda.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is under no illusions about the enormous challenges that loom for the future of public education. Yet she notes that over the past half-decade, educators and their unions have worked with their communities like never before. “If Donald Trump opts for privatization, destabilization, and austerity over supporting public education and the will of the people,” she says, “well, there will be a huge fight.”