School Choice Is Great. Betsy DeVos’s Vision for School Choice Is Not.
Article/Op-Ed in The Washington Post
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Jan. 19, 2017
Conor P. Williams wrote for the Washington Post about school choice and accountability under Betsy DeVos's Department of Education:
If you watched Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearing to become the next education secretary, you also heard a fair amount about her favorite education policy: “school choice” programs. DeVos has spent the bulk of her career advocating for this through political organizations like the American Federation of Children. It essentially led off her opening statement, when she said, “Parents no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs of every child, and they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, religious or any combination thereof.”
At a basic level, that’s unobjectionable enough — what’s not to like about giving families flexibility about the sort of education their kids get? At that level, school choice is a banal, Very Good Thing. It’s the sort of policy tool that seems like it could solve all sorts of problems.
But DeVos’s paean to school choice obscures a problem: Like any tool, policies work best when they’re actually tailored to the task at hand. When it comes to U.S. education policy, the task is supporting equitable opportunities and higher achievement for traditionally underserved students. That’s not quite the same thing as providing families with educational alternatives.