Betsy DeVoss: A Sign of the Times?

At a minimum, the test for any cabinet nominee to be confirmed is this, Is she qualified to do the job for which she is nominated? Unpacking that question involves a few considerations having to do with competence. This is the issue at the heart of Betsy DeVos’s nomination to be our next Secretary of Education. In an ideal world, the post shouldn’t be tainted by partisan ideology. After all, the ideal Secretary of Education will seek that her constituency from preschool all the way to college becomes independent, critical thinkers and rigorous problem-solvers. These are must have skills for the 21st century world we live in. Certainly, the job of Secretary of Education is not about helping students learn the 7 easy steps to become political hacks.

The questions of competence are simple and straightforward. Is the candidate a leader? Does she exhibit responsibility? Is he a teamplayer? Does she have a proven track record with sound decision-making and that is results-oriented? Are there any ethical issues to consider with this candidate's nomination? Conflicts of interest? Is he trustworthy? Does the candidate possess excellent communication skills? Does she possess experience in the field for which she is being nominated? Classroom teaching experience? Experience as a school administrator? There are more questions than these for sure, but you get the gist. Those looking for competence in a candidate will find it with the help of a few basic questions.

When it comes to political cabinet nominees, who have to appear before Senate committee hearings for confirmation, the stakes rise to a higher level. These nominations potentially end up in influential leadership roles in political administrations. There is always an agenda to carry out or push through with any given administration and in the case of the Secretary of Education that agenda must always have the best interest of its constituents in mind - children, teenagers and young adults - regardless of party affiliation.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee diligently gave itself to the task of finding out precisely how qualified Betsy DeVos is. Their questions for Mrs. DeVos came fast and some of them were furious. The one Committee hearing in which she appeared lasted over 3:30 hours on January 17 and the complete video can be seen on the C-SPAN website under Education Secretary Confirmation Hearing. The website also provides shorter video clips of the relevant questions asked to Mrs. DeVos by different senators and which reveal her stance on particular issues.

Some senators rightly complained that Mrs. DeVos came before them without all of her required documents completely filed for Senate Committee review prior to the hearing, particularly her ethics forms. This raised even more questions from them. And there was also the concern that the chairman of the Senate Committee, a former Secretary of Education himself, wanted to expedite the confirmation hearing in the least amount of time possible, hence only one hearing session for DeVos. Democratic senators strongly noted that this contravened the normal due process of confirmation hearings. It was not a good precedent.

Two weeks later, on January 31, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee reconvened for their vote to confirm Mrs. DeVos’s nomination. Since I had the time I decided to spend more than a few minutes on C-SPAN watching the inner workings of the Committee before they took a vote. I must make a few observations that caught my attention about the proceedings.

The senators sat in a U shaped line with the chairman of the committee right in the middle. They went according to party lines with all the Republicans to the left of the chairman and the Democrats to his right. Please don’t read too much into this seating arrangement. The first one to speak before the vote was Chairman Lamar Alexander, the Republican senator from Tennessee. He fully supported DeVos’s nomination. Then the rest of the senators took turns by reading their own statements to the Committee as a whole. These statements expressed their conclusions about Mrs. Betsy DeVos as a candidate for Secretary of Education.

One would assume that these politicians are all very smart and that would be a correct assumption. The articulate and intelligent way in which they spoke showed it. But they were not being articulate for the sake of speech. The senators noted their approval or disapproval of the candidate according to what they were able to glean from the cross-examination during the hearing. Obviously, some of them raised it according to their political or personal bias toward or against the candidate. When a Republican senator (Burr, R-NC) accused the Democrats of a character assassination campaign against Mrs. DeVos, the Democrats rebuttal (Franken, D-MN) to such a claim was clear. There were real, serious and legitimate concerns raised by both sides about the candidate. The senators referred to the thousands of phone calls and emails from constituents expressing their serious and overwhelming disapproval of the candidate. Why such an alarm about Mrs. DeVos?

The Committee executive session to vote for Mrs. DeVos on January 31 was an eyeopener for me. I have known of the DeVos name for years and knew that a lot of money was behind it. I knew that the DeVos family is a Christian family and I learned they were from Michigan. What I didn’t know was the amount of money donated by the family to Republican politicians. The number, Mrs. DeVos speculated, was in the hundreds of millions over the years. As the hearing went on I learned that she couldn’t differentiate between educational growth and proficiency (basic terminology for people who research, debate and practice the field). She was non-committal about reporting civil rights abuses in schools to the federal government, preferring deference to the states. She didn’t know about federal mandates regulating access of education for disabled children. She justified the use of guns in the schools citing the presence of grizzly bears on school grounds. She was fuzzy about working with Congress on the issue affordability of higher education. She has no experience with the management of college financial aid or lower or higher education institutions. These issues aren’t made up. They came up at the hearing. Mrs. DeVos answered (or in many cases didn’t answer) the questions.

As the senators read their statements, one couldn’t help to notice that the majority of the Committee shared a sense of alarm about such an ideologically compromised nominee. As far as the tests of competency are concerned she was rendered unqualified for the job of Secretary of Education by most senators. However, there was no surprise when the vote carried in favor of her at Committee level. This was an obvious political move by the Committee’s Republican majority that would not let their candidate be shot down even before take off. The way they put it was that every president is entitled to their nominees having a fair shot before Committee. Yet, it was noteworthy that two Republican senators who voted to get the nomination through at Committee stated that while they personally know Mrs. DeVos to be a deeply caring person who is concerned about the education of children, they would not vote for her at the full Senate session. Senators Susan Collins, R-ME, and Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, let the Committee know that the concerns of their constituents and their own had been far too many to risk putting her at the helm of the Department of Education.

Senators expressed their concern for the state of education and our schools nationwide. Statistics were brought up (Scott, R-SC) to show that our students’ world ranking in education lags behind many other developed countries. It seemed that it wasn’t even a question of competition, it had to do with catching up. Fixing education from within is difficult, Chairman Alexander remarked. Mrs. DeVos being an outsider should then be taken as an ideal candidate for our Department of Education.

An extremely wealthy donor without any kind of substantial, hands on experience in the educational establishment - not as a teacher or school administrator - is purported to lead the Department of Education as the next Education Secretary of the country. Her only claim, if we can call it that, is that she is a champion of vouchers and school privatization. The education system in the United States is predicated on equal access to public education.

It was clear that while this is not Mrs. DeVos’s position, she would not be sad to see public schools disappear throughout the country. Let’s then take out the public schools from the picture. What does that look like? How would a nation like this one work without public education? Would it work at all? While not warranted by the federal Constitution, state law across the land enshrines in its constitutions the equal access to education for its citizens. Betsy DeVos’s nomination as Education Secretary will gravely undermine the state of public education across the land.

No one should be surprised that Betsy DeVos’s nomination has roused such a resistance from constituents across the nation and the party line divide. Even senators who will vote for her at the full Senate session will not deny that their offices have been flooded by phone calls, letters and emails vehemently opposing her confirmation. What should be surprising is why are they still planning to vote for her. On the eve of the full vote to confirm her and for weeks now, we are experiencing the blowback from outside. Is anybody anticipating the blowback from inside the education bureaucracy once she is confirmed? Can anyone think of the tensions, fractures, even the breakdown from inside in what is currently a working educational system, its faults included?

I wonder if Betsy DeVos herself has given any thought to what it will mean, unprepared as she is, to be stepping into a potentially explosive situation if she becomes Education Secretary. Resistance from the inside is usually worse when the incoming official lacks the trust of her wouldbe constituents. I also wonder if we will have to undergo an exercise in social engineering of national proportions if she gets confirmed. Education is not a game, it’s serious business.

School administrators and above all teachers, the most courageous and greatest foot soldiers in the education equation (after parents, of course), will not have a champion in Mrs. DeVos. My wife (who is the most devoted high school teacher I know, and there are too many to count out there) and I have been discussing this nomination and don’t see anything good coming out of it. Betsy DeVos is unable to relate to the everyday realities of the classroom, much less the rules that govern the system. Her motive is not school reform. Rather, it is a single minded approach veiled in “school choice” that more than anything detracts from the equal access to education that a public school system provides. This has never an issue of providing choices because the choices are already there and the reviews of her proposals are mixed.

More importantly, children from pre-K to elementary to secondary school and on to college will be left behind if Betsy DeVos is our future Secretary of Education. Lack of accountability for the schools she proposes is not in the best interest of children whether the education they are receiving is public or private. In her case, the odds are stacked in favor of private education. A preference for the divestment of essential public funding toward private schooling demonstrates that the candidate doesn’t have a commitment to public and equal access to education for all. What puts our own children at greater peril is that Mrs. DeVos lacks elementary knowledge of the laws governing the education system and policy. Whether it be education access for children with disabilities, guns in our schools, civil rights violations or sexual assault, Mrs. DeVos seems to be disconnected from reality and unable to speak about each of these issues with a decent degree of understanding or conviction. People who navigate the public school system - children, teachers, administrators - not only live in the real world, they are subjected to the blunt reality of that world everyday. Empathy is also required.

It would be naive of me to pretend that there aren’t a myriad of stances, some more ideologically laden than others, regarding education. From the “children as wards of the state” position that places their education entirely in the hands of the government to the homeschool position where the education of the child rests entirely in the hands of the parent, the policies of children’s education has been debated ad nauseum. Most children in the country, my own included, fall somewhere in the middle where you have a sprawling and working public education system that affords equal access to all who would have it. This system is not perfect and never has been, but it still operates under the premise that any child can have access to all the resources the system provides.

While mistakenly affording ample deference to the states in their application of legal provisions, Mrs. DeVos did not categorically affirm a commitment to ensure that as Secretary of Education she would protect equal access to public education nationwide. I am thankful we live in a country that already affords plenty of educational choices to parents. Parents who can afford it avail themselves of private education. I have friends among them. There are parents who opt to educate their children at home as do many of my friends also. Some parents send their children to charter schools. Most parents have their children attend their local public schools.

We have a functioning public education system that can certainly be improved, but that at the helm of Betsy DeVos runs the risk of being trampled upon. She doesn’t have the leadership, trustworthiness or experience to work for a better system. I have watched a number of Senate hearing hours on this nomination. From the one Committee hearing to the the Committee vote to the debate prior to the full Senate vote, the questions from the senators and the read testimony from constituents had one thing in common, they all expressed great concern about this nomination. They genuinely worried about their children, their schools and their communities because in their eyes, having heard the nominee at the hearing, she would be detrimental to the future of education in the country.

Unless one more Republican senator musters the conscience to break party lines (two already have), at present we are looking at a 50-50 vote leaving the tiebreaker in VP Mike Pence’s hands and thus securing Mrs. DeVos’s place in the Trump administration as the new Secretary of Education. Things are looking as if the Secretary of Education will be ushered in by way of an “executive order” of the vice president. Stranger things keep coming.

In this new administration, Republicans and Democrats, together with President Trump, have an opportunity to transcend the party politics with the nomination of the Secretary of Education. If Betsy DeVos’s confirmation is defeated tomorrow in the Senate, as it should, why not work jointly to find and present to the president an appeasement conservative candidate that knows the needs and demands of the education bureaucracy and who will be committed to work so that the system works for all children? I know it is the prerogative of the president and his advisors to select his cabinet, but a good precedent can always be established and this appears to be a moment for it. If the president himself is paying any attention, the controversy let alone the outcry surrounding Mrs. DeVos’s nomination for Education Secretary has been unprecedented. Previous Education Secretaries from both parties have cruised through the Senate.

I can’t help but to think about what Betsy DeVos herself must be thinking of her own nomination at this point. What questions if any is she asking herself? Is she exhausted by the whole ordeal? What is her inner circle advising her to do? Does she feel conflicted about the resistance she is facing from constituents across the nation? Does she herself feel inadequate or unqualified for the job she faces? Is she second guessing herself? Has she listened to the concerns spoken of her? Contrary to the straightforward questions of competency, the answers to these questions are not easily discernible. They lie in the heart and mind of the nominee and whomever she wants to share them with. Part of them we’ll know in a few hours. The other part we’ll never know. But after all is said and done, the ballots cast and counted this is what matters - an honest to God, hardworking and committed advocate of all our children as Secretary of Education.