Trump Appointee Committed to School Privatization
President elect Trump has chosen to nominate probably the biggest enemy of public schools in our country to run the U. S. Department of Education! Trump announced that he will nominate Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Trump and DeVos have made it clear that their first priority will be to encourage a huge increase in school privatization by using federal funding to add more charter schools and voucher schools for high poverty students.
DeVos, a billionaire who derives her wealth by having married into the Amway family, never attended public school, her children also only attended private schools and has no formal training in the field of education. Appointment of such non-educator education reformers to top education positions has become the model adopted by many states and cities that are part of the radical education reform movement in the U. S. Please read this article on DeVos and the billionaire education deformer/privatization movement.
It is ironic however, that the truly elite private schools routinely exclude high poverty students and they will continue to do so. Trump and DeVos cannot force the exclusive elite private schools to accept minority and low socio-economic students. What we have seen instead in Louisiana and other states that have expanded "choice" in education has been the proliferation of what I have characterized as predatory charter schools and new church sponsored voucher schools created specifically for the purpose of profiting their founders and management organizations.
These new Choice schools use advertising (often making highly misleading claims) in an attempt to recruit the more capable and most motivated students away from the real public schools. Their manager/entrepreneurs know that the true secret to school performance is the enrollment of higher performing students. Such students can make any school look good because they generally do better on state and national tests. But these new "choice schools" still usually underperform compared to our true public schools.
A case in point are the online virtual charter schools in Louisiana where the advertising promises a college preparatory eduction which students can access on a home computer. Contrary to the advertising claims, studies have shown that their students receive an inferior education compared to that provided by our public Louisiana Educator: Trump Appointee Committed to School Privatization: