‘School Choice’ Education Secretary Not What Latino Students Need
Despite disparaging Latinos through his attacks on Mexico and judges of Mexican descent, Trump vowed to be a champion for Latinos in education. But he’s going about it the wrong way.
Donald Trump has tapped billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos as his Secretary of Education to advocate for profit-based “school choice” policies. The American Federation of Teachers has criticized DeVos’ public school privatization efforts as a disaster for education. “Betsy DeVos is everything Donald Trump said is wrong in America,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.
Elite and wealthy Americans have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into privatized school choice. Billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have focused school reform on public money being directed to corporations, churches and management organizations in the United States.
The billionaires have made simplistic— yet convincing— claims about the benefits of privatized school “choice” for Latinos. No one is claiming that there are not examples of high-quality charter schools or neighborhood public schools. However, the predominance of the peer-reviewed research literature does not support the grandiose claims that billionaires make and instead demonstrates that school choice, on average, does not produce the equity, social justice or Latino student success that proponents spin.
When corporations and churches control the schools, which is the ultimate goal of neoliberal approaches to markets, they control opportunity and access. They determine who can and cannot attend their schools. And it is not in the best interest of children — especially poor children — to create a system that allows corporations and churches to make those decisions about individual students. It’s in the best interest of our democracy to ensure that all schools are open to all children of different types and different abilities.
Several decades of peer-reviewed charter school and voucher research have demonstrated that choice is not a cure-all. In fact, school choice ‘School Choice’ Education Secretary Not What Latino Students Need – Cloaking Inequity: