DeVos' advocacy - high profile to under radar
WASHINGTON – Education Secretary Betsy DeVos came to Washington, to promote the cause of her life – school choice. Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. President Donald Trump had promised a $20 billion program.
But more than a year and a half later, the federal push is all but dead.
That's partly because DeVos herself emerged badly damaged from a brutal confirmation process, with few people – even in her own party – interested in taking up her pet cause.
She's also been stymied by division among Republicans over the idea of federal incentives for school choice. And Democrats are united against her.
“She's certainly not a very effective lobbyist” for her cause, said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “She has enthusiastically pushed it, and arguably the politics of choice are more complicated than they were two years ago, and the choice community is more split.”
That has left DeVos with the bully pulpit. She uses it to promote alternatives to traditional public schools, typically plans that allow tax dollars to follow children when they leave for private schools. She may have won some converts, but she's alienated many others.
Congress already has said no to her budget proposals. A proposed tax credit supporting voucher-like scholarships has died. A new spending bill again offers little for school choice enthusiasts.
And if Democrats gain power after this fall's midterm elections, chances for action would fall even further. For all practical purposes, the fight is over, and she lost. School choice has become the latest ambitious policy plan to arrive in Washington with great hope, only to die a quiet death.
Opposition has come from lawmakers who represent rural states and see little benefit in school choice programs when so few alternatives to traditional public schools exist in their communities. As structured, critics say, a grant plan proposed by DeVos would have amounted to a windfall for states that already have these programs.
That concern arose as early as DeVos' confirmation hearing, when Republican Sen. Mike Enzi questioned whether school choice would offer much for rural places such as his home state of Wyoming.
DeVos also ran into trouble with libertarian-minded conservatives who complain that a new federal program will bring new federal regulations.
Her aides reply that she doesn't want a large federal program, either. They point to states enacting or expanding school choice, and they claim success with a heightened public debate.
“The focus of the education debate is on school choice now in a way it never has been,” said Nathan Bailey, an Education Department spokesman. He added: “Secretary DeVos has been clear from Day One that school choice should be driven from the local level.”
And there has been movement at that level. In Illinois, a new program creates a backdoor voucher, giving corporations a tax credit if they donate money for private school scholarships. Georgia expanded a similar program. And North Carolina created publicly funded educational savings accounts to help families of children with disabilities pay private school tuition and other expenses.
Tommy Schultz, spokesman for the American Federation for Children, the group DeVos founded and Continue reading: DeVos' advocacy - high profile to under radar | Opinion | The Journal Gazette
