Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong.
And why she keeps saying it.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is fond of saying that public schools in America haven’t changed in more than a century and, as a result, are failing kids.

Our children, she has said repeatedly, deserve better than the “19th-century assembly-line approach,” and would do much better with her vision of education, one in which taxpayers shoulder the cost for any school that parents want to send their children, and the ability to choose is the most important measure of success.

DeVos is a billionaire who once said public schools are “a dead end” and who has spent decades, with her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos Jr., trying to expand alternatives to publicly funded school districts, such as charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — and programs that use public money for private and religious school education.

In her worldview, “public education” refers to any school that gets public funding, so that a religious school that accepts publicly funded school vouchers, for example, would be public. She said that here, and more explicitly on May 6, 2019, when she was addressing education journalists:

Today, it’s often defined as one type of school, funded by taxpayers, controlled by government. But if every student is part of “the public,” then every way and every place a student learns is ultimately of benefit to “the public.” That should be the new definition of public education.

Betsy DeVos and her allies are trying to redefine ‘public education.' Critics call it ‘absurd.'

But is it true that public education in America has not changed in more than a century in the way DeVos says? Historians and education scholars say it is not.

Adam Laats, for example, is a professor of education at Binghamton University (SUNY), who recently wrote a piece in The Washington Post that said it is DeVos who wants to retreat into the past, commenting on her new definition of “public education”:

While this sounds reasonable, even enlightened, on its face, those familiar with the history of American education know all CONTINUE READING: 

Betsy DeVos insists public schools haven’t changed in more than 100 years. Why she’s oh so wrong. - The Washington Post