Betsy DeVos’s ‘Voucherland’ Spells Disaster for Public Schools - Progressive.org

Betsy DeVos’s ‘Voucherland’ Spells Disaster for Public Schools - Progressive.org

Betsy DeVos’s ‘Voucherland’ Spells Disaster for Public Schools

It’s a place where private religious schools can get their hands on piles of public money and parents are left on their own.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, sensing perhaps the need to reaffirm her stamp on education policy, recently gave a speech at an education roundtable at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan. The Washington Post called her remarks an “anti-government polemic” that reasserted one of her long-held beliefs: that families, rather than the federal government, should be the “sovereign sphere” for deciding how to spend public money for education.

DeVos also made a plug for her Education Freedom Scholarship Initiative, which would provide $5 billion in federal tax credits that states could use to create school voucher programs. 

As a devotee of school vouchers, DeVos is unrivaled. She has pushed for voucher programs throughout her many years of school choice advocacy, and she’s made vouchers a policy imperative during her tenure as Education Secretary. And while in the past there might have been some question about what a voucher system would look like, we don’t have to guess any more. We’ve already been shown that future, a few pieces at a time.

Take college loans.

College loans are similar to vouchers in that they make colleges more widely available to all. But one significant difference is that, unlike vouchers (which function as grants), college loans must be repaid. Despite this downside, the loans’ attractiveness and availability have created a special market for predatory colleges, whose business model is based on enrolling students rather than educating them. CONTINUE READING: Besty DeVos’s ‘Voucherland’ Spells Disaster for Public Schools - Progressive.org