Bill Berkowitz: "Arrogance and Betrayal": Betsy DeVos Funneling Coronavirus Relief Money to Private and Religious Schools
June 1st 2020
Betsy DeVos (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz
While the coronavirus pandemic has forced public school administrators, teachers, and the parents to wrestle with how to proceed when the school year begins in the fall, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is using the crisis to strengthen her anti-public school, pro-private and religious schools agenda. DeVos recently told Glenn Beck that the pandemic was an opportunity to “look very seriously at the fact that K-12 education for too long has been very static and very stuck in one method of delivering and making instruction available.” She is funneling part of the money granted to education institutions by The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to bolster private and religious schools. According to The New York Times’ Erica L. Green, DeVos “is using the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization law to throw a lifeline to education sectors she has long championed, directing millions of federal dollars intended primarily for public schools and colleges to private and religious schools”
In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein wrote about how the late Milton Friedman, one of the gurus of unfettered capitalism, viewed tcrises as opportunities for what she labels as “disaster capitalism.” In an essay, Friedman wrote that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is out basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the political impossibility becomes politically inevitable.”
Although Friedman died in 2006, “his ideas about public education live on in the thought and deeds of Betsy DeVos,” according to Joanne Barkan writing in Dissent magazine, just prior to DeVos’ confirmation as U.S. Secretary of Education.
“In 1996 ... Friedman and his wife Rose ... launched the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice as ‘the nation’s only organization solely dedicated to promoting their concept of educational choice,’” Joanne Barkan wrote. “‘Choice’ is the ed-reform movement’s euphemism for privatization. All the tools used to create choice—vouchers, charter schools, tax credits for private school tuition, tax credits for individuals and businesses that create private school scholarships, ‘education savings accounts’ (usually government-funded debit cards used for various private-school expenses, not just tuition)—siphon tax dollars out of the public school system and into private hands. DeVos has worked with and donated to the Friedman Foundation, recently renamed EdChoice. Their visions for the future of K-12 education coincide.”
Eric Green noted that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, “included $30 billion for education institutions turned upside down by the pandemic shutdowns, about $14 billion for higher education, $13.5 billion to elementary and secondary schools, and the rest for state governments.” DeVos “has used $180 million of those dollars to encourage states to create ‘microgrants’ that parents of elementary and secondary school students can use to pay for educational services, including private school tuition. She has directed school districts to share millions of dollars designated for low-income students with wealthy private schools.”
According to Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s Wall of Separation Blog “DeVos released guidance instructing school districts to redirect millions of dollars intended for the most low-income students to wealthy private school students instead. Her guidance allows CARES Act funding to disproportionately go to private schools, while public schools with large populations of low-income students will get even less than expected.”
Designing projects to stiff public schools is nothing new for DeVos. The Wall of Separation Blog’s Samantha Sokol recently reported that “DeVos has tried to funnel public money to private, religious schools through private school vouchers. … [including] proposals for nationwide federally-funded vouchers, her plan to expand an existing voucher program in Washington, D.C., her attempt at vouchers for military families, and even her decision to rebrand vouchers as “education freedom scholarships.” …Thus far, her attempts have failed. But DeVos finally had her lucky break: the coronavirus pandemic.”
DeVos takes the hatchet to discipline processes for sexual harassment and assault on college campuses
DeVos’ expansive agenda is not limited to destroying public schools. While the coronavirus pandemic disrupts life on university and college campuses, and students have dispersed back to their homes for online classes, DeVos is working as hard as she can to dismantle as much as she can.
“On May 6th, amid this chaos and uncertainty, … DeVos’s Department of Education issued its regulations on Title IX, which impose new legal requirements on how schools must conduct their discipline processes for sexual harassment and assault,” The New Yorker’s Jeannie Suk Gersen reported.
Title IX, which passed in 1972, is the federal statute that bans sex discrimination in education and covers college disciplinary proceedings in cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
The reaction to DeVoss’ machinations was immediate: Catherine Lhamon, the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the assistant secretary for civil rights in Obama’s Education Department, tweeted that DeVos is “taking us back to the bad old days . . . when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.”
Fatima Goss Graves, the president and C.E.O. of the National Women’s Law Center, wrote, “We refuse to go back to the days when rape and harassment in schools were ignored and swept under the rug.” In a statement, Nancy Pelosi called the new regulations “callous, cruel and dangerous, threatening to silence survivors and endanger vulnerable students in the middle of a public health crisis.”
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