Ross Douthat, waxing witty, as is his wont, professes to be amused by “the most predictable of spectacles: a liberal holy war against Betsy DeVos, just confirmed as the new secretary of education by Mike Pence’s tiebreaking vote.”
What’s the fuss, asks Ross: “the bulk of DeVos’s school-choice work places her only somewhat to the right of the Obama administration’s pro-charter-school positioning, close to centrist Democrats like Senator Cory Booker.”
Sure, Ross, but what about the “non bulk” of DeVos’s school-choice work? And what about her “non school-choice work? What about her advocacy, both strident and evasive, of not holding non-public schools to the same explicit accountability standards as public ones? What about her claim that public schools are a dead end? What about her obvious hatred for the Democratic Party and for teachers’ unions, and her obvious desire to undermine both by undermining public schools? What about the fact that her testimony, described by Ross as “unprepared and even foolish”, showed her to be simply ignorant of the public school system that 90% of American students attend?
Once Ross has had his fun, he delivers a load of remarkably level-headed information about charter schools, pointing out that they typically work a little better, but only a little better, than public schools,1 and that, in many areas, people like their public schools, though, for some reason, Ross finds this “evil”,2 a sign of creeping upper-middle class suburbanism, which leads to some more Rossian socio-economic snickering at “the present Democratic Party at its worst: unstinting in defense of bureaucracy and its employees, more excited about causes dear to the upper middle class than the interests of the poor, and always girding for the battle with the Real Enemy, religious conservatives, no matter what the moment actually demands,” when in fact we’re seeing the Democrats playing politics with executive department appointments, largely though not entirely on the basis of policy, unlike the Republican habit of playing politics based entirely on partisan hatred.
Afterwords
Democratic opposition to charters is largely based on a defense of extensive, dysfunctional public school bureaucracies, which richly deserve a thorough and aggressive downsizing. But the notion of so many people who write about education, that charters and private schools automatically turn kids into people like them—that is to say, compulsive over-achievers who, if they did not go to Harvard wish they had—is false.
