By Sikivu Hutchinson*
“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and
segregation forever.” This was white supremacist Alabama Governor George
Wallace’s epic battle cry in his infamous
1963 Inaugural speech demonizing the civil rights movement.
Billionaire Christian conservative Betsy DeVos and
her foundation’s robber
baron school voucher crusade are inheritors of Wallace’s legacy. For over a decade, DeVos, President-elect
Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, has been “at
the helm” of a largely unsuccessful
nationwide push to gut public education through voucher programs. According to the L.A. Times,
"California and 36 other states have constitutional provisions—called
Blaine amendments—that ban the expenditure of public money on religiously
affiliated schools. Close to 80% of private school students attend religious
schools, which would be ineligible for vouchers in Blaine amendment
states."
As many left-progressive and secular critics
have pointed
out, a linchpin of the DeVos agenda is an assault on secular
education. The DeVos foundation has
bankrolled the ultraconservative, homophobic Family Research Council and
sponsored scores of insidious “school choice” bills from Michigan to Wisconsin.
It is part of an extensive network of right wing foundations, institutes and
think tanks that subscribe to the “dominionist” belief that “Christians must take control
over societal and government institutions.”
DeVos’ influence as an architect of checkbook
theocracy in education is unparalleled. But it’s important for progressive
humanists to understand that DeVos’ reactionary activism is not simply limited
to the usual church/state separation issues vis-à-vis science literacy and
white Christian fundamentalist efforts to shove creationism down students’
throats. Certainly, DeVos’ blatant
disregard for church/state separation would further undermine science literacy
in a nation that routinely ranks at the bottom of global rankings of STEM
achievement. Yet, a cornerstone of the Christian right’s privatization agenda
is the destruction
of racial justice in education and a Dixiecrat return to separate and unequal
schools.
The voucher agenda is a byproduct of Southern
states’ efforts to circumvent
Brown vs. Board of Education’s desegregation mandate. It was and is a key strategy in the white
nationalist/supremacist political arsenal that powered Trump to victory.
Thus, as Secretary of Education, DeVos would most
likely steamroll educational justice activists’ efforts to redress the federal
government’s neoliberal focus on charter schools, union busting, drill and kill
high stakes tests, and the militarization of school campuses. Under Obama’s former education secretary Arne
Duncan, the administration cozied up to charters and implemented wrongheaded policies
like Race
to the Top, which dubiously tied teacher salaries to students’ performance
on standardized tests. It made noises
about shoring up STEM education and academic opportunities for young men of
color (while marginalizing girls of color) but allocated a pittance to the
enrichment and wraparound programming that could have changed educational outcomes. And when it came to higher education, Historically
Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) floundered, scrambling
for funding, support and visibility in an administration that gave lip service
to improving college access for students of color. Despite Obama’s “yes we can” multicultural
rhetoric, the so-called achievement
gap between black and white students has remained static.
Yet, for all of the Obama administration’s education
policy failures, the De Vos appointment has the potential to be
catastrophic. It represents a clear and
present danger to the wellbeing of scores of students of color who have been
most heavily impacted by privatization and the gutting of multicultural
education. Nationwide, African American, Latino and
Native American students continue to have the lowest graduation and
college-going rates. They are less
likely to be taught by well-qualified teachers and more likely to be in schools
where college counselors are either absent or saddled with too many students. Indeed,
some urban schools of color have more school police than college
counselors. And because many students of
color don’t have equitable access to college preparation curricula in the
humanities and STEM disciplines they have higher attrition rates when they go
to college.
Low college admission and completion rates correlate
with the skyrocketing numbers of African American, Latino and Native American
students who are suspended, expelled, pushed out of school and imprisoned in
juvenile and adult facilities. There’s no reason to believe that DeVos wouldn’t
cosign Trump’s law and order platform and increase federal funding for more
police, military hardware and surveillance equipment on school campuses.
The DeVos privatization agenda also bodes ill for
undocumented students already facing a precarious future due to Trump’s threat
to rescind Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The threat of deportation, homelessness and
family upheaval would traumatize already fragile immigrant communities that
rely on a patchwork of social services to survive.
Under a Secretary DeVos, multicultural education,
reproductive health education and the development of safe and inclusive school
climates for LGBTQI
students would also come under fire.
The new regime could utilize its bully pulpit to further vilify
equitable bathroom policies for transgender students, and the promotion of “abstinence-only”
education would most likely be back on the federal table. Although states would have leeway in pushing
back on these policies, a DeVos education department, buttressed by a GOP
controlled Congress, could jeopardize federal funding for states and school
districts that buck the right wing agenda.
As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
recently noted
in its opposition to DeVos’ appointment, “[she] provided funding for the Center
for Individual Rights during its legal battle with the University of Michigan
over affirmative action. After
the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 to uphold the university’s affirmative action
policy…she acknowledged that the motives underlying the policy were proper
[but] stated that the policy was still unfair.”
For human rights, social justice and secular
education, a DeVos regime in the Education Department would be the proverbial
case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
*From the Humanist Magazine, 12-21 issue
Twitter: @sikivuhutch
