Cutting School by Noliwe Rooks

Author:Noliwe Rooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972496
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

5

EDUCATION DREAMS AND VIRTUAL NIGHTMARES

In December of 2016, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would tap the Michigan multibillionaire Betsy DeVos as his nominee for the Department of Education. She was confirmed in February 2017. DeVos was a longtime school choice activist in the free market–inspired vein of Milton Freidman, and upon hearing the news of her nomination, public school teachers, unions, and advocates mounted a vigorous campaign to oppose her confirmation. Protesters pointed to her involvement in the expansion of unregulated charter schools in Michigan, to her support of school vouchers, and to comments of hers that critics saw as hostile to public schools. Journalist Rebecca Mead, writing in the New Yorker, summed up the dismay over her nomination by saying, “DeVos has never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one.” In addition to concerns over her lack of personal involvement with traditional public schools, there were further questions about her support for free market–inspired forms of public education such as vouchers and virtual charter schools.1

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.2

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular off-shoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.

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