If a poll were taken to name President Donald Trump’s worst cabinet appointment, Betsy DeVos, the narrowly confirmed secretary of education, might not win. It’s a very competitive field. But you can make a case that the damage she is trying to inflict on public education might have the gravest long-term consequences.
Rex Tillerson, secretary of state, downsizes his department while the Trump administration, replete with generals at the top, sets out to beef up the military, increasing the likelihood that our country will try to solve international disagreements with force rather than diplomacy. Scott Pruitt, the cabinet-level official whose credentials for heading the Environmental Protection Agency include suing the EPA 14 times, slashes regulations and denies climate change. But neither Tillerson’s apparent disdain for diplomacy nor Pruitt’s resistance to environmental protection builds on a trend as longstanding and popular as DeVos’ affection for privatizing our schools.
The voucher movement, a way of resisting integration, became increasingly popular in the South after 1954, when the Supreme Court did what it could to end “separate but equal” in public schools. Voucher enthusiasm ultimately moved north and seems to be DeVos’ central educational idea. At the same time, politicians and educational administrators were drawn to the competitive practices of private corporations in their efforts to reduce costs, a trend that often leads to large classes, large administrative staffs and lots of standardized testing.
After attending public schools until I went to college, my perspective on the years after 1954 was often from private colleges, most recently Dartmouth College. But in 1995, when people in our small Ohio town were voting down levies meant to raise public school teachers’ salaries and were pushing instead for more teacher evaluation based on testing over standardized course objectives, I leaned on my credentials: I’d been married for 35 years to a public school teacher. “When my wife, Nancy, talks with me about her work,” I wrote in the local newspaper, “she seldom mentions scores on tests or standardized course objectives. Instead, she tells about the struggles and the triumphs of individual students, and her stories are often very moving.”
In 2002, the summer after 9/11, I experienced the kind of struggles and triumphs that are part of public education at its best. Students from New York City and Poughkeepsie who normally worked full-time jobs while attending community colleges were given a chance to attend a five-week program called “Exploring Transfer” at Vassar College. The idea was for them to see what it would be like to attend a four-year college. With Vassar biologist Bill Straus, I taught a course in that program titled “The Environmental Imagination.”
Working with those young people from community colleges reminded me of stories my grandmother used to tell of teaching in a rural Montana school, where some of her students were older than she. None of ours topped me on that score, but many had life experiences that seemed to have brought wisdom beyond their years. Some came from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which lost a building in the 9/11 terror attack.
James came to Manhattan to work for United Airlines, and three of the flight attendants lost on 9/11 were his friends. A high-strung, funny Irishman, James worried about the war metaphor we had adopted in talking about terrorism. He feared it already controlled his own thinking. When he talked about this in class one day, he fought back tears.
Angelina came to New York from rural West Virginia and got off the train on Steinway Street in Queens because it reminded her of her mother’s piano. Angelina made her living as a pool shark until she found a job, and her sister came from West Virginia to join her in her apartment on Steinway Street. They worked as bartenders in Manhattan.
Kanchana came from Sri Lanka, driven away by political violence. She had been in New York three years. When we talked about the meaning of “environmental imagination,” she said she had to learn somehow to think of the American landscape as her home.
We talked a lot about landscapes, and at the end of our fourth week we discussed a challenging essay, The Trouble with Wilderness, by the historian William Cronon. Robin and Chris, students from Poughkeepsie, led the discussion, and they began by asking us what came to mind when we thought of the Garden of Eden. Some of the students who had been silent in the early weeks were eager to talk about their ideas of Eden. But when several professors from their community colleges joined our class in the middle of the discussion, I expected our rather large class to go silent.
I was wrong, as I often was that summer. Instead of being intimidated by our visitors, the students seemed inspired. They invited each other to speak, and Robin and Chris moved us along with follow-up questions that connected the Cronon essay with other things we’d been reading. I began to realize this might be the single best discussion I’d heard in a classroom, and when I talked with the visiting professors afterwards, they seemed dazzled by their own students.
The chemistry of a class is mysterious, as any teacher knows, but when things go well, you can’t help wondering why. In addition to their generous-spirited civility, I think those students were truly fascinated by each other’s very diverse views. Unlike students who listen primarily to their teachers because what we say might be on the test, these students wanted to hear each other, and they wanted the professors from their community colleges to hear other students they’d come to know. They turned our class into a community.
Whatever Secretary DeVos’ intentions, her insistence on privatizing education reflects misgivings, often exploited by President Trump, about the same diversity that made America great in the first place and gave our class in the summer of 2002 its intellectual vitality. Those who agree with DeVos connect racial and cultural diversity with crime, homelessness, poverty and terror, and they seek ways to opt out. But Nikole Hannah-Jones, in a New York Times Magazine essay titled “Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools?” summed up the problem in such thinking: “Democracy works only if those who have the money or the power to opt out of public things choose instead to opt in for the common good.” Public schools, like public parks, libraries and transportation have helped us achieve a common good that the Trump administration seems neither to understand nor to value.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.