On this week’s episode of Students Over Systems, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos discusses her belief that education must be about students, rather than the special interests that control the K-12 education system. We talk about her decades of working with governors and state legislators to create school choice programs and the current momentum to expand education options in states across the country. Secretary DeVos explains her belief that education freedom can counter the existing industrial-era, conformity-driven K-12 education model—a topic central to her book, Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating the creation of school choice programs across the country. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos discusses why children should be hostages no more. Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom. On today’s episode, we’re joined by former U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Betsy DeVos is an accomplished business leader and champion for freedom. She served as the 11th U.S. Secretary of Education from 2017 to 2021 and delivered historic reforms to improve education and ensure civil rights are protected. For more than three decades, she’s led the fight for policies that allow students and their parents the freedom to choose the best educational option for them. She’s the former Chair of the American Federation for Children, the Philanthropy Round Table, and the Michigan Republican Party. She and her husband, Dick, have four children and 10 grandchildren. Secretary DeVos, thank you so much for joining us.
Betsy DeVos:
Ginny, it’s great to be with you and please, please call me Betsy.
Ginny Gentles:
Happy to do so. So you offered frank perspectives and insight into the contentious education policy world in your book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.” As the director of IWF’s Education Freedom Center, I was so honored to host the book launch celebration of this important book last year, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to talk with you today and delve into that book a little more. I hope that’s okay.
Betsy DeVos:
Absolutely. And thank you again for helping launch the book and helping get the message out there early on.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay, so let’s talk about what that message is. That’s quite an interesting title, “Hostages No More.” You wrote in the book that the central problem with our education system is that it’s designed to serve adults and not kids. So what should be done?
Betsy DeVos:
Exactly. Well, the title is admittedly provocative, but it is a direct reference to a quote that Horace Mann made, Horace Mann commonly understood as the father of our K-12 education system. About 175 years ago, at the founding of the system, he said that “educators are entitled to look upon parents as having given hostages to our cause.” Our cause being the cause of the K-12 education system that he was forming. And we have seen over the years, over the decades, and the work that I have done has continued to try to show and expose how kids have been held hostage in so many different ways, whether it’s hostage based on their zip code, where they’re born, where they live, where they’re assigned to go to school, or hostage to an agenda that is contrary to their own family’s agenda.
And if there’s a silver lining to the pandemic, it is that families awakened across this country about what was really going on in the schools that they thought were doing quite well for their kids. Many families found out absolutely the opposite, and it has really aroused an interest and a momentum that we’ve never seen before in the three and a half decades I’ve been involved with this work. So it’s really a momentum to change policy to support parents making the choices and decisions about where and how their kids go to school and learn.
Ginny Gentles:
So this Horace Mann fellow, I don’t think that any of us paid too much attention to what he’s created. We just assumed schools were the way that they should be. They’re assigned by residence and they are organized in a particular way. But now that parents are asking questions, they’re looking into, well, why are they assigned by residence? And why are they organized this particular way? And who is this Horace Mann fellow? So another thing that he said that you wrote about in the book, your take on what he created is that his system isn’t about embracing our inherent uniqueness. It’s about creating conformity.
Betsy DeVos:
Exactly.
Ginny Gentles:
So how did school choice counter that industrial-era, conformity-driven K-12 education model?
Betsy DeVos:
Sure. Well, the goal of the system when formed was to actually have kids go in one end and come out the other end essentially the same for a period in time where it was important to have lots of people ready to work in factories on assembly lines doing the same repetitive work. We know that that’s not how we’re wired up. That’s not how kids are made. That’s not how we learn best by doing things absolutely the same way and having the same approach to everything. And I think, again, recognizing, acknowledging the uniqueness, the specialness of each individual child and allowing families to find the way that’s going to unlock that uniqueness in each child has been the real goal of education freedom and school choice. And, again, out of necessity the last couple of years, there have been many, many experiments made out of necessity.
When schools refused to open and were not teaching children well or robustly at a distance learning environment, lots of families decided, “We’re going to just get together with a few of our neighbors or a few of our friends and we’re going to find a teacher.” Or, in some cases, there was somebody in their midst who could do it. We had all of these interesting 21st century one-room schoolhouses forming, and that trend is continuing to grow. Again, acknowledging and recognizing there are different ways for every child. Every child learns differently, and there are different ways to approach things. I think about a little school not too far from where I live in West Michigan, and anybody who knows Michigan knows it gets really cold this time of year. It’s winter. We have lots of snow, although we don’t have any right now. But this school is an outdoor school that the kids learn outdoors every day all day. Teachers choose to be a part of this school and there’s waiting lists for kids to get into it.
I use it just as an example of the fact that everybody is different and let’s acknowledge and embrace that and support those kinds of opportunities and those different kinds of approaches. That’s what states are beginning to do as they change their policies to support families and parents. Not sending resources to a system or a bunch of buildings that hold these kids captive to one approach and one method to learning and experiencing their K-12 education.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, certainly, micro schools would be an example. You talk about the learning pods and this growth of the micro schooling movement. It’s exciting to see what can come out of this silver lining of the COVID era, as you called it. So at Students Over Systems, guests are parents and policymakers with the power to make education freedom a reality for all families. And so you are certainly one of those people. You started out initially, decades ago, funding private scholarships, but then you shifted strategies. Can you tell us a little bit about your early involvement in the school choice movement and why there was that shift?
Betsy DeVos:
Yes. Well, my involvement really began when our oldest child began kindergarten and I started a search for the best place for him to attend school and to learn. And at that time, there wasn’t a lot of choice or option for us to make in West Michigan. And, frankly, there still isn’t enough of those choices today. But Dick and I knew we were going to be able to have our children go wherever we wanted them to attend. If it required tuition, we were going to be able to afford that. And I came across a little school in the heart of our city, the Potter’s House School, that is a Christian school serving the community right around it. And I began to get involved there. Rick didn’t go to school there, but I volunteered, and the more I got involved, the more I recognized and realized that the policies around education were really unfair and unjust to families of low incomes.
And so that was what the genesis of my involvement was. We thought we could help make the case by raising money for private scholarships, by giving money ourselves to support children going to schools like the Potter’s House. But it very quickly became clear that the political piece of it had to be a part of it as well because there is such strong support for and there’s such an infrastructure around protecting the system with the teachers’ unions, the school, I prefer to call them the school unions, being at the head of that pile or that pyramid and they have not in any way allowed for or made welcome to allowing families to have the kind of power they need to have to make these choices. So that was really the genesis and then, over three decades, it really was working nationally with organizations that were aligned around the same goals, changing policy at the state level, because that’s where most of the policy happens around education, though Washington controls a lot of the regulations as we well know, and also has set the tone.
I mean, the teachers’ unions demanded a Department of Education in 1979, a payoff Jimmy Carter made to them for their support in his presidential run, and they have continued to solidify their power through the federal mechanisms that then has flowed down to the states.
Ginny Gentles:
Your work initially, again, was focused on these private scholarships, funding private scholarships. You shifted to investing in elections to make sure that there were state legislators who were supportive of school choice and office and then, from that, advocating for bills that would be passed to create and expand school choice programs at the state level. Another big player in that process at the state level would be the governor. So you have decades of experience now of working with policymakers, with state legislators, and also governors. And in your book, “Hostages No More,” you, specifically mention the commitment and courage of several governors who prioritized education, because they transformed education in their state when they did that. Governors have incredible influence. So what was your most effective tactic for getting governors to focus on education and school choice? I ask because I want to hear the story, but I also want listeners to think about what they can do to influence governors.
Betsy DeVos:
Well, 30 years ago, it was a very different environment, as you can imagine. School choice was very nascent and, of course, the first choices that we really had to point to were in the Charter School Laws that, first of all, began in Minnesota. We were very involved with getting the Charter School Law implemented in Michigan, and the more success that came out of those initial Charter School Laws and the establishment of choices and something to actually point to and take governors to show people about what could be different and how things could be different for kids if we only supported policies that supported that, that was really the very beginning of this whole process. Today, governors are much more likely to be familiar with the impact that education freedom and school choice have on students because of its continued growth over the years. But those first years were very difficult.
Today, I would say, all you need to do is start pointing to successes in states where they have taken those steps. Arizona is the most recent great example of going to a universal education savings account program where every single child in that state can benefit if their parents decide that’s the right thing for them. Governors are competitive people. They don’t like somebody else in another state to one up them. So much like a few decades ago around economic development policy, I believe education freedom policies are really going to be a measure and a bellwether for governors and their states going forward. I think this is a really, really key time to capitalize on the momentum that families have felt around needing options and choices and the notion that politicians have awakened to the reality that they can make a difference, a measurable difference, for kids in their state by supporting these policies.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I love that reminder that in the early days a lot of school choice advocacy was about showing people what we were talking about. So it wasn’t just a think tank policy white paper. It was actually taking a tour of a local school and seeing those children’s lives transformed and that love of learning and that spirit of excitement that you could have in those halls. And maybe we should do more of that, those school visits. And there’s so many different types of education options, so a school choice tour could be a wide variety of options that legislators and governors could embark upon. And then I hear you say in play to their competitive spirit, make sure that the governors know what’s going on in other states and that the other state is ahead. That’s something I definitely would want the governor of the state where I live in Virginia to realize. Virginia is so far behind in school choice. It’s almost laughable.
In Florida, where I grew up, there are over 700 charter schools. In Virginia, there are barely seven. In Florida, there are hundreds of thousands of students benefiting from private school choice programs. In Virginia, there’s a tiny little poorly structured tax credit scholarship program that’s not serving very many students at all. So I do hope that model of Arizona’s universal school choice, that ESA education savings account programs is something that more and more governors will become aware of and governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa will be successful in implementing in her state. And so we’ll have even more states doing that.
Betsy DeVos:
Exactly. Exactly.
Ginny Gentles:
So let’s talk about where you went in those early days. The organization that you founded was at one point called Alliance For School Choice, but you mentioned in the book, “Hostages No More,” that you prefer the term education freedom now. Why is that?
Betsy DeVos:
I do. And just to give a little bit more context, there were a number of national organizations that were all similarly focused on policies at the state level. So Alliance for School Choice, Americans for Education Reform, there was a Children First America, but all of those organizations ultimately came together around this notion that we had to not only advocate and inform and educate, but also do the politics of really changing state legislatures and supporting Governors who would support policies. I prefer the term education freedom because I think it gives a broader picture of what K-12 education experience could look like or can look like. When we say “school choice”, we often think of the buildings that we all experience going to growing up, and yet there’s so much more that education freedom can mean or can be, and it really breaks down the walls and it breaks down the notion of a one size fits all approach to how you are educated.
And I think about a couple of schools, should be many more of them, where they have very little infrastructure. They might have a very small tiny footprint, but their whole town is their classroom, basically. And others that are not measured by the number of days that you spend at a desk in a chair, but by how you actually learn, how quickly you actually learn concepts and can move on, mastery approach. So there’s so many different ways of thinking about education and breaking it down and customizing it. Really, for example, with the education savings accounts, you can really truly customize a child’s education and buy the needs for that child at a number of different providers. And it could look very different for every single child if that’s what’s the right thing for that child and what the family decides. It could also look more traditional going to a building as we know it and in a classroom.
But that’s the beauty of an education freedom notion, that not everything has to look the same or be the same or be approached the same way. Education is the least disrupted industry in our country and some people will draw back at this notion that it’s an industry. But it is an industry. It’s a many, many billion dollar industry. We spend $750 billion a year on K-12 education in our country, and yet it’s controlled by interests that have a very keen interest in keeping it looking the same way and in controlling every facet and aspect of it. Education freedom breaks down those walls and breaks down that notion of a one size fits all same, same approach, and the creativity that will be brought to bear in a true education freedom environment, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of yet.
Ginny Gentles:
I love the line from the book, “I want this to be the spark that will force the whole system to evolve and improve.” We want the spark of education freedom to make all this creativity to come forward and help all students. Let’s, before we wrap up, begin to [inaudible] a little bit more about the organizations and institutions and forces that are preventing that spark from being ignited and keeping the system hostage. And we’ve alluded to unions along the way, but let’s dig in a little bit more, because the unions have a lot to say about you and I’d imagine you have some opinions about them as well. So Randi Weingarten and the NEA and the AFT, they love to bring up your name and sound the destroying public schools alarm. And you mention in the book that they do this because they don’t have substantive arguments to use when they’re defending their anti-education freedom positions. So have the union driven school closures and all that’s been revealed in recent years weakened their position further? Are they going to have to attack you more because they have nothing else to stand on?
Betsy DeVos:
Well, absolutely. They have revealed themselves for who they are and what they are by really holding children hostage through a pandemic in ways that we couldn’t have even begun to imagine. And, again, that has revealed to families what their agendas really are, and it’s around adults and it’s around their interests, the system’s interests. It’s not around what’s best and right for every child. And so I think that has really provided the momentum behind the policy changes that we’re seeing at the state levels now and will continue to build on that, because they’re not changing their stripes or their tune. They’re continuing to double down. They’ve demanded and extorted, frankly, billions and billions of dollars to support the same system that failed to perform, that failed to respond in large measure during the pandemic. And people have awakened to that.
And so I think that they can continue to allege everything they try, but the reality is that families know the score now and they are emboldened to really demand the changes and the options and the choices that they really need for their children. I would just make a distinction between the teachers’ unions and all of their bosses and teachers, because a great teacher is irreplaceable and I believe in a system of education freedom. Great teachers are going to be the most highly valued part of that equation. And I know from personal experience as well as lots of conversations, many, many teachers, again, saw their system respond in ways that they were appalled by and they themselves want something different. And so we need to make sure to affirm great teachers and great teaching and talk about the freedom they will have to find the right environment for themselves in an environment of education freedom.
Ginny Gentles:
Absolutely. We want the freedom for the teachers and for the students and families. As we conclude, I’d love for you to tackle your favorite school choice myth and, by favorite, the one that just really bothers you the most. I feel like we’ve been dispelling myths throughout the conversation, but what is the one myth around education freedom that you often hear and that you feel needs to be addressed?
Betsy DeVos:
Well, I think one of the ones that’s been most frustrating for myself is that, in some way, education freedom is going to benefit only wealthy families or well-to-do families when, in fact, anyone with any measure of honesty looking at the whole history of education, the education freedom school choice movement will see that all of the efforts have been focused on trying to help the families who need the most help and to be empowered with the opportunity to make those choices. There is no evidence anywhere of the focus being on anything but those kids and those families who are most in need of being able to make those choices themselves but cannot because their family income doesn’t allow them to move to a better district or to pay tuition to go to a school that requires tuition. And so that is just a dishonest argument at every level, and I just hope that folks will look beneath the veneer of that one line and realize what the goal and what the focus has been and will continue to be.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, it’s been very clear to me watching your career from afar and somewhat up close for a long, long time that your focus is very much on helping the students and families who don’t have that option, and you very much are committed to ensuring that they receive the freedom and the options and the leverage and the opportunity that they so much deserve. So thank you, Betsy, for talking with us today, and thank you for all that you do for students and families in our country.
Betsy DeVos:
Well, thanks so much for the opportunity, Ginny. Thanks.
Ginny Gentles:
We hope that listeners will check out a copy of “Hostages No More” from your local library or purchase it and read about Secretary DeVos’s work over many years in ensuring that education freedom is spread throughout our country and empowering families. We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share the episode with your friends. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.
