As we begin a new decade, it’s time for the once-every-10-years Scrooge Award. It was a close contest for me. The candidates included Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General William Barr. Each has distinguished him or herself by violating his or her oath of office with cruelty or misdeeds. As the year ended, I declared a tie and chose DeVos and Barr.
DeVos’s job is to be a cheerleader for better public education and to help make the lives of students a little better. If you’ve paid attention to her three years in office, you’ll know that she is anything but a champion for education, based on an established record back at home of undermining public schools.
The wealthy DeVos family is well known in Michigan, where they played a major role in electing a number of candidates who champion charter schools over public schools. I have nothing against charter schools, which in many communities are a positive force. But Betsy DeVos has spent years promoting them at the expense of public schools. A 2016 report by the Education Trust-Midwest found that Michigan’s K-12 system, with some help from the DeVos family, was considered “one of the weakest in the country.”
The situation in Detroit is even worse. The trust found that approximately 79 percent of the state’s charter schools are in Detroit, and have “exacerbated white flight and affluent desertion, leaving the public schools more segregated than before.” In addition, since DeVos took office, she has concentrated on rolling back student loan protections and promoting forgiveness of for-profit colleges that have broken state consumer-protection laws and have made millions of dollars cheating students from struggling families.
In recent years, hundreds of for-profit colleges, including Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, collapsed under accusations of widespread fraud. That left their students with huge debts and no degrees. Federal law allows borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness if they attended a school that misled them or broke state laws. Corinthian’s collapse alone led to more than 15,000 loan defaults totaling some $247 million. The Obama administration had approved debt elimination for about 32,000 students at Corinthian and two other schools. But in April 2017, in one of DeVos’s first acts as secretary of education, she stopped all relief applications that were pending.