Tag Archive for: Betsy DeVos

An Overlooked Trump Cabinet Pick Could Upend The Left’s Grip On Power

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President Joe Biden summed up his education vision last year with a few words.

“There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children,” Biden said while honoring the 2023 teacher of the year.

Biden’s remarks triggered a firestorm among Republicans, education activists and parents alike.

Now those Biden critics are strategizing for a potential second Trump administration. Priorities have been outlined, shortlists have been drawn. Some are preparing to join the administration.

But it’ll be up to Trump to make his pick for the unheralded but critical cabinet spot of education secretary.

“It’s pretty much impossible to overstate the importance of the education secretary. Not just to Americans today, but to America’s future,” Angela Morabito, spokesperson for the Defense of Freedom Institute, told the Daily Caller.

“It is not a secret that our country is falling behind while we’re spending more per student on education than nearly anywhere else on Earth. And yet, our results are mediocre to put it generously,” Morabito said.

There’s been no shortage of anonymously sourced conjecture on who might take other cabinet roles. But the Secretary of Education has flown under the radar despite being a hot-button issue for Republican voters — and a position that influences the future of the country in a way that’s unique from any other.

The issue of education has exploded into the spotlight during Biden’s term after accelerating at a slow burn during the Obama years, which prompted a pendulum swing under Trump. Conservatives now have a set of priorities ranging from reeling in Title IX to rooting out bias from academia and teacher training.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced students into their homes and onto their computers for months of remote learning. In the summer of 2020, the killing of George Floyd sparked racial outrage throughout the country. In response, higher education institutions raced to affirm their anti-racism and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bona fides.

The takeover runs deep — in just a handful of years of full-blown DEI capture of higher education, universities have churned out a generation of insubordinate anti-American bureaucrats, Orwellian tech overlords and a protester industrial complex. The ideological opponents of conservatives virtually all share one common trait: they were trained and equipped on American college campuses.

Colleges and universities across the country implemented racial quotas, dropped standardized testing requirements and added segregated graduation ceremonies all in the name of DEI.

“I think, looking at all the DEI programs in higher ed is extremely important and starting to deny funds to colleges, who do the DEI programs. That way they either have to scale them back as we’re seeing some state schools doing like Texas and Florida, they’re scaling them back to stay there and try to hide the program or there’s abolishing the program altogether. But either one is incredibly important,” founder of the 1776 Project PAC, Ryan Girdusky, told the Daily Caller.

By 2023, the downstream effects of DEI and remote learning brought communities to a boiling point.

In K-12 education, a grassroots movement was born. Parents had become exposed to what their children were learning at school as lessons took place in the living room via Zoom. Concerned guardians cried out against critical race theory (CRT) lessons teaching students to value each other on the basis of their skin color. Communities sought to prevent their kids from being exposed to literature that could confuse them about sexuality and gender.

But it was too late. In K-12 education, students have fallen grade levels behind in math, reading and civics. Numerous jurisdictions have implemented policies allowing students to use bathrooms and join sports teams on the basis of their gender identity, rather than sex. Other K-12 schools host student clubs on the basis of race and themselves have implemented DEI initiatives.

“The idea of deconstructing, decolonizing math and decolonizing science are coming out of these teachers colleges, to get teachers who are just promoting critical theory in all its forms into K through 12 education. So the teachers colleges are essential place to look at,” Girdusky said.

The Biden administration has pushed many of the efforts rankling conservatives. The Department of Education has finalized a rule that would modify Title IX to protect students from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, a change that would allow boys — identifying as girls — to enter the ladies’ restroom.

On the higher education front, DEI policies have thrown out merit, experience and qualification, all things the nation’s universities were once highly renowned for. Student groups and activities on campuses have been divided into different racial groups. And in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, college students protested Israel at universities across America, in some cases threatening the lives of Jewish students.

Former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz MaGill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth sat in front of Congress on Dec. 5, 2023, fumbling through attempts to condemn antisemitism and explain how their institutions had become a cesspool of hatred.

“Our schools can and should be the best in the world. And they’re not,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

Gay was ousted from her position after conservative journalists and activists uncovered numerous instances of alleged plagiarism in her academic writings. One of those conservative education activists, Christopher Rufo, told the Caller he’d like to see the next education secretary pursue an aggressive anti-DEI campaign nationwide.

“I think the next education secretary should be very aggressive in withholding or even terminating expenditures to universities that don’t meet a basic standard of fairness, equal treatment and compliance with American civil rights law,” Rufo told the Daily Caller. “This would send shockwaves through the entire public and private university system and start getting some of these ideologues who have captured University bureaucracies to start thinking twice before they administer discriminatory and illegal programs, which they do flagrantly at the moment.”

He added the next education secretary should make it clear to universities that if their policies fall out of line with the administration’s priorities, funding will be stripped.

Transforming America’s education system to meet conservatives’ vision will require the right person running the Department of Education. Numerous current Republican elected officials and activists have interest in the job, if offered, the Daily Caller has learned.

“I think when the country calls you to service, you have to listen. And when the president is looking to assemble a team to advance these ideas, these principles and these policies, he’s going to need the best people he can get. And I think something like that would be an offer that would be very difficult, if not impossible to refuse,” Rufo told the Daily Caller about the education secretary job.

“Me, I would do it,” Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told the Daily Caller. “I think that there are a lot of other people that I’ve met over the past three years who would be willing to serve in the next administration for the purpose of putting the focus back on academic achievement and meritocracy across America.”

Moms for Liberty has grown into one of the most prominent grassroots organizations advocating for parental rights in the nation’s K-12 schools. Focused on school board races and policies enacted at the state level, Moms for Liberty has become known for its battle against age-inappropriate gender ideology lessons and the implementation of CRT.

Justice added that she has been working with a team of individuals through the parental rights movement that she thought would make good leaders in the education department for the administration, including Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, Arkansas Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds’ wife Erica.

Grassroots activists aren’t the only candidates to lead a potential Trump Department of Education. A who’s-who of elected Republican officials have the support of education groups that spoke to the Daily Caller, and there were indications some might be interested in the job.

One education group listed several current and former government officials on their shortlist for the position, including former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, former New Mexico Secretary of Education Hannah Skandera and Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley.

“From her perspective, it’s something that she is interested in,” a spokesperson for Reynolds told the Daily Caller.

“Is this satire?” said a former campaign aide for Sasse, who is still close with the now-President of the University of Florida.

Walters, who didn’t indicate whether he would accept the position himself, listed Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts, PragerU CEO Dennis Prager, Youngkin, former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Sanders as his ideal candidates.

“First, I will do everything I can to support and help get President Donald Trump reelected,” Walters told the Daily Caller about whether he would accept the education secretary role if offered.

“I am focused on my role to ensure Oklahoma schools are rid of woke indoctrination, liberal union strangleholds, and reawaken a love for our country. The focus must be on firing Joe Biden and ending the culture for hating America,” Walters continued.

Another Oklahoman, Gov. Kevin Stitt, is “open-minded” about the position, an operative in the state told the Caller.

“I don’t have a firm answer on a yes or no, that he would take it. I do know that his reason that he got into public policy was because of the vitriol he has for the Department of Education and his number one personal goal in life is to see it completely dissolved,” an adviser to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told the Daily Caller.

Though the Heritage Foundation doesn’t have a formal endorsement for who it would like to see in the administration, there are role models the organization thinks are good examples for the movement.

“I know we’ve had multiple conversations with a handful of the current state superintendents, who I wouldn’t on the record say these are people that we would recommend or who we’d like to see, but people like Ryan Walters in Oklahoma, Manny Diaz in Florida, Ellen Weaver in South Carolina,” Crystal Bonham, a senior advisor to Roberts in communications at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller.

“They’re all doing work that we have pretty much wholesale endorsed and someone with their kind of character and background that would be ideal, if not Dr. Roberts. Or Lindsay Burke, she’s phenomenal,” Bonham continued.

As for Youngkin, his camp suggested he is very focused on continuing his leadership in Virginia.

“He’s got a clock behind his desk, in his office, in the Patrick Henry building where the governor’s suites are. It’s a countdown clock, because it’s only four years, you can’t run for reelection. So you know, this would all be just speculation. I certainly haven’t heard it. And I don’t know of any conversations that have occurred, but I do know that that his focus is definitely on Virginia,” Zach Roday, a former political adviser to the governor, told the Daily Caller.

The governor’s spokesperson pointed to how proud Youngkin is of his education track record in a statement to the Daily Caller.

“He’s focused on doing that right here in Virginia during his remaining time as Governor,” Christian Martinez told the Daily Caller.

Others are looking back for the best path forward.

“Secretary DeVos would be fantastic — I can’t think of anyone better and more battle-tested for the job,” school choice activist Corey DeAngelis told the Daily Caller. “She would be able to continue the momentum she started when she was at the helm of the department last time. If she is not interested in stepping back from private life again, the next Secretary of Education should be someone who will show a similar commitment to students.”

DeVos provided the Caller with several priorities she would like to see in a second Trump administration, including school choice legislation and undoing changes to Title IX that the Biden administration is eyeing. DeVos did not indicate whether she’d return to her old job, or if she had discussed it with the Trump team.

Girdusky was unsure who he would like to see in the education secretary role, noting that many contenders have a focus on school choice — a topic he thinks should be a priority but not a hyperfocus.

What the next Secretary of Education does will be even more critical than who it is. While right-leaning education advocates have been able to make progress against DEI policies and gender ideology, leading activists had different takes on what the department should prioritize if Trump takes the White House.

But rather than use federal power to enact change to the nation’s education system, some think the best solution is to get rid of what they consider to be the very problem.

“We need to dismantle the Department of Education,” Justice told the Daily Caller.

“Over the past 40 years that the federal government has really inserted its tentacles into every crack and crevice of American public education. And we need to tear it out root and branch so we are working at Moms for Liberty to ensure that we have a lot of advocacy at the state level. And in the counties where local control is so incredibly important,” she continued.

Justice added she wants to rid education of influence from outside agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In addition to dismantling the Department of Education, Walters told the Caller that he wanted the potential education secretary to drive DEI, CRT and transgender ideology out of schools, while also working to take down teachers’ unions.

Above all, Laurie Todd-Smith, director of America First Policy Institute’s Center for Education Opportunity, told the Daily Caller that she hoped a Trump education secretary would close the nation’s learning loss gap that students suffered after the pandemic. Todd-Smith also stressed the importance of undoing the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX.

In Texas, the state legislature has laid out the blueprint for using the government to rid universities of race-based initiatives, like Girdusky, Rufo and others have advocated.

Introduced by Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton in March 2023, Texas State Bill 17 quickly passed through the state legislature to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, where it was signed into law in June 2023. Under the legislation, an institution is not permitted to spend money appropriated to the institution for a state fiscal year until the Board of Regents submits to the legislature and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board a report certifying that it has complied with restrictions on DEI.

The Texas law bans DEI offices and initiatives at state-funded higher education institutions. The law also prohibits institutions from considering diversity statements from job applicants and bans mandatory DEI training for staff.

Now, Texas universities are facing consequences because of the law.

In April, the University of Texas Dallas laid off nearly two dozen of its DEI faculty in an effort to comply with the law, CBS News reported. The University of Texas at Austin eliminated 60 jobs and its Division of Campus and Community Engagement (previously called the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.)

While Justice and Rufo have priorities focused on their expertise, some education activists have a two-pronged approach in mind.

Girdusky said he hoped to see the future education secretary prioritize both K-12 learning loss while tackling issues in higher education.

“But really what there is, is there’s a two-step priority, one is going to be higher ed and the other one’s going to be lower education K through 12. A huge priority has to be to go after the teacher’s colleges. Because a lot of the problems that we’re seeing as far as education goes comes from teachers and colleges,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

In the same vein as Girdusky, Morabito expressed that the future education secretary should withhold funds from institutions or K-12 schools that engage in divisive activities.

“The first and the most powerful is federal civil rights law. It is unlawful for any federally-funded program or activity to discriminate based on race or sex, or perceived national origin. So federal funding should not be going to anywhere that discriminates based on sex or race or discriminates against the Jewish students based on shared national origin or perceived ancestry,” Morabito told the Daily Caller.

As for what Trump plans to focus on in a potential second administration, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, pointed the Caller to the former president’s already-released education plans.

Under the former president’s priorities for a second administration are several education focused initiatives. To tackle higher education, Trump says he will “fire the radical Left accreditors” and impose standards to remove all “DEI bureaucrats.”

Trump also released his 12-step plan for K-12 education, which would include passing legislation to prioritize “curriculum transparency and a form of universal school choice.” The priorities note that Trump would “keep men out of women’s sports,” an indication that he would undo any changes the Biden administration makes to Title IX.

Several education groups and activists that the Caller spoke with said they had not had any engagement with the Trump campaign about their vision for education.

Leavitt referred the Caller to a December 2023 statement from advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on media speculation over transition team efforts. The statement, Leavitt said, makes it clear “that outside groups do not reflect official campaign policy or strategy.”

“People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump…and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction,” the statement from Wiles and LaCivita reads. “Second term policy priorities and staffing decisions will not – in no uncertain terms – be led by anonymous or thinly sourced speculation in mainstream media news stories.”

“I think it’s very important that we need an education secretary who is youthful, aggressive, intelligent, and ruthlessly determined to shatter the status quo. And so, establishment figures will no longer make the cut, and even Trump’s ambitious policy agenda on education, he’s going to need a leader who can step in day one, with the courage to get things done,” Rufo told the Daily Caller, also noting that he has a very good relationship with the former president’s policy team.

Girdusky said he asked the Trump campaign about the position around the turn of the new year.

“He had not gotten the nomination at the time and it just wasn’t the biggest priority at the time, which it was probably like, January when I spoke to them, maybe December even. So the nomination process hadn’t even come up. And I was just talking about the idea of education secretary or whatnot, and they didn’t have a list of names. It was a very informal conversation,” Girdusky told the Daily Caller.

Three prominent education groups that the Daily Caller spoke to had not had much communication with the Trump campaign about the issue. DeAngelis, Defense of Freedom Institute and Freedom Works’ education initiative “B.E.S.T’ all told the Daily Caller that they had not spoken with the campaign about their priorities or their short list.

Roberts, while in touch with the Trump campaign regarding Heritage’s transition project, has not spoken with the campaign about serving in the administration himself, a senior adviser told the Caller.

“Not at this point. They do talk fairly regularly. Most of that has to do with Project 2025 and kind of general, kind of getting ready for the transition period. So at this point, they haven’t yet talked about specifics in terms of if he’d be willing to take a cabinet position or if that’s even been offered,” an adviser told the Caller.

The same could be said for Justice.

“I’m throwing my hat in the ring now. How’s that?” she said.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

White House correspondent.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

DeVos Confirmed: Everything They Said about Her Is False by James Agresti

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Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as Secretary of Education, but just barely. In the course of the hearings, outrageous claims were made about her views. Most originated from the public school industry itself, which is clinging to old forms for dear life. The result has been nothing but confusion. Let’s look more carefully.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) alleges that she is voting against Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education because:

  • DeVos opposes policies that allow “our young people, all of them, to participate in our democracy and compete on a fair footing in the workforce.”
  • DeVos supports “voucher systems that divert taxpayer dollars to private, religious and for-profit schools without requirements for accountability.”
  • “The voucher programs that Ms. DeVos advocates leave out students whose families cannot afford to pay the part of the tuition that the voucher does not cover; the programs also leave behind students with disabilities because the schools do not accommodate their complex needs.”

Each of those claims is belied by concrete facts, and Hassan is guilty of most of the charges she levels at DeVos. Also, Hassan sent her own daughter to a private school, an opportunity that she would deny to other children.

A Fair Footing

Under the current U.S. education system, the quality of students’ schooling is largely determined by their parents’ income. This is because wealthy parents can afford to send their children to private schools and live in neighborhoods with the best public schools. Such options narrow as income declines, and the children of poor families—who are often racial minorities—typically end up in the nation’s worst schools.

Contrary to popular perception, funding is not the primary cause of differences between schools. Since the early 1970s, school districts with large portions of minority students have spent about the same amount per student as districts with fewer minorities. This is shown by studies conducted by the left-leaning Urban Institute, the U.S. Department of Education, Ph.D. economist Derek Neal, and the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Moreover, contrary to the notion that certain minorities are intellectually inferior, empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that with competent schooling, people of all races can excel. For example, in 2009, Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York, had:

  • a mostly Hispanic population.
  • one-third of the students not fluent in English and no bilingual classes.
  • 80% of the students poor enough to qualify for free lunch.
  • lower spending per student than the New York City average.
  • the highest average math score of all fourth graders in New York City, with 99% of the students scoring “advanced.”
  • the top-dozen English scores of all fourth graders in New York City, with 99% of students passing.

These and other such results indicate that school quality plays a major role in student performance. Hassan and other critics of school choice are keenly aware of this, as evidenced by the choices they make for their own children. For example, Obama’s first Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, stated that the primary reason he decided to live in Arlington, Virginia, was so his daughter could attend its public schools. In his words:

That was why we chose where we live, it was the determining factor. That was the most important thing to me. My family has given up so much so that I could have the opportunity to serve; I didn’t want to try to save the country’s children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children’s education.

Duncan’s statement is an admission that public schools in the D.C. area often jeopardize the education of children, but he would not let this happen to his child. Few parents have the choice that Duncan made because most cannot afford to live in places like Arlington, where the annual cash income of the median family is $144,843, the highest of all counties in the United States.

Other prominent opponents of private school choice—like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton—personally attended and also sent their own children to private K-12 schools. Likewise, Hassan’s daughter attended an elite private high school (Phillips Exeter Academy) where Hassan’s husband was the principal.

The existing U.S. education system does not provide an equal footing for children, but Hassan criticizes DeVos for supporting school choice, which would lessen this inequity. By its very definition, school choice allows parents to select the schools their children attend, an option that Hassan and other affluent people regularly exercise.

Taxpayer Money and Accountability

Four lines of evidence disprove Hassan’s claim that DeVos wants to “divert taxpayer dollars” to non-public schools “without requirements for accountability.”

First, private school choice generally increases public school spending per student, which is the primary measure of education funding. As explained by Stephen Cornman, a statistician with the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, per-pupil spending is “the gold standard in school finance.”

Private school choice programs boost per-student funding in public schools because the public schools no longer educate the students who go to the private schools, which typically spend much less per student than public schools. This leaves additional funding for the students who remain in public schools.

According to the latest available data, the average spending per student in private K-12 schools during the 2011-12 school year was about $6,762. In the same year, the average spending per student in public schools was $13,398, or about twice as much. These figures exclude state administration spending, unfunded pension liabilities, and post-employment benefits like healthcare—all of which are common in public schools and rare in private ones.

Certain school costs like building maintenance are fixed in the short term, and thus, the savings of educating fewer students occurs in steps. This means that private school choice can temporarily decrease the funding per student in some public schools, but this is brief and slight because only 8% of public school spending is for operations and maintenance.

Second, school choice provides the most direct form of accountability, which is accountability to students and parents. With school choice, if parents are unhappy with any school, they have the ability to send their children to other schools. This means that every school is accountable to every parent.Under the current public education system, schools are accountable to government officials, not students and parents. Again, Hassan knows this, because her son has severe disabilities, and Hassan used her influence as a lawyer to get her son’s public elementary school to “accommodate his needs.”

Unlike Hassan, people without a law degree, extra time on their hands, or ample financial resources are at the mercy of politicians and government employees. Short of legal action or changing an election outcome, most children and parents are stuck with their public schools, regardless of whether they are effective or safe. That is precisely the situation that DeVos would like to fix through school choice, but Hassan talks as if DeVos were trying to do the opposite.

Third, taxpayer funds are commonly used for private schools, and Hassan actually wants more of this. Her campaign website states that she “will fight to expand Pell Grants” but fails to reveal that these are often used for private colleges like, for example, Brown University, the Ivy League school that she, her husband, and her daughter attended (disclosure: so did this author).

In other words, Hassan supports using taxpayer money for top students to attend elite private universities, but she opposes the same opportunity for poor students to attend private K-12 schools.

Hassan’s position on college aid also undercuts her objection that DeVos supports programs that “leave out students whose families cannot afford to pay the part of the tuition that the voucher does not cover.” If that were truly Hassan’s objection, she would also oppose aid that doesn’t cover the full costs of every college, because that would leave out students who can’t pay the rest of the tuition.

Fourth, contrary to Hassan’s rhetoric about accountability to taxpayers, she supports current spending levels in public K-12 schools, “debt-free public college for all,” and expanding “early childhood education” in spite of the facts that:

  • the U.S. spends an average of 31% more per K-12 student than other developed nations, but 15-year olds in the U.S. rank 31st among 35 nations in math.
  • federal, state, and local governments spend about $900 billion per year on formal education, but only 18% of U.S. residents aged 16 and older can correctly answer a word problem requiring the ability to search text, interpret it, and calculate using multiplication and division.
  • the average spending per public school classroom is $286,000 per year, but only 26% of the high school students who take the ACT exam meet its college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math, and science).
  • federal, state and local governments spend $173 billion per year on higher education, but 80% of first-time, full-time students who enroll in a public community college do not receive a degree from the college within 150% of the normal time required to do so.
  • 4-year public colleges spend an average of $40,033 per year for each full-time student, but one-third of students who graduate from 4-year colleges don’t improve their “critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem-solving, and writing” skills by more than one percentage point over their entire college careers.
  • the federal government funds dozens of preschool programs, and the largest —Head Start—spends an average of $8,772 per child per year, but it produces no measurable benefit by the time students reach 3rd grade.

In sum, Hassan supports pumping taxpayer money into programs with high costs and substandard outcomes, but she opposes doing the same for private K–12 schools that produce better outcomes with far less cost.

Left Behind?

Hassan’s claim that private school choice programs “leave behind students with disabilities because the schools do not accommodate their complex needs” is also false.

In Northern and Central New Jersey, there are more than 30 private special education schools that are approved by the state. As far as parents are concerned, these schools serve the needs of their children better than the public schools in their areas. If this were not the case, these private schools would not exist.

More importantly, if parents don’t think that a private school will be best for their special needs child, school choice allows them to keep the child in a public school that is better-funded thanks to the money saved by school choice.

In a recent brief to the Nevada Supreme Court, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, and its state affiliate argue that free-market voucher programs will lead to “cream-skimming—the drawing away of the most advantaged students to private schools––and lead to a highly stratified system of education.”

As detailed above, the current public school system is highly stratified by income, and income and education go hand in hand. Hence, the real issue is not stratification but what happens to students who stay in public schools. Contrary to the belief that school choice will harm these students, a mass of evidence shows the opposite.

At least 21 high-quality studies have been performed on the academic outcomes of students who remain in public schools that are subject to school choice programs. All but one found neutral-to-positive results, and none found negative results. This is consistent with the theory that school choice stimulates competition that induces public schools to improve.

Who Wins and Who Loses?

Wide-ranging facts prove that school choice is a win for students, parents, and taxpayers. However, it financially harms teachers unions by depriving them of dues, because private schools are less likely to have unions than public ones.

In turn, this financially harms Democratic politicians, political action committees, and related organizations, which have received about $200 million in reported donations from the two largest teachers’ unions since 1990. Unions also give many unreported donations to Democratic Party causes.

Teachers’ unions are firmly opposed to private school choice, and the National Education Association has sent an open letter to Democrats stating that “opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA.”

So why does Hassan oppose giving other children opportunities that she gave to her own children? Motives are difficult to divine, but the reasons she gave in her op-ed are at odds with verifiable facts and her own actions.

James Agresti

James Agresti

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a nonprofit institute dedicated to publishing verifiable facts about public policy.

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