“Funding is a factor but not nearly so much as the parents, teachers, and admin - usually in that order in my experience.”
That isn’t entirely true. Throwing extra money at troubled schools often doesn’t work (in a lot of cases, as the OP said, there are deep seated problems and the money often is spent on the wrong things), but it also is a fact that underfunding schools hurts education. If you look at the top performing school districts in this country, most of them are at the top of school spending, districts like Scarsdale in NY, Basking Ridge in NJ, some of the others in the country, you see places with a large tax base with heavy spending on schools. Meanwhile, trying to stay away from politics, places in rural areas and the like proud of their low tax approach to things, have school systems that generally don’t produce well, don’t have the facilities for things, etc…
It is true that schools are mostly a local thing, but the federal government is involved. Some states get up to 40% of their spending from the federal government (average is about 9%), some get very little (NJ as a whole last I checked was well under the average/typical), so the government has huge carrot/stick to use (for example, Obama used that in North Carolina with the transgender bathroom issue, and NC gets significant federal funding).
I don’t have a problem with a non educator being head of the DOE, what I do have problems with is what they have shown in the past. For example, one of the fundamental reasons for the public schools in this country, one of the reasons that states were required to have them in the first place, was the thought that getting citizens educated was important to the country, both in terms of voting and in developing a country free from the imbalances of other countries, especially the rigid class system of England. Public funding of the schools, rather than requiring people to pay for it, was designed deliberately that a poor kid would have opportunity for an education.
DeVos troubles me on many fronts, based on her past. First of all, promoting for profit public schools , paid for by public funding, is a disaster area, the profit motive is a disaster IMO (and this has been proven out, some cities privatized ambulance services and found the price, the ambulances were understocked and the EMT’s often had to beg at hospitals to get what they needed, and response times plummeted). The profit motive means those running them have a master (and given her background, again, likely to be things like hedge funds and the like, which has been who has been behind privatized EMT services and jails, for example) and they want not just profits, but increasing ones…and where does that money come from? I hear from those supporting it the profit motive causing ‘efficiences’, but that basically boils down to cutting costs…and how do you do that? You increase class size, you pay teachers less (so who will they end up with, the best or the desperate?), you don’t pay for facilities, you don’t buy new textbooks, etc…and who gets hurt? The kids.
Likewise the voucher issue bothers me given her background and also quite honestly her faith. The reformed Christian church is a very conservative, generally fundamentalist Christian denomination, and that is important. A lot of the push for vouchers and school choice has not come from education advocates, it has come from conservative Christians seeking money to pay for their kids to go to Christian schools that teach the way they want, rather than improving the overall education experience. Will someone with those kinds of religious beliefs act out of desire to improve the schools, or benefit those with similar aspirations at creating schools ‘that don’t challenge their beliefs’? Anyone remember the ‘academies’ down south (that Hillary Clinton as a young woman went undercover to bust), where they basically created supposedly private academies that were publicly paid for and were lily white?
And as I posted earlier, school vouchers to allow “school choice” don’t have a record of working. There have been several attempts at this, privately funded and some public experiments, where kids in bad school districts were given vouchers to go to private schools (that mostly were parochial schools, given that typical private schools tuition costs, the vouchers would pay only a fraction of the tuition required, not to mention that many private schools wouldn’t take the kids, the kind of prep schools and montessori schools you might think of). The problem is in at least Milwaukee and Charleston, SC (I may be wrong the exact city in number 2), over time the kids who moved to the new school on voucher didn’t do any better than the kids who stayed behind.
Will a DOE under her want to create an environment where kids are taught to respect differences, or one that will turn the other way and allow schools to do what they often have done, deliberately ignore the plight of those bullied (especially LGBT people, se DeVos faith which is not exactly kumbaya love everyone…).
I have no problem with experiments and I have no love for the NEA or the local branch, the NJEA…that said, though, if we are going to experiment I want this done in a way where we can look at the results, define them. If we set up charter schools, if the DOE influences that, then I want to see standards, too, ie if they in effect force states to set up charters, will their be federal standards they have to meet, too? Or will it be something stupid, like “we expect X % of public schools to be charters”. I don’t want to see them for profit, because there is absolutely no incentive for a for profit school to provide a good education. Yeah, I have heard the argument “they would be competing” for students, so would have to be good, but if the for profit charters are a large part of what is out there, would a parent choose a public school that is failing or in desperation, take one of the for profit schools…and if that failed, they might pull the kid of out of school A, put him in B, but if B is a for profit, likely it won’t be any better, because they have no reason to. If we put the emphasis on for profit charters, and don’t have standards, then why should they create a quality education, because there won’t be competition, it would be an oligopoly (and oh, yeah, anyone wanna take a bet that if this goes through under Devos, the schools in a state would be run by maybe a small handful of operators…oligopoly). Now if they offered the for profit schools some kind of bonus if they met standards (and that would raise a troubling question, what standards? Would this be another ‘teach to the test’ mess?), then maybe but we also would need to be looking at facilities and the like students have, too, and I personally am dubious a for profit school can produce real results…need I remind people of for profit colleges and what a disaster they have turned out to be, nothing more than mills offering a crap education , running mostly off federal education grants.
Like I said, I have no problem with someone outside the education experience trying new things, but given her track record and her beliefs, I question her motivations and where she would take things, subsidizing religious academies and making money for hedge funds should not be the goal of the DOE.