On the same day President Trump picked Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) head, Randi Weingarten, condemned Mrs. DeVos as “the most ideological, anti-public-education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.”
Right away, National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia added her ire to the fire: “By nominating Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration has demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators and communities.”
Then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer piled on with his sweeping condemnation: “The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefitted from the public education system in this country….”
Of course, elite media types like Emily Deruy had to get her two cents in by resurrecting Obama: “The lack of oversight has prompted concern from the Obama administration that some bad charters were being allowed to operate without improving or being forced to close. Civil-rights groups like the NAACP have also expressed concern that low-income children and children of color suffer when oversight is scaled back.”
So what is this all sound and fury about—insight or oversight? Journalists like Emily DeRuy and politicians like Barack Obama often use the noun “oversight” as if it meant the same as the verb “oversee.” In fact, the most common definition of the noun oversight is “unintentional failure to notice or consider.” Perhaps this was just a Freudian slip. Such important and busy people, after all, rarely have time to heed the niceties of lexical distinction. What is troubling, however, is that these people also lack insight into what needs to be done to improve education in America.
As we’ve already learned from more than a half century of failed public school reform, simply throwing more regulations (oversight?) and money at this problem—whether it’s taxpayer dollars or private donations—won’t fix it. The most recent statistical evidence of this is clear in a January 2017 report on the Obama administration’s $7 billion School Improvement Grants, which revealed “no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.”
In spite of her husband’s billions and her own reputation for supporting both public and private charter schools nationwide, Mrs. DeVos has her work cut out for her. She will need a lot of help from her friends.
Let’s begin with her potential friends in the technology sector. In September of 2015, Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims focused attention on an important but little noticed problem: “Until recently, we simply didn’t know how to use technology to make teachers and students happier, better engaged and more successful. One of the chief reasons our schools and colleges are not graduating students with the attitudes and skills they need to succeed in the 21st Century and beyond,” Mims argues, is that “the overwhelming majority of students are still learning as they always have, in classrooms dominated by a one-to-many lecturing model in which teachers inevitably leave some students behind while boring others. That model has barely changed in a century.”
The teachers unions and probably even a few parents may not like it, but what Mrs. DeVos has to do is find a way to ditch the boring lecture archetype. Mims notes that “Countless startups are working on this problem, among them Testive, which produces a cloud-based service to help students prepare for college entrance exams. ‘We need to unburden the teacher from having to disseminate content,’ says Testive Chief Executive Tom Rose. ‘It’s such a reductive way to use a person.’”
No one should better understand this than the dedicated secondary school English or history teacher who spends hours preparing lesson plans for every class and correcting and grading essay papers his or her students are supposed to write every week. Nevertheless, content course instructors in most high schools and colleges are likely to fear some robotic tutor could take away their jobs. That is not at all the case, Mims explains: “Rather, the idea is that basics can be handled by software, freeing students and teachers to spend the rest of the school day working on group projects, peer instruction and individual mentoring.”
Imagine a clean, safe and well-lighted classroom of, say, thirty 9th graders and two or three highly skilled teachers, each student with easy access to a bank of Internet-connected computers linked to a huge “cloud” of self-paced skills training programs. While some of the students work on the computer-mediated instruction, constantly encouraged and assisted by one of the classroom teachers, other students work in pairs on peer-tutoring projects or gather with one of the teachers in a group discussion or interactive learning project.
Whether it’s a public school or a public or private charter school, in this classroom setting the teacher becomes much less a content dispenser and disciplinarian and much more a deeply involved and caring facilitator. Best of all, every student is engaged constantly in a focused learning activity that is both interesting and individualized. This model already works well for adults who use the self-paced USA Learns program to learn to speak and read English.
There’s every reason to believe a similar learning model would also work well for learners at schools and colleges all across America. Mrs. DeVos’ biggest challenge is how to spread the good news about this approach to parents, school district administrators and teachers at the local level. The social media—especially through a few well-designed YouTube classroom demonstration videos—might be a helpful tool in this campaign.
An even more fertile (and too long ignored) field for planting the seeds of reform is the state university system where teachers colleges plan the curricula, do the training and set the standards for state-mandated certification. Ask any licensed public school teacher, and you will discover that this is “the belly of the beast” where teacher incompetence is propagated and where the teachers unions have the greatest influence.
Who knows? Making what Mims calls “blended learning” part of the required coursework in state teachers colleges could even inspire more talented young people to join the huge corps of truly dedicated educators our nation will need to “make America great again.” Robots will never be able to do that job.
There’s even more good news from Mrs. DeVos’ friends in Wisconsin. With the five-year success record of Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 law, freeing local school districts from the dictates of teachers unions, it’s likely many other states will follow suit. This will allow teacher pay increases on the basis of performance rather than tenure. That will be a big inducement for the best and the brightest to teach for America.
Updating our nation’s classrooms with technology and building up the quality and ranks of our nation’s teacher corps is just the beginning of the beginning. If Mrs. Devos is going to address the desperate need for educational improvement in depressed rural and inner city communities, her Department of Education will need to focus on developing local control and leadership programs tailored to each community’s unique needs. One size-fits-all solutions just won’t work.
In “An NFL Legend, Trump and America’s Gangs,” the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley has spot-lighted an excellent model for making inner cities great again. Founded in 1988 by legendary NFL star Jim Brown, the non-profit Amer-I-Can program teaches troubled youths and convicts such basic life-management skills as goal-setting, problem-solving and decision-making. “We have corporations that will hire you because you’re working to make a difference in your community.”
These may sound like vague and generic goals, but Mr. Brown works in the very real context of urban communities like the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles where, in 1992, he mediated between the vicious Crips and Bloods gangs. Since then, Mr. Brown’s Amer-I-Can has helped to provide job training and placement programs in 20 cities.
Even though Jim Brown voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he believes President Trump can help—“not only by promoting job growth, but enlisting spiritual and business leaders.” In short, Jim Brown is just one of many other African-American heroes who can help Betsy DeVos bring real insight and positive change to our schools and communities nationwide.

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.

Sharing is caring!