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Ad Astra, by Richard Lippold Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. |
Mr. Romney began his op-ed by writing,
“The nomination of Betsy DeVos for secretary of education has reignited the age-old battle over education policy. The heat is already intense not just because it involves the future of our children but also because a lot of money is at stake. Essentially, it’s a debate between those in the education establishment who support the status quo because they have a financial stake in the system and those who seek to challenge the status quo because it’s not serving kids well.”
I replied to Mr. Romney’s column by saying he did not identify the essential debate, though he did identify players whose self-serving positions obscure the fundamental failings of the American education system. The thinking of the nation’s leadership team (such as it is today, which isn’t saying much, including Ms. DeVos), must not be focused on purposefully-deceptive shiny objects and frenetically-distracting Tweets.
Our planning—for defense, for infrastructure, for energy, for social programs, and for education, among so many other needs—must, instead, be long-term and strategic. Arguments for advancing the nation’s best educational interests must be aligned with education goals of local, state, and national political campaigns and executive, legislative, and judicial actions not one-year hence, not seven years hence, but 20-40 years hence and far beyond.
When Betsy DeVos’s nomination was presented to the Senate more than a year ago, I shook my head in disappointment, again, for that portion of the electorate that voted for Donald Trump. A Trump voter had and has every right to his or her own thoughts on the direction their duly-elected leader seeks to take the nation. And I had to admit that many well-educated and ostensibly well-informed voters pulled the handle, or pushed a button for Mr. Trump. Perhaps they believed that the team Mr. Trump would pick to run the Executive Branch would be the equivalent to Lincoln’s Team of Rivals. But when Mr. Trump placed Betsy DeVos’s name up for Secretary of Education—a department in which I worked for several years—I was rocked back on my heels with dismay. Prior to the consenting vote that launched Secretary DeVos into office, I expressed the hope that the Senate would not shirk its duty and would, in the end, reject Ms. DeVos’s nomination. I continue to bemoan the willful ignorance of the members of the Senate who voted to approve Trump’s nomination.
Their vote, and Ms. DeVos’s continuing publicly displayed befuddlement as to what her job as Secretary of Education must be, is an admission that Congress is still not ready to take on the hard work of preserving our democracy if they are not willing to question those who promised a journey to the stars with no plan to teach us how to get there.
In her recent Sixty Minutes interview, Ms. DeVos did not know of, nor could she even explain—much less defend—the dismal scores of schools in her home state of Michigan, admitting that she does not "intentionally" visit underperforming schools in that state, and added an asterisk of “Maybe I should.” It was an embarrassing and abysmal performance by someone who has no practical experience whatsoever in the public school system. This was hardly the first time Ms. DeVos has been at a loss to explain her role or any practical vision for her department or for the nation’s schools.
It is not just the “future of our children” that is at stake; it is the future of a nation built on ethics, decency, humanity, and the fundamental right to feel safe within the borders of the country, the community, and the home. Whether our children and their children will be responsible for that vision of the future is not a certainty.
Mere educational outcome metrics, no matter how they are massaged by competing factions, do not reflect the underlying failure of our society to hold parents, communities, teachers, and leaders to much higher moral and ethical standards, and to do so by creating an atmosphere in our schools—all schools, public, private, and home schools—conducive to, and encouraging, educational rigor, logical thinking, and non-judgmental debate of the issues facing all of us. We must unlearn fear and distrust, and relearn reliance on others, acceptance of differences, and the immutable value of personal accountability. So far, Ms. DeVos has shown no interest in speaking to, or acting on, those issues. In that, she is an absolute reflection of the president.
The 2016 National Center for Education Statistics Report, “The Condition of Education notes
“[T]he 2015 average mathematics scores in grades 4 and 8 were 1 and 2 points lower, respectively, than the 2013 average mathematics scores. The 2015 average reading score for 4th-graders was not significantly different from the score in 2013, and the 2015 score for 8th-graders was 2 points lower than the score in 2013. At grade 12, the average mathematics score was lower in 2015 than in 2013, and the average reading score did not significantly differ between the two years. Of particular note is that in both mathematics and reading, the lowest performing 12th-grade students— those performing at the 10th and 25th percentiles—had lower scores in 2015 than in 2013.”
In short, we have not improved the outcomes of our youngest, or our most educationally-at-risk older students, and we have not really moved the needle toward excellence for the rest. No where is this more apparent than in Michigan schools…Ms. DeVos’s education backyard, where performance scoring in almost every category barely rates a C+.
Americans can debate for hours the relative merits of teachers’ unions, home-schooling, charter schools, vouchers, racial red-lining of inner city schools, the public’s willingness to fund school bonds, etc., but if there is no fire in the belly of a community to make the hard choices necessary to address the underlying deficit of core knowledge training—which I define as the development of logical thinking coupled with open-minded analysis followed by non-judgmental critical debate—we are not going to advance this nation toward a favorable goal. The person tasked with lighting that fire, the president, and the person responsible for carrying that fire to every school district, Betsy DeVos, have not even found the necessary tinder, much less the long-term fuel, for those necessary flames.
Communities and families simply cannot afford to let every upwelling spew of diversionary tactics or false equivalency trends set by political expediency, give communities the misguided impression fostered by confused leaders like Ms. DeVos that their kids are doing well. Beyond the fact that they are being shot and killed at random in our schools, a shameful condition not even close to being resolved, too many of our children are not doing well in the most important arena of all—the classroom.
We can take heart, though, that the young people of the country are not waiting for the adults to act. What we have seen in the upwelling movement sparked by the tragedy at Margaret Stoneman Douglas High School is the true grit, determination, and authenticity fueling the commitment of students to reclaim their sense of safety—physical and psychological—which will, in turn, allow them to focus on their primary mission: to learn in schools that are not only safe havens, but which are capable of lifting every student up to view the world from the mountaintop of a good education.
There is a beautiful, 100’ tall, gold-colored stainless steel spire on the Mall side of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The spire pierces a constellation of stars. The title of the sculpture by Richard Lippold is Ad Astra, meaning, "To the Stars." While this title is most apt for the sculpture, and the sculpture itself is inspiring, I prefer the longer Latin phrase, Per aspera ad astra, or, "Through hardships to the stars," because no journey of such significance can be begun without great effort supported by education at every level. Sad to say, Ms. DeVos, and her boss, are oblivious to the beauty of that goal.
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