Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, Betsy DeVos, has spent two decades successfully pushing "school choice" in her home state of Michigan — a policy that she and her husband vowed in 1999 would “fundamentally improve education.”

Except the track record in that state shows that it hasn’t.


Despite two decades of charter-school growth, the state’s overall academic progress has failed to keep pace with other states: Michigan ranks near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading on a nationally representative test, nicknamed the “Nation’s Report Card.” Notably, the state’s charter schools scored worse on that test than their traditional public-school counterparts, according to an analysis of federal data.

Critics say Michigan’s laissez-faire attitude about charter-school regulation has led to marginal and, in some cases, terrible schools in the state’s poorest communities as part of a system dominated by for-profit operators. Charter-school growth has also weakened the finances and enrollment of traditional public-school districts like Detroit’s, at a time when many communities are still recovering from the economic downturn that hit Michigan’s auto industry particularly hard.

The results in Michigan are so disappointing that even some supporters of school choice are critical of the state’s policies.

“The bottom line should be, ‘Are kids achieving better or worse because of this expansion of choice?’” said Michigan State Board of Education President John Austin, a DeVos critic who also describes himself as a strong charter-school supporter. “It’s destroying learning outcomes ... and the DeVoses were a principal agent of that.”

All of which raises the question: As Trump’s Education secretary, would DeVos learn from the Michigan experience, or simply push for the same policies on a national scale?

“My hope is that she has a very open mind … and doesn’t think the Michigan approach is the right one,” said Peter Cunningham, a former Obama Education Department official who is now executive director of the Education Post, a nonprofit group that supports charter schools. Cunningham points to Massachusetts’ more aggressive oversight of charters as a better model.

But former Michigan Gov. John Engler insists that despite the “pros and cons” of that state's much-criticized charter rules, “choice has been very popular."

“I think [DeVos] made the point that she hopes every child can have the advantage of a quality education — that parents that want a quality education ought to have a range of choices available to them," he said.

Trump’s transition team declined to make DeVos available for an interview, or provide comment for this story.

Three Michigan school districts enroll some of the highest percentages of charter-school students nationwide — Detroit, Flint and DeVos’ home town of Grand Rapids, where she’s expected to attend President elect-Donald Trump’s rally Friday night, part of the latest leg of his “Thank You Tour.”

Betsy DeVos and her husband, Dick, are billionaires who have funneled millions of dollars in campaign donations to support lawmakers who push school choice — a broad term used to promote the idea that parents shouldn't be locked into neighborhood public schools but should have other options, including publicly funded charter and in some cases, private and parochial schools.

All told, the DeVoses have contributed at least $7 million to lawmakers and the state Republican Party in recent years, and their influence can be seen in just about every major piece of education-related legislation in Michigan since the 1990s. That includes the 1993 law that permitted charters in the state and a 2011 vote to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in the state.

Michigan permits practices barred by some other states, such as for-profit charter operators, virtual charter schools and multiple charter-authorizing bodies. Along the way, fraud and waste has been a problem — one charter school spent more than $1 million on acquiring swampland it doesn’t use, The Detroit Free Press has reported. A federal audit this year noted that Michigan’s charter-school law doesn’t include rules regarding conflicts of interest, among other issues.

To be sure, Michigan has some high-performing charter schools, too. DeVos supporters point to a 2013 Stanford study that found that Michigan charter-school students are learning at a faster rate in reading and math than their public-school peers — seeing an additional two months of gains in each subject. Gains for Detroit charter-school students were greater, at three months.

“A lot of people use the phrase ‘Wild West,’ but there are a lot of places where the Wild West is working quite well,” said Matthew Ladner, a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, a libertarian-oriented public-policy group.

Recently, some of the state’s most ardent school-choice supporters, including DeVos, backed some level of accountability standards. Earlier this year, state lawmakers took some steps to beef up oversight of charters — steps largely supported by DeVos. They included a measure requiring automatic closure of charters than rank in the bottom 5 percent of schools for three consecutive years.

Michigan also created an A-F accountability system for Detroit, where schools receiving an F for three years must be closed. Authorizers that want to open a new charter school in the city must be accredited, and failing charters can no longer shop for a new authorizer.

Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the “new law stands to dramatically change the charter space in Michigan, but it’s going to take a couple [of] years before we see what it does, how effective it is, and how well it’s being enforced.”

Betsy DeVos, left, and her husband, Dick, right, are billionaires who have funneled millions of dollars in campaign donations to support lawmakers who push school choice. | AP Photo

While DeVos’ group, the Great Lakes Education Project, supported most of the changes, it pushed back hard against a proposed Detroit commission focused on improving both charters and traditional schools, contending it would be beholden to the city’s mayor and school-district officials.

The Detroit Free Press reported the DeVoses poured $1.45 million into state Republicans’ coffers during a seven-week period — right after lawmakers removed the Detroit commission part of the bill that DeVos vocally opposed.

In Detroit alone, about 70 percent of charter schools ranked in the bottom quarter of the state’s schools, according to an Ed Trust-Midwest report using data from the 2013-2014 school year. The foundation has called the quality of the city’s charter-school sector a “civil rights issue.”

Detroit Public Schools overall rank last out of large urban school districts nationwide for the performance of African-American students in eight-grade math. But the majority of charter districts statewide perform even worse than the city school district for African-American students in eighth-grade math, the report noted.

When state lawmakers were debating a financial bailout for the Detroit school district in February, DeVos authored an op-ed published in the Detroit News saying that the district had outlived its usefulness and should be shut down.

“It is no secret a vast number of Detroit’s political establishment — mayors, city council members, city administrators, judges, and even top DPS officials — send their own children to private or charter schools, instead of to failed DPS schools,” DeVos wrote. “Why should everyday Detroit parents be denied this same opportunity for their children?”

The DeVos family efforts to shape school choice policy in Michigan date back at least to 1990, when Dick DeVos was elected to the state school board and Betsy DeVos created a foundation that gave private-school scholarships to low-income families “so that parents could decide where their kids would go to school,” DeVos told Philanthropy Roundtable in 2013.

But scholarships weren’t enough, she said.

“We realized very quickly that, while it was wonderful to help some families through the scholarship fund, it was never going to fundamentally address the real problem,” DeVos argued. “Most parents were not going to get the scholarship they wanted, and that meant most kids would not have the opportunities they deserved.”

School vouchers, which allow public money to flow to private and religious schools, are one element of the DeVos plan that never materialized in Michigan. The state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected vouchers in 2000, despite the DeVos family spending more than $5 million on a pro-voucher campaign.

Vouchers are now a major tenet of Trump’s education platform. He proposed a $20 billion school-choice plan earlier this year — a plan put together with the help of DeVos’ advocacy group, the American Federation of Children.

The DeVoses have at times targeted Republicans who didn’t fall in line with their education agenda. When state Rep. Paul Muxlow, a Republican elected in 2010, voted against a 2011 effort to lift a cap on the number of charters that can operate in the state, the couple’s Great Lakes Education Project spent nearly $185,000 to support a primary opponent against Muxlow a year later.

Muxlow said he was viciously attacked by DeVos-financed campaign mailers even though the law to lift the cap passed easily, and he is a reliably conservative lawmaker. He said he felt like the DeVoses were looking for a reason to get rid of him, largely because he was a former public-school teacher. Muxlow hung on to survive the 2012 primary by just 132 votes.

“They were watching me like a hawk. I was a teacher on the conservative side — and how could that be?” Muxlow said. “My sense is that Great Lakes Education Project, under the control of the DeVos family, would like to close out public schools.”

Great Lakes Education Project Executive Director Gary Naeyaert said Muxlow was targeted because his voting record contradicted his statements.

“Rep. Muxlow was very clear in his 2010 GLEP candidate questionnaire that he would vote to lift the arbitrary cap on charter public schools, and he earned our endorsement that year,” Naeyaert said. “When he had the opportunity to vote, not only did he change his position, but he led the fight against the bill. To my knowledge, he didn't communicate his concerns or opposition to us.

“No other legislator had flip-flopped as dramatically as Rep. Muxlow on this very important issue, and we supported another candidate in this race during the 2012 election.”

DeVos has previously said she is not seeking to dismantle public education, but that she wants to give parents options and bring much-needed competition to education.

“We’ve made some changes to address quality and they’re starting to bear some fruit” said Naeyaert, referring to new accountability measures passed this year.

But there’s still room for all schools to improve, he said.

“Is Michigan the poster boy for what we should be doing nationally? I sure hope not,” Naeyaert said. “We’re not doing anywhere near what we need to be doing when it comes to educating kids.”