Like a student who procrastinated and tried to cram, her answers were inadequate.

Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, was grilled by Democrats before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday January 17, 2016.

With no experience in public education or higher education, DeVos has lobbied for decades in favor of school choice in the form of both charter schools and voucher programs. The school choice movement has advocates and critics on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Early in the hearing Democrats entered into the record a letter from The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The coalition of more than 200 national non-profit organizations railed against DeVos for seeking “to undermine the bedrock of American principles of equal opportunity, nondiscrimination and public education itself.”

In her testimony before the HELP Committee, DeVos faced tough questions from Democrats.

Her answers illustrated what the Los Angeles Times Editorial board described as “an astonishing ignorance about basic education issues, an extraordinary lack of thoughtfulness about ongoing debates in the field and an unwillingness to respond to important questions.”

DeVos seemed not to understand the difference between proficiency and growth.

Senator Al Franken asked her to explain whether she thought test scores should measure proficiency or growth. Proficiency is a measure of skill mastery. Growth is a measure of progress. This can impact how a school is labeled — as successful or failing — as a student with high growth may have low mastery. For example, a student who enters the high school with a fourth grade reading level and grows to a sixth grade reading level by the end of his freshman year has grown a great deal. However, the student’s mastery is well below grade level.

DeVos’ inability to distinguish two basic measures used in school accountability, according to Vox, “suggested she knows little about what the department she hopes to lead actually does.”

Franken clearly exasperated at DeVos’ answer replied, “This is a subject that has been debated in the education community for years. But it surprises me that you don’t know this issue.”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, right, looks to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, as he questions Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos, center, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The 2002 federal education law No Child Left Behind required schools to measure proficiency but not growth. NCLB has been superseded by the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act which gives states more freedom to decide how to hold schools accountable. The debate between using proficiency or growth to measure student and school success was a central element in the debate on ESSA.

The current thinking in the education community is growth is a better measure of a school’s quality. As The Brookings Institution explained, “The principle guiding that view is that schools should only be held accountable for what is realistically in their control.”

DeVos “may have confused” the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act with something else.

Under questioning from Senators Tim Kaine and Maggie Hassan DeVos’ understanding of the civil rights law known as IDEA was shaky at best.

Senator Kaine questions Betsy DeVos on the Department of Education’s role in enforcing the law. DeVos suggested that a federal law was “best left to the states.”

Senator Kaine: Should all schools that receive taxpayer funding be required to meet the requirements of the IDEA?

DeVos: That’s a matter that’s best left to the states.

The 162 page law, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, “… governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education and related services to more than 6.5 million eligible infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities,” according to the US Department of Education site for IDEA.

Despite what DeVos stated in her testimony, IDEA is not up to individual states to decide if they want to meet the standards or not. It’s federal law.

If a school district is found to not be in compliance with the law the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights may get involved. Initially it will first try to bring the school into voluntary compliance, but if this fails the OCR has two options available. These are both very powerful.

“initiate administrative proceedings to terminate Department of Education financial assistance to the recipient.” “refer the case to the Department of Justice for judicial proceedings.”

Senator Hassan, whose son has cerebral palsy, returns to the question of the application of IDEA. DeVos stated that she “may have confused it with something else.”

DeVos was unclear about her position on equal accountability for schools.

DeVos: I support accountability.

Senator Kaine: Do you not want to answer my question?

DeVos: I support accountability.

Senator Kaine: Ok, let me ask you this. I think that all school that receive taxpayer funds should be equally accountable. Do you agree with me or not?

DeVos: Well, they don’t. They’re not today.

Senator Kaine: But I think they should. Do you agree with me or not?

DeVos: Well, no because…

Senator Kaine: Let me move to my next question.

Senator Kaine questions DeVos on accountability. Schools — public, private, and parochial — do not currently operate under the same accountability rules in many states.

Senator Kaine’s question and aim was to find where DeVos stood on how schools are measured. Should all schools — regardless of whether or not they are public, private, parochial, charter, or new forms not yet invented — be held to the exact same standards? Senator Kaine said he believed all schools should have “a level playing field.”

DeVos’ answer was both more nuanced and a sidestep of the question. Her answer went to how all schools are not presently held accountable at the same level. This is true.

School choice has been in place for 20 years in Michigan, but as Kalamazoo Superintendent of Schools Michael Rice explained to Bridge Magazine:

“Choice is at best a means to an end of higher student achievement, it’s not the goal itself. And we’ve had choice for over 20 years in the state, and our (academic) ranking (among states) has declined substantially.”

DeVos is now against “conversion therapy,” but she and her family have funded conversion therapy proponents in the past.

Senator Franken questions Betsy DeVos about conversion therapy. DeVos says she was not involved in her mother’s foundation which did fund conversion therapy supporters.

Conversion therapy, a psychological treatment designed to help a patient change sexual orientation, has been discredited as pseudoscience and even labeled as “dangerous” by the LGBT organization Human Rights Campaign.

Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Betsy DeVos, her family, and her husband’s family all have ties to the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. Several of the stated aims of Focus on the Family include: promotion of school prayer, teaching of both creationism and abstinence-only sex education.

Additionally Focus on the Family opposes: abortion, divorce, LGBT rights including adoption rights and same-sex marriage.

Focus on the Family also touts the ability of “conversion therapy” to help individuals no longer be homosexual. Conversion therapy has been labeled as pseudoscience by many organizations including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

The APA had this to say about “conversion therapy” in its 2000 position statement:

Psychotherapeutic modalities to convert or “repair” homosexuality are based on developmental theories whose scientific validity is questionable. Furthermore, anecdotal reports of “cures” are counterbalanced by anecdotal claims of psychological harm. In the last four decades, “reparative” therapists have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of cure. Until there is such research available, [the American Psychiatric Association] recommends that ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation, keeping in mind the medical dictum to first, do no harm.

According to Open Secrets, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation donated $400,000 in 2016 to Focus on the Family. Richard and Helen are Betsy DeVos’ in-laws. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation donated $776,000 to Focus on the Family. Edgar and Elsa are Betsy DeVos’ parents. A 2007 article in Salon reported between July 2003 and July 2006, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave $531,000 to Focus on the Family.

Further Betsy DeVos was listed as a Vice President on the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation board according to tax records for over a decade. From 2001 to 2013, Betsy Devos was VP of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation. The Washington Post described the foundation as “ a nonprofit group founded by her mother that has been a generous donor to controversial groups like Focus on the Family and Family Research Council.”

Five members of congress, Co-Chairs of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, sent a letter of “deep concern” to the HELP Committee. In it, they note that “[s]ince 1998, Betsy Devos and her family’s foundations have donated at least $6.1 million to Focus on the Family[…]”

When questioned about her part in her mother’s foundation, DeVos said she never held an active role or served on the foundation’s board.

“That was a clerical error,” DeVos said before the HELP Committee. “I have never made decisions on my mother’s behalf.”

The DeVos family spokesperson John Truscott explained the error by blaming it on a former employee, Robert Haveman, who embezzled $16 million from the foundation. Haveman pled guilty in October 2016 to wire fraud and money laundering and was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison.

Despite this claim the magazine Mother Jones found that Betsy DeVos had donated to Focus on the Family more directly:

The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation gave $275,000 to Focus on the Family from 1999 to 2001 but hasn’t donated since; it gave an additional $35,760 to the group’s Michigan and DC affiliates from 2001 to 2010.

Betsy DeVos is prominently featured on the foundation’s website.

In reply to Senator Franken’s line of questioning about conversion therapy DeVos asked, “I would hope that you wouldn’t include other family members beyond my core family” in his disparaging characterization of the family’s donations.

Core family, or immediate family, would include parents, spouse, siblings, and children.

Beyond any possible clerical error there are additional concerns. The DeVos’ family has a lengthy past of strong financial support for a wide array of anti-LGBT organizations.

Her father, Edgar Prince, helped found the conservative Christian Family Research Council. The FRC has been listed as an anti-LGBT hate group since 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave over $670,000 to the FRC between 2003 and 2006.

Additionally the Family Research Council has ties to far-right and neo-nazi groups including the white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens, according to the SLPC. In 2001 FRC President Tony Perkins gave a speech to the group, described by the SPLC as “a white supremacist group that advocates against miscegenation and whose website once described black people as a ‘retrograde species of humanity.’”

In an op-ed for The Advocate, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers wrote of Betsy DeVos:

Foundations run by her parents and her husband’s parents have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Focus on the Family, a group that’s promoted damaging gay “conversion therapy” and called homosexuality “preventable and treatable.” A foundation run by her husband’s brother and sister-in-law donated $500,000 to the antigay National Organization for Marriage, and a foundation run by DeVos and her husband has donated more than $100,000 to the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. DeVos’s late father, Edgar Prince, helped found the Family Research Council; her mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, sits on the boards of the FRC and the Acton Institute, which sponsored a conference held by an antigay hate group.

Her brother-in-law also has made donations to anti-gay organizations. The Washington Blade reported “In 2012, the revelation that the Douglas and Maria DeVos Foundation, financially supported by Betsy Devos’s brother-in-law and Amway president Doug DeVos, donated $500,000 to the National Organization for Marriage in 2009 prompted calls in the LGBT community for a boycott.”

DeVos cites “grizzly bears” as rationale for possibly allowing guns on school grounds.

Between December 14 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and January 20, 2016 according to Everytown for Gun Safety there have been 210 shootings on US school campuses.

Senator Chris Murphy

This is the background for a question from Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy to DeVos, “Do you think guns have any place in and around schools?”

Senator Murphy is an ardent supporter of stringent gun controls and has vowed “to continue this fight until I have no energy left in my body.”

DeVos answered, “That’s best left to the states and locales to decide.” DeVos continued, “If the underlying question is-”

Murphy interrupts, “You can’t say definitely that guns shouldn’t be in schools?”

DeVos answers, “Well I will refer back to Senator Enzi,” who related a story about how a school in Wyoming is ringed by a fence to keep grizzly bears out. “The school he was talking about in Wapiti, Wyoming. I would think that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

In addition to being factually incorrect — the school in Wapiti like all schools in Wyoming has a ban on guns on campus — guns are a poor way to ward off bears, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They even produce a fact sheet weighing guns vs. bear spray.

Devos’ response left Senator Murphy “dumbfounded.”

Forbes Magazine wrote that DeVos’ grizzly bear argument was “silly, at best, a Hail Mary answer from an unprepared student trying for some extra credit points.”

DeVos declined to rule out cutting funding for public schools

Senator Patty Murray questions Betsy DeVos about the role of Department of Education. Devos declines to rule out the possibility of cutting funding to public schools.

Funding for public schools in America come from a variety of sources. In Pennsylvania, property taxes are the primary source of revenue for school districts.

A map of spending per student per year, by school district in America. The map was created by NPR using Education Week, U.S. Census Bureau data.

The Education Law Center’s 2016 National Report Card found “…striking differences in levels of funding for K-12 education across the states, even when adjusted for regional variations in cost.”

Without equity in funding, some education reformers argue, education quality will continue to be closely correlated to funding.

A 2016 University of Berkley study found a 10% increase in per pupil spending had clearly measurable positive effects in any school, but “effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families”

DeVos, a conservative Republican and a believer in free markets, has sung the praises of economist Milton Friedman.

“Milton Friedman’s vision laid the ground work for what has grown to become an education revolution,” DeVos, then Chair of the American Federation for Children, said to the Washington Examiner in 2015.

The Economist, however, slammed DeVos’ and Michigan’s implementation of Friedman’s own school choice scheme, as outlined in his 1955 essay The Role of Government in Education and other writings.

As Friedman also knew, markets work well only if buyers have the data with which to make an informed choice. That leads to the third principle: schools receiving public money should publish facts and figures about their performance. The best gauges are based on pupil improvement and other measures of value-added, rather than raw test scores. Alas, Michigan’s charters are among the country’s least transparent.

Municipal bankruptcy and precipitous declines in enrollment all but crippled the Detroit school system’s ability to provide quality education, according to the New York Times. Some schools lack adequate bathroom facilities as many are broken.

This is just one example in one school district. A 2016 report, State of Our Schools, released by the Center for Green Schools, the 21st Century School Fund and the National Council on School Facilities found that the U.S. is underfunding schools by $46 billion annually. The report’s concern was only on the buildings themselves not the quality of the books, desks, materials, or the staff. The State of Our School reports this $46 billion total represents “an annual shortfall of 32 percent.”

Vouchers present a questionable option for quality education

In countries where school choice and vouchers have been implemented in a widespread way, Sweden and Chile, have produced results that are hardly encouraging. In Sweden, following the 2013 bankruptcy of one the largest private education firms left 11,000 without a school to attend many former proponents of school choice were changing their mind.

In Chile, a nearly pure voucher system is in place and has been since the mid-1980s. However, the results have been mixed or negative, according to The Washington Post. The Chilean voucher system has increased the education gap between rich and poor.

The Post noted that in Chile, “The aggregate socioeconomic status of a school more strongly predicts test-score achievement in voucher schools than it does in public schools.” This means in Chile, if you can pay, you can get a good education.

In America, 14 states have school choice. The Washington Post reported, “[a]s in Chile, U.S. school choice programs can end up reinforcing class and race inequalities unless closely monitored. When schools are monitored, school choice has increased racial integration in schools in highly segregated areas.”

DeVos has offered up school choice and vouchers as a solution to failing urban schools, but at the same time worked aggressively against strong accountability.

Conclusion

From her stances on public school funding, equal accountability, school safety, enforcement of federal law, equitable treatment of LGBT citizens, and lack of a clear understanding of basic education terminology President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is far from an ideal choice.