Don't bet against our schools

Last Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Betsy DeVos to serve as his Secretary of Education. A politically conservative billionaire philanthropist, DeVos has centered her career around increasing the availability of school vouchers. Although “vouchers” sound benign, they—and DeVos’ efforts to propagate them—have drawn ire from critics who hold that they fundamentally weaken the U.S. public school system.

Vouchers allow parents to opt out of sending their children to public schools and be rewarded with a tax credit that helps them pay for private school tuition. Voucher programs are currently in place in 13 states, along with the District of Columbia; although some programs awards money in a slightly different way, they generally operate similarly. Their goal is to allow parents to choose the “right” school for their child. In attempting to achieve that goal, however, they essentially provide government support for the erosion of public school funding.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just over 50 million students attend public elementary and secondary schools. With an expanded role for school vouchers, less funds will be directed towards those schools. That will have harmful effects not only for their basic infrastructure, but for teachers’ salaries, the funding of various extracurricular activities and the ability for instructors to earn Advanced Placement accreditation. In short, less money will mean a lower quality education for students. Moreover, as students and dollars are funneled out of public schools, teachers’ unions will lose their leverage, and skilled instructors, with no guarantee of job security or a good salary, will be prodded into seeking work elsewhere. The end result of reduced funding would be a lower number of public schools nationwide and a greater proportion of those schools lacking both faculty and resources. Without access to adequate public education, many students would face a strong deterrent in the way of access to what some see as a crucial step towards achieving success: college.

That should matter to everybody, but especially to those at Duke. Around 60 percent of our undergraduate student body hails from U.S. public schools. Well-funded schools allowed us to learn from talented to teachers; to take AP and IB classes; to participate in debate club and robotics club; to find teachers willing to sponsor all sorts of new clubs; to not only provide us with a basic education, but to help us to grow into well-rounded people able to contend for spots at elite universities like Duke. That is not an opportunity many students could have found elsewhere. Around half of all students at Duke receive financial aid from the University; the average aid package is over $40,000. Private school would not an option for most of them, voucher assistance or no voucher assistance. And even if it were, they still ought to have access to a free and strong education.

Education should be held as a public good—all of us deserve equal access to it. For better or worse, it does not fit a model of privatization and economic efficiency: children are not consumers and their classrooms are not bargaining chips. Privatization has an established place in market economies, but that place is not in education. The school system cannot and should not be treated as a free market sandbox. There is too much at stake.

Those who face great adversity in life are often told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Freely available public education is often the only bootstrap available to them. If we cut it away, we sinfully err.

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