Donald Trump’s education secretary deserves a cautious welcome

FOR those looking for encouraging signs about what a Trump administration might accomplish, the nomination of Betsy DeVos as education secretary deserves a cautious welcome. The welcome is because giving parents choice over where their children are educated is a good thing. The caution because there have been enough failures in school reform to suggest that promising ideas can be discredited if done badly.

Both Republicans and Democrats suffer from blind spots on education reform. On the left there is a tendency to ignore bad public schools, pander to unions and indulge underperforming teachers. On the right the assumption is often that private is always better and that, once a voucher scheme has been set up, the work of school reform is done. The evidence suggests that what happens in the classroom is at least as important as the structure of the school system. This means recruiting and training teachers who give rigorous lessons and have high expectations of their pupils (see article).

Mrs DeVos has put money and effort behind vouchers, which parents can spend at private schools, and charter schools—public schools operating autonomously. In Michigan, her home state, the results have been poor. In a state where test scores have declined over the past decade, 80% of charters are below the state average in reading and maths. This is partly because Michigan ignored lessons from elsewhere.

The first of these is to exercise oversight. Milwaukee, the city in Wisconsin where school-choice was pioneered, began by allowing virtually anyone to open a school. This invited chancers, including a convicted rapist and a man who used taxpayers’ money to buy himself a pair of Mercedes-Benz cars. As a result, Milwaukee is now more careful about who can start a school. So is Massachusetts, which has some of the best charters in the country. Michigan, in contrast, has favoured quantity over quality: the state is home to three of the ten school districts with the highest share of charter students in America.

A second principle is that oversight remains necessary even when vouchers and charters are up and running. Although the absence of bureaucracy is one of the biggest advantages of such schools, light-touch regulation is not the same as no regulation. As Milton Friedman, patron saint of the school-choice movement, put it, schools must meet “certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit”. In New Orleans, which has a successful charter-school scheme, the school district is ruthless about weeding out poorly performing schools. Worryingly, Mrs DeVos led a campaign against preventing underperforming charters in Michigan from expanding.

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.

Put your hands up for Detroit

America’s education system is decentralised: federal money makes up just under 9% of funding for secondary schools. But Mrs DeVos can still make a big difference. Federal dollars change behaviour at the margins: witness the impact of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top programme, which gives extra money to successful states. If states take the encouragement offered by the Trump administration to expand school choice, they should thank Mrs DeVos—then study how her home state could have done better.