The Pros And Cons Of Betsy Devos

With a new President comes a new cabinet full of new faces and new ideas. Although some individuals bring advantageous ideas to the table, that is not the case for all cabinet members. Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary, has imposed several new educational principles in her time in office which have upset the community. Although she claims her ideas are going to be beneficial to society, the changes are making a negative impact on the schooling system. Betsy DeVos was President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, and until this past election, she has had no experience with education or making educational changes. DeVos has made dramatic changes regarding school choice and vouchers, sexual assault cases, and the educational budget.

One of the main ideas that Betsy DeVos advocates for is school choice and vouchers. DeVos believes that parents should have complete control over where their children attend school, and because of that, she supports the idea of school choice and vouchers. In the current public schooling system, it costs nearly $11,000 to teach a child each year. Vouchers allow parents to take that money in the form of a scholarship and use it to send their child to a private or religious school. DeVos promotes the use of vouchers as a way for low-income students to attend a school that may have otherwise been outside of his or her reach (Weller). Although the vouchers can be helpful to select students, the vouchers take away money from the public schooling systems. Trump and DeVos plan to spend upwards of $20 billion to increase the voucher system (Lauter). Parents often use the voucher option when they feel that the current school is not providing a quality education. In the case of a voucher, the previous school district of the child loses nearly $11,000 per year. When multiple parents decide to take these actions, the school district loses a substantial amount of government funding, and the lack of funding hurts the school and

Charter schools receive their funding from the government but are privately run. Charter schools are essentially public schools which have the freedom to decide what they want to teach and how they want to teach it. A common misconception is that charter schools are religion-based schools, but that is not the case. Like public schools, charter schools are required to accept all students who want to attend (Sanchez). The main difference between the two types of schools is the education. Charter schools have the opportunity to focus on what fields they want to focus on. Some schools wish to focus on engineering, while others turn to arts as the main priority (Weller). The issue with charter schools lies in the ability to not disclose all information to the public. Several charter schools around the country are performing poorly, yet they still receive funding from the government. In a study from 2011 to 2013, thirty-three charter schools were surveyed, and two-thirds of the schools were found to be mismanaged. The mismanaging of schools poses a threat to the taxpayers whose money is being used to fund these less-than-exceptional schools. Moreover, the charter schools, like students using vouchers, are taking away from the public schools. Joe Roy, the Superintendent of the Year for Pennsylvania said that schools in 2016 had “budgeted $26 million (about 10 percent of its annual