Michael Knowles is joined by Betsy DeVos who is an American politician, philanthropist, and former government official who served as the 11th United States secretary of education from 2017 to 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Music Music Music Music It seems like every single contentious issue in the country, | |
| just about, all keeps coming back to one issue, and that would be education. | |
| At the center of the education issue for the past 35 years, there has been one person. | |
| That would be the former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, author of a brand new book, Hostages No More, The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child. | |
| Secretary DeVos, thank you for coming on. | |
| Thanks for having me, Michael. | |
| Good to be here. | |
| There is this very strange circumstance, which is you've been working on this for decades. | |
| Education has flown a little bit under the radar. | |
| Conservatives talk about it. | |
| Republicans talk about it. | |
| It's never been a top-tier issue. | |
| And now, beginning, I suppose, really last year and accelerating throughout the 2022 year, It seems as though education is at the heart of the election. | |
| You see what happened in Virginia. | |
| Education flipped that race. | |
| You see Florida. | |
| Education's played a huge role down there. | |
| State by state. | |
| Is this the moment? | |
| It is the moment, and the last two years have really laid bare for American families across the country the failings of a 175-year-old system, failings that I've seen for many years, | |
| many others have seen and tried to change policy around, but those failings have been laid bare, be it in extended shutdowns, be it mandates and mask mandates, and You know, in, out, whatever, blended learning, distance learning. | |
| And they had a front row seat to all of this. | |
| And in many cases, they were very frustrated and very disappointed with what their kids were experiencing or frankly not getting in terms of an education. | |
| So this is really a key moment. | |
| Parents are riled up, and rightfully so, and grandparents and friends and neighbors are. | |
| And so it's an ideal time to push forward with policy that will empower families. | |
| What do you think specifically riled them up? | |
| You gave a few examples there. | |
| I've wondered if transgenderism in the schools, the idea that boys now are going to go into a girl's locker room. | |
| I'm not a parent of a daughter, and my son is not in school yet. | |
| That would be a red line for me. | |
| I could not accept that situation. | |
| Is it that? | |
| Is it the critical race theory in the schools? | |
| Or was it just this bizarre experience of COVID where the schools get shut down, the teachers' unions keep the kids out for two years, and the parents say, enough? | |
| I think it's all of the above. | |
| And in many cases, for families, it's a number of those problems all coming into confluence with one another. | |
| For others, it's one of them. | |
| But in any case, there are any number of issues that have become apparent to families in ways that they had never really paid attention to before or realized before. | |
| Many families had their kids in schools that they thought were good places for their kids to learn, and then they had this front row seat to what was happening. | |
| And that was really revelatory for them. | |
| So they've gotten involved. | |
| They've been told in too many cases that they should go back, shut up, sit down, don't bother us. | |
| We know what's best. | |
| And then we saw the prospect of the FBI being called out to turn parents away from expressing their concerns or asking their questions at school board meetings. | |
| That's right. | |
| You have, under the Biden administration, the FBI, the DOJ come out. | |
| They both say that parents, parents just going in and showing up to their kids' schools and saying, hey, cut the nonsense, pose a terrorist threat. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, it is jaw-dropping to think that is how we're deploying the highest law enforcement agency in our country to call terrorists. | |
| Parents, domestic terrorists, and send the FBI into schools. | |
| That, I think, has also been a huge point of contention and has awakened other parents even more to where the emphasis is in this whole equation. | |
| It hasn't been, and it is not on doing what's right for kids. | |
| It's been about adults and adult issues and their vested futures. | |
| And there is the just exposure of the teacher unions. | |
| I suspect you've known for a very long time, I've known for a very long time, that the teacher unions are positively villainous. | |
| They have destroyed so much of American education. | |
| But for your average voter, who's not totally plugged into politics all the time, probably that wasn't abundantly clear until COVID-19. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Because the school unions, and I think, talk about them broadly as school unions because they represent a whole lot more than teachers, and I would say teachers are sort of a second thought in that whole equation with the teachers union. | |
| But yes, they kept schools closed down way longer than necessary. | |
| Children around the world were going back to school in the spring of 2020. | |
| We encouraged folks to be making plans to get kids back in school in person in the fall of 2020. | |
| And we were accused of playing politics with COVID. Well, it was not politics with COVID. It was out of concern for what this is doing to kids. | |
| Kids suffered. | |
| And we won't know the full extent of how it has harmed, how all of those closures, all of the back and forth, in and out, how that has harmed kids in the long run, and especially the kids, the most vulnerable ones, who could least afford to be out of school. | |
| This is such a scary point, which is we won't know the effect of what is being done to kids in schools for quite some time. | |
| And it gets back to this issue that everyone seems to be focusing on right this moment in the schools, which is the gender ideology. | |
| The idea that in some schools now... | |
| A child, an 11-year-old, a 12-year-old, could be put on puberty blockers without parental notification, could have their biochemistry fundamentally altered because of, in my view, an absurd notion of human nature and sexuality without a parent having any say in this. | |
| This is a life-altering, irreversible sort of How do the schools get away with that? | |
| Well, I don't think they will, ultimately, because, again, people have awakened to what is happening. | |
| And exposing that and getting it out into the light, it will ultimately have to change behavior on the part of those schools and buildings, but it will ultimately help embolden Folks who've been reticent before to support this notion that parents should ultimately be in charge of where and how their kids learn. | |
| And so I think it's an important moment because I think that we will never go back to this pre-COVID situation where we just sort of assumed things were doing, our kids were doing well and We assumed that what they were being taught was what they needed to know. | |
| We've known for a long time before COVID that the system most kids are in has not done well and has not helped kids achieve to the levels they need to. | |
| Our international competitiveness is just... | |
| We're not even in the top 10 in any subject area as compared to international peers. | |
| And we keep spending more and more money, but getting worse and worse results And again, it's the kids who can least afford it that are the ones being harmed the most. | |
| I imagine that you are going to be a highly sought-after person looking ahead to 2024. | |
| This is a major issue that's going on. | |
| All of the conservatives worth their salt are focusing on this issue of education. | |
| So if you had some 2024 candidate coming, groveling to Secretary DeVos for advice, what should I do? | |
| How should I focus my campaign? | |
| What would be the first things you would tell them to focus on? | |
| I would tell them focus on universal education freedom for every family in America and fundamentally changing the system we've lived with for 175 years. | |
| It's not working for the vast majority of kids, and for those for whom it is working, it wouldn't force any change, but it would give the freedom to the families that don't have it today to make a different choice and find a different alternative and place for their kids to learn. | |
| Could a Republican president or even a well-meaning Democrat, if we can find one in office, could they enact a federal nationwide school choice policy? | |
| Well, the policy that they can enact and which we champion during the Trump administration is an education freedom scholarship, a tax credit at the federal level, doesn't form another, it doesn't create another federal program It's simply a mechanism through the Department of Treasury for individuals to redirect a portion of their federal tax bill to scholarship organizations that will help families have that freedom that we're talking about to make choices different | |
| than their assigned schools. | |
| That's a great idea. | |
| I absolutely love that idea. | |
| It's a great idea. | |
| Yes. | |
| Even the conservatives who don't want to grow the government and don't want to have a new program, it's okay. | |
| You're just moving money from a place where it's probably being wasted to a place that is so important. | |
| Because it's not as though education is just some... | |
| The classroom is a crystal ball. | |
| It shows you what your country is going to look like. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And we have not had the kind of creativity or the kind of disruption in the education industry that we've had in every other We're going to be amazed at what the American ingenuity and entrepreneurship will create and cultivate and how that's going to ultimately help kids who today are being ill served by their assigned schools and are frustrated or bored to death with the schools that they're going to | |
| and it will create a whole different environment and therefore much better outcomes and achievement levels which is important for leadership in the future for our country. | |
| Now, I have a selfish time problem, and it's this. | |
| I have a 17-month-old baby, got another baby on the way. | |
| They are going to be five years old before I know it. | |
| Blink of an eye. | |
| Blink of an eye. | |
| And there are not a lot of great school options around Nashville. | |
| I've asked people, I said, where are they? | |
| They say even the good schools have gone pretty woke. | |
| So I think, what am I going to do with my kid in the short term? | |
| Does this mean... | |
| I homeschool my kid and I lose out on my tax credit. | |
| How do I do it? | |
| Well, if Tennessee adopts a statewide education savings account program, you could access that and take some or all of that money to form a little consortium of homeschoolers with other families. | |
| And pay a really great teacher to come and teach your kids. | |
| And having education freedom for kids is important. | |
| It's also important for teachers, because really great teachers, they will be the highly valued part of that equation, and they'll be able to find their own niche and their own place to teach in ways that will really work for them. | |
| And it's really an exciting prospect for teachers as well. | |
| This sounds like when Western civilization made sense, when our civilization was growing and thriving, this is how education was done. | |
| It wasn't big, institutionalized, one-size-fits-all public schools. | |
| Alexander the Great, going all the way back, Alexander the Great didn't go to a public school, did he? | |
| He was tutored by Aristotle. | |
| And people traditionally who had privilege and had means had these small little tutoring consortia. | |
| Why can't we give that to everybody? | |
| We can. | |
| And we can do that through the mechanism of education freedom in the form of education savings accounts. | |
| So each family could take the dollars that are already designated for that child for their education. | |
| And today we spend on average $15,000 per child per year. | |
| Some places it's a lot more, in some places it's less. | |
| But if you metaphorically attach that to that child's backpack and let their family decide how and where that child is going to learn, We're going to have the creation of these homeschool, one-room school, micro-school environments, and it will be an exciting, | |
| growing time for kids for whom that approach will work, and it will be also a time for entrepreneurial folks to Take some of the things they've tested and there's been a lot of interesting educational experiments that have been going on in this country and I try to highlight many of them that I visited in my book but there's been a lot that's happened but there hasn't been the ability to scale that or offer it more broadly because there aren't enough families empowered | |
| to make those decisions. | |
| So in a very short time, maybe before your son is five, you could have that opportunity as well to choose not only a homeschool, but perhaps a multitude of other possibilities that would work for him. | |
| This sounds marvelous. | |
| I'm in. | |
| I want to sign up wherever I possibly can. | |
| I suspect most Americans will be in on this. | |
| I think this is why the parents movement has been so effective, is that it appeals not just to Republicans, not just to Democrats, not just to white people, not just to black people, not just to Northerners. | |
| It has a very, very wide appeal. | |
| However, there are entrenched interests. | |
| Yes. | |
| The school unions, as you, I think, aptly call them, they're not going to like that. | |
| The government bureaucrats are not going to like that very much. | |
| And the leftist activists who have infiltrated these schools, and openly, I'm not spatting some conspiracy theory, they've written and talked about this at length, used the schools to advance their ideology. | |
| They're not going to like that either. | |
| So, how do you overcome those political hurdles to school choice? | |
| Well, you elect people to office from the federal level to the most local level who support this notion of education freedom and hold them accountable to actually advancing those policies when in office and defeat the ones that are opposed to it. | |
| That's happening in states across the country now. | |
| It can happen more broadly because I think the parents are going to demand it. | |
| Well, this is something I've always loved about your approach to politics in particular. | |
| There are many people on the right who, unfortunately, they have a little too much faith in the free markets or in the culture. | |
| They just sort of think, look, we don't need to focus on direct political action. | |
| We'll just hope it all kind of works out in the end. | |
| That isn't really how it works. | |
| The left fills every political and government post from the lowest level all the way up to the top, and they exert real political pressure. | |
| You have worked within and on the Republican Party for many, many years. | |
| I... I'm reminded of that line from Ernest Hemingway. | |
| He's describing bankruptcy. | |
| He says, you go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. | |
| Well, that's true of edifying things, too. | |
| The movements grow gradually, and then suddenly. | |
| Maybe we're at that moment right now. | |
| So how do you, for the regular old, maybe Republican listening, maybe conservative activist listening, what do they do practically? | |
| Practically speaking, we have elections coming up in a few months, and there are candidates running for office from the federal level to your most local level. | |
| Check out your candidates' positions. | |
| Support candidates that are going to vote for, advocate for, and then vote for education freedom policies. | |
| And specifically, ask them, what do you mean if you support education freedom? | |
| What does that mean to you? | |
| And get them on record as being willing to cast votes for policies that are going to make that dramatic change and hold them accountable. | |
| Are there states that have been doing this better than other states? | |
| There are. | |
| Florida is probably the most advanced in that regard. | |
| For more than 20 years, they have continued to build on policies that then-Governor Jeb Bush put into place. | |
| I seem to recall you had a hand in some of those policies down in Florida. | |
| Yes, we've been working in Florida for a long time. | |
| But there's been legislators and governors who've continued to build on those original successes And they're still committed to more freedom and broader freedom for Florida students. | |
| And I expect they'll attain that in the next session or the next year. | |
| That's happening there. | |
| Arizona has been very good. | |
| Indiana has been great. | |
| Wisconsin and Ohio have continued to expand on programs. | |
| Tennessee has come along. | |
| The Supreme Court in Tennessee most recently gave approval. | |
| Constitutional Passed constitutional muster on the education savings account program here. | |
| I think Tennessee has an opportunity to double down on that and make it a statewide education savings account program so that families across Tennessee can access it. | |
| So it's happening. | |
| It's happening many states, 26 states that have some form of education freedom, but not nearly enough to really address the demand and the need that has become apparent. | |
| Something that strikes me, just hearing you describe all of this, is... | |
| It's something people probably don't know about you who haven't spent time with you. | |
| You have a great deal of humility about what you've accomplished in politics, and you don't go bragging about it, you don't make a big show about it, but you have been consistently chipping away at this issue for a long time, as you describe going back 20 years in Florida and elsewhere around the country. | |
| And people probably... | |
| Don't know that. | |
| In fact, if people have a public perception of you and they haven't paid close attention, the perception probably will be that you are the devil incarnate because they tuned into CNN during the Trump administration. | |
| That's absolutely right. | |
| And I would encourage them, if they'd like to get a different perspective and understand how this issue has developed over the last number of years, and to see hope for where we are in time right now and what we can accomplish in a short period of time because of the momentum. | |
| I encourage them to read the book that I just finished, and I'm really excited about getting out there, Hostages No More. | |
| It is a provocative title, but it is a reference to Horace Mann, the founder of our education system, 175 years ago said that educators are entitled to look upon parents As having given hostages to our cause. | |
| And so the title, Hostages No More, suggests we have got to free our children and families from being hostage to that cause. | |
| The multiple causes today that we've seen contrary to families' values, to their wishes for their children, to their aspirations for their children, And free them to really, really pursue their futures in meaningful ways. | |
| I have not yet read the book. | |
| In my defense, it's not out yet. | |
| I just received my copy, so I very much look forward to reading it. | |
| And I didn't catch the reference from the title. | |
| But it's a very important one, because a lot of people, I think, believe that our problems in education, they go back 20 years, 30 years, 50 years. | |
| No, they go back... | |
| Basically, to the very beginning of the public education movement in America, they go back to people like Horace Mann and others. | |
| Yes, indeed. | |
| When our modern education system was implemented, it was specifically to educate and form children to become Factory workers and industrial age just to go do the same kind of job day after day, time after time. | |
| And again, our society has fundamentally changed, and yet we're still practicing the same approach to how kids learn. | |
| We look at the situation now and we say, these kids, they're just being churned out as automatons. | |
| And we describe that as though that's a bug of the system. | |
| In fact... | |
| It was the design. | |
| It was the design. | |
| It was the feature. | |
| And so maybe that means we need a different system. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Secretary DeVos, thank you very much for the book. | |
| First of all, Hostages No More. | |
| Go get it today. | |
| The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child, available wherever fine books are sold. | |
| So be sure, go out and get it. | |
| Arm yourself. | |
| It's important for your kids. | |
| It's important for your community. | |
| It's important for your country. | |
| And Secretary DeVos, thank you so much. | |
| We'll see you next time you're in town. | |
| Sounds great. |