May 24, 2017 3 min read

The Trump administration budget proposal released Tuesday generated plenty of raised eyebrows because of the deep cuts it envisions to programs that aid the poor and disabled, along with a projected 3 percent annual growth rate that most serious economists believe is highly unlikely.

Another proposal buried within the budget should also be a source of skepticism – a vow to slice a little more than $10 billion from federal education initiatives, and take $1.4 billion of that and inject it into school-choice plans.

Promoting school choice has long been a pet issue of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education. At her confirmation hearing, she proclaimed parents “no longer believe that a one-size-fits-all model of learning meets the needs of every child, and they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home, religious or any combination thereof.”

More recently, DeVos told the American Federation for Children, an organization that advocates for school choice, “the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation’s history” was nigh. In a speech to the group Monday in Indianapolis, DeVos said, “We stand on the verge of the most significant opportunity we have ever had to drag American education out of the Stone Age and into the future.”

However, before we leap into the future that DeVos envisions, we might want to stop for a minute and look to her home state of Michigan and its experiences there with charter schools. While charter schools can be operated successfully and offer, yes, an alternative for students and their families, many of the charter schools run in Michigan since the 1990s have done so with little oversight and have not yielded results better than public schools.

Charters have proliferated in Detroit, which, along with its other much-publicized woes, has had a cash-starved public school system populated with students struggling academically.

The New York Times took an in-depth look at the proliferation of charter schools in the Motor City and pronounced it “a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.”

Charters have attempted to lure students with inducements like raffle tickets, cash and laptops, so they can get hold of the tax dollars that would accompany each student. There has been competition, to be sure, but it has not brought marked improvements to academic performance among Michigan’s students. To cite one example, charter school students scored worse than their peers in public schools on a math test given to eigth-graders and reading test given to fourth-graders.

There have also been instances where money going to charters has been spent in dubious ways.

For instance, one administrator was given a taxpayer-funded severance package of over $500,000.

Efforts to increase oversight and accountability of Detroit’s charter schools have foundered, with DeVos and her family leading the opposition.

If DeVos and the administration she serves want to expand school choice, they should insist on accountability being part of the equation.

If not, taxpayer money would be better spent bolstering the public school system, which – teachers and administrators can attest – has never been a precinct where no strings are attached.