Why Can't Parents Pick Their Kids' School? | Betsy DeVos

- [Announc­er] We believe and have always believed in this coun­try, that man was cre­at­ed in the image of God. That he was giv­en tal­ents and respon­si­bil­i­ty and was instruct­ed to use them to make this world a bet­ter place in which to live. And you see, this is the real­ly great thing of America.

- It’s time to dis­cov­er what binds us togeth­er and find­ing it has the pow­er to trans­form our world. That’s what I believe. How about you? Well, hel­lo every­one. I’m Doug DeVos and wel­come to anoth­er episode of Believe! And this is a spe­cial one because I have my sis­ter-in-law, Bet­sy DeVos, who’s join­ing us here today. Bet­sy, thank you so much for com­ing on the show.

- It’s a thrill to be here, Doug. Real­ly glad to be here.

- Yeah, well, we’re talk­ing about some­thing that’s vital­ly impor­tant and as many of you know, Bet­sy served as a US Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion recent­ly, and we could­n’t be more proud of you in what you did, what you accom­plished and the chal­lenges that you faced in that process, but it was a some­what unex­pect­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty that came your way.

- It cer­tain­ly was. It was not any­thing I’d ever got­ten up in the morn­ing and thought about pri­or to that day in 2016. But it did go back to more than 35 years of real­ly work­ing on behalf of kids, around poli­cies that were going to give fam­i­lies the oppor­tu­ni­ty to find the right fit, the right edu­ca­tion­al set­ting for their kids. And it went back to when Rick, our old­est son was going into kinder­garten. And we had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to choose the school that he was gonna go to. We could do that as you and Maria could, because we could afford to make those deci­sions. And the more I got into it, the more I real­ized there were so many fam­i­lies that want­ed to make those kinds of choic­es and deci­sions for their kids, but could­n’t because the sys­tem and the poli­cies real­ly have pre­clud­ed it.

- Right, right. And that real­ly kin­da gets to one of the cen­tral ques­tions that we talk about is why can’t par­ents pick their own schools? Why can’t choice be there? We think about it as Amer­i­cans being freed, to choose their own des­tiny, the idea of the Amer­i­can dream, but yet this seems to be an area that’s incred­i­bly restrict­ed. And there’s a lot of his­to­ry to this of how it came about. Help us under­stand how we got to this point and get our­selves framed and where things real­ly stand.

- So we’ve been oper­at­ing under essen­tial­ly the same mod­el for about 175 years. And it was a mod­el that was start­ed in an age where we had in a grow­ing indus­tri­al econ­o­my where we need­ed peo­ple to go to work, mak­ing assem­bly line pro­duc­tion items. And it was intend­ed to bring dis­parate peo­ple togeth­er under a com­mon set, like a com­mon frame­work, a com­mon set of under­stand­ings and a com­mon knowl­edge frame­work. But it’s today, the least dis­rupt­ed indus­try in our coun­try. And some peo­ple bris­tle at the thought of edu­ca­tion being an indus­try, but it tru­ly is an indus­try in every sense of the word. And it’s, I would argue, the most impor­tant indus­try that our coun­try has because it’s prepar­ing our future. And it’s not doing the job for mil­lions and mil­lions of kids today who are real­ly stuck in a frame­work that is anti­quat­ed, that is a one-size-fits-all sys­tem and approach. And we’ve been find­ing out just how anti­quat­ed it is in the last two years.

- Sure, sure. Well, why don’t you talk about that a lit­tle bit? Well, there’s a cou­ple oth­er ques­tions I want­ed to go back. You had so much right there that you just start­ed. And we can, luck­i­ly on these for­mats, we have the time to dive a lit­tle bit deep­er. But start with where you’re just fin­ished, help us under­stand what hap­pened in the past two years with COVID. How did this top­ic become so much more vis­i­ble? What were par­ents seeing?

- So I think for many fam­i­lies in the coun­try, the lock­downs and all of the man­dates around the COVID pan­dem­ic real­ly opened their eyes to a sys­tem that has been exist­ing more to serve adults and adult issues and adult needs than it has been focused on stu­dents. And we saw this with the inter­minable lock­downs and the clos­ing out of schools in par­tic­u­lar­ly large urban areas. And frankly, in many states, statewide clo­sures across the coun­try. And then see­ing how poor­ly the sys­tem respond­ed to that chal­lenge in many cas­es. Where a kid might only have one hour of a dis­tance learn­ing, a Zoom kind of class a week or a hand­ful of hours. And so the learn­ing loss is just incred­i­ble in this last two years. And then see­ing also many par­ents for the first time up close, what their kids are or aren’t learn­ing. And being real­ly dis­mayed by what they’re not learn­ing. And in oth­er cas­es, being very dis­mayed by what they are being taught. And so you have a whole con­flu­ence of issues and expe­ri­ences that have come to a head after these last two years that have awak­en par­ents in a way that they had­n’t been before. And it’s real­ly excit­ing to see the momen­tum around par­ents tak­ing back the abil­i­ty to con­trol their kid’s edu­ca­tion in a way that they had not been attuned to before COVID.

- Sure, sure. So a lot of vis­i­bil­i­ty. You think when you send your kids to school, they’re in an envi­ron­ment that we may remem­ber from our gen­er­a­tion or that you think may be there, and then when you have a glimpse into it, you find out is com­plete­ly, com­plete­ly different.

- Well, and if any­body was look­ing even before the pan­dem­ic, we would real­ize that for exam­ple, the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion was stood up in 1979. It was a pay­off to the teacher’s union that Jim­my Carter gave after get­ting their endorse­ment for pres­i­dent in 1976. And so he fol­lowed through on his promise, estab­lished the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion with the expressed pur­pose of clos­ing the achieve­ment gap between those at the high­est end of the per­for­mance scale and those at the bot­tom end. In that time since then in over 40 years, we have spent well over a tril­lion dol­lars at the fed­er­al lev­el alone to close that achieve­ment gap. Not only has it not closed or nar­rowed one lit­tle bit, in many cas­es and in many mea­sures, it’s actu­al­ly widened. And so the ques­tion has to be, why would we con­tin­ue doing more of the same thing and spend­ing more and more mon­ey, putting it after the same sys­tem, the same frame­work and expect dif­fer­ent results? My argu­ment is we have to total­ly change the sys­tem and real­ly empow­er fam­i­lies to make the choic­es and make the deci­sions about where their kids go to learn.

- Right, right. And again, lot to go in, so I’m gonna go back a lit­tle bit. First of all, start with before your role as sec­re­tary. 35 years, you’ve been pas­sion­ate about this. You talked about your fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tion, what you were deal­ing with, but you did a lot of work in oth­er orga­ni­za­tions on this issue before your role as sec­re­tary. Help our audi­ence under­stand that a lit­tle bit so we can get to real­ly good con­text of what you have ex expe­ri­enced and seen in all of that time.

- Sure, so one of the schools that I dis­cov­ered when look­ing for a school for Rick and when start­ing kinder­garten was a very small urban Chris­t­ian school in Grand Rapids called The Pot­ter’s House. I got involved as a vol­un­teer as a result there. And again, quick­ly real­ized that for every fam­i­ly that had their chil­dren there, there were prob­a­bly 10 or 20 oth­er fam­i­lies from the neigh­bor­hood who would’ve loved that kind of set­ting, that kind of envi­ron­ment or expe­ri­ence for their kids. So vol­un­teer­ing, we start­ed sup­port­ing those oppor­tu­ni­ties through schol­ar­ships. Then Dick and I start­ed a statewide schol­ar­ship orga­ni­za­tion with the goal of expos­ing more pol­i­cy­mak­ers to this notion that fam­i­lies want to have more choic­es. And it became increas­ing­ly clear that sim­ply mak­ing the case either log­i­cal­ly or emo­tion­al­ly was not going to change pol­i­cy. Ulti­mate­ly, we had to get involved. I had to get involved and got involved polit­i­cal­ly in actu­al­ly chang­ing pol­i­cy. Because the sys­tem has been rein­forced year after year after year by those who ben­e­fit from the adult part of the sys­tem. They are very for­mi­da­ble. And it’s head­ed right at the top by the teach­ers unions. And then it’s all their allied orga­ni­za­tions that real­ly pro­tect the sys­tem as we know it today. It requires pol­i­tics to change that sys­tem. And so, I start­ed work­ing in state orga­ni­za­tions that did that work to take on the polit­i­cal pieces of it, and then expand­ed to nation­al orga­ni­za­tions. And as you know, by the time I went to Wash­ing­ton, was real­ly work­ing in a vari­ety of states with one of the orga­ni­za­tions that I chaired in mak­ing a dif­fer­ence on a state by state basis around the poli­cies, but head­ed by, at the tip of the spear, being the pol­i­tics and the real­ly nec­es­sary head to head to real­ly fight the sta­tus quo that has resist­ed change at every step of the way.

- Right. Let’s go back and con­nect a cou­ple dots. So we’re talk­ing about resis­tance to change. And you talked ear­li­er about edu­ca­tion being an indus­try and how peo­ple may bris­tle to that. But you also threw out a num­ber just with fed­er­al spend­ing since 1979 of a tril­lion dol­lars. And I’m always mind­ful that of the old exam­ple that dad used to give of, what’s a bil­lion? If you put a dol­lar down every sec­ond, it takes you 32 years to get to a bil­lion. And so to get to a tril­lion would take you 32,000 years. So just the mag­ni­tude of that num­ber, it’s easy to throw around, but the mag­ni­tude of that, it’s an indus­try, isn’t it?

- It’s a huge indus­try. And we’ve seen it real­ly exist to serve itself par­tic­u­lar­ly these last two years. And what has been done to kids, par­tic­u­lar­ly the most vul­ner­a­ble kids across our coun­try in this last two years is just uncon­scionable. We won’t know for years yet, be able to mea­sure even close to accu­rate­ly what the long-term effects have been of these two years of lock­downs, of two years of loss learn­ing and what this has done to kids. We saw after just a few weeks of clo­sure in the spring of 2020, how awful this was gonna be for kids, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the most vul­ner­a­ble of cir­cum­stances. Low income fam­i­lies who did­n’t have oth­er options that some of the more well to do fam­i­lies did to be able to pull their kids out of a school that was­n’t respond­ing, or to hire teach­ers, to tutor their kids or what­ev­er. What­ev­er solu­tion some fam­i­lies found, there were way more fam­i­lies that weren’t able to find those solu­tions and their kids have suf­fered as a result. Then you add to that what they have seen being taught to their kids or lack of teach­ing the fun­da­men­tals. Because you look at the results, what our kids have been learn­ing and we are way behind our inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts. We’re not even in the top 20 as com­pared to our inter­na­tion­al peers on how our kids do achieve their achieve­ment edu­ca­tion­al­ly. And so even before we went into the pan­dem­ic, we were in a world of hurt. The kids that are com­ing up to lead our nation in the future. And this has only been mag­ni­fied in the last two years.

- Amaz­ing. You’re in busi­ness, you under­stand that. And so many par­ents are. If you keep doing the same thing and get a bad result, in busi­ness, you go out of business.

- That’s right.

- So this indus­try, how can it con­tin­ue to go when it’s not deliv­er­ing the results? If we’re not even in the top 20 glob­al­ly? If we’re not prepar­ing these future gen­er­a­tions? Help us under­stand how does the indus­try keep going?

- Well, it has insin­u­at­ed itself very deeply into one par­ty, one of our two pri­ma­ry polit­i­cal par­ties. And 99% of their con­tri­bu­tions go to Democ­rats. And so it’s politi­cians who ulti­mate­ly per­pet­u­ate the sys­tem. We keep elect­ing peo­ple who look to the teach­ers unions and all of their allies for the fund­ing to get reelect­ed. And it’s a vicious cycle. But it is an egre­gious exam­ple of a quid pro quo. So one par­ty does the bid­ding of this inter­est group, this huge inter inter­est group, this huge sta­tus quo. And it’s total­ly at the expense of our kids and frankly, our nation’s future.

- Sure, sure. A cou­ple things to elab­o­rate on. And one, and I’d love your per­spec­tive on this. When we’ve con­nect­ed with schools from time to time, when Marie and I are here in Grand Rapids , you find some amaz­ing peo­ple who are try­ing to do their best. And teach­ers admin­is­trate whose hearts are in the right place. But it’s hard to buck against the sys­tem. And you came in and the Wall Street Jour­nal rec­og­nized you as putting chil­dren and par­ents at the cen­ter of your agen­da. And there’s a lot of peo­ple in the space, in this indus­try, if you will, who do. But there’s got­ta be a bar­ri­er there. Help us under­stand the bar­ri­er. Is it just the unions? Is it in that struc­ture that’s just too pow­er­ful for peo­ple to over­come or reform­ers to overcome?

- Well, it’s sys­temic thing. So there are many, many great teach­ers that are part of a sys­tem over which they have lit­tle to no influ­ence them­selves per­son­al­ly. And inter­est­ing­ly, I had a cou­ple of round­table dis­cus­sions while sec­re­tary, I want­ed to know, there were count­less teach­ers who had been teach­ers of the year in their state or their dis­trict that had done their vic­to­ry lab for the year, and then gone back to their schools and with­in a few months, or a year or two of going back, quit teach­ing. And I want­ed to under­stand why. I mean, clear­ly, these were good teach­ers. They’d been rec­og­nized and fet­ed as such. And so I sat down and just lis­tened to them talk. And what I heard on bal­ance was this. We had our moment and we went back with the hopes that we were going to have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help our fel­low teach­ers, maybe less expe­ri­enced ones, younger ones, new­er ones to become bet­ter at what they do. But instead, we were told to get back in our box. You’ve had your moment. And now you go back and just do your thing accord­ing to our sys­tem and accord­ing to our plan and sched­ule. And more than one of them said, ​“I got tired of it. Why would I keep doing this with­out hav­ing any oppor­tu­ni­ty to advance myself?” And so it real­ly has been a sys­tem that is not set up for real­ly great out­stand­ing edu­ca­tors to have a career path oppor­tu­ni­ty. Most of them who are real­ly good get brought into admin­is­tra­tion. Which might not be their strong suit. And then they’re not in the class­room, which is their strong suit. And so it is a sys­tem that real­ly is almost self-defeat­ing and it has real­ly dis­cour­aged so many good peo­ple away from it. Nev­er enter­ing it in the first place or many who’ve been in who’ve just got­ten so dis­cour­aged and so frus­trat­ed. And so I real­ly give cred­it and great trib­ute to those who have hung in there and stuck with it, but it’s time for them to be freed in a new way also. And that’s why I believe that a sys­tem that is tru­ly ori­ent­ed around edu­ca­tion free­dom, where the funds for every stu­dent fol­low that child to the school or edu­ca­tion set­ting of their par­ents and their fam­i­ly’s choice will ulti­mate­ly be free­ing for every­one involved. Every­one who is great in their role as a teacher or admin­is­tra­tor or any oth­er piece of the sys­tem today will have much greater oppor­tu­ni­ty in an envi­ron­ment of edu­ca­tion free­dom. We will have cre­ation of new kinds of K‑12 expe­ri­ences we haven’t even begun to dream of. Because we will have cre­ative peo­ple with the free­dom to cre­ate able to do so and fam­i­lies able to take advan­tage of that.

- Sure, sure. And just to kin­da close the indus­try dis­cus­sion, it does­n’t seem like there’s any mar­ket forces at play cur­rent­ly. And what you’re talk­ing about is putting some mar­ket forces in play. That’s what guides our whole econ­o­my. Is the result of, first of all, know­ing who the cus­tomer is, the child, the par­ent. And under­stand­ing the role of teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors, like we said, many of whom are unbe­liev­ably great folks who are real­ly try­ing to do the best, but if the indus­try is spit­ting out, if you will, or frus­trat­ing its best in its bright­est, that’s a tough spot to be.

- Exact­ly, yeah, exact­ly. I mean, when you have a sys­tem that basi­cal­ly has every­one move lock­step with one anoth­er, whether you’re real­ly out­stand­ing at what you do, or whether you’re below aver­age, how long is any­one who’s tru­ly out­stand­ing going to real­ly want to be con­tin­ue to be a part of that? And we see that across the board when it comes to the expe­ri­ence in the K‑12 sys­tem is that there’s just very lit­tle oppor­tu­ni­ty for real­ly great edu­ca­tors and admin­is­tra­tors. And there’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who don’t have the means to choose some­thing different.

- Right, right. And so, let’s focus on the choice again, but maybe in dif­fer­ent aspect, not just of the school that they go to, but parental involve­ment in what the school is doing. And lots of dis­cus­sion today about dif­fer­ent pro­grams being taught, whether it was Flori­da with sex edu­ca­tion or oth­er sorts of top­ics that are being taught into the school that par­ents now seem to, through this COVID expe­ri­ence, are start­ing to see that in a new way and go, wait a minute. How are these deci­sions made? And what’s the role of my school ver­sus the role that I wan­na play as a par­ent? Help us under­stand maybe how cur­ricu­lum gets devel­oped. How some­body decides it’s a good idea and how it gets imple­ment­ed and then how the par­ents are left out of the discussion.

- Yeah. Well, this is not a new phe­nom­e­non. But what is new is the fact that fam­i­lies across the coun­try have seen now first­hand what’s going on in their kids’ schools. And many of them are not hap­py with what they’re see­ing. Whether it’s the lack of aca­d­e­m­ic rig­or. And we’ve seen exam­ple after exam­ple of states and com­mu­ni­ties that have con­tin­ued to, in the inter­est of equi­ty, have con­tin­ued to low­er the bar and expec­ta­tions as though that’s some­how going to improve the sit­u­a­tion for any stu­dent. And the oppo­site is true. And so fam­i­lies are upset about that. Fam­i­lies are upset about cur­ricu­lum that invades their space of purview. Whether teach­ing kinder­gart­ners about sex­u­al­ly charged top­ics that are total­ly inap­pro­pri­ate for chil­dren of that age, or even mul­ti­ple years old­er. And so this is again, awak­ened par­ents in a way that we haven’t seen before. And we’ve seen a lot of engage­ment at school board meet­ings, get­ting involved in school board races, talk­ing about hav­ing their mon­ey fol­low their child to choose a dif­fer­ent set­ting. We’ve seen the num­bers of home­school­ing fam­i­lies dou­ble across the coun­try, and that’s only what’s report­ed. And among black fam­i­lies, inter­est­ing­ly, increase five­fold. And so there’s a trend, or there’s a momen­tum around a dif­fer­ent approach to K‑12 edu­ca­tion and pol­i­cy­mak­ers bet­ter pay atten­tion and they bet­ter embrace this notion that par­ents need to be the ones who are dri­ving this bus, not the sys­tem. Because par­ents did­n’t sign up to co-par­ent with the government.

- Well, exact­ly right. Par­ent­ing’s hard enough. To have the gov­ern­ment into it would just make it more dif­fi­cult. Let’s keep on that track a lit­tle bit of, you con­nect­ed the dots ear­li­er that you said you had a per­son­al sit­u­a­tion. As you dove into it, you saw that is more than just emo­tion or log­ic. You had to get involved polit­i­cal­ly. And you’re see­ing that hap­pen more and more, and that’s becom­ing a pri­or­i­ty. Are polit­i­cal lead­ers see­ing it around the coun­try? Are they see­ing it? Are they sens­ing it? Give us an under­stand­ing of this sense. We may see just a piece of the ele­phant. We may not know what’s hap­pen­ing in a dif­fer­ent state or the momen­tum that you’re talk­ing about. Help us get a glimpse into how that’s being por­trayed. Where all the pow­er from gov­ern­ment comes from the peo­ple, at least in our sys­tem. So this would seem to con­nect in that sense as well.

- So one of the most recent and best exam­ples to date or recent­ly has been the Vir­ginia gov­er­nor’s race this fall. Where Glenn Youngkin, dra­mat­ic under­dog and in a blue state won as a Repub­li­can because he sided with par­ents and with stu­dents and said, ​“We need to be lis­ten­ing to par­ents. We need to be putting stu­dents in the cen­ter of the equa­tion.” And his oppo­nent, Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe, who had been gov­er­nor of Vir­ginia before, seemed com­plete­ly tone deaf on the issue. And as a mat­ter of fact, at the night before the elec­tion brought in Ran­di Wein­garten, head of the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers as his clos­ing speak­er. How much of a dis­con­nect you could have, it was just astound­ing to me. So that’s a real­ly good exam­ple of har­ness­ing that momen­tum and a can­di­date who saw the moment and read the moment right and embraced it and it went with it. Anoth­er exam­ple was in 2018, Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis in Flori­da won a squeak­er of a gov­er­nor’s race there by about 50,000 votes. And when you dove into the num­bers after­wards, you quick­ly found that Ron DeSan­tis, first of all, had cham­pi­oned the school choice edu­ca­tion free­dom pro­grams in Flori­da, and said he was not only going to pro­tect them, but expand them as gov­er­nor. His oppo­nent, Andrew Gillum, said he want­ed to wipe them out and do away with them. Well, when you went into the num­bers, there were over 100,000 Black females that vot­ed for Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis. So at twice or more the per­cent­age that you would have expect­ed vot­ing for a Repub­li­can, that vot­ed for him. And so that race, and that exam­ple is a real­ly impor­tant one for oth­er can­di­dates for office across the coun­try. Pay atten­tion to what fam­i­lies want, to what par­ents want. And today this issue of putting par­ents in charge is a 75 plus per­cent issue no mat­ter what way you look at it.

- Wow, great sup­port. And to a cer­tain extent, a val­i­da­tion of 35 years of your work of see­ing this and in the pieces seem to be com­ing togeth­er that actions are real­ly happening.

- Yeah, well, nobody would’ve pre­dict­ed that two years ago. We would be where we are now with the dis­cus­sion. But if there is a sil­ver lin­ing to the pan­dem­ic, it is this with regard to edu­ca­tion. That we have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to real­ly fun­da­men­tal­ly change a kid’s K‑12 edu­ca­tion expe­ri­ence and cus­tomize it for them.

- Yeah, great. Okay, let’s shift a lit­tle bit to high­er ed. And I’ve had the chance to talk to a few uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dents and col­lege pres­i­dents and the top­ic comes up of path­ways to pros­per­i­ty, if you will. And we’ve had some great dis­cus­sions with dif­fer­ent peo­ple about how stu­dents find their way. But one of the top­ics that has come up has been, at least the mar­ket­ing, the pro­mo­tion, that the only way to suc­cess or pros­per­i­ty is through a four-year col­lege degree. And then I would ask them the cost of a four-year col­lege degree or the val­ue equa­tion of a four-year degree. Fab­u­lous for many peo­ple, but maybe not for every­body. So the broad­en­ing of the mar­ket­ing, if you will, of the role that edu­ca­tion can play and some­body, once they’ve grad­u­at­ed from high school of where they can go, what are the options are avail­able? I know that as sec­re­tary, you stud­ied and reviewed that to not only in the Unit­ed States, but in oth­er coun­tries as well. Help us under­stand those sorts of options and the poten­tial ranges for peo­ple at that stage of their life.

- Well, high­er edu­ca­tion in my view, is any­thing that is beyond high school that you do to improve your oppor­tu­ni­ty for what­ev­er you want your future to look like. And we have for too long, cul­tur­al­ly soci­etal­ly said that the only way to a suc­cess­ful adult life is is to go to in a grad­u­ate from a four-year col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty. The real­i­ty is that might have been the case 20, 30, 40 years ago. But today, there are so many more oppor­tu­ni­ties. There are mil­lions of jobs open today that don’t require a four-year degree. And yet, again, we are con­tin­u­ing to mes­sage high school­ers that their only oppor­tu­ni­ty for suc­cess is to go to a four-year col­lege. So we have kids start­ing col­lege going for a year or two, not know­ing what they wan­na do, what they wan­na pur­sue, tak­ing on debt, and then drop­ping out and not hav­ing any­thing to show for it. A very, very bad sit­u­a­tion. We’re not giv­ing kids good input and good expo­sure to these var­i­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties while they’re in high school. I remem­ber anoth­er round­table I had with high school guid­ance coun­selors. Most of whom were total­ly in this mode of four-year col­lege. That’s what you need to do. That’s what you need to plan for. Then they had very lit­tle to no resource to help stu­dents find and get expo­sure to and con­sid­er oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties. This is one of the things that Pres­i­dent Trump was very adamant about, was real­ly expand­ing these path­ways to beyond high school, to encom­pass things like appren­tice­ships. And we worked very hard to get a new appren­tice­ship pro­gram estab­lished with the Depart­ment of Labor. Ones that would be real­ly cre­at­ed by indus­try where need exists and be able to work togeth­er with like indus­tries to put togeth­er spe­cif­ic appren­tice­ship pro­grams and then offer these wide­ly. The Switzer­land does this very well. 75% of their high school stu­dents are in some kind of an appren­tice­ship. And most peo­ple when they hear the word appren­tice­ship, think of build­ing trades and in some cas­es, health­care avenues or tracks. But in Switzer­land, the CEO of UBS, one of the largest banks in the world, start­ed as an appren­tice in the bank. And the chair­man of the board, the same thing. And so you think dif­fer­ent­ly when you con­sid­er the broad expanse that appren­tice­ship earn and learn oppor­tu­ni­ties can encom­pass. And these are areas that I think any high­er ed insti­tu­tion today should be seri­ous about explor­ing. And I think, the two years of the COVID pan­dem­ic is also going to shake out high­er edu­ca­tion in a way we had not seen or expe­ri­enced before. Because there were a lot of stu­dents who paid their full tuition and had a very poor expe­ri­ence. And are won­der­ing today, is col­lege worth it? And those are valid ques­tions. One of the things we also did at the depart­ment was to add valu­able infor­ma­tion to what’s called the col­lege score­card. And any­one can go to the col­lege score score­card at the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion site and go and look for and com­pare insti­tu­tions. So if you’re decid­ing, I might wan­na go to Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty, but I wanna–

- Great illus­tra­tion, by the way. Great illustration.

- I fig­ured that.

- But I want­ed to com­pare it to IU, for exam­ple. It used to be, you only could com­pare cost by insti­tu­tion and then earn­ings, aver­age earn­ings by insti­tu­tion. Now you can go down to the pro­gram lev­el. So you can decide is an engi­neer­ing degree at Pur­due, what’s it gonna cost me? And what am I like­ly to earn year one, two, three. And that earn­ings data is added each year now. So it will be a lon­gi­tu­di­nal val­ue as well. And I can com­pare that to oth­er insti­tu­tions. I can com­pare pro­grams to vary­ing pro­grams. And so it will help, I believe, expose many of these degree pro­grams that are not actu­al­ly pay­ing off for stu­dents in the long term. And I think that’s going to help bring about some change as well. But the change has got to come from out­side the sys­tem. And that’s anoth­er thing that we worked on, was open­ing up the accred­i­ta­tion process, so that dif­fer­ent cre­ative providers could get into the high­er ed mar­ket­place and offer new oppor­tu­ni­ties in new ways. Short­er term pro­grams and all kinds of dif­fer­ent approach­es based on what the needs are. And again, mil­lions of jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. And I think more and more stu­dents are awak­en­ing to that reality.

- Yeah, yeah. And as you talk about that, you’re speak­ing about the cost and then how peo­ple have financed that. And so that’s a big issue today. So help us under­stand why have costs in high­er ed increased so much over the years and then linked to it, stu­dent debt is a top­ic. And then the for­give­ness of stu­dent debt is a top­ic today. And you’re talk­ing about, again, over a tril­lion dol­lars. A huge amount of tax­pay­er invest­ment. So what’s going on in that? help us unpack that. I think for all of us, we’d look at, how does this happen?

- So today, there’s about 1.7 tril­lion in stu­dent debt.

- Holy smokes.

- And just to give con­text to that, and I prob­a­bly won’t get the years exact­ly right here, but my rec­ol­lec­tion is the first 40 years of stu­dent lend­ing for high­er edu­ca­tion, the loan bal­ance came to rough­ly 500 bil­lion dol­lars. The next 10 years after that, it went to a tril­lion. So 500 bil­lion to a tril­lion in 10 years after decades of accu­mu­la­tion before that to 500. And then just since 2010, it has gone to 1.7 tril­lion. First of all, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment fed­er­al­ized stu­dent lend­ing in 2010. The argu­ment was that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment could make lend­ing cheap­er to col­lege stu­dents. And it could be used to finance Oba­macare. Well, that has not panned out. Not only has that not panned out, it has been a dis­as­ter. And there’s been no gov­er­nor on the cost of attend­ing a col­lege. There’s no lim­i­ta­tion on what a col­lege can charge for tuition. And they also don’t have account­abil­i­ty on results. So their stu­dents could be earn­ing a frac­tion of what they have spent in col­lege tuition. And yet, there’s no real account­abil­i­ty for high­er ed insti­tu­tions for hav­ing charged that much to stu­dents. So the whole mod­el is real­ly wrong and it needs to be real­ly read­dressed. One of the things we did while in office was a deep dive into the whole stu­dent loan port­fo­lio. And it was judged that more than half of the exist­ing port­fo­lio was basi­cal­ly bad debt. And so when you hear this cur­rent pres­i­dent talk about for­giv­ing stu­dent loans, and we’ve had now a two-year pause on pay­ment on stu­dent loans. I mean, just that pause has cost tax­pay­ers $150 bil­lion. And so, this whole sit­u­a­tion is a house of cards. And I mean, it was some­thing that I raised very ear­ly on. I hope Con­gress gets seri­ous about look­ing at this. And I hope frankly, that the dis­cus­sion about mas­sive stu­dent loan for­give­ness is sim­ply talk. It’s not legal. I believe patent­ly ille­gal based on our research.

- Can the pres­i­dent just go do this or not?

- No. Accord­ing to all of the legal work we did, it is not pos­si­ble. And even Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s for­mer gen­er­al coun­sel at the Depart­ment of Ed has opined on this as well say­ing he does not believe it is legal. But that’s not even to men­tion the fact that this is not fair.

- Oh gosh, yeah.

- To the taxpayers.

- I was just, I was just gonna say, this is a cost ben­e­fit. How many peo­ple are pay­ing and how many peo­ple are receiving?

- So two out of three Amer­i­cans have not tak­en out stu­dent debt, stu­dent loans. And then of the exist­ing out­stand­ing loans, if you’re talk­ing about mas­sive debt for­give­ness, the vast major­i­ty of these are high income earn­ers that have tak­en out big loans for grad­u­ate degrees. Most of them wealthy, white and pro­fes­sion­al. And so it would be the biggest trans­fer of wealth from the poor­est to the wealth­i­est of Amer­i­cans if stu­dent loan debt was to be forgiven.

- Wow, wow. Well, that does­n’t seem right.

- No, no, it does­n’t seem right at all. It’s not right.

- And that’s just one of those things that goes down the track. When you talk about some of these num­bers and how this gets man­aged, it’s just down­right scary. That some of these things can hap­pen. And of course, I love how when the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment real­ly got involved, it got sig­nif­i­cant­ly worse real­ly fast.

- Exact­ly. Exact­ly. I mean, it’s prob­a­bly the prime exam­ple of how gov­ern­ment and why gov­ern­ment should not be involved in pri­vate sec­tor type of activity.

- Yeah, great. Well, so we’ll tran­si­tion now. We got a few min­utes left here. Tran­si­tion now, you’ve spent 30 years in this space. You’ve served as a sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion, but you’re not done. And in fact, right between us here and I’ll make sure I show it up is a book that you have that will be com­ing out soon. And I wan­na give you a chance to talk about it. And I’m curi­ous about how we turn some of these dis­cus­sions or how we turn, if you will, log­ic, emo­tion and pol­i­cy or polit­i­cal will into action? But talk to us about your book. Help us under­stand why did you write this and why is this an impor­tant aspect of Bet­sy DeVos going forward?

- Well, I nev­er set out to write a book. But hav­ing con­clud­ed the expe­ri­ence as sec­re­tary and hav­ing had all of the expe­ri­ences that I did and the insight into the work­ings of a fed­er­al agency.

- Which is pret­ty scary as we’ve talked about.

- Yes, yes. I felt it was impor­tant to take some of those expe­ri­ences, some of those sto­ries and sort of record them and write what my obser­va­tions are. I vis­it­ed hun­dreds of schools as sec­re­tary. K‑12 schools and high­er ed insti­tu­tions. And it was always with the inten­tion of find­ing schools and places that were doing things dif­fer­ent­ly to encour­age cre­ativ­i­ty and encour­age flex­i­bil­i­ty and nim­ble­ness. And so I’m talk­ing about some of those expe­ri­ences, I’m talk­ing about the poli­cies that relate to those expe­ri­ences, and then talk­ing about what I see as the way for­ward for the future of pri­mar­i­ly K‑12 edu­ca­tion. We touch on high­er ed in a num­ber of places. And that may be anoth­er book who knows?

- Well, there you go, you’re on a roll.

- But tak­ing that expe­ri­ence and real­ly talk­ing about how we need to change pol­i­cy to actu­al­ly upend what is an aver­age kid’s expe­ri­ence of their K‑12 edu­ca­tion. Because the one-size-fits-all top down, on the cov­er, you see, this is a class­room that looks very much the same today as it did over 100 years ago. Not much has changed in that regard. And yet every­thing around us has changed in fun­da­men­tal ways. And I think about the kids who get bored to death by the time they’re in fifth grade, that should­n’t hap­pen. Learn­ing should be excit­ing. Learn­ing should be stim­u­lat­ing. Learn­ing should be fun. And there’s no rea­son it can’t be. And there’s no rea­son we can’t have edu­ca­tion expe­ri­ences that help every kid find and dis­cov­er their inner tal­ents and every­thing that they have to offer the world and do so in ways that are going to relate to them.

- Yeah, great. Well, you’ve put it all down. Can you give us a cou­ple sto­ries out of there. A cou­ple of those expe­ri­ences and obser­va­tions. I mean we got­ta have one that just shows boy, you know, things are real­ly wrong. and there’s got­ta give us a sto­ry of some­thing that you saw on those trips when you were out there and you saw some inno­va­tion and give us some­thing that’s encour­ag­ing. Now, we want every­body to read the book when it comes out, it’s called ​“Hostages No More.” I wan­na talk about the title in a sec­ond, but maybe give us a lit­tle taste of a sto­ry or two in there.

- So one that comes to mind as a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence, but real­ly reaf­firmed my goal of try­ing to make sure every child has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to access an edu­ca­tion that works for him or her was actu­al­ly my sec­ond day or third day as sec­re­tary. I went to vis­it a school in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and pro­tes­tors had found out, the unions had found out I was going to vis­it. It was not pub­li­cized, but they had found out some­how and they blocked my entrance into the school phys­i­cal­ly. I ulti­mate­ly got in. And I ulti­mate­ly had a great con­ver­sa­tion with teach­ers, kids, par­ents, but it, again, affirmed to me and was a very evi­dent exam­ple of to what extent the defend­ers of the sta­tus quo will go to try to pre­clude change. And those kids deserve every oppor­tu­ni­ty like every kid across the coun­try. And so that was, I think one of the, it’s still my resolve to con­tin­ue to fight for them and for all the kids that they rep­re­sent. There were so many schools that I vis­it­ed that were fun and inter­est­ing and unique and were doing things dif­fer­ent­ly. I think I would say one ex unex­pect­ed place that I vis­it­ed and was real­ly excit­ed to find out about this par­tic­u­lar dis­trict was Casper, Wyoming. Which, it’s a small school dis­trict. But they have, of their own voli­tion, basi­cal­ly opened up the whole dis­trict of tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools and made each of their schools unique in and of itself. So one of them was a Span­ish lan­guage immer­sion school. Anoth­er one, the one that I vis­it­ed was a ele­men­tary school that had no admin­is­tra­tion. Teach­ers and fam­i­lies were the admin­is­tra­tors. They also did­n’t have the dis­tinc­tions between the grades. So kids would be mov­ing on in cer­tain sub­ject areas as fast as they could and then tak­ing longer time in the ones that they had to take more time in. But it was a great exam­ple of what can be when peo­ple work togeth­er and acknowl­edge that the stu­dent has to be at the cen­ter of things. So those were just two examples.

- So the first one, I remem­ber, in being your broth­er-in-law was incensed that you were at risk per­son­al­ly, when you’re try­ing to serve in this capac­i­ty. And that peo­ple can dis­agree in any way, but you got­ta let our elect­ed offi­cials and appoint­ed offi­cials do their jobs. So that’s just a per­son­al obser­va­tion. I remem­ber when that hap­pened. But the sec­ond one, that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a pri­vate ver­sus pub­lic ver­sus Chris­t­ian. These are the schools and in the state and in the com­mu­ni­ty, they just decid­ed to work togeth­er. That happens?

- It was unique to that dis­trict. I don’t know of any oth­er dis­trict that approach­es it that way. I I’d be thrilled to hear about it and learn about it, but it was, again, an affir­ma­tion of what can hap­pen when you’re focused on doing the right thing for stu­dents and then adults ori­ent­ing around that.

- Yeah, it can hap­pen. Well, that’s great. So talk about the book a lit­tle bit more. ​“Hostages No More” com­ing out soon. And talk about it in the sense, oth­er things that are impor­tant to you to pull out of it for us to know in our audi­ence, but also maybe in the con­text of, okay, we’ve had this dis­cus­sion. We’ve been talk­ing about these issues. Our audi­ence, our lis­ten­ers, what do we do? What do we do? How do we take action? How do we define results in our com­mu­ni­ty? How do we reaf­firm the pow­er that we have in our com­mu­ni­ties to not just what I want to do, but to lis­ten and share with oth­er par­ents and find a way for­ward if we put the chil­dren at the cen­ter of what we’re try­ing to accom­plish. Help us with that a lit­tle bit.

- Well, most edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy is made at the state lev­el. Now the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has a tremen­dous over­lay over that. I would argue it should not. It is the state’s role to set edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy and to empow­er, I would argue, to empow­er the most local unit, which is the fam­i­ly. And so my urg­ing would be that those who are inter­est­ed and want to be part of the solu­tion to help ensure that your state leg­is­la­tors and your gov­er­nor are going to ulti­mate­ly sup­port poli­cies that sup­port dol­lars fol­low­ing and flow­ing after indi­vid­ual kids. It should be about kids, not about build­ings or sys­tems. It should be about fund­ing those chil­dren indi­vid­u­al­ly, not about build­ings or sys­tems. I often use the metaphor of the back­pack. So kids go to school every day with the stuff they need for the day. Metaphor­i­cal­ly, we should be attach­ing the dol­lars that are already spent on that child for their fam­i­ly to decide how to best edu­cate that child. So advo­cat­ing for elect­ed offi­cials that are going to vote to sup­port those poli­cies and rais­ing voic­es about that in ways that are unde­ni­able. Like don’t be apolo­getic for being on the side of fam­i­lies and kids. Embrace that and know that you’re gonna get push­back from peo­ple who are part of the sys­tem. But the real­i­ty is that in states where more free­dom has been giv­en to fam­i­lies, all kids’ out­comes and expe­ri­ences and oppor­tu­ni­ties have improved. And so that is at the core. I think putting the stu­dent at the cen­ter of it and putting the fam­i­ly imme­di­ate­ly around that stu­dent as the best advo­cate for that stu­dent is ulti­mate­ly what we need to be doing. And the pol­i­cy changes that can fol­low. And there’s dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies and there’s lots of dif­fer­ent ways of achiev­ing that. But if that is the core of what read­ers take away fig­ur­ing out how to be a con­struc­tive part of that in what­ev­er state they live in, that’ll be good.

- That’s the path for­ward. And am I just crazy? Well, I could be. You’ve known me a long time. I could just be crazy. But at pre‑K you, par­ents pick and then pay for what they do. And in high­er ed, you pick and then pay for what you do. And, and if the gov­ern­ment, if the soci­ety and our cit­i­zens all think that K‑12 makes all the sense in the world, you’re not pre­scrib­ing a solu­tion. You’re just giv­ing them the option to devel­op or choose a solu­tion. It just seems on its face. It seems like it it’s con­sis­tent with every­thing, or with many oth­er things we do in our soci­ety. Not incon­sis­tent. In fact, the incon­sis­ten­cy is trap­ping. Am I?

- No, no, that’s absolute­ly right. And that actu­al­ly is ref­er­enced to the title, ​“Hostages No More.” So Horace Mann.

- Good, ​’cause I want­ed to ask you to talk about the title.

- Yeah, so Horace Mann, the father of the ​“mod­ern” edu­ca­tion sys­tem, and I use mod­ern in quotes because it’s 175 years old. Inter­est­ing­ly, Horace Mann died 20 years before Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell made his first first tele­phone call. So, I mean, you put that in con­text. But Horace Mann said at the found­ing of the sys­tem, and I won’t get the quote exact­ly right. But it was that basi­cal­ly, ​“Par­ents are right to assume and know that edu­ca­tors are tak­ing their chil­dren hostage to their cause of prepar­ing them to be soci­etal con­formists.” Basi­cal­ly, the wid­get mak­ers. And to fit into the indus­tri­al mod­el that was devel­op­ing at the time. So he acknowl­edged that they were tak­ing chil­dren form their fam­i­lies hostage to the cause of this con­formist approach to prepar­ing the next gen­er­a­tion. And I argue, the chil­dren have now been tak­en hostage in ways far beyond that. And hostage to agen­das that haven’t been aligned with many, many fam­i­lies agen­das and hostage to schools that have failed kids across the board and with no escape and no way out. So ​“Hostages No More” is the for­ward-look­ing title that we will achieve edu­ca­tion free­dom for kids in K‑12 in our country.

- There you go. So Bet­sy, as we, as we wrap up here, the whole title here is believe what we believe and you have lived your beliefs. You have for years and years, that’s my expe­ri­ence ever since I’ve known you, that you have strong beliefs and you work hard to express them in pos­i­tive and help­ful ways to impact oth­ers. So maybe just a few final thoughts for those who may be won­der­ing about what they believe and where could they find more, cer­tain­ly read­ing your book to learn more. But how would you sug­gest, if there’s fur­ther ques­tions, how they help shape their beliefs and gain an under­stand­ing of what’s going on?

- Well, I’d encour­age they read the book.

- I guess that was an easy one.

- It’s cer­tain­ly not the be all and end all, but it does real­ly help bring togeth­er sort of my jour­ney on this. The foun­da­tion of the jour­ney was that I firm­ly believe every sin­gle child is unique­ly cre­at­ed by God and has tremen­dous poten­tial. And I feel bur­dened by the respon­si­bil­i­ty of help­ing to ensure that every child has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ful­ly devel­op. And so that has been my dri­ving pas­sion for all of these years. And we’ve had some suc­cess­es and we have a long way to go. But there’s a lot more peo­ple engaged and ener­gized around this today, and I’m very encour­aged by that. And I just hope that many, many more will get on the train and help make it hap­pen for kids.

- That’s fan­tas­tic. That’s fan­tas­tic. Well, thank you for hav­ing those deep beliefs. Thank you for shar­ing them and thank you for your com­mit­ment to so many peo­ple so that they can have choic­es and that they’re not trapped in some­thing that’s not the right solu­tion for them. Not to pre­sume what is the right solu­tion for them, but that they can have a choice and move for­ward. So Bet­sy thanks so much for–

- Well, thanks, Doug and thanks for your con­tin­ued great sup­port and encouragement.

- Well, I’m hon­ored to be part of it. it’s a tremen­dous hon­or to have had a glimpse into watch­ing you. It’s tough, so I’m glad I had a seat where I could watch with­out being in the mid­dle of it, ​’cause you were in the mid­dle of it. That was excit­ing to watch ​’cause I was so proud of you what you’ve done. But it was hard to watch because you took a lot of shots and it’s not an easy path to go.

- Well, thanks.

- Yeah, great. Well thank you, Bet­sy, and thank you for join­ing. We’ll wrap it up this episode of Believe! And as you’ve heard, there is a ques­tion. Why can’t par­ents pick their school that they find best for them? Well, maybe in the future, they can. More and more for every­one. So Bet­sy, thanks again for being with us and we’ll look for­ward to our next con­ver­sa­tion on Believe! very soon. Thanks, everybody.