- A first look tonight at the Trump administration and the
newly sworn-in president's priorities for public education.
Ahead of the inauguration, it was a week chock full of cabinet
hearings in Washington, including the hearing for
Secretary of Department of Education nominee Betsy DeVos.
Ms. DeVos spoke to her support of something Wisconsin is very
familiar with - school choice.
- Parents no longer believe that a one size fits all model
of learning meets the need of every child.
And they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual,
charter, home, faith-based or any other combination.
- Thanks in large measure to Betsy DeVos,
Wisconsin is ahead of most of the rest of the nation
when it comes to private school and voucher programs.
Our first guest has been at the forefront
of the choice movement in the badger state.
Jim Bender is the president of School Choice Wisconsin.
Thanks a lot for being here.
- Thank you for having me.
- We just heard Betsy DeVos.
What's your reaction to her being picked for this post?
- Well, I think following the general theme
of this entire election process, change is coming.
There's no doubt about it.
Exactly what form that's going to take,
we're going to have to find out.
But right now I think her statements there were reflecting
where we are not just as a state here in Wisconsin, when you look
at the polling on school choice and the support that's there now
and growing.
So nationally you're seeing the same thing.
Milwaukee had the first voucher program 26, 27 years ago.
Now there's 25 states that have programs.
42 states that have independent charters.
You've got hundreds of thousands of students in there.
Nationally you're seeing a growing movement.
In Wisconsin you're seeing a growing movement.
And the poll numbers and general support just keep going up
and up for educational options.
- Describe how influential Betsy DeVos was in Wisconsin
with us being at the vanguard
with that Milwaukee choice program?
- So I think when the program started here, you had a number
of people, my predecessor of School Choice Wisconsin,
Susan Mitchell worked with Tommy Thompson, Howard Fuller, Polly
Williams, Tim Sheehy at MMAC to get the first program started.
After that happened, then there was much more of a national
movement that got started once there was one solid program.
Susan Mitchell and Betsy DeVos, at that point,
were part of that national movement.
Betsy has led the charge since then.
It's helped promote the Milwaukee program, expand it in
various forms to other states and then in return now that
we've expanded the program outside of Milwaukee to Racine
and statewide, American Federation for Children,
the organization that she ran,
has been influential here in Wisconsin.
- So should she be confirmed to this secretary post,
what might that mean going forward for Wisconsin?
- So they've talked at least President-elect Trump, now
President Trump, has talked about injecting
like $20 billion into school choice across the country,
which would be a dramatic increase.
What I think we're finding out is that, you know,
it doesn't sound anyway like there's going to be
a new federal program to administer those dollars.
They're really looking more at block grants and interjecting
not just that new money for school choice, but as I have
often said, I think the whole movement is going to be
kind of de-emphasizing the federal role in education.
So even for traditional public schools, I think they will get
much more flexibility than they've had in the past
without all the strings being tied to federal.
So I think you're going to see block grants.
I think you're going to see more money put down to the states.
And I think everybody will be beneficial -- or will benefit
from a reduced role from the federal government in education.
- What kinds of regulations from the federal Department of
Education would people like yourself like to see go away?
- So I think from a school choice standpoint, the federal
government right now doesn't play much of a role.
The programs here in the state of Wisconsin for vouchers are
funded by state dollars only.
There aren't any federal dollars that go into it.
From the traditional public school side, you've just got --
whether you're dealing with -- you know, you've got different
title funding for teacher prep.
For low-income students, you've got IDEA, Title IX.
You've got all these different functions.
And I don't think that -- at least what I'm hearing,
you're not seeing necessarily a reduction in any of the funding
of those items, but just the way they are administered will allow
local districts to have a bit more flexibility with how
they're going to be applied.
In other words, I think you've got a number of people here in
the state that are full-time employees that are on compliance
measures to make sure that the federal dollars are spent
the way that they're supposed to be spent.
We just got done seeing school improvement grants
for the country.
$7 billion was invested from 2010 to 2015.
Yesterday the results came out that those dollars had no impact
on improving low-performing schools across the country.
So we spent $7 billion over five years
through the traditional system.
Arne Duncan put it in place.
President Obama, one of his key measures.
It's kind of telling that it came out the day before
he left office that after those $7 billion got done,
there was no improvement.
Part of the problem was that plan had very structured ways in
which you could spend the money and didn't give the local
schools the ability to be innovative with those dollars.
And we just didn't see any results.
- We need to leave it there. Jim Bender, thanks very much.
- Thank you.