Education Secretary Betsy DeVos appeared before Congress Tuesday armed with the same shtick she’s been workshopping for three years now:
Take my education department … please!
This year’s proposal seeks $7.1 billion in cuts, including cutting all funding for Special Olympics programs — $17.6 million. Similar proposals failed last year and the year before. This time, with Democrats in control of the House, it’s going nowhere faster than one of DeVos’s runaway yachts.
But leave it to DeVos to pick the exact wrong time to apply the beautiful motto of the Special Olympics: “Let me win, but if I can’t win, let me be brave in the attempt.”
Advertisement
To put it another way, if at first you don’t fail America’s children, try, try again.
“We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results,” DeVos said in prepared remarks that borrowed the language of education reform — results, evidence-based outcomes — but twisted the ideas into something approaching the cartoon villainy that earned her the derisive nickname “Cruella.”
Given the department’s consistent effort to flay itself before Congress with the noble goal of spending far less on education, DeVos could have stopped after the first eight words. Proposing this, knowing full well it will never pass, is little more than trolling. It’s the opposite of virtue signaling. It’s cruelty signaling.
For Special Olympics Massachusetts, the cuts would eliminate $125,000 from the Department of Education that cover a portion of the $566,215 school program budget, said Charles Hirsch, director of development, brand, and marketing. About 7,600 students are involved in the programs across the state.
“It’s unconscionable,” said Rep. Joe Kennedy III, whose great aunt, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics in 1968 because she was angry over the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities. “What kind of country sits there and says, ‘We’re going to balance the budget on the backs of these people?’”
Advertisement
The Special Olympics understandably drew the most immediate outrage. But the budget proposal includes draconian cuts for after-school programs for children from disadvantaged communities, grant programs for textbooks, and other funding for public schools, and would redirect millions of dollars toward private school vouchers and charter schools.
The Special Olympics, rightly beloved, would surely weather these cuts, though it shouldn’t have to; some of these other programs would be decimated. But blathering about evidence-based outcomes and measurables and accountability, and then seeking to eliminate after-school programs that actually improve test scores and attendance, gives up the game.
That’s the thing about evidence-based decision making: It used to require actual evidence. At every turn, the Trump administration has dispensed with this petty requirement, borrowing the language but not bothering with the facts.
“They just say these words without caring about them, like they do with a lot of other things,” said Liam Kerr, Massachusetts state director of Democrats for Education Reform, a political organization that supports charter schools, school choice — and increased education spending.
There’s a lot of room for debate on those issues, of course. A state referendum to expand the charter school cap failed badly in 2016. But DeVos wading in with a few talking points borrowed in bad faith — “the perversion of our language,” Kerr said — and a slash-and-burn budget doesn’t really serve either side in a debate that is already complicated and understandably emotional.
Advertisement
“They no longer care about whether or not what they’re saying is true,” said Kerr. “If you hate government, then you don’t care if it works or not.”
They don’t care. It’s how the Trump administration will end up redirecting billions of dollars to pay for a wall that experts say won’t do much of anything. It’s how the president can block aid to Puerto Rico, even as Americans there are still struggling. It’s how you slash environmental regulations even as our own government scientists sound the alarm: By not caring.
The mission and scope of the Special Olympics has evolved over the decades. Today, Kennedy said, “It is not just creating opportunities for athletes to compete in sports,” though that too is important. “It’s about trying to help people understand how we treat each other.”
That is not the kind of lesson this administration appears eager to learn.
Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.