King: Public schools central to American Dream

WASHINGTON — Days before he is to step down, U.S. Education Secretary John King cautioned against weakening the USA’s public education system, calling public schools “fundamental to who we are as a country.”

King’s slated replacement, Michigan billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos, has called the system a “dead end” and a monopoly, and has spent years working to strengthen competition in the form of lightly regulated public charter schools and taxpayer-supported private school vouchers.

In an interview, King, 42, said the role of the U.S. Department of Education “is to ensure a strong public education system in early learning, in K-12 and in higher ed.”

That belief will likely be put to the test over the next four years. President-elect Donald Trump has proposed spending $20 billion in federal funds — more than the department spends in total to educate low-income students — to give students a ticket to the charter, magnet or private school of their choice. The plan, which would require states to kick in another $110 billion, was formulated with help from DeVos’ school choice advocacy group.

Trump has called DeVos “a brilliant and passionate education advocate” who will help “reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families."

DeVos, 59, faces what could be a bruising Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

King, a former teacher, charter school founder and one-time commissioner of New York schools, said public charter schools have the potential to be “laboratories for innovation” and opportunity, but that private-school vouchers are a different story altogether.

“Vouchers, I don’t think, are a scalable solution to the challenges that we face in public education, and I think (they) have the potential to distract us from focusing on how we strengthen public education.”

Reflecting on the Obama administration’s eight years, King pointed to several key accomplishments, including:

• thousands of new seats in pre-kindergarten classes;
• a record-high U.S. high school graduation rate of more than 83%;
• 1 million more African-American and Latino students attending college.

He also noted that low-income college students are eligible for larger Pell Grants and that families are eligible for tax credits worth $10,000 over four years of college.

“At the same time we have a lot of work to do,” King said, including more expanded preschool. Despite record graduation rates, he said, “We still have 17% of students who don’t graduate on time from high school, and we know how difficult it is in the 21st-century economy without a high school diploma.”

King also said achievement gaps between white and minority students are still too large, and that too many students graduate from high school “not yet ready for what’s next,” even in community college.

King grew up in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, N.Y. Both of his parents were career New York City public school educators, but his mother died when he was 8; his father, suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer's disease, died when King was 12.

Family members took turns caring for him, but it was teachers, King has said, who “saved my life,” making school safe, nurturing and engaging, and “exposing us to the world beyond Brooklyn.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University, a master’s degree and education doctorate from Columbia University's Teachers College and a law degree from Yale. In between degrees, King taught high school social studies in Puerto Rico and Boston and co-founded Roxbury Prep, one of a growing number of “no excuses” charter schools that use strict discipline, longer school days and close attention to data to improve the skills of their mostly minority, low-income students.

He eventually helped found Uncommon Schools, a New York-based charter school chain that now comprises nearly 50 schools.

King this week said he had no immediate plans for his post-Jan. 20 life, but added, “I want to find ways to teach.”

“For me, everything I’ve done in my career has been about the same thing, which is trying to do for other kids what New York City public schools did for me. And whatever I do next will be about that, trying to make sure that the most vulnerable kids have the support they need to succeed in school.”

He urged Trump and, if she’s confirmed, DeVos, to include “the voices of teachers and principals and school counselors and people who are working in schools every day” in shaping federal policy. “That should be a permanent part of how the department thinks about its work.”

Investing in public education is “central to maintaining the American Dream,” he said.

King added, “I’m alive today, sitting here today only because of experiences in New York City public schools. And that is true for millions of people across the country, that public school is the way that they got access to opportunity.”

That notion, he said, “is fundamental to who we are as a country and a fundamental responsibility of the department.”

Jeanne Allen, CEO of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy group, said giving families more choices could actually strengthen the system. School choice, she said, is “probably not a bad thing to shake up the way people think about how systems are run.”

Public/private partnerships, for instance, could spur changes in how schools deliver education in rural communities. Combining greater school choice with Trump’s ambitious infrastructure plans, she suggested, could make distance education more practical by bringing high-speed Internet service to more families. That would allow public and private schools to share instructors, benefiting both systems.

Allen said public schools in Washington, D.C., Indiana and Louisiana have actually been strengthened by choice, but that King may not be focused on those changes.

“If he’d been working with school choice more, I think he would think differently,” she said.

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo