WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is using the $2 trillion coronavirus stabilization law to throw a lifeline to education sectors she has long championed, directing millions of federal dollars intended primarily for public schools and colleges to private and religious schools.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, signed in late March, included $30 billion for education institutions turned upside down by the pandemic shutdowns, about $14 billion for higher education, $13.5 billion to elementary and secondary schools, and the rest for state governments.
Ms. DeVos has used $180 million of those dollars to encourage states to create “microgrants” that parents of elementary and secondary school students can use to pay for educational services, including private school tuition. She has directed school districts to share millions of dollars designated for low-income students with wealthy private schools.
And she has nearly depleted the 2.5 percent of higher education funding, about $350 million, set aside for struggling colleges to bolster small colleges — many of them private, religious or on the margins of higher education — regardless of need. The Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential, a private college in Wisconsin that has a website debunking claims that it is a cult, received about $495,000.
Bergin University of Canine Studies in California said its $472,850 allocation was a “godsend.”
“I think we are one of the most important educational institutions out there right now,” said its founder, Bonnie Bergin, who is credited with inventing the service dog.
On the Senate floor this week, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, accused Ms. DeVos of “exploiting congressional relief efforts.” He said she had been “using a portion of that funding not to help states or localities cope with the crisis, but to augment her push for voucherlike programs, a prior initiative that has nothing to do with Covid-19.”
House Democrats included language in a stimulus bill set for a vote on Friday that would limit Ms. DeVos’s ability to use about $58 billion in additional education relief for K-12 school districts for private schools. Congress has largely rejected Ms. DeVos’s proposals to create programs that resemble private school vouchers, and public education groups say Ms. DeVos is abusing discretion granted to her under the emergency legislation to achieve a long-held agenda.
“And it only took a pandemic,” said Sasha Pudelski, the advocacy director at the AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
The Education Department called the accusation “absurd.” But in a statement, the department said that every student and teacher had been affected by the pandemic. “The current disruption to our education system has reaffirmed what Secretary DeVos has been saying for years: We need to rethink education for all students, of every age, no matter the type of school setting,” it said.
Ms. DeVos has long held that taxpayer funds should be available for private school tuition, giving parents the chance to escape failing public schools and public education competition to drive improvement.
A spokesman for Republican members of the House Education Committee defended Ms. DeVos’s actions: “While there are likely multiple ways the secretary could have interpreted this broadly written law, the language the appropriators wrote gave her the flexibility to implement it as she has done.”
The most contentious move is guidance that directs school districts to increase the share of dollars they spend on students in private schools. Under federal education law, school districts are required to use funding they receive for their poorest students to provide “equitable services,” such as tutoring and transportation for low-income students attending private schools in their districts. But the department said districts should use their emergency funding, which was doled out based on student poverty rates, to support all students attending private schools in their districts, regardless of income.
Her guidance comes as elementary and secondary education groups lobby Congress for billions of additional dollars to lift students out of the educational crisis caused by the pandemic. In big cities, which serve the most vulnerable students, district leaders are projecting budget shortfalls of up to 25 percent because of collapsing tax revenues, said the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 76 of the nation’s large urban districts. Its member districts said they could be forced to lay off 275,000 teachers.
In New York City, Chancellor Richard A. Carranza told City Council members on Tuesday that the school district was facing “the most horrific budget” it had ever seen.
The federal Education Department said if school districts were to count only poor students, “they would be placing nonpublic school students and teachers at a disadvantage that Congress did not intend.”
Reproduction: The New York Times
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