If I were to ask Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos what the biggest threat to education is, she might say grizzly bears — and I would say it’s because she treats education like a free market. 

DeVos uses school choice as a means to create a free market in the education system by offering private enterprises, competition and minimal restrictions. The idea is that through government-sponsored programs, such as school vouchers or charter schools, parents can select the optimal education that fits their child’s needs. Thus the private, parochial or charter school becomes the private enterprise and they compete against public schools in the market for students and public funding. 

In a perfect world these schools would constantly be improving their curriculum to attract and maintain their students. This isn’t to say that competition is a bad thing, but that it’s most effective when the enterprises are operating at optimal capacity. Therefore, when expectations are low and you’re in a district with underperforming charter and public schools, there is no incentive to improve and parents are left with one bad school choice after another. 

School choice and competition aren’t inherently bad for education, but they’re inconsistent because of a lack of accountability since they overshadow the real issues, such as the socioeconomic education gaps. 

Christopher Bernhart, a first-year resident in the Urban Teacher Residency program,  is among those concerned that low-income students will be at a further disadvantage with school choice legislature. 

“(School choice) could ultimately destabilize the American public school system. A voucher system heavily bifurcated the Chilean school system and created a massive gap between lower resources students and schools of higher affluence,” Bernhart said via email. “(DeVos’) policies by and large, will disproportionately impact students of color, and prop up a social class system that legitimizes through law a race-based socioeconomic class system.” 

To put it simply, DeVos is using school choice as a band-aid to cover the gushing grizzly bear wound in America’s educational system rather than address how to improve the public schools that are already in place. But competition isn’t the only consequence of treating education like a free market, there’s privatization as well. 

Joel Walsh, a curriculum and instruction graduate student, is hesitant of private businesses demonstrating interest in charter school investments. 

“Charter schools were originally meant to incubate innovative instructional practices and allow the administration to have more power over hiring and hiring alongside school culture,” Walsh says. “One of the reasons why they proliferated so much is because you get tax breaks through the New Market Tax Credit, which is why you have a lot of hedge funds involved in charter schools.”

Even Trump has argued that school choice will offer higher quality education to lower income families. What he and DeVos fail to consider is that with privatization comes lax regulation and these schools could eventually turn their backs on the students they’re meant to help. 

“This could incentivize creaming,” Walsh says, “where schools try to selectively cancel out students with learning disabilities or students with low test scores. So then it becomes a profit margin where they ask ‘what’s the least amount of money I can spend to raise test scores?’”

This isn’t to say that all charter schools or school choice alternatives are bad. In fact, KIPP charter schools have found success in helping minority and low-income students. The issue at hand is believing that a free market bringing in privatization, competition and deregulation will repair America’s educational system. The real solution is more complicated because it means we have to recognize the hard truth that not every American is given an equal opportunity before we can take steps to mend our educational system.

Fernandez is a rhetoric and writing and Spanish senior from Allen.