WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 08: U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks during a White House ... [+]
Getty ImagesYou may recall that the Department of Education, under secretary Betsy DeVos, had come up with an interpretation of CARES Act aid that directed money intended for disadvantaged public school students to private schools instead. Friday, a Washington state judge issued a stern injunction to stop the DeVos rule from being implemented.
The judge is involved because Washington state is one of several states suing the department over the rule. U.S. District Court Judge Barbara J. Rothstein (Senior District Judge, originally appointed by Jimmy Carter) has put a stop to the rule while she works on the case.
DeVos’s rule has not had a lot of support outside of the folks who would benefit from it. Even GOP Senator Lamar Alexander stated that he believed the rule was counter to the intent of Congress. At the same time, DeVos and Trump have been meeting with Catholic leaders to affirm their intent to support private schools.
Congress expected that the aid package would be distributed along the same lines as Title I, a common policy tool for aiming dollars at disadvantaged students. But the department rule claims that it “resolves a critical ambiguity” by apportioning aid to all students. For example, if a private school has 200 students, and 50 meet Title I guidelines, under Congress’s intent, the school would receive aid based on 50 students. The department rule “resolves” ambiguity by giving aid based on 200 students. This leaves less assistance for the disadvantaged students in public schools, hence the lawsuits.
The department’s full argument for ambiguity is tortured and twisted; at one point they indicate that writing “in the same manner as provided in” instead of “as provided in” creates uncertainty of meaning. As a 39-year veteran English teacher, I would say the department’s argument represents a willful attempt to twist and misunderstand fairly plain English.
Judge Rothstein seems to agree. The statute written by Congress “could hardly be less ambiguous.” The law “unequivocally and plainly instructed” the department to distribute money according to a “simple, familiar and time-tested formula.” The argument about the slightly longer phrase “is, generously put, a stretch; its adoption would render all but the most laconic Congressional directives ambiguous.” Rothstein devotes five pages to bluntly crushing the various “ambiguity” arguments, but her most scathing line is this one:
The Department’s convoluted reading essentially creates an ambiguity to justify resolving it, thereby thwarting Congress’s obvious intent.
Perhaps most ironically, Rothstein further determines that the department had no authority to write the rule in the first place; if Congress had wanted to give them that authority, their work elsewhere in the CARES act shows that they know exactly how to do that—and they didn’t.
The irony here is that DeVos long argued that she would not repeat the sins of former secretary Arne Duncan, oft-criticized for over-reaching and using the department to write laws. In a typical summation of her philosophy, she told an audience in 2017, “When it comes to education, no solution, not even ones we like, should be dictated or run from Washington, D.C.”
Conservatives often charged that Duncan’s use of rule-making (and rule-waiving) was illegal, but now Betsy DeVos is the secretary to be pulled up short by the court for exercising powers she does not have. Stay tuned to see how this plays out in other states.
The Link LonkAugust 23, 2020 at 02:30AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2020/08/22/judge-rejects-betsy-devos-plan-to-send-federal-funds-to-private-schools/
Judge Rejects Betsy DeVos Plan To Send Federal Funds To Private Schools - Forbes
https://news.google.com/search?q=Send&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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