good evening from los angeles, i'm tavis smiley. never before has an education secretary become a lightning rod for contention like betsy devos. many were horrified when the official education department twitter account misspelled devos' name not once, but twice. the former education secretary joins us to discuss betsy devos.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. i am pleased to be joined by diane rav itch, a former assistant the education secretary under bush 41. ten years ago, she published a scathing critique of the standardized testing system she

once supported in programs like no child left behind. since then, she's become a defender of public schools. i am honored to have diane ravitch on this program. how are you holding up so far? >> i'm glad to be with you. >> how are you holding up so far? >> i went paragliding the other day, i'm holding up really well. >> you're paragliding, obama is water surfing, how can you be so calm at a moment like this? >> i'm not calm, i hate what's going on. i -- there's a full scale frontal attack on our public school system. it's an outrage, close to 90% of the children in this country go to public education and public education is the bedrock of our democracy, doors open to all. taking in kids who are english language learners, kids with disabilities. kids who are troublemakers, everybody gets to come in and they're taught what they need to learn about being good citizens,

that's what we have to preserve. >> i want to give you a chance to tell your story. you've been on a journey. i want to give you time to explain that journey and how you arrived at the place you are now. is it fair, i've heard all kinds of fellow citizens make this discussion. that we need an education secretary who really believes in public education? is it fair to say that ms. devos does not believe in public education? >> it's absolutely fair. she has spent millions of dollars funding candidates who are opposed to public education, she has funded anti-public education people all over the country. she's had huge influence in michigan, michigan is now not only an all choice state. she tried to promote a referendum to put vouchers into the state constitution, and it was turned down overwhelmingly. 69-31.

she tried and failed on vouchers, still, there are hundreds of charter schools, michigan is the only state in the country where 80% of the charters operate for profit, that's the way she likes it. >> what do you make of -- and i know the simple answer is politics, i want to go a little deeper than that. i know you can. let's submerge. what do you make of what congress did? what the senate did in approving an education secretary who clearly based on the record is not a supporter of or believer in public education. what was that about? was it making sure donald trump didn't lose one early on? why would an otherwise reasonable senator, no matter what party you're in, put someone at the top of the hierarchy, who doesn't believe in the system they're overseeing? >> i think number one is, they didn't want to disappointment president trump. that's the first time i've ever said that. >> you want me to cut that out when we air this. >> i don't care. >> they didn't want to disappoint trump. but secondly, she and her family

are among the biggest donors to republican politicians in the country. she and her family has given about $50,000 each to half the members of -- half the republican members of the senate. and several of the people on the committee that approved her had received 50 to $60,000 each from the devos family. you're talking about people who are masters of dark money. and masters of being republican contributors and they were not going to let her down. >> we'll come back to where we go from here, now that she has the assignment. good i do that, though, tell me about your personal journey. i mentioned where you started, where you are now on these issues, tell me how you did all that? >> i went to public school in houston, texas. from countrier garton through 12th grade, from there i went to wonderful college in the east, wellesley college. the same college hillary clinton went to and madeleine albright

went to. i became a historian of education, had children. and i got -- i became increasingly conservative in my views, i can't tell you exactly why, but i was invited to join the first bush administration, as assistant secretary in charge of research and counselor to the secretary. the secretary then being lamar alexander, from tennessee, i have great respect for lamar. >> current senator from tennessee and head of the education committee and the senate that approved betsy devos. for a number of years i was involved in very right wing think tanks at hoover institution and two others. i was in favor of testing, i was in favor of school choice. i supported the original idea of charters, about 2005-2006 after no child left behind had been in effect for half a decade, i began to look at the results and say, this is not working. it's not helping kids, it's turning schools into testing

factories. i began to hear documented case after case where charter schools were failing, and one of the think tanks i was on was sponsoring charter schools in ohio. every single one of them was a failing school. i said, this isn't what i expected. i began writing critically about what was going on, and then decided i would write a book about what i learned. and i wrote a book in 2010 called the death and life of the great american school system. how testing and choice are undermining education. i cut my ties with all the think tanks. i found myself for a time out on a limb all by myself, and then i discovered i had a lot of new friends. i felt very comfortable in my skin, because if not for public schools i wouldn't be here. my family, my mother was an immigrant from a country that doesn't exist any more. the proudest thing she ever owned was her high school

diploma from the houston public schools. i was one of eight children, we all went to public schools. i'm not sure what the world would have been like for us had we had the kind of system that donald trump and betsy devos wants. >> did you ever give thought to staying inside of those conservative think tanks. not that you could. did you ever give any thought to staying inside there and trying to change it from the inside out? >> i was encouraged by my partner to do that, i wouldn't do it, because it became -- i felt like i would have been a mole. i didn't want to be a mole. i began disagreeing in the last few years i was there, i was the dissident and i found myself out voted again and again, and i thought, this is not very comfortable, to always be the person saying no, and no one's changing their mind. i would say, look at the evidence. we don't, things are not working, the charter's not working, all this emphasis on

test scores is treating children as if they're just data, these are children, not data. what good does it do to say to a child in third grade, you're a failure. you destroyed their self-esteem before they got started. i wasn't persuading anyone, i said, i have to get out and i did. >> you used a phrase a moment ago, that no one was changing their minds. why is no one changing their minds, even with the data you referenced? >> well, i think there's a very deep ideological commitment to the idea that testing is really important. standardized testing tells you something you need to know, now, i don't agree with this, and i've come to see that the people who like standardized testing the most are the ones who got high scores. i got high scores, i got into a wonderful college. i began to understand that this is just the standardized testing is the way of privileged maintaining their privilege p.m.

a lot of kids are going to fail and they'll be told early on, you failed, you failed, you nailed. most of those kids who will be at the bottom will be kids with disabilities, kids that don't speak english, children who grew up in poverty and they will -- not every time, they won't always fail, but most of the kids who fail will be those children, i don't want to be apart of that. i want to be a part of a new vision of education, where we look at every child and say, you have potential that we don't even recognize. and we're going to help you find that potential. and their test scores are not going to tell us what that potential is. >> if not testing, then how do we know where these children are? how do we know at what level they're performing or underperforming. >> i think you begin by trusting their teachers. i think about for example the very elite private schools, very few of them ever used standardized tests. they trust their teachers to know where the kids are, what they need to do, and how to help them, i think we can learn

everything we need to know from sampling tests, so there's something in this country called the national assessment of educational progress, that's a federal test, given every other year, we can look at that federal test and say, massachusetts is doing the best. and mississippi or alabama are doing the worst. well, what's the big difference between mississippi and alabama on one hand and massachusetts income. what you know from the standardized tests, you have a proxy for family income. you can eliminate all the standardized testing and say tell us your parents income, and we'll tell you where you fall on the spectrum, we're not helping children by labelling them. but the other part of the issue you asked me about, why don't people change their mind. it's the ideology of the free market. and we went through this period of saying democracy has concurred the world and the free market has concurred the world, and we should oppose all government bureaucracy.

that's really saying that private is always better than public. and in a healthy society, you have a private sector that's strong, and you have a public sector that's strong. >> it could also, to my mind makes education another commodity. >> exactly. >> there's a big move on, and has been for a long time to make education a commodity. the states have been shifting the burden of costs to students. there are some countries that recognize that higher education should be free because education is a human right, we shouldn't expect children and young people to pay for human rights. >> why do we -- >> you got me going now, you're saying stuff so fast, that i love. i want to follow up real quick. >> let me jump in on this one first. why in this country is education not a human right? i ask that because my friend, jesse jackson jr. of course got himself in trouble. has paid his debt to society. he every year pushed for a

constitutional amendment that would guarantee every child in this country access to -- it's the key freeze, access to an equal high quality education. access to an equal high quality education, it's not about prejudging outcomes. every child to your point ought to at least start at the same place. for all the other rights that we are guaranteed in this country. and for all the rights we are arguing about during this presidential campaign, gun rights, et cetera, et cetera. why is education not a human right in this country. >> it should be. but the word education never appears in the u.s. constitution. that's number one. a lot of people have the view that education somehow is a privilege and not a right. and i think that we're -- what we have to continue arguing for, and i think one day we'll persuade people, is that education is the most important

investment we can make, in the future of this society. and that means that this society. particularly right now, we look around, and los angeles and california is a great place to see this. we're a multicultural society. we have to educate all children, we can't just educate the privileged children, those who are in the top half, and that means that we have to see our society and the future is one where the investment in brain power, the investment in thinking skills, critical thinking skills, that has to be spread across the spectrum to all children, that's controversial right now, what we're going to see during these trump years is a push to privatize education, not a push to equalize education. to my way of thinking, every child deserves as jesse jackson jr. said, every child deserves to have a high quality school within reach of them. they shouldn't have to say, we're going to close your neighborhood school and there's a good school an hour away, but

you don't have transportation to get there. that's no choice at all. also there are a couple things to understand about school choice. number one, school choice originated with segregationists. it originated the term school choice, comes from the term 1950s, it follows, it emerges in the 1950s when the brown decision came out and all these southern governors and senators said, never, never, we will never desegregate, we will never open the doors of our schools, we need school choice. it was actually stigmatized for a long time. now we hear it coming from the president's mouth. and it's a segregationist's term and we must never forget that. i can tell you this happens wherever there is school choice, leads to more segregation, and the segregation is george wallace and strom thurmond, they understood that. >> i wonder how much of the push

toward privatization -- how much of the demonization -- how much of having an education secretary doesn't believe in education has to do with the fact you just raised a moment ago, that these schools now have more children of color in them than they ever have. i wonder whether or not wittingly or unwittingly, deliberately or unintentionally, we're writing these kids off, in part because of the way they look. >> there's no question that the movement for school choice has gotten its greatest momentum among the most right wing politicians. it's been funded by the koch brothers, it also has a segregating impact. that means that in some states, the charter schools, for example, will be very white, because they don't want to go to school with black kids. in some cities, they'll be all black. the charter schools will be more segregated than a district that's considered segregated.

and the approach of these charter schools particularly when they're called no excuses is that black children need to be civilized. they need to be taught to obey, they need to stand in line, they need to wear a certain outfit and never ask questions, just to do what they're told. this is not creating children who think for themselves, this is creating children who are obedient. and many studies have been done including one that came out of texas just last year was done by a procharter economist from harvard, they said the children who go to charter schools in general in texas have lower test scores, lower lifetime earnings, the children who go to the no excuses charter schools have higher test scores, not a lot higher, but some higher. and no difference in terms of their lifetime earning. all this effort to divert money from the public schools where most kids are, every dollar for charters comes out of public schools. every dollar for vouchers comes

out of public schools. that means that where most kids are, the situation becomes worse. >> and yet what's killing me is that, i feel about education some days, diane, the same way i feel about climate change or global warming. is that there are people who are running the country in washington who just don't want to believe the science, they don't want to read the data. so i come back again to miss devos, how is it we have someone running the education department where it was abundantly clear in the hearings, all the data pointed out they are not doing well in michigan at all. after all the money they poured in, we acted during those hearings as if the data didn't exist. >> the other day i was giving a talk at -- somewhere in texas, and someone said, what's the best ammunition against privatization? i said the best ammunition is evidence. if anyone will listen to it, i

can't promise you they'll listen to it, look at michigan. michigan used to be right in the middle of the states and the states are ranked by their test scores on the national test given by the federal government. michigan was at about 25, 26, 27 in 2003, it's now scraping the bottom. number 47. number 48. michigan's down there with mississippi and alabama after 10 years of devos' policies. if you look at detroit where choice has been the answer to everything, detroit is the lowest performing urban district in the country. nothing has been done to help the children of detroit. if you want to help the children of detroit, first of all they wouldn't all be -- most of them wouldn't be poor, and secondly they would have health services, they would have adequate food, all kinds of programs to help them have a decent life. >> my granddad used to say all the time, diane, i don't -- tavis, i don't know what the question is, but the answer is

gin. i don't know what the question is, but the answer is gin. i think about that when i think about privatization. it's almost as if the question doesn't matter. for education, for everything, i don't care what the question is, the answer is privatization. when, where and how where education is concerned did we fall in love with the answer, privatization to everything? >> this has been the goal of the far right for a very long time, for maybe the last 25, 30 or more years, there's an organization which is not well known called alec. it was started in 1973, it is devoted to privatization. when it started it was very small, now it has over 2,000 state legislatures who belong. alec writes the model legislation, and they carry it back to their home state and write in their states name about making guns freely available, eliminating any regulation on the environment.

taking away any right to join a union, taking away any right for teachers to have any kind of job security. it's all coming out of alec. they've been working on this since 1973. that's a lot of years. and many other right wing organizations, whether it's the heritage foundation and they're now these little mini-conservative foundations in every state talking about libertarianism and freedom, and what they really mean is privatization, they don't want a public sector. i've been challenged about this, where people say, would you want to live in public housing, would you want to take public transit? do you want to have a police department, a fire department. do you want to have public beaches and highways? or are you going to have your own highway? are we going to privatize the highways? shall we get rid of our public forests and national parks? you have to have a strong public sector, and education is a public responsibility. >> what does, for the next four years, what does the fight look

like on the education front. >> i think strange as it may seem, betsy devos has been a gift to those of us who are opposed to privatization. this has been flying under the radar, i mean, obama administration was promoting charter schools, and they kept showing one stellar charter school after another. and the data were usually not there, at one point they went down to florida with jeb bush to celebrate a school that had turned around, and a month later that school that allegedly turned around because of firing all the teachers was put on the state failing list to be closed. and we have needed to have a president who would fight for public education, and we didn't have that in obama. >> do i hear you saying that betsy devos is really obama and arne duncan on steroids? >> she's worse than that. i mean, obama and duncan never went for vouchers, they drew the line. the problem is, when you say as obama and duncan did, they're

for school choice and they draw the line at vouchers, it's hard to maintain that line. it's like being a little bit pregnant. once you go down the road of saying public schools are failing, teachers are bad, that was wrong. factually wrong, public schools in this country do an incredible job despite the lack of public support they should be getting. i've been in schools where there are kids -- teenagers wearing diapers. they don't want them in the charter schools, they don't want them in the voucher schools. i have been in schools where there are kids who don't speak english and they don't want them in privatized schools. the public schools are doing an amazing job, and what strikes me as the most startlingly ignorant thing, here we are arguably the most powerful country in the world, the most creative country in the world, the most powerfully exciting country in the world about and they say our education system stinks. i wrote a book about what a lie

that is. the test scores are higher than they've ever been in history for every group of kids. the graduation rates for every group of kids is the highest they've ever been in history. the dropout rate is the lowest in history. they say our schools are failing, the whole failure narrative is about setting up the schools for privatization. where is the fight going to come from? betsy devos has energized the fight back. my organization, the network for public education, we were moving along, we had 25,000 members and in a period of two months, we're over 350,000 members. we have members in every community in this country and they're angry and they want to save their schools and their parents and teachers. and we're not the unions, and so we will coordinate -- there are now groups forming in every state in this country to fight back republicans, democrats, independents. they believe in public education.

she has awakened the sleeping giant. >> we clearly have the skill, do we have the will? >> that's going to be determined in the next four years, it isn't just betsy devos, it's about all kinds of services, public services, that this administration will privatize if given the chance. >> thank you for your work, and your insights. >> thank you. >> good to have you on. >> that's our show for tonight. good night from los angeles, thanks for watching. and as always, keep the faith. for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. join me next time for a conversation with actor eric braden about his new memoir. that's next time, we'll see you then.

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

good evening from los angeles, i'm tavis smiley, tonight a conversation with david oyelowo. he joins us to discuss his latest film "a united kingdom." the co-stars inspired by a true story of an african-american prince to a white clerk who became his queen. we're glad you joined us, david oyelowo in just a moment.