Politics

After backlash, DeVos backpedals on remarks on historically black colleges

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during a a meeting of the National Governors Association in State Dining Room of the White House. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

By YAMICHE ALCINDOR, New York Times Service

4 minutes to read

WASHINGTON — Facing a fierce backlash after she called historically black colleges and universities “real pioneers” of school choice, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, spent Tuesday afternoon backtracking on the controversial statement and highlighting the institutions’ roots in racism and segregation.

DeVos, in a series of Twitter posts on Tuesday and in remarks at a luncheon with presidents from some of the schools, repeatedly acknowledged that the schools were not created simply to give African-Americans more choices but because black students across the country were not allowed into segregated white schools. The controversy is the latest gaffe for DeVos, who has had a rough start.

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Since Vice President Mike Pence cast the tiebreaking vote to confirm her, DeVos has fled from a small group of protesters who temporarily blocked her from entering a school, been criticized by a middle school’s administrators for saying their teachers were in “receive mode,” and suffered through the embarrassment of the Education Department misspelling the name of civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois in an official tweet.

The latest controversy began Monday evening when DeVos released a statement shortly after meeting with several presidents of historically black colleges and universities. In it, DeVos began by praising the schools for making “tangible, structural reforms” that allowed students, often underserved, to reach their full potential.

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“They started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education,” she said in the statement. “They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution.”

Historically black colleges and universities “are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” the statement continued. “They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”

On Twitter, hundreds of angry users accused her of ignoring the fact that many of the schools were founded because black students were not allowed to attend segregated white schools, not because education pioneers wanted to give African-Americans more options in higher education. Many accused her of using the nation’s history of segregation to advance a contemporary political agenda.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said the comment was “tone deaf,” adding that the schools “weren’t ‘more options’ for black students — for many years, they were the only option.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., called the statement “totally nuts” and said that DeVos was “pretending that establishment of historically black colleges was about choice not racism.”

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Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, wrote that DeVos “appears ignorant of racial segregation” during the Jim Crow era.

On Tuesday afternoon, DeVos seemed to backpedal on her statement at a luncheon for the school presidents at the Library of Congress.

“Bucking that status quo, and providing an alternative option to students denied the right to attend a quality school is the legacy of HBCUs,” she said, according to prepared remarks released by her office. “But your history was born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War.”

She added that historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, “remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many,” and that the schools “made higher education accessible to students who otherwise would have been denied the opportunity.”

DeVos later published several tweets repeating those sentiments in an effort to clear up her earlier comments.

“Providing an alternative option to students denied the right to attend a quality school is the legacy of HBCUs,” she wrote, adding that “HBCUs remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many.”

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Still, DeVos in her speech referred to Mary McLeod Bethune, a famous civil rights activist and educator, as a leader who “is less well known than others in the HBCU legacy.” DeVos said Bethune, who founded Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, inspired her because she recognized that traditional schools “systemically failed to provide African-Americans access to a quality education — or, sadly, more often to any education at all.”

DeVos, an aggressive backer of publicly funded vouchers that public school students could use for private school tuition, also used her speech before the presidents of several historically black colleges and universities to highlight school choice programs. She pointed out that her friend and a black woman attending the luncheon, Denisha Merriweather, had been raised by a single mother in poverty, failed the third grade twice, but is now scheduled to graduate in May with a master’s degree because a family member intervened in her life “with the assistance of a school choice program in Florida.”

DeVos also mentioned an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon dealing with historically black colleges and universities. A White House official said the order was designed to more closely coordinate the White House with efforts to increase funding to the schools and to encourage more private groups and organizations to work with the schools.