“I would like your views,” Senator Al Franken said to Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary-designate, at her confirmation hearing, on Tuesday, “on the relative advantage of doing assessments and using them to measure proficiency or to measure growth.”
The question was about whether states should measure how many kids meet an absolute standard, or how an individual child’s performance improves or declines. DeVos has never worked as an educator, and she struggled to understand the distinction. “I think, if I’m understanding your question correctly around proficiency, I would also correlate it to competency and mastery,” DeVos said, “so that each student is measured according to the advancement that they’re making in each subject.”
“Well, that’s growth,” Franken said. “That’s not proficiency.” Franken’s plaintive earnestness can be cloying; here, it became an instrument. “I’m talking about the debate between proficiency and growth and what your thoughts are,” he said. “This is a subject that has been debated in the education community for years. And I’ve advocated growth, as the chairman and every member of this committee knows, because with proficiency, the teacher ignores the kids at the top who are not going to fall below proficiency, and they ignore the kid at the bottom, who no matter what they do will never get to proficiency.” Franken had landed on this topic a little elliptically, having cited a conversation with a Minnesota principal about the difficulty of applying test results to individual instruction. Now he zeroed in on the news in front of him, which was that the nominee for Education Secretary was not conversant in education policy. “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue,” he said.
Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, had allowed each senator only five minutes to question DeVos. In these short exchanges, the committee’s Democratic members did remarkable damage. Under questioning from Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, DeVos not only refused to say that guns had no place in schools but also advanced the ludicrous position that they might be needed to protect against “potential grizzlies.” Bernie Sanders got the nominee to admit that her family had spent as much as two hundred million dollars to elect Republicans. Elizabeth Warren’s prodding revealed that DeVos had little to say about the problem of student debt. Under Tim Kaine’s questioning, she repeatedly declined to say that she would hold charter or private schools to the same accountability standards as public schools. Maggie Hassan’s questioning showed that DeVos did not understand the federal government’s legal responsibility to protect students with disabilities. “I may have confused it,” DeVos said.
The typical Trump nominee has not been the ideologue but the glib billionaire, disdainful both of the Senate confirmation process and of subject-specific expertise. Last week, Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil C.E.O. who is Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, tried to duck questions about the company’s role in denying climate change. Kaine asked, “Do you lack the knowledge to answer my question, or are you refusing to answer my question?” Tillerson replied, “A little of both.” Tillerson’s performance was so unimpressive, Slate reported on Tuesday, that Republican and Democratic senators sent an astonishing one thousand follow-up questions to the nominee, seeking clarification on his views. Yesterday, DeVos was the one besieged. Today, Cory Booker questioned Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee for E.P.A. administrator, who, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, not only joined a dozen industry lawsuits against the E.P.A. but at times directly copied the language of energy-company lawyers in doing so. Booker asked Pruitt if he knew how many children in Oklahoma had asthma. He didn’t, but the answer turned out be a hundred and eleven thousand, a tenth of the children in the state. “You’ve been writing letters on behalf of polluting industries,” Booker said. “I want to ask you, how many letters did you write to the E.P.A. about this health crisis?” Pruitt tried to explain that lawsuits require an injured party and that, in the case of the E.P.A. litigation, the injured parties were the energy corporations. “Injury?” Booker said, drawing out the word, and then he returned to the matter of all those asthmatic kids in Oklahoma.
On Thursday comes another billionaire, the Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin. The advance word on Mnuchin, who spent six years leading a foreclosure operation, has not been strong. “Transition officials tell us they are worried about Steven Mnuchin’s readiness,” Mike Allen reported. Mnuchin had come across as “uneven and stiff” in practice sessions; extra consultants had been brought in to help him cram.
The primary drama of confirmation hearings is whether nominees will do something so misguided that they actually endanger their chances of confirmation. But there are deeper dynamics at work this year. The Democratic senators, in closed-door meetings with the nominees, have been discovering what the Trump Administration will be, and choosing where they will oppose it. The charge of illegitimacy made last week by John Lewis was part of a broader turn among Democratic representatives toward a politics of unified opposition, with an emphasis on the defense of working people. Last Thursday, nearly all of the Party’s senators stayed in the chambers past one in the morning, for a procedural vote on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. They had already lost, but they stayed so that each senator could cast his or her vote by voice and (though the Senate’s rules forbid it) shout, over the gavel, his or her reason for voting against repeal. “For all those with preëxisting conditions, I stand on prosthetic legs to vote no,” Senator Tammy Duckworth said. “On behalf of the thousands of people who receive health care in my state in rural hospitals who do not know how they are going to get health care if this passes without a replacement, I vote no,” Senator Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, whose seat Republicans will target in 2018, said. “On behalf of elderly people who cannot afford higher prescription drugs, I vote no,” Sanders said. Murphy was most succinct. “This is cruel and inhumane,” he said. “I vote no.”
Many conservatives have wanted to make the repeal of the A.C.A. the first big fight of the Trump Administration. Increasingly, Democrats want that, too. An NBC poll released this week found that, for the first time since the law’s passage, more people supported the law than opposed it. “My constituents are freaking out” over the suggestion that their health care could be taken away, Representative Richard Hudson, a Republican from North Carolina, said. Trump has promised not just repeal but replacement, but no one really knows what the replacement will look like (as the conservative health-care-policy expert Yuval Levin notes in a nuanced treatment of the situation, in National Review). And the President-elect himself has sent signals promising a new policy with universal coverage and much lower deductibles, whose mechanisms have not been described and whose aims seem functionally impossible.
“I envy you so much right now, because I would love to be on the field,” President Obama told a closed-door meeting of Democratic legislators, earlier this month. This, like Obama’s general optimism about the A.C.A.’s survival, was treated by progressives at the time as at least a little fanciful, and maybe even unrealistic. But perhaps he understood something about how much might hinge on political tactics or acts of persuasion. The new President-elect has at once full partisan control of government and historically low approval ratings; he is committed to working to repeal the public health-insurance system, but no one knows how he will do it. After the caution and muddle of the Hillary Clinton campaign, a defense of public health insurance offers Democrats some helpful clarity—a line between where they and Republicans stand. Perhaps the looming fight over the A.C.A. has something to do with the ways in which the Democrats have aligned themselves with science, and expertise, and asthmatic kids. These fights are prelude to a bigger one.
