Betsy DeVos, Focus
Family,
and
our
Schools
on the
Public
From 1998 to 2010, Betsy DeVos and her family’s foundations
donated millions dollars to Focus on the Family. A decade
earlier, she and her parents gave the organization funds to
launch its political lobbying firm, the Family Research
Council. Their donations helped transform Focus on the Family
from a small organization centered on James Dobson’s
conservative Christian parenting books into a multimedia
empire with syndicated radio broadcasts, a publishing house,
and an extensive online presence that promotes and echochambers its conservative Christian worldview. The immense
investments in Focus by DeVos and her family reveal her deep
connection to the ideals of the organization and to Dobson
himself, who was its CEO until 2009. When DeVos states, “If
confirmed, I will be a strong advocate for great public
schools. But, if a school is troubled, or unsafe, or not a
good fit for a child . . . we should support a parent’s right
to enroll their child in a high-quality alternative,” we
should not assume that she agrees with most educators on the
definition of what constitutes a “great public school” or an
“unsafe” one.
Due to her financial support of Focus on the Family, it is
reasonable to believe that her priorities align closely with
Dobson’s. A closer look at Dobson’s public efforts to bring
conservative Christian perspectives into the public
conversation about schools will make the differences in these
pivotal definitions more apparent.
Beginning in 1970, with his bestselling childrearing book Dare
to Discipline, Dobson has attempted to transform the American
family and the American school system from one centered on
children and multicultural pluralism to one centered on his
conservative understanding of biblical truth. His ultimate
goal for students is not to increase their critical thinking
skills but to ensure that they can achieve salvation and help
bring the nation closer to his theological ideal. Dobson
includes chapters such as “Discipline in the Classroom” and
“The Barriers to Learning,” criticizing the consequences of an
education system centered on societal rather than divine
goals.
This book was written during the era of ongoing racial
desegregation and protest, but he addresses these questions
obliquely by highlighting the consequences of permissive
leadership in public schools. Dobson, for instance, linked
the Supreme Court’s rulings that removed religious devotion
in the schools to an increase in disciplinary problems.
He seeks to redress this by advocating that teachers enforce
their authority. In Dobson’s view, teachers, like parents,
teach through role modeling:
teachers must embody their
divine role as leaders to whom children must submit while also
teaching curricula that reflects God’s Truth—a truth that must
be embodied but never questioned.
Focus supported Christians attending public schools through
the 1990s, even as these schools were embracing pluralism and
representing their diversifying student body in their
curricula. Dobson and Focus argued that public schools gave
Christian students and teachers an opportunity to influence
liberal Christians and non-Christians through words and
actions. They pushed these public-school missionaries to
advocate for a curriculum that reflected their values. The
appropriate curriculum for Dobson was the narrative that he
learned in school in the 1950s and 60s: histories of
triumphant white Christian men modeling leadership qualities
as they built an exceptional nation of founded on democracy,
economic strength, and military might.
In 2002, however, Dobson called for parents to remove their
children from public schools after students in one California
district attended a play that included the lines “I’m gay and
that’s okay.”
In representing the Christians parents’ perspective, Dobson
emphasized that the school had ignored the Christian students’
(eternal) safety in favor of the (immediate) safety of others.
The school, he argued, had put the children at risk of
imitating the attitudes of their teachers, actors in these
dramas, and friends who were no longer forced to hide their
sexuality. Such imitations of any non-heterosexual conduct,
Focus has long taught, disobeyed God by rejecting divinelyordained conventional gender roles. With the risk of damnation
looming and efforts at reform failing, Dobson urged parents to
do what he did in 1973 when the American Psychological
Association voted to depathologize homosexuality–drop out in
protest to promote Christian alternatives.
During the many decades that DeVos family has financially
supported Focus, the organization has shared its vision with
Betsy DeVos and other supporters of what constitutes a great
school:
great schools center around a singular narrative of America
driven by the stories of great (white Christian) men; great
schools teach curricula and employ teachers who act as “safe”
heterosexual role models for students; and great schools
teach children to submit to adults rather than challenge
them.
Unsafe schools do the opposite, teaching critical thinking,
multiple truths, and modeling a variety of ways to be ethical
men, women, and transgender citizens.
— Susan B. Ridgely is associate professor of American religion
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of
Practicing what the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on the
Family (Oxford, 2016).
Photo by Matthew