Teaching the value of ignorance
“GOVERNMENT really sucks.” This belief, expressed by the just-confirmed education secretary, Betsy DeVos, in a 2015 speech to educators, may be the only qualification she needed for President Trump.
DeVos is the perfect cabinet member for a president determined to appoint officials eager to destroy the agencies they run.
She has never run, taught in, attended or sent a child to an American public school, and her confirmation hearings laid bare her ignorance of education policy. She has donated millions to groups that want to replace public schools with charter schools and convert taxpayer dollars into vouchers to help parents send children to private and religious schools.
While her nomination gave exposure to a debate about charter schools as an alternative to traditional public schools, her hard-line opposition to any real accountability for these schools undermined their founding principle as well as her support.
In DeVos, the decades-long struggle to improve public education gains no visionary leadership and no fresh ideas.
Charter pioneers promised that charters would be held accountable for improving student performance, and shut down if they failed.
DeVos has spent tens of millions and many years in an effort to force Michigan to replace public schools with privately run charters and to use vouchers to move talented students out of failing public schools. She has fought legislation to stop failing charters from expanding, and lobbied to shut down the troubled Detroit public school system and channel the money to charter, private or religious schools, regardless of their performance.
In her hearing, DeVos appeared largely ignorant of challenges facing college students. She indicated that she was sceptical of Education Department policies to prevent fraud by for-profit colleges.
In the end, only two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, opposed DeVos, leaving Vice President Mike Pence to cast the tiebreaking vote. Maybe the others figured it wasn’t worth risking Trump’s wrath by rejecting his selection to lead a department that accounts for only about 3 percent of the federal budget. Maybe they couldn’t ignore the $200 million the DeVos family has funnelled to Republicans, including campaigns of 10 of the 12 Republican senators on the committee that vetted her.
The tens of thousands of parents and students who called, emailed and signed petitions opposing DeVos’s confirmation refused to surrender to Trump. They couldn’t afford to have a billionaire hostile to government run public schools that already underperform the rest of the developed world.
Did anyone who backed this shameful appointment think about them?