Betsy DeVos Is Celebrated at Week-Long Pep Rally Sponsored by Group Whose Board She Chaired | janresseger

Betsy DeVos Is Celebrated at Week-Long Pep Rally Sponsored by Group Whose Board She Chaired | janresseger:

Betsy DeVos Is Celebrated at Week-Long Pep Rally Sponsored by Group Whose Board She Chaired

The timing of School Choice Week, which generally occurs late in January, is coincidentally auspicious this year for the woman who has funded its founding organization, the Alliance for School Choice, and who has also chaired the organization’s board of directors.  If crowds in matched t-shirts and yellow scarves have been parading around your town celebrating school privatization and Betsy DeVos this week, it’s important to realize it wasn’t a spontaneous rally.

In the Washington Post, Emma Brown describes the kind of rally you may have noticed and why it happened this week: “National School Choice Week, a celebration of charter schools, private schools, home schooling and other education options, could not have fallen at a more opportune time for DeVos. The annual effort, held this year between Jan. 22 and Jan. 28, includes thousands of events around the country that bring together people who largely see DeVos not as a threat to pubic education, as her critics have framed her, but as a champion of extending more choices to more parents.”  There was a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday and, according to Brown, 21,000 events were scheduled around the country.

Twenty-one thousand events promoting her pet idea must feel like a blessing to Betsy DeVos, whose confirmation as our next U.S. Secretary of Education will be voted on by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee next Tuesday morning, January 31, at 10 o’clock.  After all, she did poorly in her confirmation hearing on January 17-–flubbing a question about measuring academic growth or benchmark proficiency—one of the key controversies in the debate about test-based school accountability—and another about the federal government’s role in enforcing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It has Betsy DeVos Is Celebrated at Week-Long Pep Rally Sponsored by Group Whose Board She Chaired | janresseger: