Deplorable Showing by DeVos at Contentious Senate HELP Committee Hearing
If I were a Senator on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, I’d vote against recommending the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education for a vote by the full Senate. And if I were one of my own two Senators, I’d vote no when the vote came to the Senate floor. I hope they listened to Ms. DeVos at her hearing on Tuesday evening. And I hope they were as distressed as I was by her evident lack of knowledge and experience and her ideological bent.
An excellent public servant is supposed to make government work for people. That is what good school principals strive to do all day every day. To make a huge federal department work, you need to respect its history and its mission. If you watched outgoing Secretary of State, John Kerry in his recent PBS NewsHour interview with Judy Woodruff, for example, you saw someone who understands all the international players, what they bring to the table, what can be negotiated and what is non-negotiable, and the role of compromise. In addition to having mastered the nuances of policy, an administrator of a huge federal department needs to grasp the department’s central functions, intimately know the laws the department is responsible for carrying out and enforcing, and understand the history that created the need for those laws and for the existence of the department to administer them.
In Tuesday night’s hearing, DeVos did not demonstrate any realization that the most central mission of the U.S. Department of Education is to do everything possible to protect the rights of groups of children who have been historically marginalized. The Department was created following the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society. It has an Office of Civil Rights because there are still myriad complaints by parents who believe their children have been Deplorable Showing by DeVos at Contentious Senate HELP Committee Hearing | janresseger:
