How Did the Idea of Education Privatization Become Normalized?
After the Office of Government Ethics released Betsy DeVos’s financial disclosure information on Friday, Senator Lamar Alexander has again delayed—until January 31st—the Senate HELP Committee’s vote on whether to recommend Betsy DeVos’s nomination for a vote on the Senate floor. The extra week gives those of us who worry about DeVos’s nomination more time to learn about Betsy DeVos and her ideas and also more time to try to keep up the pressure on our Senators to oppose her. Please continue to call your Senators and encourage your friends to do so.
In the meantime, Valerie Strauss has written an absolutely essential article to ensure that everybody is better informed. It is a history of the normalization of the idea of school privatization. As you know, privatization of education is also Betsy DeVos’s one preferred idea. Many of us remember a time when most Americans simply accepted that the public schools, paid for by the public and responsible for educating each and every student, were the best institution for meeting the needs and protecting the rights of our children.
In Democrats Reject Her, but They Helped Pave the Road to Education Nominee DeVos, Strauss explains: “Democrats have in recent years sounded—and acted—a lot like Republicans in advancing corporate education reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses, not civic institutions… By embracing many of the tenets of corporate reform—including the notion of ‘school choice’ and targeting of teachers and their unions as being blind to the needs of children—they helped make DeVos’s education views, once seen as extreme, seem less so.”
Strauss quotes the ideas Richard Devos, Betsy’s husband, presented in a speech at the Heritage How Did the Idea of Education Privatization Become Normalized? | janresseger:
