Important Perspectives on the Danger of Betsy DeVos
As Donald Trump begins his presidency, a danger is that those of us who care about public education will give up and neglect to stand up for this institution that has defined our society. Maybe—when the Affordable Care Act and stability in the Middle East and civil rights protections and the minimum wage and nuclear nonproliferation and programs to curtail climate change are all being threatened—we’ll just capitulate. Maybe we’ll just hope dysfunction in Washington will thwart Betsy DeVos’s radical quest to steal essential funds from Title I and the already paltry federal budget line for schools to serve children under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and use the money to expand vouchers and charter schools nationwide. Because we’ve taken our public school system for granted for so long, we may simply forget to defend public education.
Our democracy is complex enough, however, to entertain debate and develop policy simultaneously on a multitude of issues, and no one program or issue is more important than any other. Those of us who care about the public schools must speak up at this juncture when the schools that serve over 90 percent of our society’s children and adolescents are at risk from the policies of this new administration. We cannot permit the protest against Betsy DeVos and her policies to be characterized merely as a battle between the teachers unions and the Trump administration. We all need to speak up.
Here are some examples of important ways people are speaking up to defend public education and opposing the nomination and likely policies of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.
In a wonderful column over the holidays for the NY Times, Timothy Egan profiles the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, who made sure to mention the public schools in his Important Perspectives on the Danger of Betsy DeVos | janresseger:
