Betsy DeVos Broke the Ed. Reform Coalition – For Now
When Betsy DeVos was confirmed as United States Secretary of Education, she required an unprecedented tie-breaker vote by Vice President Mike Pence. This was because all 48 Senate Democrats voted against her along with 2 Republicans. A barrage of phone calls from constituents, her demonstrable ignorance about federal education policy, her utter lack of experience with running a large organization, and unanswered questions about her financial conflicts of interest could not scuttle her nomination – but it got closer than any cabinet nominee in recent memory. Betsy DeVos took her office with a the only bipartisan consensus being the one against her.
On the one hand, DeVos presented a very reasonable target for opposition. She really has no relevant experience whatsoever. She is an ideologue rather than a expert who has made her “name” in education by leveraging her inherited wealth into buying the votes of state legislators. While many school reform advocates favor shifting tax money to privately managed entities, DeVos appears to see the privatization of public money as a goal in and of itself without regard for outcomes. Advocacy groups funded by her actually scuttled legislation in Michigan that would have kept failing charter schools from expanding, and she has demonstrated no interest in holding the overwhelmingly for profit charter sector in her home state accountable to much of anything, leaving Michigan sending $1 billion annually into a sector rife with self dealing and absent any oversight worthy of the word. DeVos favored policies have wrought additional havoc on Detroit Public Schools, leaving children wandering a landscape with a glut of seats which are distributed so unequally that getting to a school consumes hours of commuting time and where families are encouraged to “vote with their feet” – even if it means changing schools multiple times a year.
And if that record were not enough, DeVos gave Senators plenty of reasons to oppose her during her testimony which was peppered with evasions and displays suggesting she knows painfully little about federal education policy. She whiffed a question on one of the central policy issues of the past decade. She bobbed and weaved to avoid talking about accountability. She appeared to have no knowledge about federal laws regarding educating students with disabilities. She was pathetically glib about the question of guns in schools. And when Senators sent her written questions to answer in further detail after her hearing, she plagiarized some of her responses. On top of all of that, DeVos was confirmed with votes from a raft of Republican Senators who reply on her cash for their Betsy DeVos Broke the Ed. Reform Coalition – For Now | Daniel Katz, Ph.D.: