Revealing wording in a pro-Betsy DeVos television ad
Two ads have been running on television for days now in support of Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire tapped by President Trump to be education secretary. The ads began amid an unprecedented battle over her confirmation, with the Senate expected to vote Tuesday.
The ads, put out by a group run by former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, are what you’d expect from a pro-DeVos ad: Democrats angry that Trump won can’t stand her, and her opponents don’t want equal opportunity education for all students like she does. But there’s wording at the end that is interesting.
And here’s the sentence, spoken by someone doing the voice-over, with the revealing language:
DeVos believes in giving families a choice: charter schools, online schools, parochial schools and outstanding public schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded. That technically makes them public schools, even when they are run by for-profit companies that make a lot of money from them, as many do. Charter school supporters are quick to say that charter schools are public when advocates for traditional public schools accuse them of operating like private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public in the same way.
But here, in an advertisement for one of the leaders of the school choice movement in the country, produced by a firm whose president is pro-choice, the language separates charter schools from public schools. It also says that she believes in giving families a choice of “outstanding” public schools, but she doesn’t qualify the charter schools in the same way — or, for that matter, the online and religious schools.
This is the kind of language that infuriates advocates for public education who oppose DeVos, Revealing wording in a pro-Betsy DeVos television ad - The Washington Post: