DeVos equates lack of school choice with communist East Germany - POLITICO

DeVos equates lack of school choice with communist East Germany - POLITICO

DeVos equates lack of school choice with communist East Germany

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Friday that students who lack the means to attend the school of their choice enjoy as much freedom as those in East Germany had under communist rule.

In remarks to the conservative Young America’s Foundation, DeVos recalled her own travels decades ago in which she saw the stark differences between “tyranny and freedom” in East and West Germany. And she lauded President Ronald Reagan’s “purpose and principle” in fighting successfully to tear down the Berlin Wall.

“While that wall was reduced to rubble, there’s another kind of wall that needs tearing down today,” DeVos said at the gathering at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif. “This wall is just as old and just as devastating to those who — through no fault of their own — happen to live on the wrong side.”

DeVos said she was describing a figurative wall in the United States that “separates wealthy, powerful or well-connected students from those who aren’t wealthy, powerful or well-connected.”

Families who aren’t wealthy “have about as much education freedom in America today as East Germans had freedom to do anything back then,” she said.

DeVos continued the metaphor further, seemingly drawing a parallel between unions and the “evil empire,” a label that Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union.

“Too many students are up against another ‘empire’ — governments, unions, associations of this and organizations of that,” DeVos said. “It’s an education cabal that protects the status quo at the expense of just about everyone else.”

DeVos has been urging Congress to pass a $5 billion plan to create a new federal tax credit to expand scholarships to help families pay for attending the school of their choice, including private schools.

DeVos equates lack of school choice with communist East Germany - POLITICO