Should a teacher really be the U.S. secretary of education? - The Washington Post

Should a teacher really be the U.S. secretary of education? - The Washington Post

Should a teacher really be the U.S. secretary of education?

In May, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced that if she were to become the U.S. president, she would hire a teacher to become education secretary and in the same speech, bashed President Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

“Let’s get a person with real teaching experience,” she said in a May 13 email to supporters, taking the position that such experience would be useful for an education secretary. “A person who understands how low pay, tattered textbooks and crumbling classrooms hurt students and educators.”

Trump was not the first president to hire a non-educator as secretary; Republican and Democratic presidents have done the same.

Of the 11 education secretaries (not including those who served in an acting capacity), three were K-12 teachers: John B. King Jr. under President Barack Obama; Terrel Bell under President Ronald Reagan, and Roderick Paige under President George W. Bush. The rest, nope. Several of them, however, did have experience teaching in higher education, and one, Lauro F. Cavazos, who served under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, was president of a university.

But DeVos’s attitude about traditional public schools — she once called them a “dead end” — and her poor performance at her confirmation hearing in Congress, rallied Democrats against her, and she became the first Cabinet member in U.S. history to be confirmed when the vice president broke a tie.

Warren, a former teacher, went directly after DeVos in that same May email, saying: “I’ll just be blunt: Betsy DeVos is the worst secretary of education we’ve seen.”

Her promise to hire a teacher as DeVos’s successor was met with support — and prompted several other Democratic candidates to say the same thing if they were to win.

So is hiring an educator as secretary an automatic slam dunk? This is the question that veteran educator Peter Greene explores in the post below. It first appeared in Forbes, and Greene gave me permission to republish it. CONTINUE READING: Should a teacher really be the U.S. secretary of education? - The Washington Post