DeVos Privatization Schemes Are Blocked by Courts and Likely to Be Further Blocked by Congress
Betsy DeVos, a lifelong supporter of private and religious schools and the expansion of tax-funded tuition vouchers for private schools, has pursued the privatization of public education throughout her tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education. In recent months DeVos devised a way to divert to private schools some of the funding Congress appropriated for public school CARES Act relief, and this month DeVos has persisted by working with Sen. Ted Cruz to insert her $5 billion Opportunity Scholarship tuition tax credit program into a new Senate coronavirus relief package.
Famous for disdaining public institutions, DeVos once declared: “Government really sucks.” Everyone has worried for over three years that Betsy DeVos might succeed in radically expanding school privatization from her perch in the Trump administration, but, despite all the rhetoric, she hasn’t succeeded. Now her CARES Act initiative has been struck down, and her tuition tax credit scheme is headed nowhere.
Court Permanently Blocks DeVos CARES Act Distribution Favoring Private Schools
In July, Betsy DeVos imposed a binding rule to favor distribution of a significant portion of last spring’s CARES Act relief money to private schools at the expense of the public schools serving the nation’s poorest children. Last Friday, in NAACP v. DeVos, the third court decision on DeVos’s CARES Act rule in recent weeks, a federal judge permanently blocked DeVos’s plan.
POLITICO’s Michael Stratford explains: “U.S District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that DeVos ran afoul of the CARES Act when she required public schools to send a greater share of pandemic assistance to private school students than CONTINUE READING: DeVos Privatization Schemes Are Blocked by Courts and Likely to Be Further Blocked by Congress | janresseger