Carol Burris and I wrote about our hopes for President-Elect Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education. She or he will have to do a lot of work to clear away the mess that Betsy DeVos made in her mad rush to direct public money to private, religious, and charter schools. It’s comparable to cleaning out the Augean stables, where the mythical king Elis kept 3,000 oxen for thirty years without ever cleaning them. It’s a Herculean task!
We began:
Betsy DeVos just got her pink slip. Throughout her four-year tenure, she did everything she could to undermine public education. Instead, she promoted the idea that schooling should be a competitive free-for-all in which parents shop for schools with tax dollars and then hope it all works out. Now it is time to end that war against public schools as she walks out the door. It is time to chart a course away from the failed reforms that began with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), accelerated with Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and brought us to the place we are today.
Although education has not been a major focus of this campaign, President-elect Joe Biden, unlike Obama, talked less about “reform” and more about increased support and funding for public schools — an CONTINUE READING: Carol Burris and I: What We Hope Biden’s Secretary of Education Will Do | Diane Ravitch's blog