A collection of articles and information, sorted by date, about President-elect Trump's choice for US Secretary of Education. Check back frequently for additional articles.
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November 26, 2016
From Dispatches From the Culture Wars
The Betsy Devos Nomination. Egads
She is, for all intents and purposes, an enemy of public education. She is perhaps the wealthiest and most consistent backer of school vouchers in the country (and her various foundations that work toward that end have been nailed for violating election laws more than once). She is a huge backer of charter schools, which have been mostly a disaster here in Michigan. I’m actually fine with charter schools in the abstract, but they are very often used as a way to use public funds to teach religion. Legally, they are supposed to be held to the same constitutional standards as public schools, but that rarely happens in practice.
From educationdc
Meet Our New Public Education Personnel: Just Like the Old Ones (Only More So)
Dick DeVos himself has gone even further, urging supporters to call public schools “government-run schools,” to highlight what the DeVos clan apparently considers the horrible, terrible, no-good thing that is public education in the United States–which, in addition to educating everyone everywhere is also run by the public for the benefit of the public. (Quelle horreur!)
Never mind that it is uniquely American to guarantee everyone a decent and free education–and that this idea has been the engine of the American middle class education for more than a century. The DeVos’s believe that privatizing public education is in the best interests of our nation.
From A View From the Edge
Our New Education Secretary, Mr$. Bet$y DeVo$
By appointing someone with little regard for the work we do, Trump has spat in the face of all who work tirelessly for children in public schools throughout the country.
From Nancy Bailey's Education Website
Privatization and School Buses? Thoughts, Please, Betsy DeVos?
When schools outsource the serious job of transporting students, they entrust an outside company to do the job we taxpayers pay for. We become responsible for such decisions by permitting our local school boards to choose the company that comes up with the lowest bid.
How about the analogy of privatizing school buses and school choice and charters?
Neither Trump nor DeVos seem to understand the research that shows choice and charters don’t work.
In their minds, anyone can teach. Like the idea that anyone can drive a bus.
From Daniel Katz, Ph.D.
Secretary of Privatization
...if Ms. DeVos can accomplish for the nation’s schools what she has manage to do in Michigan by leveraging her fortune to buy her desired results, then we are well and truly screwed. Ms. DeVos has never attended a public school, never sent her children to a public school, never studied education at any level, never taught a day in her life. What she does bring to the post is an unparalleled zeal for turning as much of our public schools as possible over to unregulated hands and for sending as much public school money as possible to private and religious institutions. With her appointment, the Trump administration’s priorities for our nation’s schools are made crystal clear: to hell with quality, to hell with equity, to hell with everything except privatization.
From Education News
What you should know about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary pick — and what her choice…
DeVos, an advocate for school vouchers, has chaired the Michigan Republican party and played a key role in some major education policy decisions there in recent years. But unlike former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee and charter-school leader Eva Moskowitz, two others Trump considered for the education secretary position, DeVos has kept a relatively low national profile. She has neither worked in public education nor chosen public schools for her own children, who attended private Christian schools.
November 25, 2016
From IFL Science
Betsy DeVos Picked As President-Elect Donald Trump's Education Secretary
“Her efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers — which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense. These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education."
From Douglas N. Harris in the New York Times
Betsy DeVos and the Wrong Way to Fix Schools
The choice of Ms. DeVos might not seem surprising. Mr. Trump has, after all, proposed $20 billion to finance “school choice” initiatives and Ms. DeVos supports these ideas. Yet of all the candidates the transition team was apparently considering, Ms. DeVos has easily the worst record.
As one of the architects of Detroit’s charter school system, she is partly responsible for what even charter advocates acknowledge is the biggest school reform disaster in the country.
From School Matters
DeVos money big in Indiana politics
So when Republican lawmakers support spending state money to send students to private schools, including religious schools, it’s fair to wonder: Do they think it’s a good idea, despite evidence to the contrary? Or are they thinking about who’s writing the checks?
From Badass Teachers Association
The DeVostater: Public School Advocates Unite! by Dr. Michael Flanagan
If you were writing a screenplay, where the antagonist has devised a sinister master plan to destroy public education, you could not do better than creating a character like Betsy DeVos. Heir to the ponzi-scheming AMWAY fortune, she’s never taught a day in her life. She has no education degrees, certification or teaching license. DeVos and her children have never even attended public schools. She brags about buying political influence (Mayer, 2016), which has led the State of Michigan to install the most unregulated charter schools in the nation (Michigan AFL-CIO, 2016). All of this has flown in the face of overwhelming evidence that none of the privatization policies she champions have actually benefitted children (Tyler, 2016). It is at this point in the screenplay that the plot would take its turn. We now have a rallying point for the divided forces of the pro-public education movement.
From Diane Ravitch
In DeVos’ Michigan: Literacy is not a “Fundamental Right”
Students in Detroit are suing the state of Michigan for its negligence and failure to fund adequately the public schools of Michigan.
The state’s response: we are required to provide schools but literacy is not a fundamental right.
From Eclecta Blog
Dick and Betsy DeVos avoided paying school taxes on summer home
Incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos doesn’t just want to expand school choice, provide (unconstitutional) school vouchers so parents can use state tax dollars to send their children to private and religious schools, and privatize our public schools. She’d rather not pay school taxes at all, and was nabbed in a tax dragnet by the state of Michigan for trying to avoid paying her fair share of taxes on one of the couple’s vacation homes in 2013.
From Caffeinated Rage
Open Letter to Sen. Richard Burr – Do Not Confirm Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education
The idea of a privileged billionaire “privatizer” leading the nation’s public schools is more than contradictory or antithetical; it’s diametrically repugnant.
From Curmudgucation
Opposing DeVos
* DeVos is the very model of an establishment big-money Republican-- exactly the sort of people that Trump claimed would NOT be running this administration.
* DeVos's ideas about education have been tried, extensively, in Michigan, particularly in Detroit, and they have been disastrous, helping to create one of the worst education messes in the nation with failing and churning charters and grossly undersupported public schools.
* DeVos favors little or not oversight of charter schools, providing the taxpayers with no accountability for how their tax dollars are spent.
From Philly.Com
Trump's new ed chief is a disaster for Philly
Betsy DeVos, the right-wing billionaire school choice advocate tapped today by President-elect Donald Trump to run the U.S. Education Department, is definitely good at some things. Arguably, she's displayed great skill in practicing the dark arts of big-money politics, using her family's vast Amway forture to woo state legislatures through lobbying and obscure political-action committees and impose a vast empire of charter schools from Michigan to Louisiana.
Her biggest failure, though, is a pretty huge one: Failing to do a damn thing to educate America's children, especially in the nation's poorest zip codes.
Take a look at Detroit -- Ground Zero for education reform in DeVos' home state of Michigan, where the heiress has pumped millions into the political system to boost what advocates call "school choice." The result is a broken urban school system where charter-school privateers have made big profits -- aided by the failure of an charter oversight bill that the DeVos family spent $1.45 million to fight -- and low student achievement has been locked in. Federal auditors discovered last year that an "unreasonably high" number of charters were among Michigan's worst 5 percent of schools.
From Caffeinated Rage
Welcome to Betsy DeVos’s BLACKWATER CHARTER SCHOOL, Home of the “Mercenaries” and Pioneers of the Pyramid Scheme Curriculum
Welcome to Blackwater Charter School, Home of the Mercenaries and pioneers of the “Pyramid Scheme Curriculum.”
Considering that the new Secretary of Education appointee is married to the heir of the Amway fortune, a pyramid selling scheme, and sister of the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince , the idea of such a school is not that far-fetched.
From Jersey Jazzman
What Can We Learn About Betsy DeVos From Her Husband's Charter School?
- Betsy DeVos says American schools are "failing," yet her husband's charter school, which she holds up as an exemplar, educates far fewer special education and LEP students compared to the other schools in the region.
- Betsy DeVos believes America's schools are overspending, yet her husband's charter school spends more on total salary than almost any other school in the region.
- Betsy DeVos says "choice" will unleash innovation and efficiency, yet her husband's charter school doesn't appear to put much of its spending advantage into actual instruction.
- Betsy DeVos says she values good teachers, yet her husband's charter school has a staff where nearly half of the teachers are inexperienced.
High spending schools, enrolling proportionally fewer students with special needs, taught by inexperienced teachers. That's Betsy DeVos's vision for American education -- just ask her husband.
Everyone OK with this?
From The Hechinger Report
What’s the worst that could happen under New Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos? Some Scenarios
Scenario #1: DeVos moves quickly to implement President-Elect Trump’s plan to use $20 billion of federal funds for block grants to states to support vouchers for poor children to attend private schools. With support from the Republican majority in Congress, she zeroes out the $15 billion currently allocated to Title I, the federal program devoted to providing equal access to primary and secondary education, particularly for children in poverty. The new initiative has incentives for states to treat the block grants solely as a funding stream and to provide minimal oversight of the schools that students attend with the voucher funds.
As he did on the campaign trail, President-elect Trump calls on states to buttress this $20 billion with $110 billion from their own coffers. His powers of persuasion are great; early successes in the administration give states the confidence that this is a good investment, and they reallocate their budgets to create this larger pool of $130 billion to provide a voucher of approximately $12,000 for every school-aged child in poverty in the U.S. At the state level, funds that were targeted for local education agencies are diverted to vouchers for individual children, a sharp loss in the funding that states historically have provided to school districts.
Money is siphoned from traditional public schools and towards a diverse array of unregulated for-profit and private providers. School quality takes a back seat to marketing, as the only measure of success is a school’s ability to attract students who bring public dollars with them. Schools rely on ridiculous marketing ploys, advertising “themes” and practices designed to draw students.
November 24, 2016
From GFBrandenburg's Blog
Amway is an illegal pyramid scheme.
It’s surprising how quiet the media have been about how corrupt Amway is, the company which made Betsy DeVos rich enough to have sufficient clout to be able to ruin public education?
See also John Oliver on Multilevel Marketing
From Caffeinated Rage
Betsy DeVos -The Worst Choice for Secretary of Education
Picking Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education is like letting an arsonist loose in a drought-ridden forest and giving her gasoline and matches to play with. Furthermore, she controls the weather.
From Mother Crusader
Betsy DeVos: Conflict of Interest Concerns Arise on Future Secretary's Twitter Account
Did you catch the missing word in that tweet? The missing word is public. Our new Secretary of Education can't bring herself to utter the word public in the same sentence as education while announcing that she will soon oversee the education of 50 million American students in public schools.
From Curmudgucation
DeVos, the Acton Institute. and Child Labor
We already know the basics-- DeVos is a rich patron of the GOP establishment, DeVos wants vouchers very badly, and DeVos wants tax dollars to flow freely to white Christian schools. If you want to now what DeVos policies look like in practice, simply look at Detroit, where she has largely gotten her way.
From The Progressive
Betsy DeVos’s War on Public Schools
Worst of all is the whole budget picture: public schools taking a massive hit, even as the state pours tax dollars into private schools
When Walker lifted the income cap on vouchers and expanded the program it became clear that this is not a program designed to help disadvantaged, minority kids. When the governor expanded Milwaukee's voucher program to the city of Racine, half of all new voucher recipients were students who had never attended public school.
Lutheran and Catholic schools around the state favor vouchers. Their enrollment jumped when Walker eliminated enrollment limits and raised the income cap for vouchers to $67,000 a year (and once a family qualifies for a voucher, no matter how much money the parents make, the kids remain voucher-eligible). Well-to-do religious-school parents in Wisconsin received letters cheerfully touting the voucher expansion because it would give those parents a tuition break.
The bottom line: Families that never used the public schools, that are neither poor nor living in a neighborhood with a "failing school," can get taxpayer dollars to reduce their tuition, even as the public schools are forced to slash programs and keep per-pupil spending flat.
From Huffington Post
Group Funded By Trump’s Education Secretary Pick: ‘Bring Back Child Labor’
A think tank funded by Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education pick recently advocated for putting kids back in the workforce.
The Acton Institute, a conservative nonprofit that is said to have received thousands of dollars in donations from Betsy DeVos and her family, posted an essay to its blog this month that called child labor “a gift our kids can handle.”
“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities,” said the post’s author, Joseph Sunde. “A long day’s work and a load of sweat have plenty to teach as well.”
From Keystone State Education Coalition
PA Ed Policy Roundup Nov 24: Thanksgiving Special Edition - Trump Flips the Bird at American Public Education
Billionaire Betsy DeVos may be the most ideological and anti-public education nominee ever to be put forward to run the nearly 40-year-old department.
From Gary Rubenstein
TFA Makes A Statement On DeVos
Today Betsy DeVos was offered and accepted the Secretary of Education position in Trump’s cabinet. Her entire strategy for improving this country’s schools can, it seems, be boiled down to one word: “choice.”
From Truthout
Trump's Education Pick: A Billionaire Heir of Right-Wing Dynasty and Champion of School Privatization Efforts
"Donald Trump's pick of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education proves that having a shortage of experience means nothing as long you don't have a shortage of money," Progress Michigan executive director Lonnie Scott said Wednesday. "The DeVos family has been using their deep pockets to influence the Michigan legislature for years and it looks like they have finally bought their way into a presidential administration as well. The DeVos family education plan has been a disaster for Michigan and we are truly saddened that Trump decided to import their failed ideas to Washington D.C. Progress Michigan remains committed to holding the DeVos family accountable and fighting for all children to have access to excellent public schools."
From Ed in the Apple
Trump Nominates Betsy DeVos and Declares War on Public Education: Vouchers, Charters and School Choice on Steroids
Public education across the nation is at risk.
From Alternet
Why Donald Trump's Far Right Base Is Surprisingly Up in Arms Over His Pick for Education Secretary
Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, a big time Trump backer, cited similar concerns over DeVos’ supposed support for the nationalized standards imposed by the Obama administration. DeVos served on the board of former Florida governor and failed presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which supported the controversial standards.
For posts and articles from December 20 through December 24, 2016 Click HERE.
For posts and articles from December 11 through December 19, 2016 Click HERE
For posts and articles from December 4 through December 10, 2016 Click HERE
For posts and articles from November 30 through December 3, 2016 Click HERE
For posts and articles from November 27 through November 29, 2016 Click HERE
For posts and articles from November 24 through November 26, 2016 Click HERE
For posts and articles older than November 24, 2016 Click HERE
For an updated list by source (without quotes from articles, and continuing beyond December 24, 2016) Click HERE
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