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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The NPE Toolkit: Stop Betsy DeVos
The more we learn, the more we are certain that Betsy DeVos is bad for public schools and for kids...Here are our three toolkits to help you do your part.
Educate Betsy DeVos about the value of public schools
Tell Betsy DeVos why public schools are worth fighting for. If you work in a school, educate her about the challenges of the job. Tell her what issues your students face outside of school that affect them in the classroom, and what she should do to help if she is confirmed as the next Secretary of Education.
NEA and AFT: Add Your Name: Commit to Student Success
Read our letter, then add your name to stand with us: These are our values, and I demand that our secretary of education and every elected official respect and uphold this vision for high-quality public schools for every single student.
Defend public education: Petition from MoveOn.Org
The privatization of public schools in Michigan has been disastrous for students, particularly for students of color and those with disabilities. DeVos helped block efforts to clean up the for-profit, unregulated charter school mess in her home state. Many students who currently receive a good public education will lose access to that opportunity under the system of vouchers and school choice that she advocates. Please put children before profits and stop this nomination.
Tell Your Senator to Vote NO for Betsy DeVos
We must send a clear message to Trump that we will not allow our schools to be privatized. Send the sample letter we provide or write your own. Tell your Senator to vote "no" for Betsy DeVos.
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December 24, 2016
From Nancy Bailey's Education Website
Betsy DeVos and the Ghosts of Education Secretaries Past
As we approach the end of 2016 and look with hope to 2017, educators and parents are concerned about President-elect Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos for education secretary. I share those concerns. But it is also important to remember the education secretaries of the past and how they have led us to where we are today.
None of the appointed individuals have rallied around public schools and the teachers who committed their lives and careers to working with students. They never promoted a free public school system for all children in our great country.
December 23, 2016
From Truthout
The Great Unwinding of Public Education: Detroit and DeVos
DeVos will run the US Department of Education, appointed by her fellow billionaire, President-elect Donald Trump. She has all the required affiliations: ties to the religious right, hedge funds and free market think-tanks; an embrace of the sacred memes of "free to choose" and "privatize;" a profit-driven missionary zeal; a powerful Michigan family's hold on the legislature; and the gift of never having entered a public school. So successful has DeVos been in sucking funding out of public schools and passing it on to charter schools that -- to repeat this mind-boggling statistic -- 80 percent of the Detroit schools are now for-profit enterprises. The funding either comes from a re-routing of tax dollars from public to charter, or as government payments -- vouchers -- paid to parents who then pass that money to the charters.
December 22, 2016
From Alternet
Betsy DeVos Helped Ravage Detroit's Schools, Which Is Why She Must Not Become U.S. Secretary of Education
We must stop Betsy DeVos; she has been an enemy of our children too long. Her destructive 20-year history of destroying our public school system speaks for itself. She cannot become the national leader of the education of our children.
From Curmudgucation
DeVos's Inconvenient Truths
Inconvenient Truth No. 1-- Our education system in America is antiquated and it is quite frankly embarrassing.
DeVos compares public education system to the Model T, and talks about how Detroit totally innovated to do a better job of producing automobiles, so I'm a little confused-- she wants to send American children to Mexico and Canada to be educated under less safe conditions by underpaid workers?
This truth is where we get to bring up the criticism of DeVos that she has never in her life spent any time in an actual public school. She didn't attend one; her children didn't attend one. This is not a mean, personal attack-- it's an explanation for why she doesn't appear to know what the hell she's talking about.
This is what I call Reformster Timewarp Syndrome, in which reformsters criticize public schools based on the assumption that these schools are exactly the way they were fifty years ago (when some reformsters attended them as students). This is like criticizing the military for still fighting on horseback.
Is there room for improvement, growth and new creativity in public schools? Absolutely. And there's no question that like many institutions, public education is at root conservative. But on this point of antiquation and embarrassment, DeVos is just spouting vague, baseless baloney.
From Diane Ravitch
Ellen Lubic: Reach Out to Republican Senators to Oppose DeVos
It is imperative for Democrats to nurture Republicans of good will and conscience to join in the protests against the Trump nominees for his Cabinet.
From The Answer Sheet
Under Trump, will the marketplace be the only regulator of school ‘choice’?
The “school choice” movement in the United States is bound to get a huge boost from President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire and choice advocate, as his secretary of education. If she is approved by the Senate, as expected, DeVos will push to expand a range of choice programs that use public funds for schools not part of traditional public systems.
DeVos has called the public education system in the country — which many see as America’s most important civic institution — as a “dead end” and a goverment-run “monopoly.” That’s why public education advocates are worried about her impending leadership at the U.S. Education Department.
December 21, 2016
From Americans United
Betsy DeVos Is Known For Promoting Vouchers, But Her Take On Charter Schools Also Raises Religious-Liberty Concerns
DeVos is a founder of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), a Michigan non-profit group that advocates for increased reliance on (and deregulation of) charter schools. A billionaire who has devoted much of her adult life – and a substantial part of her wealth – to promoting the so-called school-choice movement, DeVos has used her home state of Michigan to trial-run many of her policy preferences. And it hasn’t been going well.
Thanks in large part to DeVos, Michigan has incredibly unregulated charter schools.
As is to be expected whenever there’s a lack of appropriate oversight, problems have resulted. In Detroit, where over half the students are enrolled in charter schools, 65 percent of charters perform worse in 8th-grade math than the public schools. And a federal review in 2015 “found that ‘an unreasonably high’ percentage of [Michigan’s] charter schools were on the list of the state’s lowest performing schools.”
Yet this past year, GLEP successfully opposed efforts by state legislators to begin to remedy this problem through the creation of a bipartisan oversight commission. In fact, DeVos’s substantial past campaign contributions – and the potential that she could withhold future contributions – influenced Republican legislators to refuse to create the commission.
From The Answer Sheet
‘Government really sucks’ and five other principles promoted by Trump’s education nominee12/21
Betsy DeVos, the Michigan billionaire tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be his education secretary, has some very firm views about government and education, which she articulated in a 2015 speech at the SXSWedu convention in Austin. Take this, for example: “Government really sucks, and it doesn’t matter which party is in power.”
From Gadflyonthewallblog
The Ongoing Resistance to Trump, Neoliberals & Anyone Else Trying to Destroy Our Schools
I’m not scared of her. We just fought off Arne Duncan and John King – two of the Democrats Ivy League privateers who actually knew what they were doing! If we can stop those jackholes from giving away community schools to rich corporations, we can take this rich Republican lady who never held down a real job and only knows how to get her way by bribing people to do her bidding.
From Cloaking Inequality
‘School Choice’ Education Secretary Not What Latino Students Need
..privatized choice has been problematic. The choice mantra should be wrestled away from the billionaire funders of private-control and privatization of education.
Instead, we should talk more about the alternative. Americans should support community-based democratically controlled approaches to education that Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP, Journey 4 Justice, and Black Lives Matter have supported. We should be looking at innovative forms of democratically controlled schools such as open-enrollment magnets, in-district charters and community schools with wraparound services.
Additionally, we must hold the President and legislators accountable to fund what national polling has demonstrated parents want to choose in their neighborhood public schools— more parental involvement, less testing, smaller class sizes, quality teachers and less hunger.
The elephant in the room in our country is the unfortunate and consistent choice made by policymakers to talk incessantly about school choice while purposefully failing to deliver the resources to provision parental choices in both rich and poor schools.
From The Answer Sheet
The telling speech Betsy DeVos gave about education — full text
This is the full text of a speech that Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos, who was tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be his education secretary, delivered at the 2015 SXSWedu convention in Austin, Texas. These are her remarks as prepared for delivery, published by the organization she heads, the American Federation for Children.
From The Answer Sheet
To Trump’s education pick, the U.S. public school system is a ‘dead end’
Actually, contrary to her notion that all D.C. traditional public schools are low-performing, the District has a number of high-performing schools. Meanwhile, there are some charter schools — which are publicly funded but operate outside the traditional district — and voucher schools that are low-performing. The public school district’s graduation rate isn’t 50 percent and hasn’t been for years; in 2011, the district says, it was 53 percent, but by 2015 it was 64 percent and in 2016, 69 percent. Some D.C. public schools graduates go to the nation’s best public and private colleges — and many of the District’s schools have been innovating for years.
From Teacher in a Strange Land
The Year of the Lie: Fake Ed-News
Yesterday, Rick Hess let Ed-world know that some of us were being fickle, "nasty and strikingly personal" in our questioning whether Betsy Devos was a suitable pick for Secretary of Education.
He uses many of the techniques I learned from Miss Olding--testimonial (from Andy Rotherham), name-calling, plain folks claims ("Devos was a 'pretty mainstream pick'"), and good old glittering generalities, vague and unspecific praise around Devos's experience in education policy. He lets it slip that oh, by the way, he's employed by an organization of which she is a board member.
That's fake news, too--sloppy, conflict-of-interest, commodified opinion writing. I couldn't say that with confidence, unless I'd lived all my life in the state where Betsy Devos has been pulling strings. This goes back to 1978, when I was a novice teacher, and Devos's family sponsored their first voucher referendum in Michigan. Since then, there has been a constant stream of anti-public education initiatives, political campaigns, anti-union bills, purchased legislators and legislation, anti-public education media outlets and think tanks, and intense—nasty and strikingly personal—rhetoric about failing public schools and bad teachers.
December 20, 2016
From Schools Matter
DeVos: a product of bipartisan embrace of failed, racist “school choice” policies
With both mainstream presidential candidates publicly stating they believed in the white supremacist notion of school choice, it wasn’t hard to see the Trump nomination of someone as extreme as Betsy DeVos as being possible. How these abject, failed policies play out in reality is instructive.
From Politico
DeVos heads into confirmation with a megadonor's advantage
Billionaire Betsy DeVos has been unabashed about using her wealth to advance her own agenda. “We expect a return on our investment,” she once wrote about her family’s massive political contributions.
After giving millions of dollars to politicians over the past two decades, she now heads into her Senate confirmation hearing for education secretary with a clear advantage: DeVos and her husband, Dick, have donated to the campaigns of 17 senators who will consider her nomination — four of whom sit on the Senate education committee that oversees the process.
From Fred Klonsky
I know you are upset about privatizing public schools, but please keep your voice down.
With Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, neighborhood public schools aren’t even in the equation. Why get into a fight over charters versus vouchers? We can have it all! Don’t manufacture a debate between vouchers and charters, whispers Cunningham, when the real target is the neighborhood public school.
Neighborhood schools are what the right-wingers like to call government schools. Y’know. Like government cops and government roads and government health care (which the rest of the industrialized world seems to enjoy, but not us).
From Badass Teachers Association
Patchogue-Medford School District (NY) Board of Education Passes Resolution to Oppose the Nomination of Devos
Resolved, that the Patchogue-Medford Board of Education hereby, based on this record, opposes the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, and until such time as the incoming Trump administration presents a formal vision for the future of public education in the United States of America and will continue to oppose such a nomination, and calls upon the incoming United States Senate to stand firm by opposing this nominee and affirming this serious need, and be it further
Resolved, that the Board of Education invites the president-elect, the nominee for secretary of education or representatives of the incoming education team to meet with them to conduct a forthright and meaningful discussion about the future of public education and their strategies to affect the necessary changes.
From Americans United
We Have Some Questions For Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Pick For Education Secretary
...she founded the Great Lakes Education Project which was the “chief force” in advocating against a 2016 legislative proposal that would provide more oversight of charter schools, even though “a federal review found that ‘an unreasonably high’ percentage of charter schools were on the list of the state’s lowest performing schools.” Failure to impose proper oversight of charter schools leads to many problems, including violations of the separation of church and state.
For posts and articles from December 20 through December 24, 2016 Click HERE.
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For an updated list by source (without quotes from articles, and continuing beyond December 24, 2016) Click HERE
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