Betsy DeVos' Mission to Destroy Public Education

Betsy DeVos - a study in incompetence and racism.

Long before she was nominated to be Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was well known to advocates of quality public schools due to her efforts to push charter schools and vouchers for religiously affiliated schools in her home state of Michigan and elsewhere.  Her efforts were and continue to be part of the long history of right wing Christians trying to gut public education and shift funding to private, but mostly religious affiliated schools that could be segregated on a de facto if not official bases. Also, like most Christian extremists, DeVos has long hated public schools that emphasize the teaching of evolution - which gasp, challenges a mind dead acceptance of the Bible - versus the creationism that is so loved by the self-congratulatory "godly folk."  On Sunday evening, DeVos did an interview on "60 Minutes" which put her idiocy and racism on display for all to see.  The women is unfit for her office and has demonstrated that money - especially that earned by ones parents and/or other ancestors - or well connected parents does not equate to having brains or even common sense (voters in Norfolk's coming school board elections should take note of this reality).  A column in the New York Times looks at DeVos' disastrous interview and the ugliness it revealed.  Here are highlights:

On Sunday evening, CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview that Lesley Stahl conducted with Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary and one of the richest members of his very rich cabinet. It was overwhelmingly seen as a disaster for DeVos, who struggled to answer very basic questions. She couldn’t say, for example, why schools in Michigan, her home state, have largely gotten worse since the widespread introduction of the school choice policies she lobbied for. When Stahl asked whether, as secretary, she’d ever visited a failing school to find out what went wrong, DeVos said, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.”

Like many things in Trump’s administration, this performance was shocking but not surprising. Before becoming secretary of education, DeVos had never worked as an educator or a policymaker; she was a donor to education reform efforts favored by the right, such as school choice and vouchers. Her confirmation hearings last year were an embarrassment. She appeared to be unfamiliar with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a federal civil rights law. After taking office, she described historically black universities and colleges, founded in response to segregation, as “pioneers when it comes to school choice.”

As this comment suggested, DeVos is, at best, oblivious about race. That obliviousness — or worse — is behind one of the more disturbing moments in her “60 Minutes” interview. In a sick irony, some on the right would use the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla. . . . as a pretext to roll back civil rights protections for students of color. On “60 Minutes,” DeVos, whom Trump has chosen to lead his new school safety commission, appeared to signal she’s on board.

“The logic that people try to manufacture is that the effort to end exclusionary school discipline renders schools unsafe places,” Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights in Obama’s Department of Education, told me. “It doesn’t even bear scrutiny, really.”

But in this administration it doesn’t have to. DeVos isn’t just considering ending the policy. Speaking to Stahl, she refused to even admit that race plays a role in discipline.

Among experts, this isn’t really a subject for debate. “There’s some fairly good empirical evidence that says minority students are more likely than white students in similar situations to be written up and disciplined,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies education policy.

Stahl compared situations in which white kids are punished for classroom disruption by a trip to the principal’s office, while for black kids, “they call in the cops.” DeVos refused to say such a discrepancy is wrong . . . . Black public school students are suspended at 3.8 times the rate of white students. That discrepancy alone doesn’t necessarily demonstrate discrimination, but there’s evidence that students of color are punished differently from white students for the same infractions.

Combine this tacit license to discriminate with the Trump administration plan to encourage the arming of teachers, and you have a recipe for something combustible. There’s a lesson here that applies across the administration. Don’t let the clownishness distract you from the bigotry.