Posted on 05/12/2018 1:46:11 PM PDT by huckfillary
People hate Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
When she spoke at the Kennedy School of Government, students held up signs calling her a "white supremacist."
When she tried to visit a school, activists physically blocked her way.
The haters claim DeVos knows little about education, only got her job because she gave money to Republican politicians, and hates free public education.
Of course, education isn't really "free."
Taxpayers spend $634 billion a year on it. It's laughable that activists claim conservatives "cut" education spending. Funds per student tripled over the past several decades, while test scores stayed flat.
Some of that failure is because of what DeVos really opposes: government's education bureaucracy.
The department she inherited is a good example of that. K-12 schools are controlled and funded locally, but taxpayers are forced to ship education money to Washington, D.C., where bureaucrats there grab some, and then ship the rest back—with strings attached.
President Reagan tried to get rid of the Department of Education. He failed. Since then, it's only grown. It now spends $193.1 billion a year.
DeVos proposed a mere $9 billion in cuts.
But nothing goes away in Washington, no matter how wasteful. The Republican Congress ignored her proposed cuts and increased her budget by $2 billion.
DeVos, like some other agency heads appointed by President Trump, resists expanding the federal bureaucracy.
People hate her for that, too.
When activists blocked her school visit, she told me for my latest online video, "We drove away, and (the security guard) said, 'Ma'am, I don't think we should go back' and I said...'they are not going to win. I am determined to meet those kids and those teachers.'"
She did.
The protesters seemed less interested in her views on education than on the fact that she's rich.
One yelled: "Keep giving money to senators."
DeVos is rich. Her father built a company that became worth more than a billion dollars. Then she married into the Amway marketing fortune.
Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics, told CNN, "DeVos's primary expertise seems to be in being a rich person."
I asked DeVos about the charge that she "bought her position."
"Yes, I have been a contributor," she said. "I've also been an activist. I think it's important for people to engage in things that they believe in. But that's not the point. The point is for 30 years I have been working on behalf of families that have not had opportunity."
She benefited from the free market. Now she wants to bring those benefits to students who've been badly treated by government-run schools.
She donated to charter and private schools and served on the boards of groups that promote education choice.
None of that counts as expertise, says the education establishment.
"What she has done is actually made schooling worse in Michigan," ranted teachers union boss Randi Weingarten on MSNBC. "Eighty percent of the charter schools in Detroit are failing."
Some Detroit schools are doing badly, acknowledges DeVos, but charter students do "demonstrably better than the students in traditional public schools."
She's right. A Stanford study found that kids at Detroit charter schools get months of additional learning every year compared to their public school peers. Choice did help.
Charter and private schools are often better because they are freer to innovate. They can do things like set different hours, be open during summer, and pay good teachers more.
Parents in the rest of the country deserve that opportunity, too.
"If there were real choice, good teachers would make much more money," I suggested to DeVos.
"Absolutely," she replied. "By the same token, teachers who aren't good and really shouldn't be in the classroom probably wouldn't be... (N)obody would choose their classroom! People are not stupid. They know where their kid is going to do best."
Unions and education bureaucrats don't want parents making those decisions. They say, "teachers should be retrained, not fired," and "competition is not for kids!"
"We need to do something different," says DeVos. "This country is on a trajectory to failure, ultimately, if we do not turn around how we educate kids."
Like her boss, Ms. DeVos wants to seriously shake things up. She knows that our public education system needs radical changes to reverse its current downward trajectory.
The education system, primarily the Teachers’ Unions, will do everything they can to kill her initiatives while mercilessly smearing her character. This is how the Left operates. They won’t openly debate her, but will label her ideas as “hate speech,” while relentlessly heaping scorn and ridicule upon her. Unfortunately, these tactics have worked.
Education is the core foundation of the left; you will see no other area where they exhibit more hate and violence. It is a system corrupt to its core. She is drawing flak because she is right over the target.
I believe she donates her salaary correct? She is a billionaire and independently wealthy? She should strongly request that the POTUS eliminate the DOE and return all responsibilities back to the states where it belongs!
Rich liberals in politics good
Rich Americans in politics bad
/liberals
Several years ago I read a well written article in which the writer laid out an excellent case that since the inception of the Department under President Carter, the overall product of government schools has gone steadily downward. Control of schooling belongs to the communities in which the students live. The sooner the Department of Education disappears, the sooner our children will get the education they need.
I didn’t realize the federal budget for education is 193billion. She wanted to cut a mere 9 billion but congress wouldn’t have it. This is all union money! I think even Rick Perry remembered that department as one that needed to be eliminated.
Yes, but the real guilty party is the public teachers unions. They were what instituted the Dept of Ed.
The problem exists because schools have elections at special times and teachers and students and PTA organizations are the best community organizers for these elections. Hence they get school boards who support the teachers. Next the teachers negotiate with these school boards for salaries based on seniority. (This is how schools go down hill. Why should compensation for teachers be based on seniority?)
We should not allow public employees to organize and empower the very people who determine their working conditions and pay. It is a conflict of interest.
She is the light in a dark room full of vampires, that sun light burns! that’s why, The criminal operation of the board of ed is just that criminal
Betsy De Vos is a good woman with a good program to re-work our education programs.
She needs our backing!
She must be doing a good job if the left hates her.
5.56mm
Education in the schools sucks because so-called conservatives refuse to show up at their local schoolboard meetings and demand that their schools teach, not brainwash. Show up at a schoolboard meeting with 100 people demanding accountability, and the leftist schoolboards will fold like cheap suits.
But that would require time and commitment, something which so-called conservatives don’t have.
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