Russ Walsh blogs about literacy and learning. In this post, he recalls that his grandmother used to call him and her other grandchildren out whenever they did something boneheaded by saying, “Heavens to Betsy!”

Russ calls Betsy DeVos out for her zealous support of vouchers, despite experience and research.

DeVos is a “reformer” as Arne Duncan was a “reformer.” Her ideas have no grounding in reality, but she won’t let them go.

DeVos is the ultimate privatizer of education. Not satisfied with using quasi-public charter schools as a way to drain resources from actual public schools, DeVos goes Full Monty on vouchers. She wants to eliminate public education entirely by giving every child a government check to go find the private school or religious school of choice. It is, of course, “the civil rights issue of our time.” I have cataloged the danger and false promises of vouchers in this post from a few years ago. It is important to note that the heavily education reform-minded Obama administration rejected vouchers as a solution because it drained public dollars from public schools that were already strapped for resources and because vouchers did not work.

Bottom line: Why push an idea that doesn’t work? Milwaukee has had vouchers 25 years. Milwaukee is one of the lowest performing cities tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Russ urges us to resist. I join him. Get involved. Speak out. Talk to your elected representatives. Get Republicans to understand that what she proposes to do will be costly and wasteful and ineffective.