Leonie Haimson has gathered the relevant facts about the background of Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.
DeVos is a billionaire, like several other members of Trump’s choices for top positions. She is an evangelical a Christian. She would like to replace public schools, to the greatest extent possible, with vouchers and charter schools. Her primary focus is privatization of public funding for schools.
“DeVos is the daughter of a wealthy auto-parts manufacturer who funded Christian-right causes, and her brother Erik Prince founded the mercenary company Blackwater. She married Dick DeVos, the billionaire heir to the Amway fortune. The two, based in Grand Rapids, Mich., have used their personal wealth to encourage the expansion of charter schools, to prevent any government oversight of their use of public funds or regulation of the quality of education they provide and to aggressively promote the use of vouchers to let taxpayer funds pay for private and parochial schools.
She would be the first Secretary of Education who never attended a public school or sent her own children to one. She has never worked as a teacher, served on a school board, or held any position in government.
DeVos is an even more radical privatizer than either Arne Duncan or John King, President Barack Obama’s education secretaries. Both Duncan and King favored expanding the charter sector, offering these publicly funded, privately run schools more than $1.5 billion in federal grants between 2010 and 2015. The Department of Education’s Race to the Top program offered states the chance of winning millions more if they let the number of charter schools expand. Many states, including New York, then raised their charter caps.
The DeVos family is among the leading donors to the Republican Party. According to an analysis by OpenSecrets.org, they have given at least $20.2 million to GOP candidates, party committees, PACs, and super PACs. They also finance far-right groups that promote climate-change denial, oppose marriage equality, and want to cripple labor unions, such as Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Another group they support, the Acton Institute, argues for the abolition of child-labor laws.”
DeVos is a radical choice, far outside the mainstream. Like many of Trump’s selection, this one has Pence’s stamp on it. He too is an evangelical Christian, determined to eliminate separation of church and state. Unlike Pence, Trump has never shown any interest in education issues. Watch for Pence as the man pulling the strings, filling key positions with his friends and allies from ALEC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Privatizing schools, as an idea, isn’t so much an idea that exists on a spectrum. It’s more of a binary thing. Once you allow the idea in, it sort of becomes the thing.
DeVos is an affront to civil society and is a religio-maniac. This can’t be disputed. A worse choice couldn’t be imagined. Given.
We can’t, however, allow ourselves to get to a point where we thing DeVos is an order of magnitude worse that what will be her predecessors. That’s not correct and it will have the effect of enabling our side to forget and minimize the fact that dems have been the party that have run rampant on public education and taken very broad steps to union bust and privatize. I know it’s easy to say that “oh, we won’t forget how bad the Obama admin was on Ed.!” But we will. Our enemies are bipartisan on education. We can’t get in a position to ever again think dems “have our back” without us insisting on it. That’s the thing here.
DeVos is so bad. But so was King and Duncan. All in just about the same intensity. DeVos is just so unsavory in every other way. Privatizing is privatizing just as union busting is union busting.
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No need to remind you that Andrew linked up with the right wing Hasidic Community and the the Church to push for a voucher scheme.
“Our enemies are bipartisan” on a whole host of issues .
Not equally destructive but that is a charade. Our enemy is the Plutocracy the two political parties have become their servants once again. That dynamic must change or we will degenerate into Oligarchy rather than Democracy. We are a good part of the way there already.
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There are simply no good billionaires. I oppose Martha’s Vineyard, Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires as I do Texas oil and fried fast food billionaires. They’re all the same. The worst billionaires influence our governments and school boards in secret. They, regardless of party affiliation, are the most dangerous. Deepest thanks to Leonie and Diane for exposing them. One day, John Oliver will too.
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Posted th link to Leonies piece at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Meet-Trump-s-Public-Ed-Wre-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Education_Far-right_Government_Leonie-Haimison-161222-995.html
with this comment
This is the death knell to the road to income equality.
Here is a great link, as Peter Greene here debates a libertarian proponent of school choice–on his blog, not in person. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/12/school-choice-wont-save-education.html
As for me, I have pointed out that It is so very simple:
Top down started in the nineties. Education like heath care was going to be a market. The only difference was that the voice of the physician could not be completely eliminated from he equation, because the patient would die.
In our profession, if the kids don’t learn, then the teacher can be blamed”end of story.
The human brain requires certain conditions to learn. Pedagogues learn about the methods that promote acquisition of skills, just like doctors learn the methods that promote physical heath and healing.
Businessmen run the schools. They are not interested in learning, and know little about the emerging intelligence of a child” and they do not care about anything except the bottom line. When the legislatures take over the failing schools, there are no educators on board. Thus public money is sent to operators of ‘schools’, willy nilly, and the fraud is rampant.
But with almost sixteen thousand districts, in 52 states, and a media that is in the pockets of the very people who oversee the destruction of public education, the speed at which public education is tanking is speeding up.
NYC, once had a fabulous , free public school system that only needed funding” so they robbed it of money, and took out the professionals and this happened: https://gemnyc.org/2012/05/20/the-inconvenient-truth-behind-waiting-for-superman-now-online/
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The US never should have allowed individuals to acquire as much wealth as they have under the US constitution. No one man should have been allowed to acquire all that wealth because in the US we now have these freky billionaires who want to change the US the way they see it and have the power to do it with the money influencing elections all over the country. Why should someone like mikey bloomberg be allowed to earn 30-40 billion dollars just for selling computer terminals to stock market companies. Why should Bill Gates our education guru be allowed to earn billions of dollars or the dopey Koch bros…..no one man should have all that power. Now, the argument is that its a free market bla bla bla but the realities are that we are now becoming slaves to these goons.
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“Now, the argument is that its a free market bla bla bla. . .”
The last time I checked that free market, according to Google Earth is located at 13, 33 14.99 North and 29 29 42.44 West. Pretty hard to drive there.
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Didn’t Trump say during the election that he was going to appoint Pence to deal with domestic and foreign issues. In other words, Trump will be the president in name only as he goes from rally-to-rally to bask in the cheers of his adoring deplorable fan base while Pence rules the country and turns the United States into a market based theocracy where the government is turned into a shell corporation.
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That was baby little hands talking to a Kasich aid . Kasich could not be convinced to hop in the cesspool. One would assume Slime bucket Pence was given the same offer. Will little hands grope Karen or are the girls more his speed. .
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