Peter Greene didn’t see the whole hearing because he was teaching. But he saw enough to know this was a play with preordained roles. A sort of political theater. Democrats stewed (although they didn’t berate Duncan for having similar ambitions). Republicans protected Mrs. Moneybags and praised her sacrifice, her willingness to mingle with us commoners.

 

She was smug, because she knew the hearing was unimportant.

 

“The closest thing the woman has to educational experience is being the political muscle behind the Detroit Experiment. The DeVos’s are perhaps the only people who are in touch with every major player in that charter revolution, and they’ve been on top of it for decades. She has served as a self-appointed official of the state of Michigan with education at the top of her portfolio. It is the one card she had to play against the “inexperienced” charge– and she totally blew it. She has learned nothing. From the destruction of a city’s school system, the gutting of educational opportunities for Detroit’s poor, she has learned nothing. She felt expert enough to call for the dissolution of Detroit Public School system, but she has learned nothing.”

 

True ideologues never ever learn anything. They know it all. Like Trump. She is ignorant but no one will tell her.

 

Best of all is her exchange with Tim Kaine, when she insists that she is in favor of accountability. Greene cites the transcript. This is the same DeVos that rewarded legislators with gifts of $1.4 million after they gutted a bill to impose accountability on charters in Michigan.

 

Stephen Henderson, the editor of the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press, wrote an article about Betsy DeVos and “the twilight of public education,” where he wrote:

 

“The DeVoses have helped private interests commandeer public money that was intended to fulfill the state’s mandate to provide compulsory education. The family started the Great Lakes Education Project, whose political action committee does the most prolific and aggressive lobbying for charter schools.

 

“Betsy DeVos and other family members have given more than $2 million to the PAC since 2001. GLEP has spent that money essentially buying policy outcomes that have helped Michigan’s charter industry grow while shielding it from accountability.

 

“This summer, the DeVos family contributed $1.45 million over two months — an astounding average of $25,000 a day — to Michigan GOP lawmakers and the state party after the Republican-led Legislature derailed a bipartisan provision that would have provided more charter school oversight in Detroit.”

 

Accountability? What a joke. Accountability is for public schools, not for charters or Betsy’s beloved religious schools.