Mitchell Robinson, a professor of music education, realizes that DeVos has been off to a rocky start. He has some advice to help her improve on the job.
First he tries to explain that professors and teachers don’t tell their students what to think, they try to teach them how to think.
And he feels her pain.
Betsy, it looks like you’ve had a busy first week on the job, and aren’t letting your complete lack of experience or knowledge about public education get in the way of “getting stuff done“. In just the last week or so you…
*insulted teachers at a middle school
*bashed protesters, saying they are “hostile” to change and new ideas
*said she would be fine if the department she runs is shut down
*complained that critics want “to make my life a living hell”
*did not participate in the first Twitter chat her department had for teachers on Feb. 21
*suggested schools should be able to compensate for troubles children have at home, such as absent fathers
*had U.S. marshals protect her after protesters blocked her entrance to a D.C. school door
*made a confusing statement about the Common Core State Standards
*made crystal clear that a top priority will be pushing for alternatives to traditional public schools, otherwise known as “school choice.”
Whew. Quite the whirlwind, eh?
So, here’s my last bit of advice for you: slow down, talk to some real teachers (not those Teach for America interns the Department of Education seems to be so fond of these days), and make a real, pre-approved, planned, coordinated visit to an actual public school (not another one of those ninja-style assaults you tried to pull off last week).
When you get to that school, try this: listen more than talk; pay attention to what the students and teachers are really saying, not your own interpretation of what you think they are saying; and–most importantly–ask them how you can help.
Rolling over on your duty to protect trans kids isn’t going to make this any easier with teachers, who take their responsibility to protect their students pretty seriously, whether they are working with college students or kindergartners. But it’s also your duty to show a little humility, acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers, and work with teachers to improve all schools, for all children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wise words from Professor Robinson.
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I truly believe that teachers have the answers and they are the experts with whom Mrs. DeVos should be consulting.
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Devos is a complete sham and a disgrace to our American education system. The balls of her to think she was right or qualified for this position This is a woman who really is not any good for us in educating our students. What troubles me about this woman is that she has this smirk all the time – including when she was being grilled at her hearing with the US Senators. Devos has a smirk that makes one want to wipe it off and put some sense into this education neophyte who does not have any original ideas other than the bizarre idea of “choice”. Is choice really so great?? Do I really need to see 20 different brands of cereal when I walk down the supermarket isle?? This country is sold on the idea of choice but rather choice is never good when the choices are one worst than the other. For example, staying with the cereal example, if I walk down the isle and there are 20 different cereal brands with each filled with nothing but sugar sugar sugar, then the choices are one worst than the other. So choice is not the end all be all and in education choice is bringing the system down. For example we will begin to see money hungry savages suddenly becoming “educators” simply for the money. This is what has happened in the once great state of Michigan where most of the charters (80 percent) are for profit charter schools yet there are so many bad choices there!!! Devos will still argue however that the kids there have “choices”. Devos will be one for the history books when it is all said and done.
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Has anyone else ever made tons of money selling those crap products from Amway or are just the Devos the only people who made money with the pyramid crap scheme. I have never heard of anyone else getting rich selling the shittt
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I strongly suspect that the only people getting rich are the people at the top of the pyramid. The Van Andel and DeVos families are doing very well, indeed, and maybe the people just under that level who got into Amway fairly early on.
After all, that’s the way pyramid schemes work.
As for me, I’ve never bought Amway products, and I never will. If one of my neighbors or friends invites me to attend an Amway home party, I decline.
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You, Mr. Robinson, are under the naive impression to think she cares enough about “what is” to listen and learn. Her agenda is to DISMANTLE everything including public schools….so you watch and you listen……… is their mantra.
I sat at a town hall meeting while my US Representative encouraged educational leaders to counter mobilize. One of the Area Superintendents….asked if the Representatives office would organize us. I couldn’t believe her question…..you are the Superintendent….you ARE the educational LEADER…..you should be organizing and the US Representative should be fighting for our schools in Washington DC. This is the problem…no leaders and people like Donald Trump fill the void.
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ALL too true.
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I have an idea. Why not get a degree in education and student teach for a year. Oh and then teach long enough to be tenured. Maybe then she’ll have a clue. Maybe.
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If she can find a place that still has tenure.
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Yes. Regardless, I mean she should put in the years it takes to obtain tenure. For some it’s 3-4 years. Even that wouldn’t be enough to run the department, but it’s a start.
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Devos has little interest in having her views about education challenged. She thinks educators are the major obstacles to parental choice. Add a big period.
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I wish Betsy DeVos could spend some time with Viola Davis, because her joke about free school lunches shows how little she understands poverty. This quote is from a New Yorker article, “Viola Davis’ Call to Adventure” (link at the end).
“Among the many dilapidated buildings they lived in, the most notorious in family legend was 128 Washington Street, a partly boarded-up, condemned building, in which the Davises lived rent-free for a time, often without heat or electricity. Rats ate the faces off Davis’s dolls; from her bed, she could hear them killing pigeons in the attic. She went to bed each night with rags tied around her neck to keep them from biting her in her sleep.
The precariousness of Davis’s life made it difficult for her to concentrate in school. “I messed up all the time,” she said. “Detention every day. Nasty back talk with teachers. I pushed a teacher once. I wanted attention really bad. I felt I just didn’t fit in.” She wet the bed until she was fourteen. “We didn’t have money all the time to do laundry. A lot of the time, we didn’t have soap or hot water,” she said. “We were smart kids academically”—her sisters Deloris and Diane made the Rhode Island National Honor Society—“but we’d go to school smelling. I reeked of urine.” Davis and her sisters were lectured on hygiene by teachers and by the school nurse. But “it wasn’t an option to out ourselves,” she said. “We just sat there with our heads down.”
For most of Davis’s childhood, school lunch was her main meal. “When I say we had nothing, I mean zero,” she said. “I remember one time a friend came over to the house and she opened the refrigerator. There was nothing in it. She said, ‘Are you guys moving?’ ” Davis and her sisters mooched off the families of friends, dumpster-dived, and stole. “The last time I stole something, I was nine years old,” Davis said. “I stole a brownie, but I never got it out of the store, because the store owner just told me to get away and never come back.”
Now, think about our leaders who want to ensure that students’ free lunches aren’t nutritious because it’s cheaper. That’s in HS 610. Think about Betsy and her cruel joke. Hunger is not funny. Our legislators claim children in high poverty districts are attending “failing schools” and that closing them & giving everyone vouchers to attend for-profit or religious charter schools is the solution. They don’t realize that a child like Viola can’t sit in front of a computer for 90 minutes and do well on a standardized test, the way suburban kids do.
What this will really do is allow wealthy families to have a $5000 refund from their $20,000 private school tuition that they pay so their children don’t have to attend public school with children like Viola Davis. This is the reality of HS 610, and every other “voucher” or “school choice” legislation proposed in our states at in Congress. The 1% do not care about poor kids, or middle class kids either. They pretend to, and maybe ALEC conventions have convinced them that they are righteous and that charter schools will help kids like Viola.
And if a starving, traumatized child lashes out at a teacher or other child, they believe in zero tolerance that will ensure the for-profit prisons will fill their cells and generate profits for their shareholders. Not every child’s story will have as happy and ending as Viola Davis’.
This is why schools must not be run as businesses. This is why every American should call their legislators and demand they pass laws to fully fund PUBLIC schools and give children like Viola the help they need and deserve. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/viola-davis-call-to-adventure
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Lack of respect for teachers now reaches the highest levels of government with Betsy appointment.
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