Peter Greene reviews the speech that Betsy DeVos gave to the annual meeting of the Global Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs at Arizona State University.
She interminably bashes and belittles the public schools as obsolete, failing, etc.
She has, as he puts it charitably, a one-track mind.
She visited wonderful public schools in Van Wert, Ohio, and saw children and teachers who were engaged in learning. She learned nothing. Whatever she saw passed through her mind immediately without leaving an impression.
She keeps searching for an analogy to plug school choice. She tried Uber and that didn’t go over so well. Now she has a new metaphor:
Think of it like your cell phone. AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile may all have great networks, but if you can’t get cell phone service in your living room, then your particular provider is failing you, and you should have the option to find a network that does work.
Because is just a commodity or a service. Of course, lots of folks live in a place where they have none of those networks as a choice because businesses only serve the customers that are profitable enough to get their attention. This may just be an area of ignorance typical to the really rich– I’m betting that DeVos has never been in a situation where a business told her it wasn’t worth their bother to serve her, nor has she found herself in a situation where that service was simply priced out of her reach.
She truly has no idea of what a public service is and why it is different from something you buy or rent.
She has already given up on the claim that school choice produces better results or better education.
She pushes choice for the sake of choice, even if the quality of choices are diminished.
Betsy has bought her own ideological blab–with the analogy, we cannot get cell service in our living room translates to: public schools are bad. So, like getting a new cell service, let’s privatize!
But public schools are not all bad; and even if they were, their roots are in the FOUNDATIONS of DEMOCRACY and the public good in a way that private schools are not and cannot be, on principle. So let’s double-down on them instead.
The analogy is false. And so for Betsy, like getting a new phone service, we need a new privatized model of education. But she doesn’t know that the analogy doesn’t hold because with education, the living room and house disappear too.
“Think of it like your cell phone. AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile may all have great networks, but if you can’t get cell phone service in your living room, then your particular provider is failing you, and you should have the option to find a network that does work.”
Betsy, Betsy, Betsy, said in that exasperated teacher voice. . . .
I guess then folks like me just don’t need to have any cell service. TFL! Be an entrepreneur and start your own, eh.
No clue, Betsy. You have no clue!
If DeVos has her way there will be many “islands”, and I ain’t talking tropical paradise ones, more like the ones at the tip of Tierra del Fuego, of no service for the students, even though it is each state’s constitutional duty to provide an education for all.
Betsy: “I have Clue and there are other choices. There’s the original version, the Hitchcock version, the Simpsons version, the Scooby Doo version, a whole buch of board game versions! Just like schools!”
No matter what false market based analogy she tries to make, she is full of bias and hot air. She understands nothing about the concept of the common good because she has never needed to depend on it. Her wealth has kept her enconced in a bubble. She will remain true to her nature, bewildered Betsy.
retired teacher Yes, but Betsy DOES already depend on MANY common goods, in ways we all take for granted, like riding on a public road or flying in an airplane where government regulations make it the safest way to travel; and allow her land at an airport that is saturated with regulations to keep her as safe as possible. Or the food she eats; or the air she breathes; or the safeguards for her children’s future when democracy could be gone and they fear to speak out loud what they think; or when Congresspeople can avoid their oath while channeling the hoards of bureaucrats clapping for their Chinese leader–oops!–that’s happening now. But you see what I mean. Like the rest of those idiots, Betsy is like the snake eating its own tail, or a different analogy: she is in the process of shooting herself in the foot big-time.
But why not? Under a market mentality, she should get what she pays for. BTW, ROLLING STONE had a good article about her–realizing not only the DeVos privatization, but linking it with an attack on secular government and the correlate “advent:” of an all-Christian world. Stupid is a stupid does.
Regular people should be wary of the attacks on public institutions by the wealthy. People need to understand that so called choice systems are a cover for a disinvestment in the common good. It is a bait and switch tactic to destroy what the public needs, quality public schools. What they will get are systems of corporate schools that are exclusionary and often less effective than what has been lost. Most of all they will lose democratic governance, and they will be hard-pressed to get back once corporations have the power.
retired eacher Yes–and with Betsy, we can add to privatization the installing of so-called Christian ideology.
BTW, I have nothing against Christian values (I am a Catholic). What I AM against is the de-secularization of a democratic culture and the purveyed loss of religious freedom. A loss of secular government (and the installment of religious (aka Christian) schools is an invitation to BIG problems . . . you know, like religious wars?
The odd thing is that, though Betsy says she thinks the US Constitution is an instrument of God, in the same breath she sets the stage for its destruction.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, impolitic though it may be: she is a spoiled, callow heiress who grew up in an echo chamber and really does believe the Calvinist nonsense that is a staple of her economically rarified culture.
“…finds nothing” equates to “Trumpcare is really, Trump Don’t Care” -Leo Gerard
Linda: Here is an overlooked distinction in the talk that is out there: Trump’s base DID want to REPEAL the Affordable Care Act. But Trump also promised that the REPLACE would be better, for all, BLAH BLAH BlAH. Remember?
They get the REPEAL right. But they forget that the REPLACE was NOT the Draconian bill that the so-called “Freedom Caucus” put forth–just the opposite.
Trump’s base heard Trump right–and he confirmed what he said earlier when, post-election, he complimented the Australian president about THEIR better health care policy.
It looks to me like Trump doesn’t even know what was in that bill–he just let the “Freedom Caucus” and the rest of the spineless Republicans run right over his own campaign promises, dolt that he is. And the Republicans just keep on saying that they are “doing what the base wanted.” It’s the biggest bunch of BS going. And no one seems to see it.
“Dolt” -perfect description
Breathtaking ignorance is on display with equally dumb speech-writers enlisted to amplify that.