Did you know that DeVos wants to scrap the Office of English Language Acquisition by folding it into the much larger Office of Elementary and Secondary Education? OESE is one of the major subdivisions of the Education Department. Making such a change would likely require a Congressional approval, but DeVos hopes to skip that step, which she would be (should be) unlikely to get. Congress may not be as enthusiastic about Trump’s war on immigrants as Trump and DeVos. After this administration, the Republican party will be redefined as the party that is hostile to immigrants, specifically Hispanics, who are the largest beneficiaries of the Office of English Language Acquisition programs and services.
Jan Resseger writes about this bureaucratic maneuver here, which few people are aware of other than advocates for the students served.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Then how will Betsy ever hope to learn English?
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Thanks for the chuckle…we could all use it.
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Actually, I don’t think anything can help Betsy at this late date.
Not even the office of English language Acquisition.
She’s like an old broken record that keeps repeating the word “choice”.
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Behind her back, Trump calls her Bitsy DeVos- an Omarosa revelation.
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Maybe “Bitsy” is referring to size of her brain that is supposed to be between her ears. Of course, what would Trump know about a brain–he is missing his.
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Something’s wrong with Betsy’s family. McMansion Hell reported on her monstrosity of a house in Holland, Mich. which resembles a cruise ship that wrecked into a dock and then, had an an outlet store facade plastered on to hide it. The monstrosity of bad taste has 3 times as many bathrooms as it has bedrooms.
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Poet,
You took the words right out of my mouth!
So true,
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She is a fool!
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This is another attempt by Trump to diminish immigrant communities in our country. He does not seek to help immigrants adapt and adjust to a new language and culture. He would rather round them up and deport them. This is more of the same bias and xenophobia that the Trump administration endorses. Trump has mentioned eliminating the DOE as well because, frankly, he would prefer to destroy public education in favor of charters that provide revenue streams for more wealthy people like him.
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¿Qué sabe DeVos de la educación?
Menos que nada.
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Even I can translate your message.
Thanks to Jan for her meticulous presentation of the facts of this matter. In truth, the powers that be in Washington are intolerant and perhaps in fear of a policy that, “In addition to preserving heritage languages and cultures, … is committed to prompting opportunities for biliteracy or multiliteracy skills for all students.
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Expect you’re right. Perhaps DeVos can be convinced to just tweak the mission statement & hang onto OESE by using an “English-only” argument 😀 – Don’t ESL classes support that mission? I note “Mrs Richard DeVos” [presumably Betsy, as her MIL passed last year] is a current member of the Advisory Board of US English, the nation’s oldest and largest organization advocating for Official English.
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YES.
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¡Una verdadera malcriada sin vergüenza!
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Tell me if I say this at all logically: Ella sabe menos que nada de la educación, pero ella sabe BIEN que hay mucho mucho dinero en el juego de educación…
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Bien dicho
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I think the only way the Republican Party will survive Trump is to rewrite the US Constitution so no other party will be allowed to exist in the US
With the new Constitution, the GOP will become the Capitalist Party of the United States (C-PUS) modeled after the CCP in China, a political party that has often been compared to a corporation because of the way it conducts business.
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Dump is a treasonous liar.
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I recall Mayor Bloomberg speaking and writing often about the value and right thing to do AND the necessity of the population who are immigrants to make New York City run – hundreds of thousands of jobs and assuredly not hundreds of thousands of natural U.S. citizens to fill them.
This current administration (and I use that term loosely since they can’t administer their way out of a paper bag; only out of a news cycle) needs to (wait for it) look at the data (just like science is real). How many immigrants are employed or eager and waiting for employment? Compare that with the “hoodlums, rapists, and gangsters” the president would like us to believe are in the hundreds of thousands.
Here’s an excerpt from a 2012 article about Bloomberg (first one that came up on a quick search – there were better editorials)
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mayor-bloomberg-shows-real-immigration-reform-article-1.1084857
Immigration know-nothings gasped when Mayor Bloomberg said the federal government “should deliberately force some places that don’t want immigrants to take them” as a way to revitalize America’s “big, hollowed-out cities.”
Experience teaches that he’s right. Imagine what New York would have been like had the city not benefited from new arrivals. Whole neighborhoods that now thrive would likely be shells.
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Some of my more anti-immigrant friends are fond of suggesting that we should not be responsible for teaching immigrants the English language. My response is always a history lesson. Perhaps Madame Seceretary might like a lesson.
The last big wave of immigration before his one came as the country was industrializing and Europe was in convulsions at the end of the nineteenth century. Eastern European immigrants arrived, carrying the baggage of the various philosophies of their own political struggles. The United States, for its part, took no pains to teach anybody anything, and the immigrants ended up,in places like Jane Addams’ famous Hull House in Chicago, where they learned Enough English to get a job and enough radicalism to scare the crap out of the country. Anarchists were blamed for this or that radical attack in a day that saw a real dangerous left as opposed to the fictional one we hear discussed today.
Maybe is is a good investment to let the people that are new here understand that we value their presence, just as it is a good investment to let all our kids know that they are valued. The radical wolf might otherwise come to our door. It might huff and puff and blow down the straw man arguments of the aging right wing.
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When foreigners come to the US, the only way for them to fully participate in the economy is to learn English. It is better for the rest of us that they learn to do so as well. English is the language of access in this country. Marginalized people are more likely to become criminals to survive, and that is bad for everyone.
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@retiredteacher: We are in agreement! I have married two foreign women (not at the same time), and I have met many hundreds of immigrants, through my clubs and organizations.
ALL of the immigrants that I have met and known are hungry to learn English. Everyone knows, that you cannot participate in this economy and in our nation, without solid English language skills.
(I would love to see English made the official language of the USA, our nation has never had an official language set down in law).
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Maybe DeVos should just convince Donnie Boy Trump to write another one of his Executive Orders and just go around all the Legislators. Dumb Trump believes he can do anything with a stroke of a pen. The fools in the House and Senate won’t say a word.
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Betsy DeVos’ Dept of Ed. gave $10 mil. to private Tulane University to create a a better product for charter schools to sell. The group designing the better product is made up mostly of state university faculty like Katherine O. Strunk, who while at Rossier* school (University of Southern California) got $681,000 from John Arnold. She’s now in Betsey’s colony at Michigan State where it appears there’s a typo and it’s likely that she got $131,000 from John Arnold and before that, $190,000 from the Waltons. Also there’s Gates money.
* Rossier had the first college dean who was a Pahara fellow.
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As a foreign-lang teacher, I am somewhat ambivalent about ESL classes. And that’s mostly due to my [advanced] age: I’ve known & worked w/many 1st-gen Americans who arrived here between ages of 8-12 & learned Eng rapidly “the hard way”; i.e., thro immersion in school & nbhd, becoming the family translater overnight. [Also knew a bunch who did AFS (hisch yr abroad) in countries whose langs they studied only briefly in an intensive summer course, becoming fluent w/n a couple of months’ immersion in non-Eng-speaking families.]
So I’m open to the theory that dumping immigrant kids into US schools w/o benefit of special instruction may possibly be the way to go. But, please show me the studies. I suspect that lined up behind my successful 1st-gen nbrs, friends & colleagues who succeeded w/o benefit of ESL are a host of folks who lived in the shadows of their native-lang-speaking enclaves, their job opportunities severely limited by poor Eng skills.
If we mean it when we say equal access to an adequate ed – & an adequate ed for many non-Eng-speaking immigrant children must include ESL – let’s not play games. The proposed DofEd action sounds like a game called “Equal Access to an Adequate Ed for All Except Non-Eng-Speaking Immigrant Children.”
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Slightly revised:
“Equal Access to an Adequate Ed for All Except Non-Eng-Speaking Immigrant Children and children that live in poverty that don’t test well since this is a challenge for every country.”
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Education use to be about helping every child reach their full potential. I guess in Trump Land and Devos World this is not the case. I can help to clue them in- Fund this program now so these children learn to be productive members of society- or fund them later with social programs.
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“Education used to be about helping every child reach their full potential.”
And it still should be if one believes in following what the state constitutional purposes of public education say. As gleaned from the wording of 20/25 state constitutions that give a rationale for public education:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
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