Betsy DeVos tweeted a thank you to teachers whose public schools she reviles.
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Dear Secretary DeVoid:
Your resignation would be a profound service to your country. And what a great anti-government statement that would be! It’s a win-win.
Thank you for taking this under consideration.
Bob,
You made my day with the name, DeVoid. Thanks for the laugh.
Maybe we should all sign that letter … for real.
I’m sure legislators would be ready to give teachers higher salaries if they had ‘strikes’ in the evenings and on Saturdays. It is possible that soon we will be rid of DeVos.
………………………….
Betsy DeVos says teachers should use “adult time” to protest low wages, classroom sizes so “students don’t get hurt”
BY DONICA PHIFER ON 5/6/19
Speaking at a conference in Baltimore on Monday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said teachers should use time outside of work to protest low wages, large class sizes and other issues.
“I think it’s important that adults have adult disagreements on adult time, and that they not ultimately hurt kids in the process. I think too often they’ve doing so by walking out of classrooms and having arguments in the way that they are,” DeVos said, according to the Associated Press.
DeVos agreed that “great” teachers should be “well paid” but did not give her support to teachers who have chosen to strike for better working conditions.
Strikes have occurred in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and California, among other states, during the 2018-2019 school year. Teachers in other states, including North Carolina and Mississippi, have mulled strikes but thus far have not walked out of their classrooms. The graph from Statista below shows the number of teaching strikes in the U.S. over recent years…
DeVos also said she wasn’t sure she would sit for another term if Trump is reelected to the White House in 2020.
https://www.newsweek.com/betsy-devos-says-teachers-should-use-adult-time-protest-low-wages-classroom-1417436
You’ll enjoy Trevor Noah’s take on “adult time”:
Christine Langhoff: I watch Trevor Noah on the Daily Show regularly. He is bright and gives out lots of information. I also like the regular cast of performers. Comedy offers news in a way that is factual but more digestible.
When a person is confirmed as a cabinet officer, the first duty they must perform is to submit an undated resignation letter (to the President) . Cabinet officers serve at the pleasure of the president. The president need only fill in the date, and the cabinet officer is resigned and out the door.
Absent some unusual circumstance, the president is normally free to refuse to accept the resignation of a cabinet officer.
Encouraging a cabinet officer to resign is basically futile.
Charles,
That is nonsense. I served in President George H.W. Bush’s subcabinet. Every presidential appointee serves at the pleasure of the President. I was never asked to submit a resignation letter, not when I was appointed nor at any other time. I never heard of the Secretary (Lamar Alexander) offering such a letter. If the President asks you to resign, you resign. Where did you pick up that little bit of mythology?
Every citizen is free to demand the resignation of a cabinet officer.
Betsy DeVos will never be asked toresign because she contributed so many millions to GOP Senators. She bought her job.
Cabinet level burn! I enjoyed that.
To show her appreciation for teachers like me, Dick and Betsy can donate nine of their ten yachts to AOC.
Also, I have to go off topic here for a bit. A couple weeks ago someone here (I’m sorry, I forgot who it was) found on the California Department of Education website a statement that standardized tests were a model of good teaching. I can’t stop being befuddled by that statement every day since. How can an assessment — the results of which are highly volatile and inaccurate — be considered teaching, let alone model teaching? It’s a test. It’s not a lesson. How lost was my state government for how many decades as to arrive at such a ridiculous conclusion? They actually thought students were learning while taking Common Core tests! Boggles the mind. Just had to get that off my chest.
The Trump misadministration/clown car show has had more entrances and exits than the most farcical of stage farces. Here’s a looooooooooog list of senior ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations
It’s pretty astonishing. With this many people, one could staff several normal administrations.
Lloyd, the ones who have not resigned or been fired have lost their reputations.
hopefully, in the political world, forever
I don’t know about that, Diane. For one thing, I don’t think any of them had reputations to begin with. At least, not good ones to lose.
But more importantly, I think most people going into the Trump administration know upfront it’s going to be a temp job. He is famously mercurial, after all. I think they probably milked it for everything they could get upfront, and I’m sure they landed gently on a luxury mattress of future employment with some soulless contractor/consulting firm.
Michael Flynn? Rex Tillerson? Many of these people had significant reputations to begin with. All were tarnished by their associations with Don Cheeto Trumpbalone
Who do you think Trump would appoint to replace DeVos? Mercedes Schneider? Peter Greene? Diane Ravitch?
Considering who appointed her, I think DeVos is the best we’re going to get. She’s so blatantly obvious in her evilness. I don’t usually like comic books because the “bad guy” is so blatantly bad that it’s completely unrealistic. Except that DeVos comes about as close to a real life comic book villain as I’ve ever seen.. You can practically see her rubbing her hands together and muttering, “And soon the world will be mine, BWAHAHAHAHA!”
If we get rid of her, Trump might just learn his lesson and pick someone less visibly odious and then people would probably just shrug and assume everything is okay again. Give me Blindingly Bad Betsy over Attaboy Arne any day.
Dienne,
I agree with you. I want DeVos to stay exactly where she is. She is the gift that keeps on giving. She is so blatant in her heartlessness that she builds the Resistance.
And who else is going to argue that teachers should be armed because they might have to fight off grizzly bears? It doesn’t get better than that.
Spot on, Dienne!
I have to pile on with devos also. I get the sense that she has a mechanism in her brain that is able to blindly avoid obvious issues in society mainly education and it is quite astonishing to witness.
For example the statement to teachers to “do it on their time” is so out of bounds, so ruthless, so out of touch it boggles the mind but I now truly believe that she is oblivious to the facts and is sort of in her own “trance” of mental conscious.