Peter Greene says that Secretary DeVos should either “help or hush,” which is certainly more civil than, say, help or shut up.

DeVos has threatened to cut off funding to schools that don’t open fully, but fortunately she lacks the authority to shut any school for not following her orders. She spends her time campaigning for charters and vouchers, and has nothing to offer the public schools that the vast majority of students attend.

Greene describes two events where DeVos touted her privatization agenda.

Then he wrote:

While you’ve been out slamming public schools at events like the two above, you’ve made it clear what your interest is–promoting school vouchers. You keep plugging your scholarship tax credit plan, and keep insisting that the pandemic underlines how badly families need choice, as if one of the available choices were a school that is completely immune from the covid spread. 

It’s seems hard to believe that you could make people more angry at you than they already were (I understand that you don’t care–I’m just saying). But here we are with the school house on fire, and the head of education is using it as an opportunity to sell her personal brand of asbestos gloves.

I suppose it should be clear after all these years that we can’t expect any help from you for public education. And it’s a sign of the times that it makes sense to type a sentence like “the United States secretary of education cannot be expected to support public education in the United States.” So sure– no guidance, no assistance, not even a sympathetic pat on the shoulder or a half-hearted attaboy. Certainly not a “These are really difficult times– what can we on the federal level do to help you?”

But if you’re not going to help, can you at least hush? If you are not going to be part of any sort of movement to help public schools, can you at least not be out in the front lines of people trying to attack it? Is that really so much to ask? Just, you know, hush. Just let the people who are actually doing the work of public education in this country have one fewer voices bussing in their ear declaring that they stink and they’re failing and we should be giving them less support and instead buying everyone a pair of these asbestos gloves. 

Either pitch in and help us get through this, or, if you can’t bring yourself to so that, just sit down and hush.