MEDIA STATEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday March 31, 2023
Contact: Cassie Creswell, Illinois Families for Public Schools, 773-916-7794
PAUL VALLAS LIES ABOUT SUPPORT, CONNECTIONS WITH TRUMP SECRETARY OF ED BETSY DEVOS
DEVOS’ SUPER PAC CHAIR ATTENDS VALLAS EVENTS; VALLAS HOSTED EVENT WITH DEVOS IN 2021
CHICAGO — Mayoral candidate Paul Vallas is falsely denying his connections to former President Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and an Illinois Super PAC that DeVos funds.
DeVos funds and controls the Illinois Federation for Children PAC which made a $59,000 independent expenditure in support of Vallas’ campaign last week. On the same day, DeVos’ American Federation for Children Action Fund, a national 527 PAC funded primarily by DeVos and her husband, made a $65,000 contribution to the Illinois Federation for Children PAC.
Yesterday evening at the Sun-Times-WBEZ mayoral debate, Vallas denied having contact with DeVos, stating “I’ve never had any conversations or contact with Betsy DeVos. And our campaign has not received any money from her.”
The Vallas campaign said on Wednesday evening that “our campaign has not been in contact with this organization [Illinois Federation for Children PAC].”
In reality, Vallas and DeVos served together as hosts at an Urban League of Chicago event on September, 9 2021 in honor of the superintendent of schools of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
Moreover, the chair of the Illinois Federation for Children PAC Nathan Hoffman has been regularly attending Vallas campaign events in the last month, including Vallas’ February 28th election night party:
- https://twitter.com/milenatehoff/status/1637554629020901378
- https://twitter.com/milenatehoff/status/1630763304581750784
- https://twitter.com/milenatehoff/status/1630764601376686080
- https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10221719429121407&set=a.1372071028244
Hoffman was a registered contract lobbyist in Springfield for the DeVos-founded and funded 501c4 American Federation for Children until January 2023.
On June 18, 2022, Vallas appeared on a panel hosted by extremist anti-LGBTQ+ group Awake Illinois with keynote speaker Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at DeVos-founded and funded American Federation for Children.
Paul Vallas’ decades-long history of privatizing multiple school districts in the US and extensive support for transferring public funds to private schools are tightly aligned with DeVos’ ideological opposition to the existence of publicly-run, publicly-funded schools.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
After I received a fund raising letter for the democratic party, I wrote a note to the legislator, who has come out in favor of Vallas. They keep praising this guy’s educational experience and financial acumen. Try as I might, I am having great difficulty identifying anything other than mismanagement. I really do not understand the love affair between Vallas and so many of the state Democrats.
Vallas is a huge privatizer. What do Democrats like about that?
You got me, but there is quite a string of them.
Not Democrats, Republicans-Lite. They are the outmoded relics of the Democratic Party past. It is time to move on past Arne Duncan, who hosted the Urban League event along with DeVos and Vallas. It’s been easy for the billionaires’ pet Democrats to support one another. But throw DeVos’ name in there with them, and they squirm like the worms they are.
Some of them (who had been themselves running for mayor) are probably angling for jobs or have already been promised something.
It is shocking that Jesse White & Dick Durbin endorsed.
&, as speduktr wrote, there’s a long list of Dem endorsements. Aside from White, my thinking is the terrible & persistent Dem neo-liberalism (not liberal at all, really) such as what we had in the Obama-Duncan admin (& Duncan in Chicago before that, & Renaissance 2010), worse than anything the Bushes did, & it was a DINO Chicago mayor who bragged about closing more public schools than any other city (& at the same time closing down mental health facilities in those same neighborhoods). Speaking of which, want to talk about the ROOTS of the violence, the reasons for the increase in Chicago crime? What I just wrote–poverty + loss of school communities (school staff who were like parents to their students, loss of friends as being moved to different schools) + closure of mental health facilities=recipe for disaster. Kids need families, & if they can’t get them at home or in schools, gang members are happy to welcome brothers into their fold. On the jacket of a Jonathan Kozol book (“Savage Inequalities,” perhaps?), a principal in a poor community writes, “One day my kids are going to meet your kids.” & it’s happening, folks. We are all meeting them. (BTW, Covid didn’t help.)
Of course, there is so much more (so read “Savage Inequalities,” read Alex Kotlowitz, read “Monster,” written in 1993 by a gang member while he was in jail), but it’s beyond bedtime &, of course, I’m preaching to the choir here.
Yeah, I’ll be waiting to see who gets a job if Vallas wins. The charter and voucher vultures are salivating. Plus, too many people opt for “Get tough on Crime!” slogans without really thinking about what works. Johnson does a better job of defining all the factors that go into confronting the problem, but I’m not sure he knows how to craft a comprehensive plan. If your life has been devastated by neighborhood crime, you might be tempted to “take the handcuffs off the police,” whatever that means.
Retiredbutmiss
What Vallas and Durbin have in common is the preference for Catholic schools. Vallas attended them and praised them when he became an education administrator.
Durbin sent his kids to Blessed Sacrament. He graduated from Georgetown.
Btw, Durbin is not opposed to reproductive choice.
Paul Vallas by his lies, reveals that he is a closet fascist planning to come out of the closet just like Dangerously Deranged Despot DeSantis did after he was elected governor of Florida.
“I have never had relations with that woman, Ms DeVos” — Paul Vallas
Beat me to it.
Close, but no cigar.
Hahaha! Close and a cigar.
Bernie Sanders hosted a rally for Brandon Johnson in Chigago last night. Here’s a couple of minutes:
21/23 Twitter replies are negative, & some of those are really ugly. This is an ugly race with so much at stake here. Again, the msm has been mostly silent (I continue to think about George Santos.)
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.