The conservative media has mobilized to defend Betsy DeVos against the emerging portrait of her as a voucher-loving, out-of-touch billionaire who wants to privatize public funding and replace public schools with charter schools and religious schools.

Mercedes Schneider describes some of the rehabilitation attempts. One of them appears in the current issue of EdNext, whose editors are affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution (disclosure: I was once on the editorial board of EdNext).

Having a sharp eye, Schneider scrutinized the photograph of DeVos that accompanied the article. She made a discovery: DeVos is looking at carpet samples! This is a strange way to portray a woman who is trying to establish her credentials as an “educator” or a serious person who cares about issues. Carpet samples? Was she redecorating the drawing room?

Stuart Egan is a high school teacher in North Carolina. When he read Mitt Romney’s endorsement of Betsy DeVos, he was enraged. In this post, he reviews Romney’s ignorant, out-of-touch claims on behalf of DeVos. Detroit as a model? Charters in Michigan as a success story? DeVos as a successful businesswoman, when she was born to billionaires and married a billionaire?

Facts matter. History matters. Evidence matters. Not to Romney.

Mitt Romney’s Very Misguided Op-ed Endorsing Betsy DeVos

Ed Patru, Friend of– and Mouthpiece for– Betsy DeVos

Mercedes Schneider noticed a strange phenomenon: whenever a news reporter went in search of a friendly comment about Betsy DeVos, for balance, the quote almost always came from the same person: Ed Patru, speaking on behalf of “Friends of Betsy DeVos.”

She he searched the Internet but could find no such organization. She searched for Mr. Patru and discovered he is a paid PR guy.

Ed Patru is the Friends of Betsy DeVos. Does she have any friends who are not paid to be her friend? We.. there’s Campbell Brown, but she gets DeVos money too.

Here are some great questions that Senators should pose to Betsy DeVos at her hearings on January 11.

http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2017/01/ten-questions-for-betsy-devos-by-russ.html

The questions were written by literacy expert Russ Walsh.

Russ Walsh, literacy expert, has ten questions that the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions)  committee should ask Billionaire Betsy.

http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/01/ten-questions-for-betsy-devos.html

He sent these questions to his senators from Pennsylvania. One of his senators, Bob Casey, is a member of the HELP committee.

 
“Ms. DeVos, would you please state, concisely, any relevant experience you have had in public education, either as a student, a teacher, a school leader, a public school board member, a parent of a public school child, a PTA member, a volunteer in a traditional public school or as someone who once drove past a public school?
You have a long record of advocating for school choice in the form of vouchers and charter schools. What if parents’ first choice, as it is for most American families, is to send their children to a clean, safe, well-resourced, professionally-staffed, local neighborhood public school? How would the voucher and charter school schemes you advocate support this kind of choice?
In your home state of Michigan, you and the foundations you support have fought hard to make sure that governmental oversight of charter schools is extremely limited despite indications of widespread fiscal mismanagement and poor academic performance. Should charter schools be subject to the same financial and academic scrutiny as traditional public schools? If not, why not?
The Detroit Free Press has called you the lobbyist “at the center” of the current “deeply dysfunctional” school choice landscape in Detroit. Policies you have heavily advocated for and supported are on full display in that city.

How is that working out? Would you care to take the committee on a site visit to Detroit to see the impact of your good works?
Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, has called you “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward” since forever. Talk about how you will develop good working relationships with the 2.5 million teachers represented by unions.
Your family made much of its fortune through Amway, a quasi-legal pyramid scheme that, according to one suit that cost the company 150 million dollars to settle, “induces salespeople to buy thousands of dollars of overpriced products and useless success tools and then to recruit others to do the same thing in an endless chain scheme that dooms, by design, nearly all to losses.” Do you think as Secretary at DOE you might be able to use such a multi-level marketing scheme to raise needed money for public schools? Do you think pyramid business schemes should be taught in school?
In interviews you have discussed visits you have made to charter schools and the wonderful programs you saw there. Would you discuss any visits you have made, ever, to a traditional public school and talk about the programs you saw there?
Your predecessors at the federal Department of Education have faced a great deal of criticism for advocating the use of standardized testing to rate schools and teachers. Explain in detail the pros and cons of these so called Value-Added Measures, how they are calculated and whether or not you think they are a good way to evaluate teacher or school performance. Can we see the valued-added scores of the charter schools in Detroit, please?
Lightning Round. Please identify these education program acronyms:
IEP
RTI
PARCC
SBAC
CCSS
ELL
ESL
FERPA
IDEA
PAC
WPA (Oops! Sorry, that one sneaked in from the Roosevelt administration)
In the end, Ms. DeVos, as the person designated to lead the federal Department of Education, overseeing the programs and resources for the 90% of American school children who attend traditional public schools, does a viable system of public education matter to you at all? Take your time with this one, but not as much time as you have taken to sign your required financial disclosure forms.”