Tag Archives: Betsy DeVos

Undermining Academic Achievement, by Walter Williams

Posted on March 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

The public education establishment keeps lowering the bar for itself. From Walter Williams at lewrockwell.com:

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefitted from the public education system in this country.” Expressing similar sentiments, Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Cedric Richmond said, “I expect that Mrs. DeVos will have an incredibly harmful impact on public education and on black communities nationwide.” Those and many other criticisms of Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could be dismissed as simply political posturing if we did not have an educational system that is mostly mediocre and is in advanced decay for most black students.

According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov). For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.

The nation’s high-school graduation rate rose again in the 2014-15 school year, reaching a record high as more than 83 percent of students earned a diploma on time. Educators see this as some kind of achievement and congratulate themselves. The tragedy is that high-school graduation has little relevance to achievement.

To continue reading: Undermining Academic Achievement

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Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary: Enjoy the Delicious Tears of Teachers Unions, by Robby Soave

Posted on February 7, 2017 | 1 comment

A proponent of school choice—charter schools and voucher plans—is now the Secretary of Education. SLL would prefer full-on privatization, but it’s a start. From Robby Soave at reason.com:

With Vice President Mike Pence formally casting the vote to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate, Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as the next Secretary of Education.

DeVos, whose vigorous enthusiasm for school choice and presumed support of Title IX reform make her one of Trump’s better Cabinet picks, encountered furious opposition from Democrats. Indeed, the left fought DeVos harder than they fought Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General pick. Sessions opposes criminal justice reform, asset forfeiture reform, and immigration reform, but knocking out DeVos was a higher priority for liberals.

That’s due to the all-consuming influence of public teachers unions, which remain one of the most powerful political forces in the Democratic Party and a constant obstacle to education reform. If DeVos can do anything to diminish the teachers unions’ ability to thwart change in the education system, her nomination will have been well worth the fight.

Needless to say, enemies of education reform are freaking out.

Randi Weingarten called DeVos’s confirmation “a sad day for children.”

Here was Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson in a since-deleted tweet:

Not an exaggeration in any sense.

The Women’s March tweeted an anti-DeVos statement as well—undermining the idea that the movement is grounded in opposition to mistreatment of women:

Here was Silicon Valley’s Kumail Nanjiani:

But it was the Dems who voted strictly along party lines: two Republicans actually voted against DeVos. And no one deserves as much criticism for using children as pawns as union leadership does. The unions claim to be serving the interests of kids and families, but their job is to protect bad teachers from accountability and use membership fees to fund left-wing causes.

To continue reading: Betsy DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary: Enjoy the Delicious Tears of Teachers Unions

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Education at a Crossroads, by Thomas Sowell

Posted on February 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Thomas Sowell argues why it’s important to have someone like nominee Betsy DeVos, who is not part of the “education establishment” as the Secretary of Education. From Sowell on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

In just a matter of days — perhaps Monday — a decision will be made in Washington affecting the futures of millions of children in low-income communities, and in the very troubled area of race relations in America.

An opportunity has arisen — belatedly — that may not come again in this generation. That is an opportunity to greatly expand the kinds of schools that have successfully educated, to a high level, inner-city youngsters whom the great bulk of public schools fail to educate to even minimally adequate levels.

What may seem on the surface to be merely a matter of whether the U.S. Senate confirms or rejects the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be head of the U.S. Department of Education involves far bigger stakes.

The teachers’ unions and the education establishment in general know how big those stakes are, and have mounted an all-out smear campaign to prevent her from being confirmed.

What makes Mrs. DeVos seem so threatening to the teachers’ unions and their political allies?

She has, for more than 20 years, been promoting programs, laws and policies that enable parents to choose which schools their children will attend — whether these are charter schools, voucher schools or parochial schools.

Some of these charter schools — especially those in the chain of the Success Academy schools and the chain of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools — operate in low-income, minority neighborhoods in the inner-cities, and turn out graduates who can match the educational performances of students in affluent suburbs. What is even more remarkable, these charter schools are often housed in the very same buildings, in the very same ghettoes, where students in the regular public schools fail to learn even the basics in English or math.

To continue reading: Education at a Crossroads

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