Betsy DeVos Has a Few Words to Say to Her Protestors

New Education Secretary Says Protests Were Not ‘Spontaneous’ or ‘Genuine’

Betsy DeVos has been busy since making history last week by becoming the first cabinet nominee to ever have so few Senators supporting her she needed a tie-breaking vote cast by the vice president. The remarkably unqualified yet newly-confirmed anti-public schools Secretary of Education was temporarily prevented from entering a Washington, D.C. area public school last week – possibly the first time she had ever been in one – by parents, teachers, and activists protesting her visit. She responded by saying she will not be deterred.

But DeVos now has a few words to share with her opponents.

In an interview published Thursday at Town Hall with the far right wing political commentator Cal Thomas, DeVos calls the protests that surrounded her nomination not “spontaneous” or “genuine,” but instead insists they were “sponsored and very carefully planned.”

Some of the most important protests this nation has ever seen were not spontaneous and were carefully planned (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom comes to mind) but that certainly does not make them not genuine. (Do these photos from an anti-DeVos rally in DC last month look like the protestors are not genuine?)

DeVos also says protestors “want to make my life a living hell.”

Well, given that’s what her policies will do to this nation’s children’s futures, can you blame them?

She adds, “They also don’t know what stock I come from. I will not be deterred from my mission in helping kids in this country.”

Unless those kids own stock in for-profit education companies, she’s not going to be “helping kids in this country.”

How do we know?

In a separate interview published Friday with Axios, the new right-leaning news site founded by Politico’s co-founders, DeVos revealed she sees higher education as vocational training, something people do in order to get a job, rather than embracing education and learning for their own sake. There’s no mention of teaching people to think or analyze.

“She and Trump believe many students aren’t well served by four-year college degrees, and they want to promote vocational training as a means of preparing them for work and reducing student debt,” Axios says. There’s nothing wrong with vocational training, just with many of the for-profit “schools,” like, say, Trump University, that defraud students who often are poor and find themselves robbed of their life savings, or run up credit card balances thinking they’re investing in their futures.

DeVos also says that during her tenure on the job, “I expect there will be more public charter schools. I expect there will be more private schools. I expect there will be more virtual schools. I expect there will be more schools of any kind that haven’t even been invented yet.”

The Washington Post notes, “The one thing she said she didn’t expect more of was traditional public schools.”

And she says she would be fine if some day the Dept. of Education was entirely dismantled, if it no longer existed. 

Does she think the federal government should have any role in education?

“I think in some of the areas around protecting students and ensuring safe environments for them, there is a role to play,” she told Axios. “I mean, when we had segregated schools and when we had a time when, you know, girls weren’t allowed to have the same kind of sports teams — I mean, there have been important inflection points for the federal government to get involved.”

But are there any remaining issues like that where the federal government should intervene? “I can’t think of any now,” she replied.

So, LGBTQ students and families should expect no help from DeVos’ Education Dept., not that that is any surprise.

And no other minority students or families should expect help from DeVos either. Apparently, as far as protecting children and ensuring they are in safe environments that help ensure learning, all the work the federal government needs to do has been done. 

Including defending the Obama administration’s guidance to help protect transgender students, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to do last week.

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Image by Ted Eytan via Flickr and a CC license