Betsy DeVos is Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary. Here are some facts that emerged from yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing:
- She called the public school systems a “dead end” even though she did not attend a public school, did not send her children to public schools, and never taught in a public school.
- She has no experience with college financial aid- either from the personal or administrative side.
- She does not understand the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
- She doesn’t know the difference between proficiency and growth as it relates to student learning (an important distinction and a major debate in education today).
- She supports Trump’s plan to rescind gun-free school zones and refuses to say that guns do not belong in schools.
- She refuses to say that she will enforce the gainful employment rule – a law that prevents fake institutions of higher learning like Trump University from receiving federal dollars.
- She claimed that her 14 year position as Vice President of family.org, an anti-LGTB organization, was a “clerical error.”
I think we deserve a whole lot better than this.
To her credit, she also acknowledged that the behavior described by Donald Trump on that bus with Billy Bush constitutes sexual assault. I’m sure that if pressed, she would attribute his bragging as “locker room talk” or some other nonsense, but at least she acknowledged that if it actually happened, Trump would be labeled as sex offender.
The again, we all knew that already.
