DeVos statement on black colleges sparks uproar

The top two Democratic lawmakers on education issues in Congress are asking for more details from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about her stated plans to look for ways to trim the U.S. Department of Education.

While overshadowed by the appropriateness and deeper meaning of Kellyanne Conway’s couch photo in the Oval Office, yesterday’s meeting of President Trump and presidents of the nation’s historically-Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) was accompanied by a historically ignorant statement from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

This is the statement America’s Education secretary released after a meeting with the leaders of historically black colleges and universities.

“While it doesn’t come out in the data, many students who are lower on the socioeconomic scale would be more successful if they didn’t have problems outside the classroom”, Whitehead said. Another points out HBCUs didn’t represent more choice for black students; they were usually the only choice following the Civil War.

Talk about tone deaf.

With constant f*ck-ups like this, it’s a good thing Black History Month is coming to an end. After all, Betsy DeVos went to some of the best private schools in America.

The criticism was loud.

While she doesn’t use the term, DeVos’s statement appears to be drawing a comparison between HBCUs and charter schools. In response, they were forced to form their own institutions of higher education.

Totally nuts. DeVos pretending that establishment of historically black colleges was about choice not racism.

“Every child has the right to attend a public school that is warm, welcoming, rigorous and that prepares them for success in life”. I should know as members of my family were allowed to flourish in such institutions of higher learning in the 1960s when many schoolhouse doors were barred to blacks as a dying vestige of Jim Crow laws throughout the South.

The Democrats’ premier school choice advocate, New Jersey Sen. She acknowledged at a luncheon that HBCU founder Mary McLeod Bethune started Bethune-Cookman University in Florida because traditional schools “systemically failed to provide African Americans access to a quality education”. It’s not really “choice” when you aren’t given any other options.

DeVos’ tone-deaf attempts to connect her programs to a bleak time in American history easily overshadowed any public goodwill that President Trump’s executive order offered.

The press release arrived after that now infamous “listening session” with the leaders of HBCU’s.