Nominee for Secretary of Education brings concern for Educators

She also says she has found a few “moles” (my word) in the department who are committed to her not succeeding and pledges to do whatever can be done to render them ineffective.

On Thursday, the online news site Axios reported that DeVos will be going on a school visit with AFT President Randi Weingarten, who last month said DeVos was an ideologue intent on undermining public education. She may have been attempting a joke.

Meanwhile, parents, teachers and others across the country are looking for clues as to whether DeVos will fulfill their hopes or reinforce their fears. Tim Kaine, D-Va., whether she supports holding charter schools to the same standards that neighborhood public schools are held, DeVos effectively said no. The results of her efforts there haven’t been promising. Since there was a tie, it was up to Vice President Pence as president of the Senate to be the deciding voter.

Glenn McCoy faced backlash Tuesday for drawing DeVos in the place of the African-American girl in the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With“, which was a statement about the violence surrounding the desegregation of public schools.

We have a crew at the Capitol and will have a full report on the News at Noon. Nevertheless, her confirmation provides a boost for pro-voucher initiatives in the states.

Amanda Utterback, Master’s of Arts in Education concentrating in Special Education, is one of many in the education field concerned about the current nominee, “Personally, one of my concerns is that if elected she could push to privatize public education which could put Special Education programs in public schools at risk”. Among these people are Cee Lo Green at the Grammys, Stephen Miller, the Twenty One Pilots guys, and every person involved with the making of “Fifty Shades Darker“.

We strongly support children and public education, regardless of who is in charge at the federal level, but we agree with recent comments by former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and education historian Diane Ravitch. Parents who have the cultural capital to navigate the complicated web of bureaucracy that is public education in America. The team even called the program “one of the most effective urban dropout prevention programs yet witnessed”. To divert money from our schools is to end the very things that make a school a home away from home. DeVos, an enemy of public schools, pledged to “slim down the department in some ways”, and said that new kinds of schools will be introduced.

“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities”, the post by Joseph Sunde reads.

But parents who actually flee public education because Mrs. DeVos is now secretary – as if that made her principal-in-chief of the nation’s public schools – are acting for a different objective than most of those who exercise school choice.

John Crisp is an MCT op-ed writer.