President Trump’s executive orders aren’t the only decisions that are drawing a lot of attention. His cabinet nominees have been raising a lot of eyebrows from critics. The latest in a long line of shaky decisions is a woman named Betsy DeVos. She was just voted in by the Senate to be the next Secretary of Education. Many people love DeVos’s for her decades of tireless work trying to reform the current school system. She strongly advocates for charter schools and vouchers. Charter and other private/for-profit school systems tend to have higher quality education. But the use of vouchers would mean that taxpayer money would be used for tuition of those private and for profit schools.
Critics also note that she lacks experience in large scale administration. When she was questioned by the Senate it was clear that she was unfamiliar with the current public school system as well as the laws that are meant to help students. DeVos has also never taken out a student loan either for herself or her children owing to a privileged upbringing; which is a concern since she will be head of the department of the third largest student loan distributor in the US. She grew up in a wealthy family and married into an even wealthier family by way of the Amway fortune. Many people say that she cannot possibly connect to the vast majority of those that demand reform for the current education system.
Her wealth is another issue for many as she, like President Trump, have a vast network of investments. There is fear that she will have a conflict of interest and that fear is further intensified by her being the only nominee not to have completed an ethics review before appearing before the Senate.
Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, had this to say about DeVos. “That’s because DeVos shows an antipathy for public schools, a full-throttled embrace of private, for-profit alternatives, and a lack of basic understanding of what children need to succeed in school.”
But is her plan really that detrimental? DeVos plans on heading an initiative that will funnel $20 million dollars into vouchers for low income households so their children can attend private schools. That is such a huge amount and experts predict the only way to produce that much money is by rerouting federal funds from other areas of the public school system. This is especially detrimental in rural areas where there are far fewer schools to choose from.
David E. Kirkland, an education professor at New York University studied DeVos’s impact in Michigan. He feared she could hurt public education across the country by pulling resources out of schools in need of federal funding. “Her extensive conflicts of interest and record of diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich make DeVos completely unfit for the position she was just confirmed to.”
To top it all off, she is dividing people even in the republican party. Two Republican senators voted against her instatement. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska publicly announced that DeVos is not fit to serve as Secretary of Education. They also noted that they were moved by the thousands of messages they received urging them to vote against DeVos. Her nomination was confirmed with a historic tie break. For the first time in history the Vice-President was called in to settle the vote with 51 yays to 50 nays.
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