American education has deep problems. Funding for the public school system is patchy and inconsistent, relying on local property taxes which leads to gross inequities; higher education has suffered from declining support for decades. And now Donald Trump has appointed Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education.
Why?
The sole reason is that DeVos is a corrupt billionaire, just like him; she made her money off of the Amway empire, which is a repellent, criminal pyramid scheme, a colossal con that has escaped most of the weight of legal retribution by being filthy rich and cozying up to the right wing.
In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of Ronald Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after calling the brutal 1982 recession a “cleansing process,” and insisting that anyone who was unemployed simply didn’t want to work. That same year, DeVos and his Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were charged with criminal tax fraud in Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded guilty and paid fines of twenty-five million dollars, and the criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were dropped. Despite these incidents, the DeVos clan remained a major political force. “There’s not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the last fifty years who hasn’t known the DeVoses,” Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told Mother Jones, in 2014.
The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the family’s wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a fortune in auto-parts manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35 billion in cash, in 1996. Her brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that the government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.
The whole damn family ought to be in prison, but instead, they’ve been embraced by the Trump regime.
But wait, that says nothing about her ability to run the US educational system. What are her education qualifications?
She doesn’t have any. She’s had no training in education, she did not attend public school, her kids didn’t attend public schools, she’s been a crusader for vouchers. Vouchers don’t work!
The longest running voucher program in the country is the 20-year-old Milwaukee School Choice Program. Standardized testing shows that the voucher students in private schools perform below the level of Milwaukee’s public school students, and even when socioeconomic status is factored in, the voucher students still score at or below the level of the students who remain in Milwaukee’s public schools. Cleveland’s voucher program has produced similar results. Private schools in the voucher program range from excellent to very poor. In some, less than 20 percent of students reach basic proficiency levels in math and reading.
Vouchers are simply a means to an end: the demolition of the public school system. The DeVoses can afford the best private schools, and if you can’t, you deserve to be uneducated.
We thought Trump would be bad. We had no idea how awful electing an incompetent sould be, because it’s clear that the first thing he’s doing is appointing more incompetents solely on the basis of ideological fanaticism.
This is one of the way the elites keep control.
They could care less about the public schools. To them, they are just a money sink.
They send their kids to private schools. At $8,000-$10,000 a year per kid. Or lots more for the best.
The right wingnuts hate public education.
Because it works. It teaches kids stuff.
And because it costs money. Roughly half of all state budgets goes towards education. K-12 and higher ed.
Two centuries of mandatory public education is one of the things that Made America Great!!!
The principle here is well known. Don’t fix things that aren’t broken.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
Followup to comment 282 on MPM thread.
Betsy DeVos is also an anti-union activist. She helped turn Michigan into a “right to work” state.
Part of her push to deregulate charter schools, and to increase the number of charter schools, is meant to weaken teachers’ unions.
Right Wing Watch link for background material.
Trump made it very clear that he was going to spend his presidency pogo-sticking in the oval office. In terms of damage his administration is going to do, I thought it was obvious that it was the Republicans he was giving the keys to the country to that we ought to be worried about.
Ugh, and I thought we had it bad when Michael Gove was education secretary (he’s still awful of course, but not in the same league as this festering stain of a human being).
My question would be – to what extent is this appointment actually likely to cause serious harm? Are there checks and safeguards to prevent too much executive power being wielded? How much of the US’s educational infrastructure is run centrally by the minister, and how much is delegated to civil servants and local government? We got through Gove’s attempts at reform thanks to a) a vocal opposition to them in parliament, b) the fact that most of the significant education decisions are made at a county level, and c) the strength of our teachers’ unions and the influence of education academics on policy.
So that’s another chance people are supposed to give Presidentish Donald. How many more chances is he supposed to get?
Wow. I can’t believe he found an even worse candidate than Jerry Falwell, Jr. for secretary of education. At least Falwell would have already been familiar with the paperwork.
I feel for you guys, Ontario once had a highschool dropout for an education minister, he only stayed for half a term (yeah, he dropped out of that too), and it still took more than a decade to recover from the damage he did. He wasn’t even actively antagonistic to the idea of education, he was just mad that it wasn’t a high profile posting, so he deliberately created a crisis to bring himself media attention. You guys are about to get hit with worse.
Yeah! But who needs education these days anyway? Like science research!
As one American fundy told me recently, we don’t need that now we can just look everything up on the Internet!
Good point.
Schools are mostly run at the local and state level.
As to how much damage Betsy DeVos can do, who knows? As much as she and the GOP can.
Well, there are other uses for children. (Note that the Acton Institute received last year’s Templeton Freedom Award.)
Also, has Donald Trump actually appointed anyone who isn’t a complete bastard yet? I keep seeing these stories about the latest bigoted creep to be put in charge of something – are there minor ones about unremarkable seat-fillers who are sort of all right too or is this the totality of i?
… paid fines of twenty-five million dollars…
Hmm: now we know the magic number for Trump & Trumpistas to buy off their problems.
(Yeah, I know: that was in Canadian dollars, not real money…)
@Rosa Rubicondior #8, ah, but that internet won’t be running for very long once we have eliminated education entirely and are a proper third world nation.
Perhaps, it’s best to let them demolish the education systems. After all, who will maintain the nuclear (and conventional) arsenals?
And our population surplus will be taken care of by the melting down nuclear power plants that the operators left in their old age and nobody could replace them.
Somehow, I can see a post-apocalyptic film in the making.
Idiocracy meets Mad Max, where melting down nuclear plants and chemical plants turn the nation into a vast wasteland and mutants fight the remnants of humanity for the scraps left over from the fallen civilization and billionaires are eaten for lunch by both.
Yeah…he’s going to “drain the swamp” by piling enough crap into it to get the sodden mass above water level…
@HappyHead: Just think: if the Tories win the next election we could have a homeschooled teenager as minister of education.
@16, wash your keyboard out with soap. Tories winning indeed…as if Mike Fucking Harris wasn’t bad enough?
Er, my 16 is @15, not self-referential.
@specialffrog: I have nightmares about that sort of thing. 8 years of Harper drained nearly all of the funding from the university research communities I’m employed by (with a massive “why don’t you nerds like me?” surge just before the election that amounted to about half of what he took away over his tenure…) getting stuck with the “we hate science and education” party for provincial government at the same time would have finished us off.
@HappyHead / @CatieCat: I wish I could be confident it won’t happen. At least it is still relatively far away.
I see quite a few charter schools here in San Antonio. They tend to appear in empty buildings left behind when big box stores move to a bigger, better building. Often, they soon close up and the building is once again empty. I suppose that the so-called administrators have made their money from the scam and have moved on. Unfortunately, their poorly-educated students are then poured back into the over-crowded public schools. When those students inevitably bring down the test scores of the public schools, the conservatives in the state legislature can then point at the “failing public schools”.
It’s a downward spiral that the conservatives put into action, and now they will have the chance to make it nation-wide.
I’m hoping that the blue states (looking at you, California!) will stand strong and resist this.
What does Trump need a Secretary of Education for? Hasn’t he already told us that he loves the poorly educated?
How depressing that this utter buffoon has gotten to where he is now. And how shameful and embarrassing that the American electoral system is so unfit for purpose that the person who came second won the election.
It’s not surprising that the Grand Nagus-elect (or is it better Grand Neg-us? Grand Neg-U.S.?) would give this position to a major contributor. I imagine that to him it’s a throwaway position; after all, what’s so important about education? He’s done just fine without a sophistimacated education, so everyone else can too, right?
Exactly! I’ve been saying for a long time, vouchers won’t work, because (as every teacher knows) the quality of a school depends much more on the quality of the students than on the quality of the teachers or admins. Private schools mostly outperform public schools because the private schools get to select which students to enroll; most public schools have to take all comers. Those public schools which DO get to be selective (like mine, Stuyvesant) do just as well as the private schools do, in spite of being run by the e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-evil tyra-a-a-a-a-a-annical government.
So if you give the public-school students vouchers, most of them won’t be able to get into private schools, and if you force the private schools to take them, the quality of the private schools will drop.
Given that Sam Oosterhoff is 19 maybe there’s a chance he can still learn not be a religious conservative. On the other hand given that he’s 19 Young MPP could conceivably be in office 30 years from now and still have another 20 years left in his political career.
Well, don’t worry. Europe will be happy to take in your displaced top research scientists. And for those production jobs you want to get back from South East Asia you don’t need any education anyway.
One charter school I know of, is sort of like this.
1. All the teachers are part time. This allows them to get by a lot of rules over employment including providing health insurance.
2. Speaking of benefits, they don’t have any. None.
No health insurance, no sick days, no vacation, nothing whatsoever.
Oddly enough, this probably isn’t even close to the worst ones.
I don’t know too much about them but they’ve been around for a few years and I think they provide at least an average education.
I wouldn’t send my kids there though.
I’m amazed that these people don’t realise you need a large pool of highly educated people to run an empire. I guess they equate worth and success with wealth, and since they got rich without ever cracking open a book or having an abstract thought…
I mean, you can work to ideologically control the institutions of education. But trying to burn them down because you think you’ve lost ideological control of them is extremely foolish.
I just gave $100 to Jill Stein’s Election Integrity website. If you don’t already know she’s trying to get recounts started in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Her goal is $4.5 million and it looks as though she’ll make it tonight. I know it’s a long shot but for the first time in two weeks I don’t feel helpless and unable to think of anything useful to do. Even if the recounts don’t change anything it’s an act of defiance. If a man like Trump can win then anything, no matter how improbable, is still possible.
Including Foster Campbell winning a LA Senate seat (people can donate here).
Oh, hi. I graduated from a charter school.
I was a National Merit Scholar.
(Granted, the only one the school ever had, but…)
Integrity? Oh, so she’s building a time machine to stop herself from becoming a fucking licensed medical doctor who promotes homeopathy and sucks up to antivaxxers?
It’s a little late for that, given that if she’d announced to her drones that defeating Trump and THEN holding Hillary’s feet to the fire was the way to go, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation (she got ~1% in several states where Trump beat Hillary by <1% as I recall).
To 30. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
I was also a National Merit Scholar, and I graduated from a PUBLIC high school which produced MANY National Merit Scholars. And, four Nobel Laureates. And a very large number of successful scientists and technologists.
@#31, Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
I find it utterly amazing that anyone who supported Clinton could possibly be such a hypocrite as to complain about Jill Stein pandering to the anti-vaxxers, as though Clinton had not pandered to groups much more dangerous and morally worse than that (the anti-vaxxers may be stupid, but most of them are nevertheless trying to do what they believe to be right — can’t say the same for oil companies, private prisons, or Wall Street) for years and years.
Besides, Clinton said to the press within 3 days of losing the election that she wants to be friends with the Trumps again, like she was back before 2008 or so. All those horrible things Trump said and all the awful appointments he’s making? That’s just fine, water under the bridge — after all, he’s rich and powerful, and therefore a desirable acquaintance to people like the Clintons. The people who thought she would stand up for decency were dupes of a con artist just as much as the people who thought Trump meant it about bringing back manufacturing jobs.
You got played. Time to admit it.
Nope, you were ignored, therefor YOU couldn’t play us.
Thank you, handsomemrtoad,
I was also a National Merit Scholar who graduated from a public school at the age of 16, with a full tuition scholarship to an excellent private university. My daughter was the valedictorian of a very large class in a public school, who earned a scholarship to one of the top colleges in this country, then was the top graduate after five years, with both a bachelor’s and a master’s. She then went on to another top school for yet another master’s and a PHD, graduating as the top PHD candidate of that year. She is now a highly successful scientist.
Public schools have been the great equalizers in this country, giving students like myself from poor families as much of a chance to succeed as the children of the wealthy.
As an educator, I saw many students who were returned to the public schools from those charter schools who had very poor educations. As a taxpayer, I do not want any of my taxes funding any sort of private schools.
Another problem with comparing private and charter schools to public schools is that the only measure ever taken is “standardised test scores”.
As a teacher I know that teaching is a lot more than making kids score in a test. Kids aren’t just small adults who need to grow and learn more. They are fundamentally different from adults in many ways and one part of your job is to help them make that transition and developing their personality.
Standardised tests that determine the future of your school create a true “teaching to the test” situation in which the scores become the one and only priority. Charter schools and private schools everywhere make sure that the bottom percentage doesn’t take the test at their school and they (as well as many public schools) drill the kids in test taking with everything else being put on hold.
PZ wrote:
I dunno about that. It seems they’re working quite well at the thing they were designed to do: Slowly dismantle the public education system and eliminate universal education. As SC (Salty Current) pointed out above, Betsy DeVos has financially supported the Acton Institute which has advocated eliminating mandatory elementary and middle school education because why should “the poors” get something they didn’t earn.
Clearly that is the endgame for vouchers — Children labouring in grueling working conditions that are grotesquely unsafe that few adults would accept (but will because children can be more easily dominated by authority figures than adults).