According to President Trump’s Department of Education Secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos -- United States’ public education is “at a dead-end.” DeVos may have some personal experience driving down “dead-end” streets -- but it’s certain that she’s never driven into a public school parking lot other than to quickly turn her car around.
For DeVos to analogize the public school system as a hopeless lost cause, is at the very least - a spurious insult lobbied against educators, students, and the very parents that fund those “dead-end” schools.
DeVos never attended public schools, her children never attended public schools, nor has President Trump or his children. So it is perplexing and incredulous that billionaires DeVos and President Trump continually denigrate the public school system, citing unproven hyperbole spoon fed to them by “school choice” special interest groups.
Betsy DeVos is not an educator, she is a business woman and a staunch -- for profit -- charter and private school advocate, espousing self-serving ideologies that go hand in hand with for- profit racketeers. She knows firsthand how lucrative the privatization of schools benefits profiteers siphoning off public school funds -- greedily funneling tax funded monies into corporate coffers.
Aside from DeVos’ obvious lack of qualifying credentials, it is clear by her own Senate testimony, that Betsy DeVos is woefully uninformed about the most rudimentary of educational policies, such as federal laws pertaining to students with disabilities (IDEA). She seems to be more interested in making sure that schools keep firearms on hand to shoot campus- bound grizzly bears, instead of how to demolish the No Child Left Behind Act, a dismal post-Bush legacy.
As an educator, I know what “dead-end” really looks like in the classroom. It’s the endless assessment testing environment that has kidnapped education -- holding it ransom for federal funding. It’s the absence of opportunity for educators and students to teach and learn in a productive, creative, and exciting environment because they are instead -- learning how to give and take tests; a miss-mash of mandated skills and curricula that provide inadequate scholarship, and instead induces stress- laden “learning” environments.
Instead of maligning public education with the hope of obliterating it in favor of charter and private school profiteers, the Trump administration should expend its efforts towards recruiting and hiring a qualified education veteran that will work towards unifying a disjointed educational system that has been abandoned by special interest politicians, whose allegiance has been to their profit-driven benefactors -- and not to students, educators, and taxpayers.
When I walk into a public school classroom and look into the eyes of a student, I do not see a “dead-end.” I see a child deserving of an equal and comprehensive education administered by qualified, knowledgeable, and dedicated educators. Our children neither deserve, nor should they expect less, from the United States’ Secretary of the Department of Education.
For DeVos to analogize the public school system as a hopeless lost cause, is at the very least - a spurious insult lobbied against educators, students, and the very parents that fund those “dead-end” schools.
DeVos never attended public schools, her children never attended public schools, nor has President Trump or his children. So it is perplexing and incredulous that billionaires DeVos and President Trump continually denigrate the public school system, citing unproven hyperbole spoon fed to them by “school choice” special interest groups.
Betsy DeVos is not an educator, she is a business woman and a staunch -- for profit -- charter and private school advocate, espousing self-serving ideologies that go hand in hand with for- profit racketeers. She knows firsthand how lucrative the privatization of schools benefits profiteers siphoning off public school funds -- greedily funneling tax funded monies into corporate coffers.
Aside from DeVos’ obvious lack of qualifying credentials, it is clear by her own Senate testimony, that Betsy DeVos is woefully uninformed about the most rudimentary of educational policies, such as federal laws pertaining to students with disabilities (IDEA). She seems to be more interested in making sure that schools keep firearms on hand to shoot campus- bound grizzly bears, instead of how to demolish the No Child Left Behind Act, a dismal post-Bush legacy.
As an educator, I know what “dead-end” really looks like in the classroom. It’s the endless assessment testing environment that has kidnapped education -- holding it ransom for federal funding. It’s the absence of opportunity for educators and students to teach and learn in a productive, creative, and exciting environment because they are instead -- learning how to give and take tests; a miss-mash of mandated skills and curricula that provide inadequate scholarship, and instead induces stress- laden “learning” environments.
Instead of maligning public education with the hope of obliterating it in favor of charter and private school profiteers, the Trump administration should expend its efforts towards recruiting and hiring a qualified education veteran that will work towards unifying a disjointed educational system that has been abandoned by special interest politicians, whose allegiance has been to their profit-driven benefactors -- and not to students, educators, and taxpayers.
When I walk into a public school classroom and look into the eyes of a student, I do not see a “dead-end.” I see a child deserving of an equal and comprehensive education administered by qualified, knowledgeable, and dedicated educators. Our children neither deserve, nor should they expect less, from the United States’ Secretary of the Department of Education.
