Upon hearing that Betsy DeVos has been nominated to be Secretary of Education in the new Cabinet of President-Elect Donald Trump, I imagined the following conversation between DeVos and someone I’ll call “Citizen Tom”:
Betsy, “I have never attended a public school, nor have my children. You should want your children to attend private, preferably Christian schools. I married the son of a billionaire. I know what is best for everyone.”
Citizen Tom, “Have you ever taught, or been on a school board, or been a superintendent of a large school district?”
Betsy, “No, no, and no. Weren’t you paying attention? I married the son of a billionaire, and I grew up the daughter of a very wealthy businessman, Edgar Prince. I know what is best for everyone.”
Citizen Tom, “Even if I wanted to send my children to private school, which I don’t, I don’t earn enough money to send my three children to private school.”
Betsy, “You want to send your children to private school but you can’t afford it? Well, don’t you worry, we’ll just take the money from the public schools budgets and funnel it into private schools. That will help you pay for your children’s tuition.”
Citizen Tom, “But taking from the public school budgets will harm the public schools. I’m not opposed to private schools, but if education is private it should be paid for by the people who send their children to those private schools. That’s what private means.”
Betsy, “I don’t care about that. I want to privatize education and eliminate public schools completely. If we can funnel enough money out of the public school budgets and into private education, we will be able to starve the public schools until they are no more.
“And then we will have only good, highly profitable private schools. It’s what God wants.”
There are many reasons to be concerned about the nomination of DeVos to be Secretary of Education in the Trump cabinet. One is that she expects to be repaid for all the contributions she and her DeVos family members have made to the Republican Party and various conservative causes.
According to the reporting by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “Betsy DeVos has been a major financial backer of legal efforts to overturn campaign-spending limits. In 1997, she brashly explained her opposition to campaign-finance-reform measures that were aimed at cleaning up so-called ‘soft money,’ a predecessor to today’s unlimited ‘dark money’ election spending. ‘My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican National Committee,’ she wrote in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. ‘I have decided to stop taking offense,’ she wrote, ‘at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.'”
Given the words of DeVos herself, as well as her past actions, one can only imagine what she will want to do with regard to education policy. And there is little reason that the outcomes will be positive for most Americans and their children.