She tried to defund the Special Olympics. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the security contractor repeatedly accused of murder and other crimes in Iraq. She had no experience in education prior to her appointment. Her stated goal is to defund public education, and her own department, in favor of using public money to support private "faith-based" schools. She's taking advantage of the pandemic to try and steer stimulus money intended for public schools into the hands of wealthy private schools. Even by the low low standards of the Trump administration, she a notably horrible public servant, defiling the department she's supposed to be leading. There is an endless supply of well-sourced stories trashing her, but here's one more or less at random: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/betsy-devos-s...
Fortunately, most public school policy funding occurs at the state and local levels as compared to the federal level.
DeVos is and remains exceedingly unqualified for the position. She's literally never been taught or been taught in a public school in the entirety of her life. Her B.S. is in poly sci.
Her brother founded what was once known as Blackwater, the same Blackwater that murdered civilians in Iraq. Her husband is heir to the Amway fortune, a name quite prominent in the multi-level marketing community. They also donated 200 million USD to Republican campaigns and causes.
I don't think you know who DeVos or her family is. Her family owns the largest private military in the world. They don't need jobs; they aren't going anywhere. They are going to continue shoving billions of dollars of government funds into their pockets.
They will be standing right there to fill key cabinet roles for the next Republican administration.
Her actions and policies aren't well-publicized, but they're not good.
As a simple example: in 2017, DeVos and Trump proposed "cutting $1.2 billion for after-school programs that serve 1.6 million children, most of whom are poor, and $2.1 billion for teacher training and class-size reduction" [1]. These cuts also affected efforts such as mentoring, recruitment, and retention [2].
In 2018, she proposed regulations that "require full hearings, cross examination of sexual assault victims, and raise the standard of evidence to hold a student accused of sexual assault accountable" [3], which experts have said "would allow schools and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to ignore much of the sexual harassment that occurs in schools" [3].
I don't even know how to summarize this whole mess, so I'm just going to use the subtitle of the article: "The administration wants to keep schools safe by ditching rules meant to prevent racial bias in school discipline" [4].
More recently, she "illegally delayed an Obama-era rule that required states to address racial disparities in special education programs" [5].
My initial concerns with DeVos were twofold: first, she had never spent a single day in an American public school and second, that the primary reason she was appointed was the millions of dollars she contributed to Trump’s campaign.
It seemed very unlikely that out of roughly 150 million eligible Americans, the very best choice was someone who had zero experience with the public school system.
After she began her work, the thing that I particularly disliked was her support of Indiana charter schools to both receive federal taxpayer funding while at the same time being allowed to ban a student for being gay (or their parents being gay).
How is she still in office? She's the spitting image of Dolores Umbridge; an authoritarian freak who has nothing better to do than make the lives of honest individuals completely arduous.
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