President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education is an ideologue with no real experience with public schools.
Betsy DeVos is a billionaire who grew up very wealthy in Michigan. She has never attended a public school, at any level -- nor have her children. She does not hold a single educator’s credential -- neither a teaching certification nor an administrator’s endorsement.
She is on record claiming that she does not believe in or support public education -- an interesting point from someone who has never attended nor worked in a public school. She has also opined that teachers are generally overpaid, which is out of step with a majority of Americans.
She has been a staunch advocate for vouchers, which funnel much-needed resources from public schools to parochial and private schools and is also very unpopular. She also champions unregulated for-profit charter schools. Studies increasingly show that charter schools perform no better -- and often worse -- than traditional public schools and do not have to face the same accountability.
The public school -- one of the greatest institutions of American democracy -- is shortchanged when ideological activists like Ms. DeVos beat a drum of doom, gloom, and profit-driven reform. They show little knowledge of the research and innovations happening in our schools.
There are many education experts, liberal and conservative, who have a profound understanding of how our system works and what it needs, and have been doing great work in schools and with educators for decades.
And for the record, my pick is Linda Darling-Hammond. Look her up; she’s one of the best.
I am Joseph Flynn, and that is my perspective.
