U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke before the Department of Education for her first full day on the job Wednesday.
“I will challenge all on how and why we’ve done things a certain way,” she said. “But I will listen to each of you on your ideas on how we can do better for students. You are professionals whom I respect.”
President Trump and many Republicans have supported her because she is an outsider to the public education system, having never attended or worked in public education. But her critics say that she lacks the experience necessary to run the nation’s public school systems. Nationwide there was a great deal of opposition to her confirmation, both in public protests and between policymakers.
In the Senate, DeVos received great criticism from Senate Democrats, especially after many Democrats felt she lacked understanding of federal education policy during her confirmation hearings.
“It is hard to imagine a worse choice,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass said of DeVos.
The senate was in a tie vote about whether DeVos should get the job, so Vice President Mike Pence was called in to break the tie. His vote confirmed her as Secretary of Education and was the first time a vice president had been called to break a tie for a cabinet appointment.
Clinton Gill, who represents West Texas Educators for the Texas State Teacher’s Association, said that on typical education issues his association is lucky to get a thousand people who will contact their representatives expressing opposition. But Gill said that so many people were vehemently opposed to DeVos’ confirmation, that his association tracked millions of opposition emails and calls from the public.
“Both at the state level and at the national level, we mobilized members all across the United States asking them to send emails, make phone calls to their state senators and just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve sent over a million emails to state senators all across the United States asking them to vote against Betsy DeVos,” said Gill who has worked in education for the last 15 years. “Particularly because of her lack of qualifications for the job and secondly because of her strong push to get charter schools and private schools vouchers across the United States.”
For Gill, DeVos’ support of vouchers is a big issue.
“Vouchers basically take money a public school would get for a student and gives that money to the parent and allows them to use that toward the tuition of a private school education,” Gill said. “And our biggest concern with that is private schools get to pick the students they want and at public schools, we have to take all students, whether we want them because they have high academic standards or because heir parents are not involved.”
“Private schools, they are not required to have any accountability, so they do not have to take the STAR tests like public schools have to so truly there’s no accurate picture about what students are learning in those private schools, and no way for us and the public schools of knowing if those schools are truly benefiting the students,” Gill continued.
Gill explained that many in public education are worried about the state of public education under DeVos’ direction.
“You hear state legislators here in Texas and all across the nation saying we need school choice and we need to provide these vouchers to students, but they refuse to realize and they refuse to acknowledge, that they are not going to provide accountability for these private schools– even the money– because they are saying these can be used for anything that would help educate a child,” Gill said.
Gill added that people from around the state called the offices of Senators Ted Cruz R-Texas, and Senator John Cornyn R- Texas.
“Many times those calls went unanswered because their phone lines were busy or if you actually did get through the voicemail was full,” he said. “So we heard from many of our members who were never able to speak to somebody or leave a message so they had to resort to posting to Facebook or posting to their Twitter page hoping their offices would see that.”
In Gill’s eyes, it is shameful that all of these public concerns fell on deaf ears.Both Cruz and Cornyn voted to confirm DeVos.
Cornyn posted on his Facebook page February 6:
“This week, I’ll be voting to confirm Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Power over education should be handed back down to the states, so that parents and teachers can choose how best to accomplish our universal goal of making sure every child has a good education. Ms. DeVos will lead this effort, so that parents, teachers and our local school districts will have a greater role in these important decisions.”
“Our hope is that the public will wake up and realize that people need to be held accountable, so the people who voted for [DeVos] to be confirmed will need to be voted out of office when they’re up for reelection and we truly as a public need to be more involved in the whole education system, so that we hold our local officials accountable and we hold our state and national officials accountable,” Gill said.
But Gill remains encouraged because DeVos’ nomination mobilized so many people to organize on behalf of the public school system. He hopes that activism continues to help communicate to lawmakers what the realities and needs are of the people learning and working in public education.
“We will continue to work with our local school boards and superintendents to pass policy and regulations that will be beneficial, not only to the teachers, but to the students as well,” Gill said.
