Voting Resources
Delicious Leftist Hysteria About Incoming Education Secretary
Man, the left sure hates Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education.
Although I haven’t researched her background in detail, she seems like a mixed bag to me. She favors homeschooling, which is great, but she’s also for “school choice” by means of a voucher system, a neoconservative policy proposal I (and libertarian education author Sheldon Richman) oppose.
People scrimp and save to live in neighborhoods where their kids won’t be terrorized, and the school choicers want to march the terrorizers into bourgeois schools. I can’t support that. The only “voucher” we should support, as Murray Rothbard said, is a dollar bill.
This, by the way, is yet another reason I cheer the self-destruction of the conservative movement. Never conserved a #$%^& thing.
A meme circulating on Facebook complains that Betsy DeVos never attended public schools, sent her kids to public schools, or worked in public schools.
I have to admit, she’s sounding better even as I type this.
What’s the problem with getting a different perspective, instead of the same old education bureaucrat type? I thought we were supposed to believe in diversity (he says, laughingly).
My commentary on the three final sentences in the meme:
“She does not have an education degree…”
Hooray. So she won’t be testing out wacko theories on kids.
“…and has never taught. So, Trump picked a billionaire who doesn’t believe in public education…”
Leftist hysteria. Public education is the American religion. What kind of tin ear would someone have to have to think an avowed enemy of public education would ever be nominated to such a post, much less confirmed?
So before even looking into Betsy DeVos I knew this was preposterous nonsense. And of course it is. She has never spoken against public education in principle, and seeks only to work within the system to improve it. Anyone with the slightest sense of political reality knew this about her without even having to check.
“…to be in charge of education.”
The Secretary of Education is not “in charge of education.” Yes, the whole department should be abolished and serves no good purpose (even the American Federation of Teachers opposed its creation under Jimmy Carter, if you can believe it), but the vast bulk of educational decision-making occurs at the local level.
At the same time, what a revealing remark: the left thinks there is or ought to be someone “in charge” of education. Creep and chills factor: 10 out of 10.
“…Let the privatization & profiteering begin.”
Privatization is great, so no problem there. “Profiteering”? The private sector, in the form of the Khan Academy, made the teaching of mathematics from simple arithmetic to advanced calculus available to anyone in the world, for free.
The private sector educates countless millions of people in developing countries, at a fraction of the cost of government schools and with much better results, as James Tooley and Pauline Dixon at Newcastle University’s E.G. West Centre have shown.
Meanwhile, who’s profiteering? That wouldn’t be the school districts somehow blowing tens of thousands of dollars per student for mediocre results, right?
Or how about the New York City public school system, with its 6000 bureaucrats in the central office. The Catholic school system, with 1/6 the students (and which should therefore have 1000 bureaucrats to be in the same ratio with the city), had a mere 26 when the Brookings Institution called to ask.
No profiteering going on with those 6000 bureaucrats!
If it’s true defiance of the public school system you want, check out my Liberty Classroom, where you’ll learn the history and economics that people with degrees in education kept from you.
And no profiteering here: for less than half of what you’d pay for a single community college credit hour, get 17 courses you can listen to in your car, taught by professors you can trust. And I add more all the time.
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