Does DeVos Matter?

 Does DeVos Matter?

 

For many of you who are reading this, your response might be DeVos who?  So maybe she doesn’t matter.  But truthfully, she can matter quite a bit.

DeVos is the outgoing Secretary of Education in the Trump administration.  By some counts she is the most disliked of all Trump’s cabinet members and she has had some tough competition.

Initially her selection was challenged by the fact that she has no experience at all in education.  Oddly, many people thought that the Secretary of Education should have some experience in the area.   Her strongest qualification was that she had donated heavily to the Trump campaign.  But the major reason for her detractors was that she strongly supports private education and does not support public education.  Although in fairness, she has had very little experience with public education because she is very wealthy, went to all private schools herself and so have her children.  Having never worked in any area of education she hasn’t worked in public education either.

So why has that mattered?   About 6% of all funding for public schools comes from the federal government.  People think it is more than that but it isn’t.  it is almost entirely directed toward special areas of interest, high poverty areas, leveling the playing field for girls in sports, or supporting HBCU’s.   Most of the money is determined by Congress, but the Secretary of Education gets to distribute it.   She has strongly advocated for schools opening totally in-person during the pandemic and threatened to take money away from public schools that didn’t open and give that money to private and parochial schools.  She has weakened the protections for students who are raped on college campuses.  She has reduced the civil rights protections of students in public schools and erased protections for students in predatory and for-profit higher education facilities.  She has intervened in cases where schools were accused of disproportionately putting children of color in special education so that the school districts could continue those practices.

Because other secretaries get more ink, DeVos frequently flies under the radar except with people in education or the children who are served.   All during her term, there has been no question but that she sought to move money from public schools to private and religious schools.  She sees no Constitutional issue with spending public funds on religious education.

There is heavy pressure on President-elect Biden to pick an experienced educator for that department.  All educator eyes will be on his pick and hopefully whoever that is will matter very positively to public educators and children with challenges.