Betsy DeVos Impact on Education

1. She in charge of a department she despises.
   • When talking about how useless she thought the public education system is (the system she is now supposed to guide) Betsy DeVos called public schools a “dead end.”

2. Children with Disabilities
   • DeVos did not initially know the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) was a public program. She said she thought it was something the states could decide to enact or not. IDEA is a Federal law which requires public schools to provide appropriate education to students with disabilities and provides legal due-process when students feel that those rights have been violated.
   • She made efforts to connect her supposed support for IDEA to her strong anti-abortion stance.
   • DeVos responded to criticism by expressing support for a voucher program that requires families to give up those due process rights.  The Deep Irony in Betsy DeVos Speech

3. Michigan
   • She bankrolled a private school voucher measure in Michigan, which voters defeated by a ratio of two-to-one. After that failure, Betsy DeVos spent millions electing legislators who would further slash the state’s public school budgets.

Read about more about the raging dumpster fire

3. Extra-curricular (i.e. extraneous) education
   • Betsy DeVos will eliminate the after school and summer programs,
   • all funding for the arts and gifted student programs,
   • all funding for civics (a program which teaches students to be better voters, consumers, and critical thinkers, among other things, and connects them more proactively to their community.)
4. (Not) Improving the teachers
   • DeVos and Trump would eliminate teacher professional development programs, and eliminate funding for over 35,000 teachers.
5. (Not) Improving Education
   • Betsy Devos wants to divert educational improvement funds into private schools and religious schools.
   • Specifically, she will dismantle the Education Innovation and Research Program. This progroam funds and encourages research into improving and creating educational programs. Simply, this program funds research into educational models and takes the best ideas and helps to integrate them more broadly. This is literally the program that improves American education.
   • DeVos, who claims she wants to build evidence, responded to recent studies showing the negative impacts of voucher programs, by saying, “We’re not taking questions.”

7. Trump’s budget funnels more than $1 billion to new market strategies and vouchers, even after a study which concluded that children are the sole sufferers in this scenario.
8. Choice (vouchers, charter schools, religious schools)
   • Choice seems like a great idea, but frequently, and especially for middle and lower income children, it looks more like “oh, I get to choose between these privately funded and completely unregulated money-making schemes.”
   • It’s funny that she is such a champion of privatization, when you consider what a cautionary tale Amway and the Blackwater group are for the idea of unregulated privatization.  Or maybe it makes perfect sense, considering how much money her family has made fleecing private citizens and the government.  (See more about this in our other article:Betsy DeVos Family, a cautionary tale of privatization and deregulation)
   • We already showed her actions and philosophy regarding charter schools in previous examples. She also supports putting more funding to religious schools, which is really just boilerplate republican goose-stepping across the separating line between church and state.