Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls for abolishing department
"I personally think the Department of Education should not exist," DeVos said at a conservative education summit.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said at a conservative education summit Saturday that she believes the Department of Education should be abolished, according to the Florida Phoenix.
Driving the news: DeVos' rejection of the department she once led was well-received at the Moms for Liberty summit, which provided training on how to develop conservative majorities on local school boards, the Phoenix reported.
- "I personally think the Department of Education should not exist," DeVos told the crowd in Tampa, Florida, per the Phoenix.
The big picture: The summit is part of the so-called parental rights movement, which arose in response to efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in schools, particularly mask and vaccination mandates.
- Florida has been ground zero for many of the efforts to increase parental involvement in, and reduce teachers' autonomy over, classroom decisions.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also issued an executive order in August 2021 banning mask mandates in schools.
- The state's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, which went into effect on July 1, bans instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade. It also allows parents to sue schools and teachers who discuss these topics.
- The state's Board of Education banned schools from teaching critical race theory — a legal theory about how racial discrimination influenced America's foundations — last June. Critical race theory is not taught in public schools. The ban led to the rejection of dozens of math textbooks that "contained prohibited topics."
Background: DeVos is not the only Republican to suggest abolishing the Department of Education.
- Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced a bill in 2021 to abolish the department, claiming that "Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should not be in charge of our children's intellectual and moral development."
- The bill's co-signers included many of the House's most conservative members, such as Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
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The Department of Education began as we know it on May 4, 1980. It was created by the well educated and always incompetent Jimmy Carter after the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was split up.
So what happened to the Department in the years that followed?
Simple answer: It became infested with progressives who wanted their ideology taught to America's students.
We cannot trust unelected bureaucrats with our children's wellbeing.
Put it at the top of the DeSantis agenda.
DeSantis wisdom is spreading to other states. He's going to make an excellent president
That's a plus for DeSantis. Trump did most things right but he never took on the ideologues in education.
That's just a bunch of horse shit rhetoric only espoused by the bitter religious conservatives who have seen their power in public schools wane as schools began to be further integrated to improve diversity and fight financial segregation as well as focus more on secular education and less on celebrating all the seasonal Christian holidays or leading impressionable youth in group prayer.
When the civil rights act was passed we saw a phenomenon called 'white flight' where whites fled previously segregated affordable housing communities where black families were moving to get their children into the better schools. The whites who were wealthy enough and who could get loans that many black families still couldn't qualify for moved to higher priced areas they knew few black families could afford and the racist segregation that had become illegal turned into financial segregation with virtually an identical result. Since then education departments across the nation have tried all sorts of things to reduce the gap between the wealthy majority white schools and the financially poor schools which were often majority minority. This vestige of systemic racism continued to keep minorities in poor high dropout rate low performance schools.
The department of education has tried to make all public schools equal but white religious conservatives see that as bringing their nearly all white high performing wealthy schools down in order to level the playing field while poor and minority families aren't seeing enough lift in their school outcomes so both parties are aggrieved.
I've no doubt many of the right wing religious conservatives today would love to end the Department of Education and re-segregate schools and society so they can go back to the 1950's they look on so fondly, the time when they felt they were so "Great", the 'Leave it To Beaver' era where the only black person in their orbit was a maid.
Do you have kids?
Do you send them to public schools?
Well, I can tell you where we are at:
"Professors are objecting to identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Others are objecting to identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy.".....Jonathan Turley
That from America's professors!
The beginning of the end of it may come in 2024.
Great! Without that pesky DOE interfering anymore they'll be able to funnel billions of dollars to their christofacist 'alternative' schools.
Now there is a thought!
Yes, it is. After tremendous backlash, progressive/Marxist teacher union heads changed the name to DEI ... Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
According to The Daily Beast , a spreadsheet accompanying the Williamson County letter of complaint contained several other stated concerns about the county's curriculum. An article about police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s was criticized for its "negative view of Firemen and police." A fictional account of the American Civil War used with fifth-graders was deemed unsuitable because of its depictions of "out of marriage families between white men and black women". A book about Galileo Galilei, an astronomer persecuted by the Catholic Church for theorizing the Earth revolves around the Sun, should, according to the spreadsheet, not be read without some counterbalancing praise of the church: "Where is the HERO of the church?", asks the spreadsheet notation, "to contrast with their mistakes? ... Both good and bad should be represented". A picture book about seahorses was condemned for depicting "mating seahorses with pictures of positions and discussion of the male carrying the eggs." The Williamson County Moms for Liberty chapter told The Daily Beast in an e-mail: "Some books should be removed entirely. Some books are objectionable only because of how they are presented via the accompanying teacher's manual. And yes, some books would be better suited to a higher grade level due to their age inappropriate content."
Melissa Bosch rocks! /S
Abolish the Department of Education?
In 2018, we were 5th out of 37 OECD countries in per primary student spending but mediocre in reading and science and well below average in math,
... but you were 1st in sports.
Well, maybe basketball and football.
My wife is a public school teacher in a wealthy county.
Over the last 40 years, school support staffs have grown by exponentially, far outpacing student growth. The numbers of guidance counselors, principals, assistant principals, administrators and instruction coordinators have more than doubled. The cost of this growth is one reason why teachers are underpaid. The amount of bureaucratic paper work impacts teacher preparation time.
It's now hard to remember that one of the reasons for establishing the Dept of Ed was to improve administrative streamlining.
The latest from the city by the bay:
Somebody tell the SF school board that Hispanic Americans don't want to be called "Latinx!"