Betsy DeVos’s Confirmation Hearing to be Education Secretary

Expanded techniques to open up the financial flood gates of public education to education reform Cartel members.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates, a leading Cartel Member, after meeting with President-Elect Donald Trump, compared him to the late President John F. Kennedy in terms of the innovation he will bring to K-12 education, sending a strong signal of his support for Trump’s proposal to allocate $20 billion for the establishment of more voucher and charter schools.

At the same time, Trump summoned a number of African American celebrities and sports figures to Trump Tower, in a modern-day minstrel show, to enlist them in facilitating his vision for the educational uplift of the black community: Kanye West, who came to the meeting after his release from a hospital psychiatric ward; Ray Lewis, former NFL player; and Steve Harvey, a comedian, who has recently made racially insensitive jokes about the slavery of African Americans and about Asian men, the latter to whom he was forced to offer an apology. All three have little knowledge and experience in K-12 education other than having attended public schools.

All will be overseen by Omarosa Manigault, who worked as Trump’s director of African American outreach during the campaign season, and who Trump recently appointed as his director of community engagement. She has stated that all who did not support the Trump presidential candidacy will now have “… to bow down” once he takes office.

Elsewhere, Pearson Education, arguably the most profitable education services and products provider in the world, is on standby waiting for DeVos to assume the helm of the U.S. Education Department. The company made billions off President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT) via books, testing materials, and assessments. In addition, Pearson also ate heartily at the public education troughs in those states where DeVos’s money had aided in clearing the path for substantial increases in voucher and corporate charter schools. There are also thousands of local, regional, and national corporations waiting to be fed as well.

Therefore, Betsy DeVos had little reason to devote significant time to preparing to testify before the HELP committee for her confirmation. She concluded, and rightfully so, that she had already done that by purchasing the majority of the committee members’ votes as well as that of the chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, who was recently awarded the Friend of Education Award by the National Education Association (NEA). Moreover, she was introduced by former four-term Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) whom she has supported for years and was instrumental in his hotly contested reelection in 2007 (along with then Newark Mayor Cory Booker) when he had to run as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary.

Sen. Lieberman enjoyed the strong support of education unions and other public education stakeholders throughout his political career and was able to survive the scrutiny of the Congressional Black Caucus, when it questioned his support of vouchers, after Al Gore selected him to run as his Vice President on the Democratic ticket in 2000. To be successful, public education backers will have to practice politics as the “blood sport” that it is as DeVos has done throughout her thirty-year crusade to privatize public schools and to tilt them toward religious control. In Michigan, ex-politicians who defied her school privatization ideas have been politically executed as examples to their remaining colleagues.

Betsy DeVos has played and continues to play hardball as she did with the steel fist in a velvet glove at her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. My bet is that she will be comfortably confirmed with both Republican and Democratic votes—unless the public education lobby does something different which it has not demonstrated it is able to do.