UPDATE 1/18/17: DeVos’ hearings were an utter fiasco; she made clear she lacks even a basic understanding of education issues. Mother Jones has gathered together videos of her worst moments here; Vox looks at one key issue she evidently knows nothing about. Also, BEARS!
Time to pester your senators again, this time about Donald Trump’s awful pick for Secretary of Education: Betsy DeVos, a billionaire school-privatization fanatic who’s devoted more than two decades to questionable education “reforms” that put more government money into the pockets of private corporations and Christian schools while undermining public schools.
After a delay caused by her failure to fully disclose her financial info, DeVos will be grilled by members of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee today.
Lisa Graves of the progressive Center for Media and Democracy sets out the case against DeVos, noting in a post on PR Watch that many observers “have decried the choice as a looming disaster for public schools in America.”
Teachers unions are aghast:
Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, stated that “Betsy DeVos is everything Donald Trump said is wrong in America–an ultra-wealthy heiress who uses her money to game the system and push a special-interest agenda that is opposed by the majority of voters.”
As Graves concludes,
The nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the head of the Department of Education is a clear sign that the nation is about to embark on a dangerously extreme national experiment in the privatization of our education system that could deal a death blow to our public schools as we have known them.
The expansion of charters has marched forward despite the fact that fly-by-night charter operators … have committed more than $200 million dollars in fraud and waste in recent years, as documented by the Center for Popular Democracy. …
As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed, the federal government has spent nearly $4 billion in tax dollars on the charter school experiment advanced by DeVos and other billionaires, like the Kochs and the Walton family. …
[C]harter schools in the DeVos backyard of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and … the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never even opened. …
Betsy DeVos has used her family fortune to distort public policy to suit her personal agenda through direct donations and dark money because, in her own words, she wants a “return on our investment.”
Meanwhile, NPR notes that
DeVos and her family have given more than a million dollars to sitting Republican Senators, according to Federal Election Commission reports, as well as some $10 million more to Super PACs and party committees.
That has prompted numerous left-leaning groups, including End Citizens United, to call for some senators to recuse themselves on a DeVos confirmation vote.
Ya think?
So get calling! Or emailing!
You can find contact info for your senators here.
You can find out if they’re on the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee here.
See my posts here and here for information and advice on how to make your calls and emails effective. If making these sorts of calls is tough for you, here’s some advice on calling politicians if you have social anxiety.
And please set some time aside this week to call your senators and congresspeople to urge them to oppose the GOP’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. (See my post here.)
And to encourage them to boycott Trump’s inauguration. (See my post here.) At last count, more than 40 congresspeople have announced that they will be standing with John Lewis and skipping Trump’s coronation.
A real national resistance movement is developing to stand up against Trump and the Republicans. Make yourself part of it!
@IP
….Did I make a good song for you?
@IP, wow. How stunningly dishonest. I read these fevered beat-ups all the time, but when someone is describing a place that you actually know well, it’s just disorienting, not to mention infuriating. And those replies…
Re deVos, this piece in Mother Jones has quite a detailed run-down of the family background, donations, views, etc. Most of it has been covered here, I think, but there’s a lot of useful information, perhaps especially for people who are in a position to call/contact govt peeps.
DeVos is like the anti-education appointment. This is becoming a habit of Trump’s.
@Molly T
It would not be very feminist of us to approve a cabinet pick based solely on their gender.
@Molly T, hello! Welcome to the blog. Your entry is a bit confrontational, but that’s okay. Welcome all the same!
I’ll slice your comment into parts and reply by the numbers, if you please. Pardon the sarcasm!
It is, in fact, very feminist! Just not 1920’s feminist. We believe that women should be treated as adults. Patriarchists believe women should be treated like children and barred from positions of influence. We believe they should be evaluated on their merits. And Betsy DeVos is without.
Do feel free to defend her qualifications, though! Again – we’re looking at her merit.
Hi, 4Chan.
Funny how when conservatives make plans, they’re serious and responsible and legitimate; when anyone else makes plans it’s an agenda.
Molly, again – we judge things based on their merits. You should try it!
Yeah, turns out that feminists aren’t a monolith, and they have disagreements! And that most feminists, like most people, are progressive! And they judge anti-abortion positions accordingly! And take legitimate actions based on those judgements!
Almost like that’s how freedom works or something!
The only thing that can save us from the communists is the fascists! Gee, that wasn’t a common thought in the 1930’s. Wonder how that turned out?
http://media.giphy.com/media/SriJPYsPgvpNm/giphy.gif
If you want to live under a dictator, there are plenty of places in the world for you to move to. Freedom’s hard, and you don’t always get what you want. You confuse freedom of speech with treason, and freedom of action with treachery. You also confuse freedom of belief with totalitarianism.
There’s no totalitarianism on the Progressive side, Molly – You just don’t like what we’re saying, and are willing to support anyone who gets us to shut up. We ain’t shutting up. Cumaþ ábrice hit.
Yeah, I know you’re talking about some forced birther group who fancies themselves to be feminists even though the basic feminism 101 concept of women being humans with bodily integrity and autonomy is lost on them. But the name is just making me picture Joan Jett or Cyndi Lauper or something. Silly name for a right wing group masquerading as feminist.
Lol. Cool story.
I don’t the Cheeto king would appreciate you capitalizing Putin’s name but not Trump though.
@Molly T
You mean the New Wave Feminists who oppose Planned Parenthood? The New Wave Feminists who oppose abortion? The ones who blog about birth control also being immoral? Oh, the ones who call the rest of us “Tumblr fauxminists” and ask us this:
Why would anyone have issues with these new wave feminists? /s
eta: ninja’d by wwth and Scildfreja on this 🙂
And a genuine welcome to the non-troll newbie. Welcome, Unsolved Mystery!
Mish.
Egads. It’s like a whole troop of JudgyBitches.
@wwth
http://anasattic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/9337597.gif
@Unsolved Mystery, 😮
Welcome! I will solve you.
Education cuts close to my heart – it sort of represents so much about what a society is. What sort of a future do they see for themselves? It’s written in the school books. Are they optimistic or pessimistic, creative or pragmatic, dull or bright? You find that in the drama class options and the instruments in band; in whether they spend money on the football team or a student art collection. Whether their glass display cases are filled with somber, gleaming trophies on dusty velvet, or filled with macaroni-and-glitter collages and poems written in felt marker. Education means so much.
And Special Education, too – how does the society treat those who don’t have the same needs? Are they forced into the same box as everyone else, made to succeed or fail regardless of those needs? Are they simply forgotten? Are they given special attention to help them achieve? It shows the sort of people that they are.
Betsy DeVos shows the world exactly who she is.
I really, really hope that she doesn’t get chosen, or barring that, isn’t able to put through the changes she proposes. Please, pay attention to her actions, and fight her every step of the way. Show the world exactly who you are.
Molly T, New Wave feminism sounds fascinating! I love Debbie Harry, Polly Styrene, Annie Lennox, Chrissy Amphlett, Grace Jones, Cyndi Lauper, Deborah Conway, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Joan Jett and so on.
I’m sure they consider Betsy DeVos as worthy of high office as they did Margaret Thatcher.
@Molly T
So apparently you consider sex to be the only concerning factor when it comes to women and not you know the issues that feminists of all stripes tend to strive and want within society?
As a white citizen of South Africa, fuck you, Paulina Forslund.
‘Yeah, the headline just cuts off there. Officials what? We’ll never know.’
Well to be just a tiny bit fair, in headlines the dash is shorthand for ‘according to’ (as it looks like someone’s already mentioned….).
I love Sweden—have visited several times, and Stockholm is my favourite city in the world. I thought for a while that I’d like to move there, but it’s really not any better there now, is it? Last visit, a few years ago (at an academic conference, where I’d have expected to meet people capable of critical thinking) I got to listen to someone explain about how we’re wasting our tax money on poor foreigners. Really unpleasant. (Also I hear there’s a 20 year waiting list for flats in Stockholm.)
@Overly I think, more generally, that a lot of us deal with acknowledging that we’ve benefited from unearned privilege. I admit I’m incredibly resentful of less ‘deserving’ people who have more than I have (money, security, recognition) because of their privilege and my lack of it, but I also realise that just being a white English-speaking person has already given me a ton of opportunities plenty of people have no access to.
Instead of feeling guilty and defensive, remember the three rules of privilege:
Acknowledge you have it, and don’t attribute whatever success you’ve had entirely to your own individual merit.
Acknowledge that other people don’t have it, and don’t judge them because of that.
Use it where you can to eliminate it.
@Overly
Bit late to this but, regarding how you should feel about having gone to a charter school and getting (in your case) a good education?
I’d go for grateful.
Unless you were particularly precocious, you had no say in what schools you attended, right? So why fuss it? Just acknowledge you were lucky and try to pay that luck forward, be it as educator, parent, or wickedly fun aunt/uncle to nieces and nephews both bio and honorary.
Note to self: Once I’ve had my coffee, I need to make a version of that “Oh hi Mark” meme that says “Oh hi Mr Al” instead.
I can’t believe that, in replying to Ms. “I’m totally feminist, it’s you who are being bad feminists because reasons” nobody brought up yet the delicious tautoligy of “treacherous […] treason”.
It’s as bad as traitorous treachery!
[Insert XKCD “the first rule if Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club” here.]
(Okay, yeah, I know there were better things there to answer and/or make fun of. Still, that one jumped out at me.)
@Troubelle
*APPLAUSE*
I loved it. 🙂 Especially this part:
Do you ever actually put music to things? It would be interesting.
(Sorry for not replying sooner. I was in bed and couldn’t sleep, not wearing my glasses, so I was a bit limited.)
@guest
I wouldn’t say 20 years, but the lines are definitely long. It also depends on what kind of apartment you want. If you’re trying to rent a decent size place in the city-city, you could definitely be waiting a few decades. But if you’re settling for 15-20 minutes subway ride from central station you could probably get it after less than a decade. My friends in Stockholm live in Svedmyra, about 10-15 minutes south of the city proper, and it took them 7-8 years to get those apartments. Granted, this was 10-15 years ago, so lines are probably longer now.
I’ve been on the list since 2011. Not looking for an apartment in Stockholm right now, but it’s a small yearly fee to stay on the list so we’re gonna keep paying just in case. Maybe I’ll have kids some day, then it would be nice to have the option for them to move to Stockholm without having to sleep on someone’s couch for 20 years before getting a place of their own.
When I was actually looking at apartments a few years ago, we were competing with people who had been on the list since before I was born. I think the earliest we saw was 1981!
@IP I think this is where I saw it:
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160517-this-is-one-city-where-youll-never-find-a-home
‘When I was actually looking at apartments a few years ago, we were competing with people who had been on the list since before I was born.’
Haha OK that’s kind of mind-blowing 🙂 I now think it’s unlikely in the extreme that I’ll be moving to Sweden any time soon, but just out of curiosity what is it like to rent with animals? In the US I used to figure maybe one out of three rental listings would take the cat; in the allegedly animal-loving UK it’s less than a tenth, and pretty much none if you’re a single person looking for a small flat (both places I’ve lived in the UK have been two-bedroom houses).
@guest
The rest of the country isn’t quite as extreme as Stockholm when it comes to looking for apartments. Our place in Gothenburg we actually found through an online ad, and we moved in a week or two later.
It’s a very good place to be a pet owner! You actually have a legal right to keep pets, including cats, in your home. In fact, even if your landlord says in the contract that pets are not allowed, you can ignore it and move your cat in anyway. A landlord cannot legally evict or otherwise punish you for keeping legal pets in your apartment.
There are a few exceptions, for example some student apartments and certain buildings designated for people with allergies. Also, if you’re keeping 15 cats in a studio apartment you might run into some kind of problem. But in general pets are allowed, no questions asked.
de Vos also supports guns in schools to defend children against Grizzly Bears (link to Crooks and Liars)
This leads me to think that the version of “Goldilocks” she uses must be rather short and bloody
Wow, I’d heard that US schools can be dangerous, but I was unaware of the grizzly bear problem. Is that a big deal outside of Alaska?
@IP Wow OK I am moving there.
If I learnt one thing from Yogi Bear its that the average bear isn’t very smart. So I can see why they’d want to go to school.
SFHC,
Could Mr Al have gone 12 hours without re-engaging, in days of yore? Congrats Mr Al.
Molly T has dropped that mishmash of contradictions and ignorance, been refuted, and not returned yet to handwave away their internal inconsistency, and then to melt down.
(highlighted by Penny) reminds me of Miggy’s prose style before hitting the more florid phase, and there’s also a whole Mick Dash, Boy Mansplainer vibe to the reference to the totally legit New Wave Feminism.
I thought Miggy and Mick were Mark socks? Were they Mr Al too? I have as much trouble keeping all these sockpuppets straight in my head as I do telling my actual footwear socks apart. I should pay more attention, I suppose, but hey – socks are pretty interchangeable.