Betsy DeVos Is Wrong For Secretary Of Education
- Sarah Niemi
- Jan 20, 2017
- 2 min read
Betsy DeVos will be a disaster for America’s students. That’s a pretty gentle way of saying it. Between her extreme ideology, her disastrous record, and her right-wing religious social views we should all be speaking up loudly and clearly that the Senate should reject her nomination.
DeVos has no experience with public schools. She did not attend a public school, did not send her kids to public schools, and has never served as an educator or on a school board. In fact, her entire experience in education advocacy has been to promote the dismantling of traditional public schools in favor of privatization. She’s nominated to lead the department that’s tasked with making sure there’s equity in our public schools and she has none of the experience she would need to do that job.
As AFT President Randi Weingarten explained in a speech last week, DeVos is ready to reignite the education wars of the last decade rather than moving forward with a purposeful approach to meeting the needs of students.
I’m a speech pathologist in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. I’m with students every day and I can tell you that we know what students need. We need the resources, the time, and the tools to be able to meet the needs of each individual student. Students deserve a secretary of education who will fight for those resources. I imagine a day when I can focus 100% on helping students with their communication deficits, not spend my time fighting for basic supplies for my students, or defending my job in public education. But Trump’s plan and DeVos’s record tell us that what we need will be ignored.
Here in Detroit, we’ve seen the outcome of DeVos’s agenda. She made huge cash contributions to GOP lawmakers to expand unaccountable private charters and ultimately destabilize the district. As the district became cash-strapped, due to 15-plus years of state mismanagement and the unregulated, unchecked growth of for-profit charter schools in Detroit, the district couldn’t keep up with basic things like cleaning the mold out of our schools and maintaining the buildings. The floors literally buckled in some of the schools. I was proud to be a part of the protests that pressed the state and district to fix some of the maintenance problems, but we shouldn’t have to do that.
Students shouldn’t have to get sick from mold or wear coats in class for GOP leaders to care. Teachers shouldn’t have to deal with rodent infestations or water dripping through classroom ceilings for politicians to respond. Parents shouldn’t have to alert the media when there are 25 desks for 35 students in a classroom before schools are adequately funded.
But that’s what happened when DeVos got to experiment on the students I spend every day trying to help. Her right-wing ideologies are directly responsible for the chaos and destruction of public schools in the city of Detroit and to my knowledge she has never even set foot in a Detroit Public Schools building. With that record it’s very clear that Betsy DeVos belongs nowhere near the Department of Education.
Sarah Niemi is a speech pathologist in Detroit Public Schools.