Deroy Murdock:
Today’s U.S. Senate vote on Betsy DeVos should be a nail-biter. Every Democrat and two stray Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — plan to oppose DeVos’s nomination for secretary of education. This probably will trigger a 50–50 tie, with Vice President Mike Pence splitting the difference and confirming DeVos. If only one more Republican defects, DeVos will not survive. The outcome is unpredictable.
What is sadly and maddeningly predictable is the stench-inducing hypocrisy of Democrats who attack DeVos as a creature of private schools — even as they and their children have attended and otherwise benefited from private education.
“The basic reason I’ll oppose her nomination is that I don’t think she is committed to public education,” Senator Robert Casey (D., Pa.) declared about DeVos. This could be easier to take from Casey, if he were the product of public education.
“Casey and his father are regarded as the most famous alumni of Scranton Preparatory School, a Catholic Jesuit preparatory day school in Pennsylvania,” the Daily Signal reported last month. “Casey’s daughters, Caroline Casey and Julia Madeline, also attended Scranton Prep.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) announced that “I have received thousands of letters, calls, and emails in opposition to her nomination, many of them citing the school voucher and privatization agenda Mrs. DeVos and her allies imposed in Michigan.” He also addressed government-education advocates in Providence in December. As WPRI reported, “The senator also questioned whether DeVos had ever entered a public school, drawing laughs from the supportive roundtable.”
While Whitehouse surely has entered a public school, he never studied in one until he had graduated from Yale and entered the University of Virginia Law School. Whitehouse is an alumnus of St. Paul’s School, a private boarding institution set on 2,000 bucolic acres in New Hampshire. Whitehouse’s daughter, Molly, studied at Providence’s Wheeler School. His son, Alexander, also attended a private boarding school, as the Daily Caller discovered.
Whitehouse explained on the Senate floor in 2012 that he sent his kids to private campuses so that he could give them “the best education that I can for them, and I felt that, in their circumstances, the places that I chose to send them were the best schools for them.”
Senator Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) rose last night to attack DeVos on the Senate floor.
“Mrs. DeVos has shown no evidence of her commitment to be the torchbearer for both excellence and equity,” Bennet complained. “And a commitment to competition without a commitment to equity would forsake our democratic ideal that a free, high-quality public education must open the doors of opportunity for all.”
But Bennet did not walk through those doors.
In fact, Bennet is a product of St. Albans, one of the most prestigious private schools in Washington, D.C. His daughter attended Denver’s Logan School for Creative Learning, an exclusive private institution of learning.
I’m sure the NEA and the teachers unions oppose her becuase she will huopefuly bring a end to COMMON CORE and end the brainwashing/indocrination of the school kids the leftists NEA has been doing
Well she is in there, I was hoping the department got eliminated along with EPA, BLM, Energy combine NSA DHS. Then start combining and eliminating those depts that are duplicated at state levels.
If children get better opportunities for education, if competition improves public education, if the government influence over education, the left loses out because if the population becomes more educated and better informed, they will turn away from liberalism. If the population becomes better educated and have greater access to economic opportunity, they won’t need socialism, identity politics, divisiveness and class envy.
So, the left opposes improvements in education.
Explain to me how diverting the average American family’s tax dollars into private school vouchers will improve the public schools that the average American family’s children will still be attending.
You’ll be subsidizing people who don’t need to be subsidized, at the expense of our public school budgets.
You will, in fact, be subsidizing people like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who pays for private schools for his own kids, but supports policy that benefits the average family.
Good move.
Count me as still skeptical of which way she will go on Common Core. Otherwise, I have no qualms.
I thought leftists were pro-choice. Why should not parents, who want the best for their children, be able to choose a school that is in the best educational interest of their child? Is it not “all about the children”?
End the brainwashing of the kids by Greenpeace,EDF and PETA