Amid fierce and even vitriolic opposition from teachers unions and other activists, President Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was confirmed Tuesday by the Senate, with Vice President Mike Pence casting a historic tie-breaking vote.
While Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee praised DeVos for leading “the most effective school reform movement of the last 30 years,” Democrats, who kept the Senate in session all night protesting the nomination, were even more passionate in their opposition.
All 48 Democrats voted against her along with two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who, critics point out, were supported by the national teacher’s union.
“The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefited from the public education system in this country,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
‘Policies will kill children’
Some Democratic allies, citing her advocacy for school vouchers and charter schools, were even more strident.
Vanity Fair film critic Richard Lawson warned that DeVos’ policies will “kill children.”
“That is not an exaggeration in any sense,” he tweeted Tuesday.
“Voucher programs will create systems in which queer kids have literally zero access to support apparatus bc they are in religious schools. Meaning voucher programs will lead to more suicides. Betsy DeVos’ policies will kill children.”
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Bill Maher, on his HBO show “Real Time,” evoked John F. Kennedy’s assassin, FoxNews.com reported.
“Betsy DeVos is the worst person to be around schoolbooks since Lee Harvey Oswald,” said Maher, alluding to Oswald’s perch in the Texas Schoolbook Depository.
The New Republic said DeVos’ views “are simply much too dangerous” while the United Federation of Teachers called her a “danger to special education.”
After the vote Tuesday, Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N. H., said DeVos “demonstrated a complete lack of experience in, knowledge of and support for public education.”
Reacting to the vote, the Democratic National Committee’s “DNC Rapid Response” dispatched a fundraising email.
“Senate Republicans just voted to put their party ahead of the future of America’s children,” the DNC said. “Pitch in now to help elect Democrats in 2018 who will listen to the will of the people.”
‘Unpardonable sin’
DeVos, 59, will head an agency with a $68 billion annual budget and 4,400 employee that some Republican presidential candidates have vowed to dismantle, including Ronald Reagan.
About 10 percent of funding for the nation’s 50 million public school students comes from the federal government, but it’s enough to wield considerable influence.
DeVos, in her written responses during her hearings, said she favors states’ rights.
“It is necessary and critical for states to have flexibility to determine how to identify and improve schools,” she said.
Some conservatives have expressed concern that she hasn’t displayed resolve to end the Common Core federal education standards and promises to continue implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.
But she has wide support on the right , including from the evangelical nonprofit Illinois Family Institute, which called her a champion of “genuine school reform and school choice.”
Reacting to the opposition from the left, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, in an editorial published last month by FoxNews.com , wrote that for Democrats, DeVos “has committed an unpardonable sin.”
“Yes, she has tried to help millions of disadvantaged families have the ability to send their kids to better schools. This is of course reprehensible behavior on her part that must not be rewarded,” Jindal said.
“Oh, and there is one more thing, she has spent millions of dollars of her own money in order to try to help these kids be able to achieve their dreams. How awful.”
Jindal pointed out that his state has enacted the biggest school-choice statewide program in the country. And in New Orleans, he said, every public school will soon be a charter school.
“But let’s be clear, this is Holy Grail for the American Left,” he wrote. “They will fight to the last gasp to stop anyone from delivering equal opportunity in education.
“They attacked me for it every waking hour after we got our program enacted, in the same irrational and nasty manner they are now attacking Betsy,” said Jindal.
Funded by teacher’s union
Pence’s vote Tuesday, the first time in U. S. history a vice president has broken a tie on a Cabinet nominee’s Senate confirmation, was necessary because Collins and Murkowski joined the 48 Democratic senators in voting no.
Murkowski said school choice was the issue for her.
“I have serious concerns about a nominee to be Secretary of Education who has been so involved in one side of the equation — so immersed in the push for vouchers – that she may be unaware of what actually is successful in public schools, and what is broken or how to fix them,” she said in a statement.
On the Senate floor, Collins said DeVos’ “concentration on charter schools and vouchers” raised “the question of whether or not she fully appreciates that the Secretary of Education’s primary focus must be on helping states and communities, parents, teachers, school board members, and administrators strengthen our public schools.”
However, both of the Republicans were financially supported by the National Education Association, noted political analyst Alice Stewart in an Washington Examiner column .
