In Thanksgiving pause, Trump calls for national healing

Largely unknown outside of MI political and philanthropic circles, her appointment signals that Trump intends to make school choice and a voucher plan for low-income families a centerpiece of his education agenda.

Ms DeVos’ husband, Dick, is an heir to the Amway fortune and a former president of the company. Ben DeGrow, director of education policy at the free market Mackinac Center for Public Policy, praised DeVos’ record of school reform. Her donations and advocacy go nearly entirely toward groups seeking to move students and money away from what Trump calls “failing government schools”. She attended private Christian schools herself in MI.

As the Education Secretary many expect DeVos will encourage distribution of more vouchers and development of more charter schools. “Her allegiance is to families, particularly those struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder, not to an outdated public education model that has failed them from one generation to the next”.

Holland Mayor Nancy DeBoer told WHTC’s Mary Ellen Murphy that’s it’s incredible someone from West Michigan has been nominated for the President’s cabinet. She is an advocate for school choice.

“She was involved in a debate in MI involving charter school quality where it certainly appears she was against some of the measures that would have brought greater accountability to the charter schools there”. She neither attended public schools nor sent her children to them.

Forget the school privatizers’ misleading catch phrase-that school choice is “the civil rights issue of our time”.

DeVos is the chairman of the American Federation for Children, the nation’s largest school choice advocacy group. He says it will put a west MI native in one of the nation’s most important jobs.

The Michigan billionaire and conservative activist who could be the next secretary of education has been a major funder of the school voucher movement in Indiana.

Haley was beginning to earn buzz as a possible vice presidential pick in January when she delivered the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address.

DeVos, 58, is mostly known as a champion of school choice. As the state embraced and then expanded charters over the past two decades, its rank has fallen on national reading and math tests. That law replaces the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act and puts more power in the hands of states to determine how to identify schools that need improvement and what to do about those schools.

Madeloni’s criticism of DeVos, and what DeVos stands for, would be stronger if the MTA response did not have the sound of a knee-jerk reaction to privatization of schools.

This educational dystopia is the plan Betsy DeVos would like to take nationwide. Every American should be concerned that she would impose her reckless and extreme ideology on the nation.

SANCHEZ: Kress says DeVos’s record on school choice in MI sealed the deal. He wrote, “So long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser”. Grassroots folks report to me that DeVos’ husband personally called state senators in MI to get them to vote against a Common Core repeal bill.

But to understand DeVos’s political footprint, it is necessary to examine her powerful family dynasty, whose well-heeled members chair the Orlando Magic. Betsy DeVos’ brother, Erik Prince, was also the founder of the private security firm Blackwater USA.

DeVos is a Republican megadonor from MI who has been active in promoting school choice, a movement that advocates the use of tax credits and vouchers to allow parents to opt out of the public school system. “But… they also represent the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities, and setting the foundation of a flourishing nation, in turn”. In the most recent election cycle, she and Richard gave more than .5 million to conservative political action committees, including $400,000 to the PAC that backed Little Marco Rubio.