Donnelly To Oppose Betsy DeVos For Ed Secretary

Baldwin said she’s opposing DeVos, known for her support of school vouchers, based on the fundamental belief in her home state of Wisconsin that everyone should be able to access education. She failed to meet three requirements I consider essential to serving as Secretary of Education – someone who is pro-public schools, pro-accountability and pro-civil rights.

Afterward, he indicated to Education Week that he wasn’t anxious that attacks on DeVos’ remarks about special education and guns in schools would linger at the department, saying, “The way the Democratic senators have been says more about them than it does about her”. Donnelly said after he carefully reviewed DeVos’ record and qualifications, he planned to vote against her nomination.

Similarly, Paul Reville, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, believes DeVos will be confirmed as secretary of education.

DeVos’s support for private schools doesn’t stop there.

Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” divided individuals who were skeptical and those who believed Washington would soon hold the values of the American people, not elitists who were just handed cabinet positions. Our Secretary of Education-to-be actually cited bears for the right to bear arms.

Still, the delay in the confirmation vote does not signal any increased likelihood that DeVos won’t be confirmed, according to some education policy experts. He pointed out that it has existed in higher education since the 1940s, when the GI bill let returning soldiers attend the college of their choice on the government’s dime.

DeVos won’t be the first Trump nominee Gillibrand has voted against. And of course, he has nominated Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education.

DeVos answered no and admitted to having no experience managing loan programs.

DeVos has spent almost 30 years as an education reformer, fighting to better the educational opportunities for low-income and at-risk children and is well known as a believer in the decentralization of education decisions to the family. “She would also have the authority to revise payments and fees to contractors for rehabilitating past-due debt”. Detroit Public Schools, which leads the nation in chronic absenteeism, and has experienced an enrollment drop of 42.5 percent over the past ten years, recently received a 7 million rescue plan from the state legislature. MI students’ test scores in reading and math are among the worst in the country, and Michigan’s charter schools continue to under-perform compared to public schools, Politico reported. At present, 37 states do not allow state-funded school vouchers.

Pressed on whether she supported Trump’s stated intention to reopen NAFTA, a trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that has been in effect since 1994, Murray again said she wasn’t clear on the president’s intentions. In 2008, the Ohio Elections Commission found that a PAC started by DeVos-devoted to promoting school choice and called All Children Matter-broke state law by funneling $870,000 from a national PAC to its Ohio affiliate.