DeVos criticized for calling historically black schools ‘pioneers of school choice’

“Secretary DeVos must preserve OCR’s critical role in ensuring equal access to education and enforcing our nation’s laws protecting students’ civil rights”, said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. And they didn’t show that “more options help students flourish”, so much as they established that “black people benefit from not being completely excluded from all forms of higher education”. They were formed because racist Jim Crow laws made it so black Americans didn’t have ANY access to education and went UNserved, both in schools and elsewhere in society.

Talk about tone deaf.

According to the Washington Post, the United Negro College Fund requested that Trump move the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities back to the White House, which Trump’s executive order is expected to do. On Monday, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoss met with leaders of the HBCUs to discuss the ongoing issues.

The criticism was loud.

Ms. DeVos is slated to give the keynote speech at Tuesday’s luncheon during a meeting between HBCU leaders and members of Congress. Mr. Kimbrough said that morning that he hoped Ms. DeVos could clean up and clarify her comments from Monday night. In implying that HBCUs pioneered this idea, DeVos insulted the many black Americans who historically could not attend the vast majority of colleges and universities.

DeVos’s confirmation was among the closest in history, with the Senate splitting 50-50 and Vice President Mike Pence casting the deciding vote. Although some institutions, including Ohio’s Oberlin College, permitted black students to enroll, a vast majority of American universities were off-limits to black students.

“Yesterday’s attempt to whitewash the the stain of segregation into an argument for privatizing our public schools is perhaps a new low in her current position”, said the MI congressman John Conyers, who also called the statement “shocking and insulting”.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, called the statement “tone-deaf” and “uninformed”, noting that for many years, HBCUs were the “only option”. Unlike most of the charter-school grifters, she doesn’t really seem to stand to profit in any real way off of school-privatization policies-that is, she’s so insanely wealthy already that no plausible school-privatization scheme could meaningfully enrich her.