WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday pledged support for magnet schools in a bid to repair ties with proponents of public education in the wake of a bruising confirmation battle, but also slammed her critics for rejecting innovation and change. In one of her first public speeches since ... Read More »
Arne Duncan, Education secretary under President Obama, condemned protesters who briefly blocked Betsy DeVos from entering a Washington, D.C., public school on Friday morning. “Agree or disagree w @BetsyDeVos on any issue, but let’s all agree she really needs to be in public schools,” wrote Duncan, who served as Education ... Read More »
The confirmation hearings for Betsy DeVos provided an inordinate amount of drama: guns and grizzlies, an all-night talkathon on the Senate floor, and Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote — and with good reason. DeVos, now confirmed as secretary of Education, is not just another inexperienced member of the president’s ... Read More »
Betsy DeVos, just sworn in as education secretary after Vice President Pence cast a tiebreaking vote in the Senate to confirm her appointment, visited Howard University on Thursday to meet with university leaders. It was her first visit as secretary. On Friday, she visited Jefferson Academy, a public school in ... Read More »
WASHINGTON — U.S. Vice President Mike Pence says he fully expects billionaire GOP donor Betsy DeVos will be confirmed as education secretary with his tie-breaking vote. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Pence says the Trump administration is “very confident” she will take up her Cabinet post soon. Last week, two ... Read More »
Today is D-Day in Washington — the confirmation debate and vote on Betsy DeVos, one of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees and the most contested. Despite the assurance of President Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer the confirmation is a cinch, the administration is making a last-ditch push today for DeVos in ... Read More »
In a powerful and passionate speech, a Detroit student expressed why she doesn’t think Betsy DeVos should be Secretary of Education. In a video the American Federation of Teachers posted on Facebook, Dannah Wilson (whose name was spelled incorrectly in the video and later corrected in the comments) explained that 119 parents, ... Read More »
Asked whether Christian schools should continue to rely on philanthropic dollars—rather than pushing for taxpayer money through vouchers—Betsy DeVos replied, “There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education … [versus] what is currently being spent every year on education in this ... Read More »
Democratic senators tried their best to rattle Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing to be Education Secretary on Tuesday, but she glided serenely through the process. “Nothing in life is truly free,” she sweetly said to Bernie Sanders (I-VT) when the former Democratic presidential candidate brought up his proposal to ... Read More »
WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was not a hearing. It was the mere burlesque of a hearing, rendered meaningless by a preposterously accelerated process that rendered all questioning perfunctory and that left all cheap evasions hanging in the air of the committee room the way cigarette smoke used to canopy the proceedings back ... Read More »
Senate Democrats hit Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, on all sides at her confirmation hearing Tuesday night. But the question that made her look worst required her to demonstrate a basic understanding of education policy — a test DeVos failed. Sen. Al Franken asked DeVos to explain ... Read More »
After Tom Casperson, a Republican state senator from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, began running for Congress in 2016, he assumed the family of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to be education secretary, would not oppose him. The DeVoses, a dominant force in Michigan politics for decades with a fortune ... Read More »
