The rage and hostility and contempt had been percolating since last spring, and then, when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos gave an interview to 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, the percolator erupted into a tsunami. “Betsy DeVos’s disastrous interview shows the limitations of being rich,” read the headline in the Washington Post . “Betsy DeVos Teaches the Value of Ignorance,” said the New York Times . A congressman from North Carolina, in a tweet, accused DeVos of being “rich, white and dumber than a bag of hammers.” The interview even prompted the Post to sic its two house “humorists” on the secretary. “Betsy DeVos has definitely seen a school once,” one of them wrote cleverly. The other used this headline: “The unappreciated genius of Betsy DeVos.” He was being sarcastic. Sarcasm never fails to kill. It’s comedy gold. (I’m being sarcastic.) DeVos – also known to her more sophisticated critics as Ditzy DeVos, Betsy DeVille, and Cruella DeVos – has become the most controversial member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. This is saying something. For liberals and Democrats, Trump’s cabinet is the most target-rich environment since Sgt. York lowered his sights on that trenchful of German soldiers at the Battle of Meuse-Argonne. Aside from its singular intensity, there was nothing new in this expression of DeVos Hate. A philanthropist, businesswoman, and Republican activist, she has long been reviled by the teachers’ unions in her home state of Michigan. Her particular crime has been
to throw a fairly large chunk of her billion- dollar inherited fortune behind the cause of school choice – a system of taxpayer-funded vouchers that would allow poor parents to send their children to the private, public, or charter school of their own preference. DeVos’ enemies see school choice as a raid on the public purse – a sly way to undermine the public-school system by redistributing tax money to schools beyond the grasp of government administrators and their union allies. When Trump chose DeVos to be his secretary of education, the fear that she would nationalize her school-choice crusade sent shivers up every progressive spine. The Blob’s great ambition, in the view of outsiders like DeVos, is to block school reform. After a rocky confirmation hearing, DeVos took her seat in the education department’s hideous headquarters off the National Mall and began behaving just as her enemies feared: She started getting things done. We can assume that DeVos, like other conservatives and libertarians, thinks the Department of Education is a waste of time and a misbegotten federal intrusion into a sphere that properly belongs to the states. For 40 years, its most obvious function has been to bolster the vast, parasitic education establishment – that unsightly agglomeration of teachers’ unions,
By “Horace Mann“
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American Consequences 23
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