Trump's terribly unqualified Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, may be ready to jump ship

Courtesy of Salon:

Thomas Toch, director of independent education think tank FutureEd, told Politico that DeVos was ignorant of the job's constraints when she accepted it and insiders are already preparing for her to vacate the position. 

"She can’t fill her senior staff slots," he said. "Morale is terrible at the department." 

DeVos was roundly criticized for her lack of basic knowledge about education policy during the confirmation hearing process. She blames President Donald Trump's transition team, claiming she was "undercoached." 

One doubts most nominees for education secretary need to be coached not to cite grizzly bears as a reason for guns in schools. 

"I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long," Toch told Politico. "I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”

There have been other murmurings about Devos being frustrated and wanting out of her job, but at least one MSNBC contributor thinks that there may be another reason for her desire to up and quit. 

I’ve received reports today saying DeVos, Huntsman, Ross, Sessions, Tillerson & Zinke are resigning for ties to Russia &/or for corruption.

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) November 6, 2017

Now I don't really care why Betsy DeVos quits necessarily so long as she quits.

But if I have to choose a reason, I like the one that Dworkin offered the best. Especially since it likely means that DeVos will be followed out of the door by a number of other Trump enablers. 

Elizabeth Warren has Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in her sights. And that's a good thing.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is setting her sights on Betsy DeVos, the wealthy Republican donor who has become a lightning rod for the liberal grassroots as President Trump’s secretary of Education. 

Warren on Wednesday announced the launch of DeVos Watch, a coordinated effort to scrutinize the secretary’s handling of the $1 trillion federal student loan program and her oversight of student loan servicers, among other issues. 

“We all have an interest in a well-run, fiscally responsible, corruption-free student aid program that puts students first. That is Secretary DeVos' job — and it is Congress' job to make sure she does it,” Warren wrote in an op-ed published by CNN. 

Recently, Warren has raised concerns over potential ethics violations at the Department of Education, pushed DeVos to reinstate student loan protections and pressed the Trump administration to shield student loan borrowers from unnecessary fees. 

The salvos targeting DeVos are just the latest attempt by Warren to branch out from her expertise on financial matters — a pattern that has fueled speculation she is eyeing a presidential bid in 2020.

Warren going after DeVos is only good news for the country, and especially our education system. 

DeVos is certainly no match for the Massachusetts Senator, and this might even eventually convince her to step down from the job.

That is if the Russia investigation does not frighten her into resigning before that.

Remember it WAS her company that the Russian bank was repeatedly contacting using those servers in Trump Tower. 

Trump's Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is loudly booed during commencement speech at historically black university.

Courtesy of Yahoo News:  

Drawing shouts of "Liar!" and "Just go," Education Secretary Betsy DeVos powered through her commencement address Wednesday at a historically black university, even as many of the graduating students turned their backs to her in protest. 

"Let's choose to hear one another out," DeVos said, reading her prepared text in a measured tone despite continuing waves of boos, catcalls and scattered applause at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida. 

As the crowd kept trying to shout her down, university president Edison Jackson briefly took over the microphone to sternly lecture the class of 2017. 

"If this behavior continues, your degrees will be mailed to you. Choose which way you want to go," Jackson warned. 

DeVos alienated many African-Americans in February when she described historically black colleges as "real pioneers when it comes to school choice." After a storm of criticism, she acknowledged that these colleges were "born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism."

Look I am one who typically does not believe in publicly disrespecting people, or shouting over them when they are trying to speak, however the fact is that Donald Trump chose the people he chose to undermine and even damage the agencies that they now lead, and there is nothing to respect about that.

Betsy DeVos is criminally unfit for her job, and the damage she can do to the Department of Education, and the students who are still in the system is incalculable.

In light of that, she should expect to get booed and shouted down in virtually EVERY university, high school, and kindergarten class that she visits.

From the official White House Snapchat account.

I originally saw this on Reddit so my first response was to think, "Nice try you merry pranksters, but I am not falling for this one."

However after doing a little Googling, I found that it was indeed legit.

I know it's just a simple typo but why does this unfortunately happen with DeVos (via the White House snap chat) pic.twitter.com/zx4IWxTz0b

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) April 17, 2017

Now first off we need to admit that EVERYBODY makes mistakes.

However THIS is from the official White House account.

And it features the woman who is dedicated to destroying public education as we know it.

And the word that is misspelled is "education."

How could we NOT make fun of it?

Additional security for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos may cost as much as 8 million dollars, and she is charging the Education Department for it.

Courtesy of the MSN: 

Government officials said Friday that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos requires additional security detail due to a threat to her safety and that it may cost up to $7.8 million through September to protect her. 

The U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement that a threat assessment was conducted in February and DeVos was put under additional protection. 

The statement did not provide details on the threat or the number of personnel assigned to her. The agency said it will be reimbursed $7.78 million from the Education Department for services from February through September. 

The Education Department said that's a projected, not a final figure. The move comes amid a proposal by the Trump administration to cut the department's budget by 13 percent. 

The evaluation of DeVos' safety took place after a protester briefly blocked her from entering a public school in the nation's capital.

Okay seriously WTF?

The Education Department needs to shell out as much as eight million dollars because this precious snowflake had never seen protesters before?

Here is video of that protest.

You will notice that nobody touched her, or threatened to harm her in any way.

They simply blocked her from entering the building and shouted "shame" at her.

I am sure that was humiliating, but should her humiliation cost the taxpayers 8 million dollars?

And remember this is on top of all of the money being spent to protect the Trump family and all of Trump's associates. 

Trump's Education Secretary claims that she could do nothing to make America's public schools any worse, but of course we know that is far from true.

Wait until you see how badly SHE'S going to fuck everything up!

Courtesy of Slate:  

On Wednesday, at a forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington, the president’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was asked whether she would concede that when poorly implemented, the “school choice” doctrine she has championed for much of her career could have a negative effect on students. She saw no such risk: 

“Well, I’m not sure how they could get a lot worse on, you know, a nationwide basis than they are today,” the secretary said. “The fact that our PISA scores have continued to deteriorate as compared to the rest of the world and, you know, that we’ve seen stagnant—at best—results with the NAEP scores over the years—I’m not sure that we can deteriorate a whole lot.” 

The problem with DeVos’ sweeping assertion—and by extension, her apocalyptic view of American public education—is that the numbers tell a more complex, muddier story. Take PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, a test that compares 15-year-olds’ performance across dozens of countries. Depending on how you read the most recent PISA results from 2015, American schools could be described as doing great (we’re ahead of Switzerland in reading, and above France and Sweden in science), as doing OK (the U.S. placed near the middle overall), or as failing miserably (America’s math ranking is bad and has gotten worse since 2012). 

And, of course, numbers can also be an unreliable diagnostic tool: Just because you think the PISA or National Assessment of Educational Progress numbers are awful doesn’t mean you know what to do to improve them—or even know how to track that you’re doing something right. DeVos certainly doesn’t seem to: Asked earlier in the Brookings Q&A what dataset could be used to assess her own performance as education secretary in four years’ time, DeVos rambled a little about the primacy of policies that favor choice while conceding, “I’m not a numbers person.”

No she is not a "number's person" but neither is she an "education person." 

Simply put she is uniquely unfit for this particular responsibility.

As for not making things worse, all one has to do is look back at the LAST Republican President's attempts to make over our education system, the disastrous NCLB, to quickly realize the ignorance of that statement.

So today Donald Trump got just that much closer to destroying public education in America.

This will teach liberals to stay home on election day.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

The Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos on Tuesday as education secretary, approving the embattled nominee only with the help of a historic tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence. 

The 51-to-50 vote elevates Ms. DeVos — a wealthy donor from Michigan who has devoted much of her life to expanding educational choice through charter schools and vouchers, but has limited experience with the public school system — to be steward of the nation’s schools. 

Two Republicans voted against Ms. DeVos’s confirmation, a sign that some members of President Trump’s party are willing to go against him, possibly foreshadowing difficulty on some of the president’s more contentious legislative priorities. 

It was the first time that a vice president has been summoned to the Capitol to break a tie on a cabinet nomination, according to the Senate historian. Taking the gavel as the vote deadlocked at 50-50, Mr. Pence, a former member of the House, declared his vote for Ms. DeVos before announcing that Mr. Trump’s nominee for education secretary had been confirmed.

This, by the way, was an appointment that DaVos and her family essentially paid for with donations.

Donations from Betsy DaVos and her family.

I think we are supposed to take some solace in the fact that the vote was this close, but in the end DeVos was confirmed and that is all that counts.

I am also hearing some voices suggesting that we should stay calm because the Federal Government can only have so much of an impact on public education, but those people must not have been paying attention to what Bush's NCLB did to our schools and to our teachers.

I lived through all of that and saw first hand the devastating effects that NCLB had on our ability to adequately prepare children for college, their future career path, and for life in general.

In fact we are still recovering.

So yes Betsy DeVos can have an incredibly negative impact on education in this country.

And I imagine that is exactly the kind of impact that she WILL have.

Donald Trump's nominee for Education Secretary cites grizzly bears as reason for guns in schools.

Courtesy of CNN: 

Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump's education secretary nominee, said it should be up to states whether guns are allowed in schools, citing grizzly bear protection as part of her answer. 

She also said she would support Trump if he moved to ban gun-free schools zones, a position he advocated on the campaign trail. 

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who represents Sandy Hook, the site of the 2012 school shooting, asked DeVos if she believes guns have "any place in and around schools." 

"I think that is best left to locales and states to decide," she said. 

After Murphy pushed DeVos about why she can't say definitively whether they belong, DeVos brought up a story Sen. Mike Enzi told earlier about a school in Wyoming that has fences around it to protect against grizzly bears. 

"I will refer back to Sen. Enzi and the school he is talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine there is probably a gun in a school to protect from potential grizzlies," she said. 

The comment drew some laughs in the room.

I actually watched this live as it happened, and even tweeted about it.

Went to school in Alaska. Never once had grizzly bear show up in classroom. https://t.co/aJwkE2SFu4

— Gryphen 2009 (@Gryphen2009) January 18, 2017

I kind of forgot about the exchange until I saw it show up again last night and thought it needed to be shared here on IM.

First off I am sure that all of you know that I consider the idea of guns in public schools to be just about the dumbest idea imaginable.

Having said that I thought I should share that I actually worked at a school where a grizzly bear once ambled onto the playground.

We had moose show up with some frequency but this was our first bear.

In case you are wondering the protocol was to bring the children into the school, no running, and to then notify the authorities that there was a bear in the area.

No shots were fired, because we are Alaskans and we know that is an ignorant overreaction.

We actually went back out later in the day as if nothing had happened, and the bear never made a return visit again.

Simply put there is NEVER a good reason for guns to be in a public school setting, and no not even if a grizzly bear shows up.

P.S. By the way this was only one of the pathetic answers provided by DeVos, you can see many more by clicking here.

Trump's choice for Education Secretary wants to "advance God's Kingdom" in American education.

Psst, she secretly hates kids learning anything. Don't tell anybody.

Courtesy of Politico:

The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to "advance God's Kingdom." 

Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools.

Her comments came during a 2001 meeting of “The Gathering,” an annual conference of some of the country’s wealthiest Christians. DeVos and her husband, Dick, were interviewed a year after voters rejected a Michigan ballot initiative to change the state’s constitution to allow public money to be spent on private and religious schools, which the DeVoses had backed.

In the interview, an audio recording, which was obtained by POLITICO, the couple is candid about how their Christian faith drives their efforts to reform American education.

Well it looks like Trump has finally done the impossible.

He has almost turned me into an advocate for homeschooling.

Because let's face it once this Christofascist is finished with our education system the only place an American child will receive a well rounded education is as far away from the public school system ad they can possibly get.

And that is really the evil genius of Republican politics.

They screw government social programs and services up so much that soon American citizens are BEGGING for them to be given to the private sector.

It's not government that sucks, it's Republican led government that sucks.

As it turns out Donald Trump did offer Jerry Falwell Jr. the Secretary of Education cabinet position and he turned him down.

Courtesy of Yahoo News: 

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says President elect-Donald Trump offered him the job of education secretary, but that he turned it down for personal reasons. 

Falwell tells The Associated Press that Trump offered him the job last week during a meeting in New York. He says Trump wanted a four- to six-year commitment, but that he couldn't leave Liberty for more than two years. 

Falwell says he couldn't afford to work at a Cabinet-level job for longer than that and didn't want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.

Holy shitballs!

The fact that Trump offered this position to Falwell suggests to me that he really determined to gut out education system in this country.

And as much as I would be terrified with Falwell in such an important position I am not at all sure that Betsy DeVos is really any better.

The NCLB program that Bush introduced was devastating to the teachers and students in this country, but whatever Trump has in mind could be infinitely worse.

Meet Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's choice as Secretary of Education.

And here I thought that Jerry Falwell Jr. would be the worst possible choice.

This is going to be a VERY bad four years for public education in this country. Let's hope it survives until the next presidency/

The Obama Administration calls for an end to corporal punishment in our schools.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

The Obama administration Tuesday called for an end to corporal punishment in states and school districts that continue to allow the practice. 

In a letter to governors and state school leaders, U.S. Education Secretary John B. King, Jr., called corporal punishment “harmful, ineffective, and often disproportionately applied to students of color and students with disabilities.” 

He urged states that had not yet ended corporal punishment — generally defined as paddling, caning or otherwise using physical force to inflict pain as punishment — to “eliminate this practice from your schools, and instead promote supportive, effective disciplinary measures.” 

While corporal punishment is banned in 28 states and the District of Columbia, there are 15 states that permit the practice and seven more that do not expressly prohibit it.

Just he very idea that this even has to be done in 2016 makes me sick to my stomach.

We now know so much about the harmful effects of corporal punishment on the emotional and mental well being of our children, and there are now so many more effective methods for behavior management, that it just seems barbaric that there are still institutions of learning who resort to physically injuring a child in order to gain compliance.

And of course this letter needs to be written now because once Jerry Falwell Jr. replaces John B. King Jr, as our Education Secretary I imagine he will reintroduce public floggings as a form of behavior modification.

Is Donald Trump seriously considering Jerry Falwell Jr. for Secretary of Education? Because that simply cannot happen.

Courtesy of Alternet:  

Liberty University President, Jerry Falwell Jr. is under consideration for Secretary of Education. Yes, the president of an Evangelical university, who believes that evolution is a lie, who is president of a university that was founded in opposition to school integration, may be dictating the educational agenda of America's public school children. Falwell Jr. confirmed to the Associated Press on Friday that he had met with Trump at Trump Tower. 

Falwell told Virginia's Richmond Times-Dispatch last week that he's let the administration know that "one of my passions is reforming higher education and education in general." When pressed by other outlets, including the Associated Press, whether that role would be as Secretary of Education, Falwell would not, "confirm or deny whether he was being vetted as secretary of education, but says he will 'definitely play a role' in the administration.'

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Okay I just had to get that off of my chest before I attempted to respond to this news in anything resembling actual English.

This blog is called "The Immoral Minority" directly because of this guy's father, and I have long been predicting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Religious Right in this country.

However if Trump actually puts this anti-intellectual, creationism believing buffoon in office as the man in charge of education in this country, there is no telling the amount of damage that he could do.

Liberty University was founded because Jerry Fallwell Sr. could not stomach the idea of the little white Christian snowflakes having to share dorms, cafeterias, or "gasp" locker rooms with African Americans.

That's right the school is a monument to racism. 

The school is notoriously anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ, and Fallwell Jr. suggested this last year: 

“I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.” 

So yes it is also Anti-Muslim. (You can see why Donald Trump probably likes this POS so much.)

I swear that virtually all of Trump's possible cabinet choices read like a "Who's Who of No Fucking Way." But this one, this one might be the worst so far.