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Democrats Who Oppose Betsy DeVos Have Nothing To Lose
The opposition to DeVos, Politico reports, comes from “more than a dozen Democratic senators from all wings of the party” who “will portray DeVos’ views as being outside the education mainstream.”
The non-mainstream “views” Politico cites include
her “bankrolling efforts to create state voucher programs” and
to expand a “loosely-regulated charter school sector” in Michigan, her home state.
The Senators are “also intent on drawing attention to
her lack of experience in a traditional public school setting. DeVos has never worked as a public school teacher or superintendent, nor has she sent her own kids to public schools.”
DeVos, The Ultimate Insider
In DeVos, Trump has found the ultimate inside power player.
Jennifer Berkshire, my colleague at The Progressive magazine, recounts on her personal blog how
Betsy DeVos and her husband have played a “long game” to control the fate of Michigan’s much beleaguered public schools.
Berkshire points to a piece by Michigan-based journalist Allie Gross calling attention to
a campaign conceived in the early 1990s to expand charter schools in the state. According to local news accounts Gross uncovered, there were just four major financial backers for the campaign, two of which are directly related to Betsy and DeVos.
Everyone knows that politics is ‘dirty business,'” writes Michigan State University professor and blogger Mitc Robinson,
“but the brand of politics played by the DeVos family in Michigan is a particularly brutal version of the game.”
According to Robinson, the
DeVoses have mostly failed at achieving political success the old-fashioned way – by using the electoral process.
When their efforts to win a statewide referendum for a school voucher program and elect husband to the governorship both resulted in resounding defeats, the
“twin humiliations” motivated the DeVoses to attain their goals “like most political operatives and lobbyists, in the background.”
Among the “background” efforts Robinson points to is a DeVos financed “Skunk Works” campaign, “a secretive, off-the-books work group that had been tasked with developing a system of ‘low cost schools'” that would eventually lead to a school voucher program of some sort.
Robinson also points to the considerable influence Betsy and DeVos had on ensuring
the 2016 legislation to turn around the troubled Detroit school system did not include any further regulation of charter schools.
He cites evidence backing up his claim the DeVoses were “the major players” in the effort to
ensure any bill that passed “carved out special protections for school choice and charter schools, even going so far as to ‘freeze out’ a leading Republican senator and Detroit’s mayor from the deliberations.”
The DeVos Money Machine
The inside influence DeVos and her husband have wielded in Michigan has extended to “the national political stage” as well, according to Education Week, where they “are perhaps best known as big-time donors to Republican candidates and groups.”
EdWeek reporter Andrew Ujifusa notes,
“In the 2016 election year, for example, the two gave $2.7 million to Republican candidates … But their campaign-donation record goes back much further. And it includes contributions to several senators who may vote on Betsy DeVos’ confirmation in the Senate education committee and subsequently on the Senate floor.”
Ujifusa unearthed nearly $2.7 million in political donations, over the past 20 years, Betsy DeVos personally gave to 370 individuals and causes.
The DeVos funding machine also extends to the All Children Matter PAC, which finances campaigns related to education and other issues. “Over nine years since it was founded,” Ujifusa reports, “the group gave $1.8 million to 581 candidates and party committees,” some of which got the organization in trouble for skirting campaign finance rules in Ohio in 2008.
The state has fined All Children Matter $5.2 million, which the organization has yet to pay.
In the questionnaire DeVos had to submit to the Senate committee that will meet with her next week, there is an astonishingly long list of political contributions.
The insider status DeVos enjoys is especially in character with the nature of the
education reform agenda, which has always been much more reliant on the inner workings of politics and wealthy people rather than the will of the general populace.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...e-nothing-lose
DeVos isn't pushing for PUBLIC charter schools, but only for for-profit corporate charter schools.
Just another cheat, fraud in Trash's mafia.
