This past week, President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees seemed to be competing for the honor of having the weirdest confirmation hearings.
Although former Texas Gov. Rick Perry beat out current Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin for the title of Most Bizarre Potential Appointee some time ago, the recent combination of good ol’ Okie science deniers Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Sen. Jim Inhofe provided some surrealistic moments in Pruitt’s nomination hearing to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
As the week began, my hope was that President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education would embarrass herself the most — perhaps to the point where even Republicans would reject her.
Alas, it would take quite a fiasco to persuade 10 of the 12 Republican senators who have been funded by Betsy DeVos or her family to convince a majority of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to reject her.
But DeVos, the Amway heiress who sees school choice as a way to “advance God’s Kingdom” to “greater Kingdom gain,” may have actually pulled it off.
Clueless on metrics, federal policies
Follow NonDoc:
Although the questioning of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) failed to produce the belly laughs we might have hoped for from a former Saturday Night Live cast member, he still managed to elicit a stunner from DeVos.
She touts her decades of education advocacy — a movement preoccupied with data-driven accountability — but apparently DeVos doesn’t even know the difference between proficiency scores and growth scores, which are key metrics in quantitative education analysis.
“This is a subject that has been debated in the education community for years,” Franken said. “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue.”
Further, DeVos, whose wealth is about $5.1 billion, has had no personal experience with public schools as a student, parent or educator, but she pointed to her three decades of advocacy for vouchers, private charters and attacking teachers unions as evidence of her qualifications for Secretary of Education.
Since charters and voucher-funded private schools have a long record of pushing out special education students and other kids who make it more difficult to raise test scores, surely she would be prepared for questions from the committee about their compliance with the federal IDEA special education law.
Twice, however, DeVos seemed to indicate that this long-established federal law is “an issue that’s best left to the states.” At one point, she indicated that enforcing the civil rights law is “certainly worth discussion.” DeVos later explained her lack of awareness of education law, saying, “I may have confused it.”
As reported by the Washington Post, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who has a child with a disability, “explained to DeVos what IDEA actually guarantees to students with disabilities, and urged her to learn about it, saying she was ‘concerned’ that DeVos was unfamiliar with it. DeVos responded that if she is confirmed as education secretary, she would be ‘very sensitive’ to the needs of special needs students.”
Either grossly inept or potentially corrupt
Before the hearing, DeVos filed an inaccurate report on her family’s political donations, for instance leaving out a $125,000 anti-union donation. She also omitted other personal and business financial information.
But Hassan asked a question that was so close to home that surely DeVos would know the answer. The senator asked about a $5 million donation “made by a foundation ostensibly run by DeVos’ mother to Focus on the Family, the anti-gay extremist chop-shop that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.”
DeVos then denied she sat on the foundation’s board and said she didn’t know about her mother’s donation. This prompted Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-Wash.) fact check: From 1990 through 2013 DeVos was listed as vice president and a board member of the organization.
“That was a clerical error,” DeVos replied. “I have never made decisions on my mother’s behalf.”
Sen. Warren gets a shot in
Oklahomans should be proud that Northwest Classen graduate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) joined the fray to challenge DeVos on another issue for which she should have been prepared.
Given Trump’s scandalous record with the for-profit Trump University and her husband’s ties to dubious virtual schools, surely DeVos knew she would have to explain her thoughts on the fraudulent online universities. Instead, she acknowledged the DOE’s responsibility to “ensure that federal monies are used properly and appropriately.”
“So, you’re going to subcontract making sure what happened with universities that cheat students doesn’t happen anymore?” asked Warren.
“No, I didn’t say that,” DeVos answered.
‘Bear’ necessities
Ultimately, DeVos claimed the prize for the most unforgettable answer of any Trump nominee: Asked whether guns should be allowed in schools, DeVos pointed to Wyoming, saying, “I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”
If Oklahoma can’t always take the center stage for political silliness, it’s good that the prize will likely go to an education reformer.
At the very least, DeVos created an opportunity for Some Dam Poet, a frequent commenter on Diane Ravitch’s blog, to contribute his new verse, A Nation at Risk:
The number one problem in schools
Is grizzly-bears breaking the rules
Attacking the teachers
And hacking the bleachers
And leaving their grizzly bear stools
