Born billionaire Betsy Devos has been trying to starve public education for decades and she’s been extraordinarily successful at it. Her family’s big money has enabled her to ram her agenda on her home state of Michigan, leading to the biggest funding drop of all the fifty states over the last two decades with an explosion of for-profit charter schools that has helped make the state’s schools the second most segregated in the nation, only trailing Mississippi.
As Secretary of Education, she’s trying to bring this agenda to the nation, proposing budget cuts to education that were even to severe for a GOP Congress. While she’s emboldened usurious lenders, she’s abandoned the trans kids’ basic rights and fought to make it easier sexual predators get away with abuse.
Betsy DeVos taking over the Department of Education was the greatest victory for those who seek to starve and re-segregate our public schools. But it could also be its demise.