While it is doubtful that US President-elect Donald Trump
ever read George Orwell’s 1984, Trump’s cabinet choices appear to come right
out of the doublethink that ruled Orwell’s dystopian society. In Orwell’s book,
the Ministry of Plenty rationed essentials while the Ministry of Truth
manufactured falsehoods.
Trump’s pick for the Secretary of Energy said last year he
wanted to abolish the department. His choice for the Environmental Protection
Agency is best known for suing the agency. His proposed Labor Secretary has
criticized overtime, minimum wage and sick leave initiatives. His attorney
general nominee has a long history of opposing voting rights, women’s rights
and once said he decided he didn’t like the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan only
after he learned they smoked marijuana.
However, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy
DeVos, is perhaps the most extreme of Trump’s cabinet nominees. She has spent
her entire adult life — and her family’s considerable wealth — mounting
campaigns to transfer public dollars away from public schools and into private
and religious schools.
The 59-year-old DeVos will be in charge of the U.S.
Department of Education, which has 5,000 employees and a budget of $73 billion
last year. Unlike many countries, the U.S. educational system is decentralized,
with much power resting at the state and local level. However, federal policy
initiatives have played a growing role in recent decades, particularly in
shaping educational policy across the country.
Historically, the department has been focused on protecting
civil rights in areas of class, race, and gender, and has focused its budget on
public schools. Before he won the election, Trump announced his main education
focus was to invest $20 billion in federal money to increase school choice.
In the United States, the term “school choice” has become
code for supporting “independent” charter schools that are nominally public but
privately controlled, More threatening, it is code for transferring public tax
dollars to private schools, including religious schools, that operate with
little to no public oversight. For instance, under U.S. law private schools are
able to circumvent basic safeguards such as freedom of expression and gender
rights. In general, neither their finances nor their curriculum are made
public.
Betsy DeVos is the ideal candidate for such an unprecedented
policy shift. She has had virtually nothing to do with public schools her
entire life. She’s not an educator, nor has she worked for any public school
institution. The main organizations she has headed, The Alliance for School
Choice and the American Federation for Children, were specifically set up to promote
school privatization, and have spent millions of dollars electing local, state
and national politicians.
DeVos hails from a wealthy family and married into an even
wealthier one. Her father, Edgar Prince, was a politically active auto parts
businessman. When not making money, he supported the creation of the Family
Research Council, a conservative Christian religious group that has been called
a “hate” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT views.
DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, is founder of the security firm Blackwater, which
ushered in the era of private contractors performing duties for the U.S.
military in order to evade public outcry over U.S. operations in the Middle
East. Its employees were found guilty of killing dozens of Iraqi civilians in a
massacre in 2007.
When DeVos married Richard DeVos, Jr., her oligarchic empire
expanded. Her father-in-law co-founded Amway, a pyramid marketing company that
made millions for its founders. Richard DeVos, Sr., has also been a long-time
supporter of right-wing religious and economic groups.
Forbes magazine estimated the net worth of the DeVos family
as $5.1 billion. This puts DeVos in the top tier of Trump’s oligarchic cabinet
— even richer than Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, who was the CEO of
Exxon.
Betsy and her husband have continued their families’
right-wing political traditions. They have been powerbrokers in the Republican
Party and have donated millions of dollars to right-wing think tanks,
foundations, legal teams and political action committees.
Known as a smart and determined political organizer, Betsy
DeVos understands the important role of labor unions, particularly public
sector unions, in opposing privatization. Thus her strategy has long included
attacks on unions and worker rights.
DeVos ability to bring religious groups into the
privatization struggle is strengthened by her personal beliefs. In 2001, she
told a group of Christian philanthropists that her work on school issues was a
campaign to “advance God’s Kingdom.”
In fact, her positions are so extreme — against any form of
government regulation of voucher or charter schools — that some supporters of
school privatization have expressed concern about her appointment. The main
association of charter schools in the state of Massachusetts, for instance,
said that DeVos’s positions would “reduce the quality of charter schools across
the country.”
The Republicans control both the Senate and House of
Representatives of the U.S. Congress and it is expected that DeVos and Trump’s
other nominees with be approved. But as the last year has made clear, political
developments in the United States are highly unpredictable. The fight over the
federal role in public education is far from settled.
Originally published at educationincrisis.net.
