Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Education, might not be the worst of the megabucks donors and right-wing crusaders in Mr. Trump’s prospective cabinet.
DeVos, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now, is not a friend of teachers’ unions. Nor of what she calls “government schools”—traditional public neighborhood schools—though she has no personal experience with them. She’s never been a teacher or a school administrator, and she never attended public school herself. Neither did any of her four children. So what, besides millions of dollars in campaign contributions, is leading her to the federal government’s top education job?
“She’s the epitome of the billionaire philanthropists who are intervening in public education to dismantle it and turn it into a market,” Lipman told me. “Education in this country is something like a $635 billion industry. When it’s public, there’s no opportunity to make money from it. But if you privatize pieces of it, you create opportunities for investment. Teachers’ unions are a critical defender of public schools and a major barrier to privatization, so dismantling them is a strategic necessity for those who would like to privatize public schools.”
