The Secretary of Education is the member of the president’s cabinet who oversees the nation’s educational systems. Despite around 90% of U.S. kids attending public schools, the current Secretary, Betsy Devos, has exactly zero personal experience with public education. She’s not a teacher or school administrator, she’s never worked in a public school, she’s never attended a public school, and her own children have never attended a public school.
Her appointment was extraordinarily controversial at the time, and has remained so over the past three and a half years. To say she has a contentious relationship with teachers unions and leading education groups is an understatement. Now, as schools struggle with decisions over reopening in the fall, that divide has widened. with the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) saying the administration has “zero credibility in the minds of educators and parents when it comes to this major decision.”
Devos has pushed a simplistic “We need schools to reopen fully” message, with no real plan for how to do so safely in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, she’s skirted questions about whether schools should follow the CDC guidelines for reopening. According to Politico, she also called one school district’s spring distance learning efforts a “disaster” in addition to blasting education leaders “who won’t accept risk and ‘gave up and didn’t try’ to launch summer instruction.”
A principal shared some thoughts with Devos in a video shared by Bored Teachers. The two-minute video synopsizes the heroic efforts that teachers took on when the pandemic hit and how she needs to “sit down somewhere” because she is oblivious to what really went on in the spring. It needed to be said.
