"When I heard the news of Betsy DeVos’s confirmation, I was sad, above all else. I had watched the #NoDeVos movement gain momentum, and I had kept up hope that the Senate would choose what was best for America’s students. When Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote, amidst feelings of anger and uncertainty, my heart also broke.
Mrs. DeVos has demonstrated (on more than one occasion) her utter lack of knowledge in the field of public education in America. Her career’s focus is solely on charter schools, and I have no doubt that she is knowledgeable about them. However, her idealistic views on charter schools are a threat to public schools. My primary concern with Mrs. DeVos’s confirmation is in her apparent disregard for the value of public education. In her [vision of a] perfect world, parents everywhere would have the option to send their child to a charter school. She claims that students in America are being “trapped by their zip code in a school that fail[s] to meet their needs.” DeVos is an advocate for what she calls ‘school choice’, which to me, means she favors sending students to private or charter schools instead of public schools.
I fear for rural America when it comes to school choice. There are towns I teach at across the Midwest that have populations of less than 1,000 people, and the K-12 public school in those communities may be the only school for 40 miles. Mrs. DeVos is forgetting that for these small towns, charter schools are simply not feasible. As Senator Claire McCaskill said, these private charter schools will never exist in small towns of 500 or 600 people; taking money away from public schools in favor of charter schools would only serve to irreparably damage the quality of rural education in communities that may already be struggling. My fear is that her enthusiasm for charter schools will cause public schools across the country to suffer."
