Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, July 12, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, August 1.
Education Secretary at a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing being held in the Department of Education building, Wednesday, July 8, 2020. AP Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta via the Boston Herald.
[More catching up on my July blogging even though it's August.]
DeVos’ mission is to destroy public schools and make college unaffordable for the poor and working and lower middle classes. It’s part and parcel with the Republican corporatist plan to create and control a class of desperate and optionless laborers who will take any job at whatever pay the owners chose to pay them and stay on the jobs without question or complaint because there’s nothing else out there but poverty. Only the already well-off are supposed to go to the better colleges and universities, can have educations that will carry them into the ruling elite. Only the upper middle class are allowed educations that will, with luck, keep them, anxiously, upper middle class. The others, disproportionately people of color, will attend poor schools, underfunded and overcrowded, without resources or adequate supplies and up to date textbooks, where they will learn at best to read, write, and do simple math, enough to make them employable, useful, usable.
Just got to thinking as I was reading:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made clear on Sunday she wants schools to reopen fully for most students for the 2020-21 academic year, even as coronavirus infection rates are soaring in some parts of the country and some superintendents say it is impossible for them to do that.
DeVos made her latest statement about what schools should do on CNN’s “State of the Union.” In the interview with journalist Dana Bash, DeVos doubled down on calls she made last week for schools to reopen. “Kids need to be in school,” she said. “They need to be learning, they need to be moving ahead. And we can’t — we cannot be paralyzed and not allow that or not be intent on that happening.”
DeVos said nothing, however, about what school superintendents have been saying they need to reopen: billions of dollars in additional federal funding to cover the costs of changes they have to make and personal protective equipment they need to buy. In fact, DeVos last week threatened to withhold federal funding from districts that didn’t do what she wanted, even though she can’t unilaterally stop funding approved by Congress.
---“Do what I want: Betsy DeVos tells school districts trying to open for 2020-21” by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, Sunday, July 12, 2020.
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