Let’s get us a buncha outsiders up in here
Charles Pierce on the Betsy DeVos hearing. (Not really a hearing, more of a façade of a hearing.)
As nearly as I can tell, the nominees for the president-elect’s Cabinet fall into several different categories. There are the people you’d pretty much expect from any Republican administration. (James Mattis, Michael Flynn, Ryan Zinke). There are the people who understand the mission of their departments and have spent their lives undermining it. (Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Rick Perry at Energy, Andrew Puzder at Labor). And there are the people who are fundamentally clueless about the general nature of public service. (Rex Tillerson at State.) On Tuesday night, DeVos demonstrated that she is that rarest of Trump administration fauna: Someone who fits capably into all three categories.
Cool. Standard (so hooray free market, to hell with losers) Republican, underminer, and clueless. There’s also the bribery aspect: can we count that as a fourth classification?
Her ignorance about the field she is nominated to be Secretary of which was particularly displayed when Al Franken questioned her:
Franken: I’m talking about the debate between proficiency in growth, what your thoughts on that?
DeVos: I was just asking the senator to clarify…
Franken: This is a subject that has been debated in the education community for years. I have advocated growth as the chairman, and every member of this committee knows, because with proficiency teachers ignore the kids of the top who are not going to fall below proficiency, and they ignore the kid at the bottom who they know will never get to proficiency. I have been an advocate for growth. But it surprises me that you don’t know this issue, and Mr. Chairman, I think this is a good reason for us to have more questions. This is a very important subject — education, our kids’ education. I think we are selling our kids short by not being able to have a debate on it.
As I may have mentioned, my father was a teacher and an administrator in the public high schools for over 35 years. He explained the essential difference between proficiency and growth to me 40 years ago. That a prospective Secretary of Education hadn’t the faintest idea what Franken was talking about should have been enough to make the committee adjourn itself in helpless laughter.
Or to Google yet again “emigration.”
Perry’s more in the third category… he didn’t know what the DoE did before he accepted (namely, it concerns nuclear energy).
That may be the case…but my experience was a lot different. The schools my nieces and nephews (and my son, too) attended did the opposite. They focused on the kids at the top, because they brought glory to the school. They focused on the kids at the bottom, because there is a great deal of funding available for the special needs kids. They ignored the kids in the middle, because they were ordinary and uninteresting, and weren’t going to set the world on fire or bring in much in the way of funds. So a kid who could be a decent but not brilliant student with encouragement was left to flail in the mud and drop out before high school was over, while her brothers finished school without even learning to tie their shoes, write their name, or for that matter sit up by themselves (one of them was in a persistent vegetative state, but went to class every day), and were given hours of attention, while their sister, a kid smack dab in the average range on interests and testing ability was left to end up coming out way below average because the school simply wasn’t interested in her.
Anecdote? Yes. But I’ve seen it several times, not just my niece, but multiple people, almost always girls (that might have been coincidence; for some strange reason, most of the males in my family fell into the special needs category, and the females didn’t).
So, yeah, I think that there are a lot of conventional wisdom beliefs out there about education that might benefit from being looked at a little closer, just to see if they might not be quite what people think they are.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1417523878266069/?type=3&theater