Education: Democrats and unions are joining to kill any prospect of meaningful education reform by President-elect Donald Trump. How? By fatally damaging school reformer Betsy DeVos' nomination as Secretary of Education.
DeVos is unquestionably qualified to head the Education Department. She has spent most of her adult life as an enthusiastic and thoughtful school reformer, fighting the teachers unions and their bought-and-paid-for Democratic political pals, to bring hope and educational change to the state of Illinois' dysfunctional schools.
What irks unions and Democrats alike is that DeVos is an unabashed advocate of school choice, which mostly means charter schools and voucher programs. Most thoughtful critics of our failing education system agree that greater choice for parents and students is the only way to make our schools excellent again.
And yet the major teachers unions have launched a vicious campaign against DeVos, one that if successful will continue to punish American children — especially those from lower-income homes — by denying them a decent education despite the huge sums of taxpayer money spent.
As former presidential candidate Mitt Romney noted last weekend in the Washington Post, in 1970 it cost $56,903 to educate a child from kindergarten to 12th grade. By 2010, after adjusting for inflation, it cost $164,426 to educate the same child. That entirely contradicts the idea that we're "underfunding" schools.
Of course, it would be a great investment if the returns on education had matched the amount spent. But they didn't. Teachers and their unions lined their pockets, staffed up with useless administrators (the number of school employees has nearly doubled), while student test scores went nowhere.
Yet, as Romney wrote in a defense of DeVos, "The establishment predictably calls for more spending and smaller classrooms — in other words, more teachers and more pay. But more of the same is demonstrably not the answer."
Absolutely correct. And, in the private sector, there's a name for this: fraud.
That's why it was such a disgrace for the head of the 1.6-million-member American Federation of Teachers, Hillary Clinton supporter Randi Weingarten, to call DeVos on Monday night "the most anti-public-education nominee in the history of the department."
That's false, and she knows it. As Glenn Reynolds rightly points out, charter schools are public schools. And he quite accurately further notes, "her critics aren't attacking her because they think she'll do a bad job. They're attacking her because they're afraid she'll do a good job."
Weingarten's counterpart at the 3-million-member National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, proves that point, claiming DeVos has "consistently and systematically worked to dismantle and privatize our public schools."
If that means fix the schools, give parents and poor kids more choices, hold schools accountable for their failures, and break the iron monopoly the unions have over education, then yes, that is correct.
No doubt the progressive congressional Democrats waiting to grill DeVos will take their talking points from unions that generously give to them while stiffing poor students on the promise of a decent education.
One of the main talking points of both unions is that DeVos didn't attend private school and has never taught at one. But the fact that she, despite her wealth, has dedicated her life to bettering our collapsed education system says all you need to know.
But as the Daily Caller noted, six of the 10 Democrats attending a special tactics meeting on the DeVos nomination sent their kids to private schools. Remember that when the inevitable lectures about DeVos being "out of touch" with public schools begin.
By the way, neither Randi Weingarten (total pay: $543,150 in 2013) or NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia (total pay: $347,751 in 2013, but she was only an NEA vice president then) aren't exactly working pro bono. In 2015 and 2016, their two unions spent a total of $31.9 million, mostly to elect Democrats — using taxpayer money laundered through teachers' dues, which they must pay, to do so.
The corruption of the union-dominated U.S. education system is a shocking disgrace. Only an outsider like DeVos will be able to break the stranglehold on our kids' futures.
Yes, all Cabinet nominees must be vetted. No one expects anything other than tough questions. But the union-led attack on DeVos is little more than character assassination, and contributes nothing to our debate over education.
Rather than debating DeVos' obvious qualifications for the job she is to take, Congress would be better advised to start discussing how to remove the pernicious influence of the teachers unions from our nations' classrooms.
RELATED: