Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, born a Prince, has been a billionaire for her entire life. Her father was a billionaire. So she inherited a shit-ton of money. She married a billionaire Dick who inherited his money from the long-running Ponzi scheme known as Amway. As such, she never, ever had shit to do with public schools except as a hobby. Public school education was never life or death for her or her children. It was a thing this rich person decided to fuck with because, shit, what the fuck else are you gonna do with all that time and money if you can't attempt to force your completely bullshit ideas about education, Jesus, and capitalism on the poors?
I'm reminded of a friend of mine whose son was having trouble with a public high school teacher. The teacher was making his regular chemistry class as hard as his AP class for students who had no interest in advanced chemistry. In fact, every other chemistry teacher taught regular old chemistry to the regular old chemistry students and saved the hard stuff for those who geek out on it, as it should be. When my friend looked at the teacher's web page, she saw how he bragged about how he and his wife had home-schooled their 5 kids. Finally, when her son was ready to just give up, my friend set up a meeting with the principal and the teacher. The teacher tried to be a pal and say how he's just challenging the kids and it's good for them and it shouldn't be my friend's concern. That's when my friend looked him square in the eyes and said, "You home schooled your children, right?" The teacher proudly said he had all the way through high school, and my friend responded, "So you never had to deal with an arrogant teacher being a jerk to your kid, did you?" According to my friend, a nauseous look of "oh, fuck me" crossed the man's face before he sputtered something about needing to get back to class. (Note: The class did become more normal after that.)
I thought of that incident when I watched DeVos completely shit herself repeatedly on 60 Minutes last night. She shit herself so much that, by the end of the interview with Leslie Stahl, DeVos was looking down from her thick shit cushion. Asked the simplest questions, ones about the very worthless things that DeVos had allegedly spent the last decade or so of her life working on, like school "choice" and charter schools, the motherfucking Secretary of Education couldn't even manage to come up with a halfway decent defense.
Stahl wanted to know about why schools are fucked in Michigan, which is not only DeVos's home state, but it's where she and her Dick husband recently built a 22,000 square foot house. DeVos gave the look of a college freshman who thought she didn't have to study because she's on a volleyball scholarship and said, "I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them."
Oddly, DeVos had not trouble talking about all the fucking schools in Detroit back in 2016 when she wanted their funding to go to charter schools and school "choice," which means, in part, "public funds being used at private religious schools because fuck the separation between church and state." Wrote DeVos, "We must acknowledge the simple fact that [Detroit Public Schools] has failed academically and financially – for decades." But what about the individual students, Secretary DeVos? She's actually more correct here than with Stahl. Schools aren't about individuals. They are about groups who rise and fall based on the teachers and the support they have. You don't back the teachers, you don't have a good school and students fucking suffer across the board.
That ignorance was on almost breathtaking display in the very next question, when Stahl asked DeVos if she had ever visited a failing school, maybe even in Michigan. DeVos answered, in what should be her political epitaph, "I have not — I have not — I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming." I just wish Stahl had followed up with, "The fuck? Did you ever unintentionally visit one? Did your driver ever bring you to the wrong address and you walked in and saw a bunch of black kids and ran back to the car and threatened to have your brother kill your driver's whole family for daring to put in you in such close proximity to 'those people'?"
DeVos continued her reign of being Secretary of Stupid when Stahl asked her about whether or not false accusations of sexual assault are really a problem on college campuses. DeVos moroned, "Well, one sexual assault is one too many, and one falsely accused individual is one too many." Stahl pressed, asking if they were the same, and the rational answer to that is "No, of course not. One is real and actual physical violence and a violation against the body." But DeVos is not rational or compassionate or smart. She is just full of conservative nonsense, so she said, " I don't know. I don't know. But I'm committed to a process that's fair for everyone involved."
And that shit comes from being so rich that no one ever challenges you, no one ever tells you, "You know, Bets, that's fucked up right there and it's gonna hurt people, you fucking pathetic idiot." Maybe if DeVos had had some teachers who fuckin' flunked her ass, she'd know how dumb she really is.
This doesn't even get into the guns in school discussion she had this morning, where DeVos essentially giggled, "Whatever the NRA tells you, Donald. Sure, we'll arm the teachers." And all I can think about is how Betsy DeVos never had to wonder if her kids' teachers should have guns in the classroom.
Then I think about my freshman high school English teacher, who was regularly drunk in class, who insisted that Geoffrey Chaucer's last name was pronounced "Saucer" (that always fuckin' galled me), who would get tired halfway through diagramming a sentence and just give up, who would occasionally miss the chair when she sat down and hit the floor. Oh, she'd've wanted the gun. Hell, if she had been a billionaire, she might have become Secretary of Education.
One other thing that's fucking annoying about Betsy fuckin' DeVos. You know that boxed water you see at the grocery store and you think, "I wonder if I should buy that because it tells me boxes are better than bottles"? You know that shit? Yeah, DeVos owns that company.
