DeVOS SHOWS AGAIN HOW UNQUALIFIED SHE IS AS EDUCATION SECRETARY

…The pro “Charter Schools” Secretary of Education , Betsy DeVos.

Student Journalists learn that Betsy DeVos is not on the side of public education.

Everyone who knows me, knows my attitude toward all of Trump’s unqualified cabinet members.  The worst of those is the Secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.  This woman is only there because she married into a wealthy family and they donated heavily to the GOP and Donald Trump’s campaign.  This secretary wishes that all US schools were private Charter Schools.

The following is a perfect example of how-to screw-up what should have been a great way to counter the fact that you are the most incapable of all the cabinet secretaries.

Last month, the Education Secretary was scheduled to attend a roundtable discussion on education that was being hosted by the Republican Governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin.

The event was advertised as an “open press event”.

The student writers and journalists of their school paper at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Lexington, Kentucky, with permission from their school, they piled into cars and drove across town to the community college where the event was happening.

These students were taking Ms. DeVos at her word when last Fall she stated: “It is easy to be nasty hiding behind screens and Twitter handles. It’s not so easy face to face.”

Therefore, the student journalists turned away from their computer screens and social media apps, and they went in pursuit, they would later say, of “that face-to-face opportunity."

But these young journalists would never get the chance.

They were shut out of the roundtable, advertised as that “open press event,” because they had not sent in an RSVP to an invitation they never received.  Nothing was ever published as to what it would require to attend the so called, “open press event”, which obviously wasn’t open.

The journalist were totally confused and dejected. But they still had to come up with the press about their trip and they needed to do it fast.  The students were on deadline, and they were on a mission.

Unable to document the “open press event”, or even query DeVos in person, they set about investigating the circumstances of that private appearance at the community college. Ultimately, they penned an editorial flaying the education secretary and the Kentucky governor, accusing them of paying lip-service to the needs of students, while excluding them from the conversation.

“How odd is it that even though future generations of students’ experiences could be based on what was discussed, that we, the actual students, were turned away?” they asked in their piece, titled “No Seat at the Roundtable” and published on their school website the following day.

“We expected the event to be intense,” the young journalists wrote. “We expected there to be a lot of information to cover. But not being able to exercise our rights under the First Amendment was something we never thought would happen. We weren’t prepared for that.”

As their issues became the real story, the students began to see the terms of the event as an example of the approach of the education secretary, who has been criticized as displaying only cursory understanding of the students under her responsibility.

They wondered why there had been so little advance notice of the event and of the discussion which was to focus on school “freedom” scholarships.  These so called scholarships would allow public funds to be used to send children to private and religious schools, even those that discriminate against LGBT students.  DeVos, whose prior expertise in education policy is limited to steering her personal wealth to the cause of school choice, (she wants all schools to be “Charter Schools), and she is seeking $5 billion of tax-payer dollars for a program that would promote Charter Schools.

The journalists asked why the event was held at 11AM on a Wednesday, when most students and educators are busy at their schools.

“We wondered if the topic of school choice at the roundtable in Lexington is what kept public school students from being able to attend,” they speculated. “Don’t they want student input?”

We must remember that this Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos received multiple questions and much criticism after her controversial budget cuts to the 2019 Special Olympics.  President Trump had to personally countermand her decision on cutting the Special Olympics budget.  (She had attempted and failed to cancel that same item on last year’s Education Budget.)

The Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper picked up the student’s story and obtained a statement from a spokeswoman for DeVos. The local outlet sent the response along to the high schoolers, who added it to their account. It read: “No one from the Secretary’s staff was made aware that student journalists were attempting to attend the roundtable. We welcome student journalists and would have been happy for them to be in attendance. We are looking into what, if any, miscommunication might have happened between other staff on site for the event.”

Aides to the governor, who has been an eager partner of DeVos in her effort to expand school choice, (Charter Schools), didn’t return a request for comment.

The students added the clarification from the Department of Education in one of five updates appended to their editorial, as they continued to cover the fallout from the event. In the process, they learned that their student, “dismay” tapped into a much broader story line.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists, fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, and to leave us empty-handed,” they wrote. “But as we researched, we learned that we were not the only ones who were disappointed and frustrated.”

The members of the editorial board at the PLD Lamplighter, an award-winning student newspaper, learned of the event from the local news reports. They swiftly made plans to attend, seeing an opportunity “to demonstrate our professionalism.”

When they arrived at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, where the event was happening.  Unfortunately, they encountered a man with the college’s badge on his blazer. The student paper’s editor-in-chief, Abigail Wheatley, told him, “We’re here for Matt Bevin and Betsy DeVos’s roundtable discussion.”

“Well, okay,” he replied, according to the students. “Who are you with?”

They showed him their school identification and their student press credentials, but he wasn’t satisfied. He asked to see their invitation.

“Invitation?” they asked. “For an open-press roundtable discussion on education?”

The man with the badge, then just waved them away.

“It was then that our story turned from news coverage to an editorial,” they recounted.

They looked into all the social media for details about the event. They saw it mentioned on a government website that credentialed journalists were required to RSVP, but they wondered why those details hadn’t been more widely broadcast. “Doesn’t ‘open press’ imply open to ALL press including student journalists?” they wondered.

They also found it interesting that the event featured “no public-school teachers, parents or students”.  The students noted that not one of the 173 school districts in the state was represented.  

Instead, as the local journalists who had properly RSVP’d observed, it was a platform for school-choice (Charter School) advocates to air their views to a highly sympathetic audience, including members of the Kentucky Board of Education, representatives of the business community and delegates from interest groups such as the conservative Koch-Bros. funded: Americans for Prosperity.  It was a total set-up.

“It is remarkable to me that this is even remotely debatable,” Bevin said of the contest over choice, which pits those who want more alternatives to traditional public schools against those who argue that transferring funds from the public system is a means of “privatizing one of the country’s foundations of civic institutions”.

Kentucky has been a noted battleground in the struggle over public vs private education.  

Last year, schools across Kentucky were shuttered as the teachers protested a budget plan that threatened to undermine their pensions.

The showdown, which ended when lawmakers voted to override Bevin’s veto of a spending package that expanded education funding.  This was part of a wave of teacher strikes in the three states of West Virginia, Colorado, and Arizona.

DeVos allude to these conflicts when she acknowledged “frustrations” in Kentucky, urging Bevin to persist in supporting “choice”.  The Kentucky Education Association, the statewide teacher’s union, seized on those comments, promising that it had only begun to “frustrate your (Bevin's) agenda.”

The students asked the superintendent of their school system, Fayette County’s Manny Caulk, if he had been invited to the event.  He said he had not.  Meanwhile, Tyler Murphy, a member of the county’s board of education, lampooned the Bevin event on Twitter.

After the discussion, Bevin told reporters, “The people here care about the kids. Every single person who sat around this table cares about the children — not about funding, not about territory, not about power, not about politics. They care about parents and they care about students."

The student journalists labeled his statement as, “interesting.”  They now know that they should have been more vocal about not being allowed to attend.

Even though they were unable to gain the experience they had set out to acquire, they had learned a tough lesson nonetheless.

“We learned that the job of a journalist is to chase the story by any means necessary,” they wrote.  “We learned to be resourceful and meet our deadline even if it wasn’t in the way we initially intended. And we learned that although students aren’t always taken seriously, we have to continue to keep trying to have a seat at the table.”

They also learned that the nation’s Secretary of Education is not on the side of their “public education” and that she needs to be followed and reported on in her endeavors to turn public education into private education.

Copyright G. Ater 2019