Long into her tenure as Education Secretary, Trump appointee Betsy DeVos is continuing to attract harsh criticism. This week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) called for her to resign over her use of “racist research” to back up her department’s upending of Obama-era rules demanding that school districts identify and address racial disparities in delicate elements of the educational system like discipline.
Clark did not hold back, explaining:
‘I am calling for her resignation because she has failed to live up to her basic job responsibilities: making sure that our kids have fair and equitable access to a great public education and to keep them safe… She rescinded civil rights policy and cherry-picked racist research to back it up… Her fundamental failure to stick up for children as secretary of Education makes her unfit for this job.’
Watch:
A federal judge recently demanded that a policy whose handling has set off student advocates be implemented, ruling that the Education Department had broken the law in failing to provide adequately substantive reasoning for their delay in implementing a rule set into motion towards the end of the Obama administration to address racial disparities in special education programs. Still, the DeVos team has separately rescinded guidance along these same lines of addressing racial disparities in overall discipline, justifying their position with the inescapably racist argument that black children are just different.
In response to Clark’s criticism, Education Department press secretary Liz Hill asserted that her boss has always fought to “make sure every student is treated like an individual and has the opportunity to learn and grow in an environment that is safe and nurturing” — which is wild considering what DeVos has actually done on the job, well outside of this situation.
She has undertaken moves as dramatic as trying to change rules to allow for accused college campus sexual predators to cross-examine their alleged victims through an intermediary as part of the process surrounding complaints — and Hill wants us to believe that she’s inexorably committed to ensuring that every student can thrive safely? Seriously? Because of that policy alone, students could be traumatized because of the DeVos agenda.
The Education Department had raised concerns about the rule related to what Clark discussed sparking “racial quotas” via its demand that districts address racial disparities in special education tracks and the like. To be clear, however, that rule specifically prohibited practitioners from using any such “quotas” in making their decisions. The point is to make those decisions more in line with the reality on the ground.
Still, DeVos and her associates have stuck to their line against the ideas. She worked with prominent Trump officials like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on a school safety commission that concluded at one point that demands for discipline rates to not diverge from overall demographics offered a “perverse incentive” that could let violence go unchecked in schools, sparking their move to rescind the past provisions.
That commission was formed in the aftermath of the high-profile mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year. However, the group neither tied their recommendation against concern about racial disparities in discipline rates to the shooting nor addressed actual gun issues.
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