Wednesday, November 23, 2016

HORROR Trump Picks Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education

Jennifer Jacobs at Bloomberg is reporting that Donald Trump has offered Betsy DeVos the education secretary position, and she has accepted.

ChalkBeat formerly commented:
If Trump ends up tapping DeVos as his education secretary, here are a few things we could reasonably surmise...

He intends to go through with his sweeping voucher plan...

.On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to use federal funds to encourage states to make school choice available to all poor students, including through vouchers that allow families to take public funding to private schools.
That’s exactly what DeVos has zealously worked to make happen on a state-by-state basis for decades. In 2000, she helped get a ballot measure before Michigan voters that would have enshrined a right to vouchers in the state’s Constitution. After the measure failed, she and her husband formed a political action committee to support pro-voucher candidates nationally.
Bottom Line:  Yet another indication that Trump is an out and out central planner. He wants to use federal funds to encourage voucher programs? How horrific.  There is now way this can happen without the federal government determining "qualified" schools that can receive vouchers.

Murray Rothbard correctly identified vouchers as a lefty-libertarian big government program:
Let us now turn to a final measure that illustrates the Great Leap Stateward of the libertarian movement. This is their championing of the school voucher scheme, which the left-libertarians literally wrote for the California proposal voted on, and defeated, last November. Neoconservatives and left-libertarians happily plunged into, and largely financed, the California voucher drive, secure in the supposed knowledge that their only opponents would be the usual array of left-liberals and teachers’ unions.
The left-libertarians featured their favorite buzzword, “choice,” which they first applied to women’s choice on abortion and now to the expanding choice of parents and children on which schools to attend and whether or not to attend private or public schools. Anticipating the framework of the debate, the voucherites were having their own way, but this time they were, once again, blindsided by an extremely influential article that Lew Rockwell wrote in the Los Angeles Times, which the distressed voucherites later ruefully admitted was the greatest single force in scuttling their plan. For Lew bypassed the standard debate by making points that appealed especially to embattled California parents and taxpayers critical of the public school system.
Lew pointed out (1) that the welfare state, and the burden on the taxpayers, would increase instead of being reduced by the voucher scheme; and (2) that while the public school teachers might well oppose the plan, it is more important and more dangerous that the voucher scheme would greatly increase government control and dictation over the private school system, now still largely free of government intrusion. The government always controls what it subsidizes, and in the case of vouchers, the government would be obliged to define what a “school” is, in order to let the school be eligible for the voucher subsidy.
  -RW

UPDATE

It just got worse:

2 comments:

  1. Well I suppose the positive side to this is private schools do not have to accept a student just because they can pay.

    It also begs the question about standards and colleges. Are there not already "standards" private schools have to adhere to? Don't public colleges require a HS diploma? Are you telling me private schools don't already have standards to meet for their students to get fed aid for college? Or to even go to a state college?

    I can't see how this changes anything accept that a high IQ poor kid may be able to test out of the terrible inner city public schools...which he/she still has to get accepted to. We will have to wait and see exactly what kind of strings are attached to this money.

    RW you are becoming almost as bad as NYTimes with your scare mongering. You are right to be skeptical and suspicious but lets see the final details before we completely shoot down every single idea as "horrifying". What was horrifying was the idea of HRC as pres.

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