Heaven to Betsy

Trammps pick for Secretary of Education is one Betsey DeVos. She and her husband, whose family owns Amway, have long been major contributors to Republican conservative causes. In the past, someone like Betsy would have been rewarded by being named ambassador to Luxembourg or something like that. Betsy is a long time supporter of charter schools. There can be little question that an element of her crusade for charter schools is a strong antiunion bias. She also appears to be a religious ideologue. At her hearing she exhibited  surprising ignorance about many educational issues and strongly overstated the success of charter schools. She seemed to suggest that all communities should have both a regular  public and a charter school. There was not much discussion of cost. Her constant theme is that parents should have a choice of where their child goes to school. She is therefore strongly for vouchers. Many parents are against regular public schools because of political or religious ideological concerns as opposed to the quality of education. Some are legitimately concerned about the quality of their neighborhood public schools. To people like betsy, the answer is not improving the quality of all public schools which is what public education should be all about. Charter schools should be laboratories to see if alternative educational techniques can be created and applied across the board. What they tend to be is money making opportunities for the well-connected to run numerous of them. In fact all charter schools should show greater educational gains than regular public schools because the parents are more motivated and there is more outside help as a result. In fact, the results of charter schools are mixed with many showing dismal performance. If Betsy really wants choice to be the operative principle of creating a better school results she is giving choice to the wrong group. She should allow all young children to choose their parents so that they could have well educated parents who make decent incomes. That would go along way towards solving the problem.

Rex Tillotson, Trumps candidate for Secretary of State at his hearing said he had never discussed China with Donald Trump. Actually one wonders if any of the candidates have ever had a serious discussion of any subject with Donald Trump. You may recall that the co-author of Trump's book, the art of the deal, wrote that Trump had no intellectual curiosity and a minimal attention span. This of course matches his proclivity to use Twitter . The only subject that Donald Trump discusses at length is his own greatness and his vague plans to share that greatness with the world.

I read today the opinion Pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It appears we have elected two different presidents