Betsy DeVos Thinks Schools Are Like Food Trucks. Seriously. Read What She Said.

The Education Secretary’s speech was also met by protesters with “White Supremacist” signs.

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Thursday night, at a conference on the future of school choice at Harvard University, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continued to make friends. As she has at a slew of recent events, the cabinet member was met by a scrum of mostly silent protesters, some of whom carried signs bearing the words “Education Justice is Racial Justice” and “White Supremacist.” 

And that got started even before DeVos made her arguments (yet again) in favor of giving families options in what schools they send their children to. This time her talking points were different, though; in an intriguing bit of wordplay, school choice, she said, could be thought of in the way we think about what to eat for dinner:

Near the Department of Education, there aren’t many restaurants. But you know what—food trucks started lining the streets to provide options. Some are better than others, and some are even local restaurants that have added food trucks to their businesses to better meet customer’s needs. Now, if you visit one of those food trucks instead of a restaurant, do you hate restaurants? Or are you trying to put grocery stores out of business? No. You are simply making the right choice for you based on your individual needs at that time. Just as in how you eat, education is not a binary choice. Being for equal access and opportunity—being for choice—is not being against anything.

https://twitter.com/jmlarkin/status/913529330197778432

More than a dozen protesters were at the event, holding signs and raising fists. A separate protest gathered outside the venue. Some called for protections for sexual assault survivors, less than a week after the Education Department rescinded Obama-era directives for how schools should adjudicate sexual assaults on campuses. Others warned of a loss of funding for public schools as a result of the promotion of charters. Before the speech on Thursday, the Education Department announced it would dole out $253 million in grants to fund “the creation and expansion of public charter schools across the nation.” When DeVos began to leave the event, the crowd began chanting, “This is what white supremacy looks like.” 

Another notable moment of the evening came when a student asked DeVos, a billionaire, how much she expected her net worth to increase as a result of her policy decisions, given that, the student said, corporate interests made money off the school choice movement. “I have written lots of checks to support giving parents and kids options to choose a school of their choice,” DeVos said. “The balance on my income has gone very much the other way and will continue to do so.” 

Under President Donald Trump’s budget proposals from earlier this year, the Education Department would see a $9 billion cut to its overall budget but would have $1.4 billion set aside to support expanding charters and vouchers for private schools. While it’s unlikely Congress will approve such a budget, and a rumored federal tax-credit scholarship program failed to materialize when the White House and Congressional Republicans introduced its tax plan this week, DeVos insisted Thursday night that there was still hope for such a program. 

The two-day conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which featured some school-choice friendly scholars, was, as Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum pointed out, sponsored in part by the Charles Koch Foundation. (The event’s webpage initially claimed as much, but the reference to the Koch’s was later scrubbed from the site.) 

Watch the full speech below: 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate