Education Secretary DeVos says pandemic is a good thing to push the school policies she wants

On Friday, during an interview on SiriusXM Business Radio show, Wharton’s Business Daily, US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stated that “it’s a good thing that the coronavirus pandemic will force the nation’s schools to make changes that should have happened many years ago.”

The interview, which only lasted for 1 minute and 50 seconds, can be heard at this link. In those brief comments, DeVos referred to recently introduced legislation, known as the School Choice Now Act, which essentially would provide, according to the Washington Post:

“one-time” emergency federal funding for state-approved scholarship-granting organizations to provide families with “direct educational assistance.” This assistance would help them pay for things like private school tuition and home schooling expenses. This emergency funding would constitute 10 percent of emergency education aid for state education departments and local school districts.  

In addition, the bill would create permanent tax credits of up to $5 billion annually for scholarship-granting organizations in states for similar purposes. The section of the bill dealing with these tax credits states that nothing in it “shall be construed to permit, allow, encourage, or authorize any Federal control over any aspect of any private, religious, or home education provider.

Like the Secretary of Education’s friends, who are part of the Capitalist Class and are using the pandemic to redirect public funding to the 1%, DeVos wants to use the pandemic as an opportunity to push through policy that will achieve what she has been attempting to do since the early 1990s, when she and her husband, Dick DeVos, tried to get a School Voucher ballot initiative passed in Michigan.

None of this should come as a surprise, since the Capitalist Class loves Disaster Capitalism, which is the use of a crisis to further their own interests.

We encourage people to stay informed about what Education Secretary DeVos is up, which we try to monitor on an ongoing basis through our Betsy DeVos Watch section.