[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 19 (Friday, February 3, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S664-S668]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EXECUTIVE CALENDAR
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the nomination.
The legislative clerk read the nomination of Elisabeth Prince DeVos,
of Michigan, to be Secretary of Education.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, with this vote, the Senate will move
early next week to confirm the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the U.S.
Education Secretary. In my judgment, she will be an excellent and
important Education Secretary for this country.
The No. 1 job of the U.S. Education Secretary is to help create an
environment in which our 100,000 public schools succeed, because that
is where 9 out of 10 of our children go.
When I was Education Secretary for President George H.W. Bush in the
early 1990s, I had the privilege of working with a man named David
Kerns, who had been the chief executive officer of the Xerox
Corporation. He came in as the Deputy Education Secretary at a time
when he was not only one of the country's leading businessmen, but he
was also the leading businessman who tried to help change public
education. David Kern's belief was that it was very difficult to help
children by changing public education if you try to do it from within.
As all of us do, he respected the teachers, the parents, and the
students who work within the public education system, but over the last
30 years, as this country has worked to try to improve our public
schools, much of that energy has come from outside the public school
establishment. Among those were the Governors of the country.
In the mid-1980s, all of the Governors met together--in 1985 and
1986--on one subject for a whole year. The purpose was, how can we help
improve our public schools? I was chairman of the National Governors
Association that year, Bill Clinton was the vice chairman, and we did
that in a bipartisan way. We did that from outside the schools. Since
that time, many Governors and many business leaders have worked hard in
support of our public schools, trying to help them have even better
opportunities for our children. Among those has been Betsy DeVos. The
Governors I spoke of are Governors who are familiar names in this
country. I think of Gov. Jeb Bush, Gov. John Engler of Michigan, Gov.
Mitt Romney, and the work they did in their respective States to make
their public schools better and to create other opportunities for
children. All of the three Governors I mentioned--Bush, Romney, and
Engler--support Betsy DeVos.
As chairman of the Senate's Education Committee, there are 22
Governors who have written letters to me supporting Betsy DeVos. They
see her as someone from outside the system of public education who, as
they worked for 30 years, can help change and improve it.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the
Record following my remarks the names of the 22 Governors who support
her. They come from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois,
Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri,
North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma,
Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.
The Governors of all those States support Betsy DeVos. Four of the
last Education Secretaries support Betsy DeVos. Bill Bennett, Rod
Paige, Margaret Spellings, and I support her. Joe Lieberman, who served
in this body and worked on the DC voucher program for many years,
endorsed her. She has strong support from the Governors who for 30
years have been working hard to successfully improve our public
schools.
Some have said: Well, she has spent her time working on giving
children choices of schools other than public schools.
She has done that, and it has always puzzled me as to why anybody
would criticize that. The idea that a low-income child should have the
same opportunity or more of the same opportunities as a wealthy family
has would seem to me to be a very all-American idea. Not only does it
seem to be, it is an idea that underlies the most successful piece of
social policy our country has ever enacted, arguably--the GI
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bill for veterans in 1944. Think about that. The veterans came home
from World War II. We gave them a scholarship. It followed them to the
college of their choice. Ms. DeVos has argued for the same thing for
children. Why is an idea that has helped to create the greatest
generation and the greatest colleges of the world so dangerous for
schools?
I would argue that she has been among the forefront of the leaders--
like the Governors--for the most successful reform of the last 30 years
to change and improve public education, and that would be the public
charter schools. Those began with 12 schools in Minnesota created by
the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in the early 1900s. Since then,
charter schools have been supported by every President--President
Obama, President Clinton, Presidents Bush. President Obama's most
recent Education Secretary was a founder of charter schools. Four
times, this Congress, by big bipartisan majorities, has supported
charter schools. The last six U.S. Education Secretaries have supported
charter schools. Charter schools have grown from 12 Democratic-Farmer-
Labor schools to 6,800 today, and 2.7 million children attend them.
Teachers have more freedom and parents have more choices. They are
public schools, and Betsy DeVos was in the forefront of helping to
create that opportunity for public education.
Finally, she believes what 85 of us voted for in the law that
President Obama called a ``Christmas miracle'' in December of 2015, and
that is to reverse the trend from a national school board and restore
control of our children and our schools to those closest to the
children. There will be no mandates for common core, no mandates for
teacher evaluation, no mandates for vouchers, and no mandates for
anything else from a U.S. Department of Education headed by Betsy
DeVos. We will be swapping a national school board for what she
believes in, which is a local school board, which is what 85 of us
voted for.
I am pleased to support her.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the
Record following my remarks an article published by Max Eden on January
29, 2017, which shows Detroit charter schools--by three major studies--
are better and children perform better than the traditional schools of
Detroit.
I look forward to casting my vote for Betsy DeVos for U.S. Education
Secretary early next week.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Highlights Among DeVos supporters
22 State Governors, including:
Gov. Robert Bentley, Alabama; Doug Ducey, Arizona; Gov. Asa
Hutchinson, Arkansas; Gov. Rick Scott, Florida; Gov. Bruce
Rauner, Illinois; Gov. Eric Holcomb, Indiana; Gov. Sam
Brownback, Kansas; Gov. Matthew Bevin, Kentucky; Gov. Paul
LePage, Maine; Gov. Rick Snyder, Michigan; Gov. Phil Bryant,
Mississippi.
Gov. Eric Greitens, Missouri; Gov. Doug Burgum, North
Dakota; Gov. Pete Ricketts, Nebraska; Gov. Brian Sandoval,
Nevada; Gov. Chris Christie, New Jersey; Gov. Susana
Martinez, New Mexico; Gov. John Kasich, Ohio; Gov. Mary
Fallin, Oklahoma; Gov. Bill Haslam, Tennessee; Gov. Greg
Abbott, Texas; Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin.
Former Governors:
Jeb Bush; Mitt Romney; John Engler.
Four Former Education Secretaries:
William Bennett; Rod Paige; Margaret Spellings; Lamar
Alexander.
Former Senators:
Joe Lieberman; Bill Frist.
Democrats including:
Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success; Academy Charter
Schools; Anthony Williams, former Mayor of Washington, D.C.
____
Eden: When the New York Times's Reporting on DeVos and Detroit Charters
Looks Like `Alternative Facts'
(By Max Eden)
The campaign against Education Secretary--designate Betsy
DeVos has been both predictable and extraordinary. It's no
surprise that the education establishment was perturbed by
the selection of a school choice advocate, and opposition
from interest groups is to be expected.
But in an era when the president of the United States has
declared a ``running war'' on the media, accusing reporters
of distorting facts to attack him, the work of one education
journalist unfortunately lends some credence to that
argument.
Some critical coverage has been responsible and fair, but
DeVos was sadly not ``spinning'' when she told the Senate
that there's been a lot of ``false news'' about her record.
The New York Times has been most conspicuous in this regard.
The editorial angle of its national education correspondent
Kate Zernike was clear from her first piece on the nominee,
``Betsy DeVos, Trump's Education Pick, Has Steered Money From
Public Schools.''
Liberal bias at the Times is less than a non-story; if
anything, I'd argue a partisan press is healthy in a
pluralistic democracy. But when America's ``paper of record''
makes verifiably false claims, they must be checked and
corrected. Here are two significant ones.
In a front-page June article titled ``A Sea of Charter
Schools in Detroit Leaves Students Adrift,'' the Times
education correspondent asserts that ``half the charters
perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit's traditional
public schools.''
That claim was echoed by a Times editorial and would be
big, if true. DeVos was nominated based on her school choice
advocacy. If that work helped foster charter schools that are
worse than the worst-in-the-nation Detroit Public Schools,
that would be profoundly troubling. But if Detroit's charters
are better (even if not as much better as we'd desire), then
it's a different story entirely.
Fortunately, they are better.
There are three key studies that compare Detroit's charter
and district schools: one from Stanford University, one from
the center-right Mackinac Center and one from Excellent
Schools Detroit (ESD), a local education nonprofit. As Jason
Bedrick, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for
Educational Freedom, and I demonstrated in Education Next,
all three show that charters significantly outperform
district schools. Perplexed at how the Times reached the
opposite conclusion, I reached out to Zernike.
Some critics assumed that Zernike was twisting data from
the Stanford study, the presumptive source of district-to-
charter comparisons. But Zernike informed me that she chose
to use the ESD study after contacting the Stanford study's
author and determining that the data was too outdated for her
purposes.
I asked why she chose the ESD data over the Mackinac
Center's. Mackinac grades schools using a complex regression
taking into account students' socioeconomic background. ESD
grades on a combination of raw test scores, test-score growth
and a school climate survey, but it doesn't consider
socioeconomic status.
She explained that Mackinac is ``a partisan group that is
pro-school choice and anti-DPS. ESD, despite how GLEP [the
DeVos-backed Great Lakes Education Project] will characterize
it, supported charters and traditional public schools, and
the measures seemed broader.''
When I told her that sounded more like political than
methodological reasoning, she countered, ``It's not politics,
it's methodology. I think graduation rate was the only thing
Mackinac used to compare,'' and added that she thinks the ESD
data ``do break down for demographics.'' Wrong and wrong.
Now, it's possible that she didn't simply default to the
politically congenial option without further scrutiny.
Perhaps she just failed to properly recall the details
several months later. Whatever the case, the ESD data also
show charters outperforming district schools.
So, how did the Times national education correspondent
reach the opposite conclusion?
Now, bear with me, here because it's complicated and it
makes no sense.
First she separated out K-8 district schools and high
schools, calculating their respective average scores,
weighted by student enrollment. She included high-performing
selective-admissions district schools and excluded low-
performing Detroit public schools that have been taken over
by the state. (Neither decision is justifiable in a
traditional-to-charter comparison.)
Then she saw that for both K-8 district schools and high
schools, the (inflated) weighted average score was higher
than the median charter school score, and concluded that
``half the charters perform only as well, or worse than,
Detroit's traditional public schools.''
On the high school side, the unweighted average score of
.33 is significantly lower than the weighted average of .41.
It's worth noting that the .41 is above the charter median
score and the .33 is below it. So going by the weighted
average was the only way to arrive at that result for high
schools.
On the K-8 side, the weighted and unweighted averages are
essentially equal. That average is indeed slightly higher
than the median charter score, but it's much higher than the
district's median score. So on K-8 schools, by her same
faulty logic, it would also be accurate to say that ``two
thirds of the public schools perform only as well, or worse
than, Detroit's traditional public schools.''
If that sounds silly, it's because comparing an average to
a median is statistical nonsense. The ``apples to oranges''
metaphor is apt but insufficient here. Essentially, Zernike
took a basket of apples, pulled out the rotten ones, kept the
genetically modified ones, made statistically weighted
applesauce, and plopped that applesauce in the middle of a
row of organic oranges. Then she drew a false conclusion
that's become central to the case against Betsy DeVos's
nomination for secretary of education.
Personally, I doubt the mathematical mistakes were
conscious or intentional. But what really matters is that the
ESD, Mackinac and Stanford studies all show Detroit charters
significantly outperforming traditional public schools.
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The second claim also involves the Times's editorial
against DeVos, in this case lamenting that she funded charter
advocacy efforts, ``winning legislative changes that have
``reduced oversight and accountability.'' The editorial
linked to a December article by Zernike covering a
legislative debate on Detroit charter regulation wherein
``Ms. DeVos pushed back on any regulation as too much
regulation.''
Whatever the rhetorical merit of that editorial claim, it
is flat false. In a Detroit News op-ed, to which the article
later links, DeVos called for two additional regulations: A-F
school accountability grades and default closure for failing
schools, both charter and district. She certainly pushed back
on some regulations as too much. But the bill that passed
included the additional accountability regulations for which
she advocated. In fact, the final legislation boosted
Michigan's accountability score on the National Alliance of
Charter School Authorizers index.
Given the fact that the main subject of her article was a
net increase in charter accountability, Zernike admits on
Twitter that she's ``not sure what the ed board meant by
that,'' but notes that ``MI legislation in 2011 (not June
bill) did weaken oversight.'' Zernike's December article
refers to the 2011 legislation in one passing sentence. Her
June article noted that ``the law repealed a longstanding
requirement that the State Department of Education issue
yearly reports monitoring charter school performance.'' While
true, that provision didn't merit mention among the 12 key
changes in the official legislative summary (five of which
increased charter regulation).
It's possible that the Times's editorial was referring to
that repealed reporting requirement from 2011 when it claimed
that DeVos backed ``legislative changes that have reduced
oversight and accountability.'' But that seems unlikely,
given that the editorial linked to Zernike's December article
on the 2016 legislative debate and that piece doesn't even
mention the 2011 provision. It seems more likely that the
editors honestly confused an increase in accountability that
was smaller than some stakeholders wanted with an actual,
absolute reduction. And given the reporting they relied on,
it would be hard to blame them.
Education blogger Alexander Russo has skillfully outlined
the ``problematic media coverage'' of Betsy DeVos, in which
journalists have latched onto hyper-simplified story lines
while ignoring complexities and eschewing nuanced criticism.
Whatever your take on DeVos or the media, everyone loses
when the line between fact and falsehood is blurred beyond
distinction. At a time when the president's advisers proudly
tout ``alternative facts,'' critical, fact-based reporting is
more necessary than ever, especially from outlets with the
weight and influence of The New York Times. Their readers,
and America's schoolchildren, deserve better. Correcting the
record would be a good start.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I am on the floor today to stand with
parents, students, teachers, families, and communities across our
country to make sure they have a voice to strongly oppose Betsy DeVos
and her plans to privatize public schools and destroy public education
in America. I urge my colleagues to stand with their constituents and
join Democrats and Republicans in rejecting this nomination.
I come to the floor as a former preschool teacher, someone who got my
start in politics fighting for strong public schools, a former school
board member, a Senator committed to standing strong for public
education in America, and a mother and grandmother who cares deeply
about the future of our students in our schools.
Like so many people across the country, I am someone who owes
everything I have to a strong public education I received growing up in
this country. I believe it is my responsibility to do everything I can
to make sure the opportunities that were there for me and so many
others are open to every student in this country, no matter where they
live or how they learn or how much money their parents have. In
general, I believe the Federal Government and specifically the
Department of Education has an important role to play in making that
happen.
I take the position of Secretary of Education very seriously. Leading
this agency in this moment is a critical job. I consider it to be my
job to do everything I can to make sure the person who fills it is
truly committed to putting students and families first. As I will
discuss in detail today and in the coming days, I do not believe Betsy
DeVos is the right person to do that.
Before I get into Ms. DeVos's failed record and her lack of
experience, I wish to make a point about how I approach nominees and
how that impacts my perspective on this one.
Many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are going to
spend their time in this debate trying to impugn the motives of
Democrats and Republicans who are trying to stop this nomination. They
will try to say that President Trump won the election and he should be
able to pick anyone he wants to fill this position and that we should
all sit down and be quiet. I reject that. I believe the Senate has an
important role to play in this process. It is our constitutional duty
to take these nominations seriously, and I refuse to stand by and just
watch.
President Trump absolutely has the right to nominate people for his
Cabinet who he thinks will carry out his vision for the country, but
that does not mean the Senate should be a rubberstamp. To the contrary,
we owe it to the people we represent to make sure every nominee is not
only qualified for the position and free of conflicts of interest but
that he or she will put families and workers first and not millionaires
and billionaires or big corporations.
President Trump was the first Presidential candidate in decades to
not release his tax returns, and he is openly flouting ethics
conventions regarding his personal and family businesses.
I believe that in an administration where lines around potential
conflicts of interest are very likely to be blurred at the top, they
need to be even clearer at the individual agencies. So I will not
apologize for demanding that the Senate do its job when it comes to
doing our due diligence with these nominees. I will not back down from
asking my questions for my constituents--the ones they would want me to
ask. I will not stop fighting as hard as I can to oppose a Secretary of
Education who doesn't stand with them.
I am extremely disappointed at how this process has gone so far. I
have great respect for the chairman of our committee, but I have never
seen anything like it, especially coming out of our Health, Education,
Labor, and Pensions Committee, where until now we have worked together
across party lines so well. Right from the start, it was very clear
that Republicans intended to jam this nominee through the process as
quickly as possible. Corners were cut, precedents were ignored, debate
was cut off, and reasonable requests and questions were blocked. Again,
I have never seen anything like it on this committee, Democratic
administration or Republican, Democratic majority or Republican. It has
been truly frustrating and deeply disappointing.
I believe it is our job in the Senate to scrutinize nominees, but
Republicans were acting like it was their job to protect Ms. DeVos, to
shield her from questioning. First, Republicans rushed us into a
hearing before we had Mrs. DeVos's ethics paperwork in. That might seem
like a small thing, it may seem like a procedural issue, but it was
important.
Every single nominee during the Obama administration had their ethics
paperwork in before a hearing in our committee. The Republican majority
leader made having ethics paperwork in before a hearing a core demand
of his during the Obama administration. The reason for this is simple:
Senators should be able to ask nominees questions about their finances,
their potential conflicts of interest, how they plan to avoid them, and
how they plan to uphold the letter and spirit of our ethics laws. But
without the Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure and
without their review, Senators go into a hearing in the dark on a
nominee's ethics and finances, and that is exactly what we were pushed
into with Mrs. DeVos.
Secondly, when we got into that hearing, we were told that Democrats
would only have 5 minutes each to ask questions--5 minutes to ask about
Betsy DeVos's finances, her long record of privatization of public
education, her vision for this Department, and the many, many issues in
this Department's jurisdiction--5 minutes and, then, cut off.
Now, this was completely unprecedented and absolutely wrong. Never
before had it been the case in our committee--not a single time that I
recall--that a Senator, who had a question for a nominee, was cut off
and blocked from asking it. Democrats were sitting in the hearing,
waiting, hoping the chairman would change his mind, but we were shut
down and we
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were silenced, and Mrs. DeVos was protected from answering additional
questions.
Third, after we finally got Betsy DeVos's ethics paperwork and had a
number of questions about it, I requested another hearing where we
could ask her those questions. That was a reasonable request. It was
rejected.
Fourth, I had a number of questions for Betsy DeVos about missing
information in her paperwork to the committee, and she has simply not
provided the committee with the required financial disclosures.
We have a strong tradition in our committee of not moving to vote
until the ranking member's questions are answered to satisfaction, and
that tradition was ignored as Betsy DeVos was jammed through.
Then, finally, after a vote was pushed through the committee as
quickly as possible, with questions about rules being bent or ignored
to get that done, this nomination is now being rushed to this floor,
and Republicans are attempting to jam it through here as well. It is
pretty clear to me why. The more people learn about Betsy DeVos, the
more they realize how wrong she is for our students and our schools.
The more they hear about her background, the more they see her as one
more way President Trump has broken his promise to ``drain the swamp.''
The more that comes out about her failed record, her tangled finances,
conflicts of interest, and her lack of understanding or experience, the
more the pressure increases on Republicans to put their allegiance to
President Trump aside and stand with their constituents.
So I understand why some Republicans want to rush to get this
through. I think it is absolutely wrong, and I know people are paying
attention.
I want to make one final point on this. The chairman of our
committee, the senior Senator from Tennessee, has brought up the idea
of ``fairness'' when it comes to how we should approach this
nomination--that he believes President Trump's nominees should be
treated ``fairly.'' But my friend, the senior Senator from Tennessee,
is defining fairness in an interesting way. He is saying that, if
Republicans didn't scrutinize President Obama's nominees and if they
didn't take the time to do their due diligence, then, it would be
unfair for Democrats to do that for President Trump's.
Well, I don't agree with that. I define fairness very differently. I
believe the fair thing to do is what is fair for our constituents, that
we work for them and should do right by them--not for a party, a
nominee, or an administration. I believe the ``fair'' thing to do is to
scrutinize these nominees, ask tough questions, and push for real
answers, and that we should err on the side of deeper review and more
robust questioning, rather than on the side of pointing to how
Democrats and Republicans were treated in the past and ``fairness'' to
nominees.
So I think it is clear that this nominee is being rushed through and
corners are being cut.
I want to take some time now to talk about why I will be opposing her
and urging all of our colleagues to do the same. I have three main
reasons, and they are these: open questions about her tangled finances
and potential conflicts of interest; strong concerns with her record,
her lack of experience, and her clear lack of understanding of basic
education issues; and the belief that her vision for education in
America is deeply at odds with where parents, students, and families
across the country want to go.
First of all, there is her tangled finances and potential conflicts
of interest. I mentioned this a bit before. I have never seen a nominee
with such tangled and opaque finances and who is refusing to shine
anything close to an appropriate level of light on them.
Mrs. DeVos is a billionaire, and her inherited money is invested,
along with other members of her family, in potentially hundreds of
holding companies. Now, these holding companies often invest in other
holding companies, and it is often very hard to untangle the individual
companies in which she and her family actually own stakes. That is very
relevant because we know her family has had significant education
company holdings in the past, and they would be impacted by the
decisions she made if confirmed.
Mrs. DeVos has told us that she will comply with all ethics rules
should she be confirmed, but we still have questions, and she still has
not fulfilled the committee requirements. We have questions about areas
in Mrs. DeVos's ethics paperwork, where it is simply unclear if assets
she continues to hold have potential conflicts of interest, and we have
not been given the full answers.
We also want to know more from her about the family trusts she is
maintaining positions in, and we have not been given the full answers.
Finally, as I mentioned before, I have raised a number of questions
about Mrs. DeVos's failure to provide the required financial disclosure
to the committee, and I have not been given full answers there either.
Secondly, I have very strong concerns with Betsy DeVos's record, her
lack of experience, and her clear lack of understanding of basic
education issues. I will take these one at a time.
Nominees for this position have generally been people who were
committed to students, had a long career dedicated to education, and
were focused on keeping public education strong for all students and
all communities.
Betsy DeVos is very different.
First of all, she is first and foremost a Republican and conservative
activist and megadonor. She was chair of the Michigan Republican Party,
and she and her family have reportedly donated hundreds of millions of
dollars to Republicans and conservative groups over the years.
Second of all, Betsy DeVos has spent her career and her fortune
rigging the system to privatize and defund public education and hurt
students in communities across our country. She has no experience with
public schools, except through her work trying to tear them down.
She has committed herself for decades to an extreme ideological goal:
to push students out of public schools and weaken public education, no
matter what. She has spent millions of dollars in political donations,
organizations, and super PACs to try and influence elections and
policies to accomplish that goal.
It is not difficult to pick out where Betsy DeVos has focused. The
signs are usually pretty easy to see. Where she has succeeded in
getting her way, too often there are weaker public schools, worse
outcomes, and fewer true opportunities for students.
In fact, the only people guaranteed to benefit when Betsy DeVos
focuses her attention on a community or a State are the TV stations who
see hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in money pour into
attack ads against her political opponents.
But all people need to do is watch her hearing in our committee, and
they can learn everything they need to know. This is a hearing that
people across the country heard about--and for good reason. From local
newspapers to local news to the ``Daily Show'' to ``The View'' and
posts that went viral on social media, a whole lot of people heard
Betsy DeVos herself for the first time in that hearing, and they were
not impressed, to put it mildly. They watched as Democrats were blocked
from asking questions in an unprecedented and disappointing attempt to
protect this nominee. Then, on the questions we were allowed to ask,
they saw a nominee who was clearly ill-informed and confused and gave a
number of very concerning responses to serious and reasonable
questions.
Let's go through what Betsy DeVos said to us. She refused to rule out
slashing investments in or privatizing public schools--privatizing
public schools.
She was confused that Federal law provides protections for students
with disabilities.
She did not understand a basic issue in education policy--the debate
surrounding whether students should be measured based on their
proficiency or their growth.
She argued that guns needed to be allowed in schools across the
country to ``protect from grizzlies.''
Even though she was willing to say President Trump's behavior towards
women should be considered sexual assault, she would not commit to
actually enforcing Federal laws protecting women and girls in our
schools.
Her hearing was such a disaster, and it was so clear how little she
understood about education issues, that a
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number of people and groups who usually stay on the fence--or even
sometimes stand with Mrs. DeVos on some issues--could not stand with
her anymore.
Parents watching across the country saw a nominee who doesn't seem to
care about or understand the education issues that impact them and
their kids.
This takes me to my final point right now on Betsy DeVos. Her vision
for education in America is one that is deeply at odds with where
parents and students and families across the country want us to go. At
a time when education and the opportunity it affords is more important
than ever, she would take our country in the absolute wrong direction.
Eli Broad, a philanthropist and a strong charter school advocate, put
it very well when he said: ``At the risk of stating the obvious, we
must have a Secretary of Education who believes in public education and
the need to keep public schools public.''
He went on to say: ``With Betsy DeVos at the helm of the U.S.
Department of Education, much of the good work that has been
accomplished to improve public education for all of America's children
could be undone.''
I completely agree. Parents across the country want their government
and their representatives fighting tooth and nail to improve public
schools for all students in every community, while Betsy DeVos is
committed to privatizing public schools and diverting public funds into
taxpayer-funded vouchers that will leave far too many of our students
behind.
I will add that I have many friends here in the Senate representing
rural States that will be severely impacted by a Secretary of Education
who implemented a radical agenda like this.
The bottom line is that strong public education is at the heart of
true opportunity in America--something we all strive for and work for
every day. People understand that. They see that Betsy DeVos's vision
for this job is a direct attack on that core national value.
I truly believe this is what has motivated so many people around the
country to stand up and speak out. They saw her disastrous hearing on
the news and going viral on social media. It is clear that people
across the country care so deeply about education and are so passionate
about making sure we have strong public schools that seeing President
Trump nominate someone like Betsy DeVos to run this Department just
hits very close to home to a whole lot of people, and it is so deeply
offensive to them. For parents of students in our public schools, it is
very hard to see a billionaire--who never went to public school, who
didn't send her children to public school--put in a position to work
against your interests.
For teachers who work so hard every day in our public schools, it is
hard to see your work denigrated.
For so many others in communities across the country, something about
Betsy DeVos has lit a fire underneath them, as well, and they have all
decided to do something about it. Senate office phone lines have been
shut down over the past week with so many callers weighing in against
Betsy DeVos. Every office is receiving tens of thousands of letters
asking the Senate to reject her. Almost 40,000 have come in to my
office alone. Millions of people have signed petitions with the same
message. There have been rallies and protests across the country and
millions more posting on Facebook, sharing it with their friends,
tweeting, and doing everything they can to make their voices heard.
I wish to share just a sample of what I have heard from my
constituents.
One teacher from Mukilteo School District, a 26-year veteran of
Washington State public schools, said she has worked tirelessly at
title I elementary schools to help children achieve their greatest
potential. If DeVos is confirmed, this teacher is terrified her school
will lose its funding.
Another constituent of mine from Federal Way tells me she has
grandchildren in Michigan who are at risk because of Mrs. DeVos's
reckless policies there, and she does not want to see this disaster
repeated throughout our country.
The regional superintendent in Wenatchee, a small city in North
Central Washington, told me that he and his colleagues didn't even know
where to begin laying out their concerns about Betsy DeVos.
A fourth grade teacher from Spokane, WA, reached out to tell me she
watched the confirmation hearing and was shocked at how little Betsy
DeVos seemed to understand about the issues she faces every single day
in her classroom.
Those are just a few examples. There are thousands upon thousands in
every community, in every State, and it is having an impact. Every
Member of this body has felt the pressure. Already, two Republicans
have made it clear that the voices of their constituents have pushed
them into the ``no'' column, and I know there are other Republicans who
take seriously what their constituents have to say and who have serious
concerns about putting partisanship ahead of their States' and their
constituents' interests.
I don't like that we are rushing into this without the information we
need. But if the majority is going to jam this through, we are going to
do everything we can to have a robust debate over the next few days.
So I am here to say: I am proud to stand with parents; I am proud to
stand with students; I am proud to stand with teachers; I am proud to
stand with those in my home State of Washington and across the country
who support strong public schools and true education opportunities for
all; and I am proud to stand up and fight back against Betsy DeVos.
Madam President, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.