Betsy DeVos, Secretary for Education, has a long history of advocating for private, for-profit schools – and that implies a dislike for teachers’ unions. That would explain this rather ridiculous remark concerning the current Oklahoma school teacher walkout, as noted by WaPo:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Oklahoma teachers who walked out of their classrooms to protest school funding cuts should “keep adult disagreements and disputes in a separate place.”
“I think about the kids,” DeVos said Thursday, according to the Dallas Morning News. She had been touring a middle school and meeting with leaders of an anti-violence initiative in Dallas. “I think we need to stay focused on what’s right for kids. And I hope that adults would keep adult disagreements and disputes in a separate place, and serve the students that are there to be served.”
One of the most potent weapons in a unions’ armament is to stop working. Secretary DeVos, by implying that, somehow, children may be terribly injured by a strike, is trying to stack guilt upon teachers who, quite frankly, are hardly making poverty-line wages for a job where they are both teaching and helping raise children.
But it’s not going to do that much damage to kids; in fact, it’s a civic lesson in action. If it takes a couple of weeks of no teaching by the teachers in order to get better wages and more support for the educational sector from a government that is far too fixated on low taxes, then fine – have them, and the students, make it up at the end of the school year. Let the kids learn that Americans can be flexible, that education is important, and that they, too, can be important parts of societal improvements.
DeVos, as Secretary of Education, should know all this and not engage in fallaciously guilt-inducing remarks that are designed to defang the teachers.
