(The Guardian) Betsy DeVos, who served as Donald Trump’s education secretary throughout his single term of office, now believes the department she led should be abolished.
DeVos was speaking at a weekend conference in Florida hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ activist group dedicated to electing rightwing candidates to school boards and opposing diversity and perceived “wokeism” in classrooms. “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” DeVos told the three-day gathering in Tampa, to loud applause, according to Florida Phoenix.
Decisions about education, she said, should be made by state government and local school boards, which she asserted were best placed to serve their communities.
Her comments almost exactly echoed the language of a bill by Republican Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie last year that said: “unelected bureaucrats in Washington DC should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development.”
DeVos, who once advocated for guns to be allowed in schools to counter the threat from grizzly bears, was among several ultra-conservative speakers at the summit of a group set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to fight mask and vaccination mandates in schools.
They included Florida Republican senator Rick Scott, who was applauded by attendees for voting against the bipartisan gun reform package signed into law by Joe Biden last month.
The conference also featured a breakout panel on school safety including Scott and Ryan Petty, a Florida board of education member whose daughter Alaina was among 17 murdered in a 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
The panel, the Phoenix reported, discussed arming school personnel and tightening security on campuses, but not gun reforms advocates say might have prevented shootings such as in Parkland and in Uvalde, Texas in May, where a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
The Moms for Liberty group has a high profile supporter in Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, whose raft of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in recent months includes the so-called “don’t say gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms.
DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate whose state education department banned dozens of math textbooks earlier this year for “prohibited topics,” urged attendees to resist what he sees as left-wing wokeism. “Now is not the time to be a shrinking violet. Now is not the time to let them grind you down. You’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to fight,” he said, according to Politico.
DeVos was speaking at a weekend conference in Florida hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ activist group dedicated to electing rightwing candidates to school boards and opposing diversity and perceived “wokeism” in classrooms. “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” DeVos told the three-day gathering in Tampa, to loud applause, according to Florida Phoenix.
Decisions about education, she said, should be made by state government and local school boards, which she asserted were best placed to serve their communities.
Her comments almost exactly echoed the language of a bill by Republican Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie last year that said: “unelected bureaucrats in Washington DC should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development.”
DeVos, who once advocated for guns to be allowed in schools to counter the threat from grizzly bears, was among several ultra-conservative speakers at the summit of a group set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to fight mask and vaccination mandates in schools.
They included Florida Republican senator Rick Scott, who was applauded by attendees for voting against the bipartisan gun reform package signed into law by Joe Biden last month.
The conference also featured a breakout panel on school safety including Scott and Ryan Petty, a Florida board of education member whose daughter Alaina was among 17 murdered in a 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
The panel, the Phoenix reported, discussed arming school personnel and tightening security on campuses, but not gun reforms advocates say might have prevented shootings such as in Parkland and in Uvalde, Texas in May, where a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
The Moms for Liberty group has a high profile supporter in Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, whose raft of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in recent months includes the so-called “don’t say gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms.
DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate whose state education department banned dozens of math textbooks earlier this year for “prohibited topics,” urged attendees to resist what he sees as left-wing wokeism. “Now is not the time to be a shrinking violet. Now is not the time to let them grind you down. You’ve got to stand up and you’ve got to fight,” he said, according to Politico.
