Galt's Gulch

Trump picks Betsy DeVos as Sec of Education.

Posted by mminnick 7 years, 5 months ago to News
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Excellent choice.. She favors charter schools and good education for all.

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  • Posted by Dobrien 7 years, 5 months ago
    Let's get back to the fundamentals , make schools compete and then they will become competent.
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 7 years, 5 months ago
      Schools do compete. They always have. I grew up in a neighborhood where many kids went to Catholic schools. Their parents complained, of course, about having to pay taxes for public schools; but they made the choice to send their kids someplace else. One family sent their kids to a Ukrainian Orthodox school in a different neighborhood. It was their choice. And we had private schools for rich kids way out in the suburbs and rural towns.

      At the college level, by the 1850s, Ohio alone had more baccalaureate institutions than all of Europe. They competed with each other and against schools in other states.

      What you mean is that we should not have public education. No government should run a school. Perhaps not. Are you opposed to the military academies? How about police academies? What about high school ROTC? I agree with your emotional sentiment, but you have not thought this through completely.
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      • Posted by $ nickursis 7 years, 5 months ago
        Mike, that is not a bad idea, and I think is where a lot of people are going. The Charter School idea is just that, you take your tax money and decide where to put it. If you do not like the public school political indoctrination then go tp a Charter that does not do it. The public school system may shrink 50% but it is not a shrink, as a change. Totally removing government is laudable, because like anything else they do, they are incompetent at it, and the system has been corrupted by using it as a political platform, same with colleges.However, the dismantling process would be daunting,
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  • Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 5 months ago
    Productive business family background, too.
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    • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 7 years, 5 months ago
      She inherited wealth. She did not earn her own. The same is true of her husband. They have a wind power company. Their son is employed by it as an "urban planning consultant." I would not jump to conclusions about Elisabeth Prince DeVos.
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      • Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 5 months ago
        Thanks for the additional info, Mike.
        Was thinking about this last night. If there was a Gulch, I think voting there should be earned, not merely given as a right of birth or due to inherited wealth.
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        • Posted by MikeM35 7 years, 5 months ago
          For earning the right to vote, read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, This is on the left's burn before reading list.
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          • Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 5 months ago
            Read it years ago. I don't agree that "service" must be to the government as Heinlein apparently did at the time he wrote Troopers. Maybe a point system (with many ways to earn) could be devised for voting like many countries have devised for immigration.
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            • Posted by term2 7 years, 5 months ago
              Great idea. Citizenship should be earned and it should make the country better. Let the refugees meet the same citizenship test
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              • Posted by BeenThere 7 years, 5 months ago
                Citizenship or voting rights?
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                • Posted by $ nickursis 7 years, 5 months ago
                  Citizenship was equated to the right to vote in ST. I was 11 yo when I read it and thought then, and still do, that he was absolutely correct. He did not limit it to military, even in the 50's, his idea of equality was if you were blind and paralyzed, they would find something for you to do for 2 years (like counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch), to earn it. It was his empasis on value that I liked, he equated things to how much it was worth to you to have. Voting today has no value, requires no effort, and ends up with horrible decisions by a careless majority. I would say this election illustrated that very well, the Trump voters covered a wide band of "non republicans" but I am willing to be a deep analysis will show the vast majority are hard working people, many of whom have sat out the past elections, but reached the point they saw the negative equity line in the current system, and rebelled.
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                  • Posted by JohnJMulhall 7 years, 5 months ago
                    I don't remember an alternative way to earn citizenship in Starship Troopers, although I could toss in doing another job for the country where you put your life on the line (that was Heinlein's criteria, as I recall) - Police, Fire Fighters, etc. If you cared enough to put your life on the line, you wouldn't squander other lives, other's money, etc. What would we become if only "people who have skin in the game" could vote? College towns would go back to being non-radical since the children and 'snowflakes' couldn't vote.
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                    • Posted by $ nickursis 7 years, 5 months ago
                      It was early on when Juan Rico was being evaluated, the evaluator explained to him what it would mean if he failed and he explained they were not allowed to let them fail, they were there to just define what they would be best at, based on preparation. And yes, I could go for any job where you have to serve the community, to earn your franchise, remember, it came out of WW3, and a disastrous peace where many POW's were not forced to be returned by their governments, so the people became "vigilantes" and were not "going to allow some stinking politician to decide what they could or could not do". You are very correct in what college towns would turn into, as they would have to earn their privilege.
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        • Posted by LibertyBelle 7 years, 5 months ago
          People are not allowed to take the law into their own hands, but required to use the government as
          their agent to right their wrongs. That being the case, they are certainly entitled to a say in making
          the laws, in the form of the vote. --Having paid money, or not.
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          • Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 5 months ago
            Unfortunately, universal suffrage doesn't work in reality. If your motivation is only to get paid by government without any incentive to work and produce and you use your vote to loot others who produce then you should not be allowed that vote. Democracy has always been a failure, and was not intended to be the method of government in America.
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            • Posted by LibertyBelle 7 years, 5 months ago
              I don't think people should "get paid by govern-
              ment without any incentive to work and produce."
              The welfare state should be eliminated. We should
              have some kind of Constitutional amendment that
              the only purpose of government shall be to protect man from force and violence, and pun-
              ish same. Then it would be safe to allow "uni-
              versal" suffrage (although children and mental
              dificients would have to be excluded from the
              franchise, of course).
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              • Posted by freedomforall 7 years, 5 months ago
                While I agree in principle, that will not happen. Those receiving loot can vote and they will not vote to remove their access to loot.
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                • Posted by LibertyBelle 7 years, 5 months ago
                  Unlikely at this time; but it takes awhile for a philo-
                  sophical movement to gain acceptance. The Marx-
                  ists and welfare statists have been in the dominant
                  part of the culture for a long time; what it remains for us to do is push Objectivism ,push Objectivism, push Objectivism.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 7 years, 5 months ago
    So-called educators must be gnashing their teeth throughout the country over her appointment. Finally a fellow Michigander I can be proud of.
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  • Posted by $ MikeMarotta 7 years, 5 months ago
    A few words of caution from Cato here:
    https://www.cato.org/blog/its-devos-e...
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    "Elisabeth DeVos was born Elisabeth Prince on January 8, 1958. ... DeVos' brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater USA, a private security firm which had operations in Iraq." -- She inherited her father's wealth, as her husband inherited his. Much more in Wikipedia (here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_D...

    She has been an educational activist for vouchers for decades. That much, anyway, seems good enough for the job. However, as Neal McCluskey pointed out in his Cato blog, it is not the domain of the federal government to support school vouchers: laissez faire. The federal governmnet's role in education would properly be limited to Washington DC, military bases, and perhaps Indian reservations.
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    • Posted by Dobrien 7 years, 5 months ago
      "It is not in the domain of the federal govt to support school vouchers: laissez faire. The federal government 's role in Education would be limited to Washington DC, military and reservations."
      Is this statement only applicable to vouchers or all public Ed?
      Because if fed funds and influence were removed from public schools I would oppose vouchers.
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      • Posted by $ nickursis 7 years, 5 months ago
        Why? That would seem to be a good thing. I would say that a proper school system uses a common set of standards (not common core crap) to define the minimum education needed to produce a self sufficient adult after gestation, at age 18. The system today fails at that utterly, so we send them to 4 more years of wasted time, then either send them back to mom and dad, the military or inflict them on business.....
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    • Posted by $ WilliamShipley 7 years, 5 months ago
      While we have philosophical objections to government funding of education, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of winning that battle at this time. For generations, the left has owned the school system and has been pumping out socialists. The more 'education' you have the more socialist you are.

      If we can leverage the money that is already being spent to get some of the children out of that educational system and into a more competitive one there might be a remote chance of the number of economically literate citizens increasing.

      If there is one thing the left has excelled at, it's getting what they want a little bit at a time. We keep trying for philosophical purity. We want to throw a hail-Mary into the end zone, rather than make the next down marker.
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 7 years, 5 months ago
    I don't favor charter schools. I favor outright
    abolition of public education. And it would be nice
    to start with abolishing that whole Federal depart-
    ment.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 7 years, 5 months ago
    My leftist friends are completely flipping out over this. I just keep saying, "More choice for families is good. Let's let the poor child in the ghetto have a choice!" And they just start speaking in tongues...They flat-out refuse to let poor children have a choice, because it is being carried out by a Republican president. They're really loosing their s*$t.
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  • Posted by $ jbfulgham 7 years, 5 months ago
    I agree with the statement that a Hail Mary has very little chance of success. However, what does taking the fed out of education 'a little bit at a time' look like? I'm not wanting a debate but would truly like to know the best, next small step and open to any ideas that really do want the same end.
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  • Posted by chad 7 years, 5 months ago
    The correct choice for liberty would be to banish the Department of Education not choose someone who is 'favorable' to charter schools. What criteria will she make the charter schools meet? What federal guidelines will she demand they meet to get their charters?
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  • Posted by $ jbfulgham 7 years, 5 months ago
    Is it true that she is a big supporter of Common Core? As a father of a 6th and 9th grader, I've seen the dramatic difference between how my daughters have been taught and really hope she is not carrying that torch.
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