Betsy DeVos Makes Unexpected Administration Picks

Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under the Trump administration, has been under fire since her confirmation in January. She has been painted as an out-of-touch billionaire with no ability or desire to sympathize with poor, minority, immigrant, disabled, LGBT students. She recently announced the administration’s plan to cut several programs from the education system which largely benefit minorities and students from low-income families and instead give money for scholarships to charter schools. These schools are not held to certain legal standards that public schools are held to and are not required to serve students with disabilities and can refuse students based off of their or their families part in the LGBT community. However, three of her appointees to the education department have been unexpected picks which could turn the narrative around.

Candice E. Jackson was appointed to the department’s Office of Civil Rights. She is a sexual assault survivor and a lesbian who has been married to her wife for more than a decade. Jackson will be responsible for overseeing issues involving the treatment of LGBT students and investigations of sexual assaults on campus.

Critics of Jackson have highlighted her involvement in attacks against Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign where she tried to draw attention toward women accusing former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault and harassment. However, she was hypocritical in that she denounced those who accused Mr. Trump of the same. Critics also note that she has never worked in civil rights enforcement before and that she is a known critic of both affirmative action and the women’s rights movement.

A research organization at George Washington University named FutureEd, looked into articles that Jackson wrote when she was writing for The Stanford Review in college. Notable remarks that Jackson made in The Review were “as with most liberal solutions to a problem, giving special assistance to minority students is a band-aid solution to a deep problem.” She expressed her views on the women’s right movement in the paper in 1998 by writing, “college women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”

A fellow writer for The Stanford Review, Eric Jackson, came to Ms. Jackson’s defense saying that she was being “unfairly tarred by views from decades ago” and that Jackson was a self-proclaimed “libertarian feminist” and lawyer who would follow the rules of the law to defend students from mistreatment. Mr. Jackson also added, “what we can infer from her personal background is that she’s compassionate; she understands what it’s like, as a gay woman, to have overcome adversity.”

Jason Botel has been appointed as the deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. He is a progressive Democrat who supported President Barack Obama and has served as an educator. He believes that education system in America is broken and is the result of white supremacy. Botel is a supporter of charter schools as a way to fix the broken system and is behind school-choice agenda.

He worked for Teach for America for three years in a school with many students living in poverty. From there, he founded a national charter school effort, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which has gone on to be a rigorous, high performing program with many applicants. Botel has publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement and is an advocate for the poor and black children.

Critics of Botel say that they don’t “appreciate his one-dimensional thinking” toward solving education with charter schools. Jessica Schiller, an associate professor of urban education at Towson University in Maryland comments that the charter schools, “benefited some students in Baltimore” but that the “scaling up of that agenda for whole school districts can be dangerous.”

Jose Viana was appointed as assistant deputy education secretary and the director of the Office of English Language Acquisition. He is also a second generation American whose mother emigrated to the United States from Cuba when she was six months pregnant with Viana. His father remained behind in Cuba where he was imprisoned by the Castro regime. He himself did not learn to speak English until he was in elementary school. Viana spent eight years working at the North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction helping first and second generation American student, including those undocumented, overcome academic barriers from movements from one education system to another and lack of access to services like healthcare.

These three appointees have surprised many and have pleased many to the left. But as Ethan Hutt, a professor of education and policy and the University of Maryland, points out, “the question is how much influence they will ultimately have.”

Featured Image via Flickr/Michael Vadon