Behold, Casual Progressivism: Betsy DeVos Is Rich Edition
A challenge: see whether you can find a valid criticism of DeVos anywhere in this.
tl;dr: I don't know anything about policy, but I heard DeVos was rich, and so now I'm an activist I guess.
Oh, there's another hint at a criticism: DeVos doesn't have a background in education. This is actually a point in her favor, however. Ed schools are catastrophes.
Seriously. There's dumb on both sides, of course. But this seems to me to be one paradigm of it on the left: I have no idea what's what, but I've got some feelz and suddenly I'm woked or whatever!
posted by Winston Smith at
6:31 AM
5 Comments:
Being totally ignorant of the field in which you're a supervisor should not be a point in anyone's favor. Her confirmation hearings were jaw dropping. Even without a background in education one should, at least, be expected to know the basics of the issues one will face.
I disagree.
Ed schools are such a disaster that I'd rather pick someone at random off the street than someone who's been educated in them.
And DeVos's Ed dept. has been head and shoulders above the last bunch on Title IX and other cultural crusades.
Please read what I said again. You can disagree with the ed departments and policies, etc, using coherent logical arguments. She couldn't! She's jaw droppingly ignorant on even the most basic issues. Since when is that an (effing) virtue?
Well, originally I was just making fun of stupid, feelz-based arguments against her, not defending her...
Though...I do honestly think that some fields are so fouled-up that someone pulled off the street would be better than someone immersed in the prevailing paradigm...and I suspect that education policy might be one of those fields...but I'm not wedded to that.
More to the point: *that's* a kind of case in which something like ignorance might be something like a virtue.
But enough quibbling--has she done anything bad that outweighs the good she's done on the culture-war issues like Title IX?
None that I can think of but with everything else going on I've hardly paid attention to the dept of ed. I'll agree Title IX was implemented poorly but unless they're going to give specific guidelines/rules little will change in the foreseeable future.
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