Education Secretary Betsy DeVos really took her chance to show off how clueless she is in a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl that aired Sunday night. Though Stahl introduced DeVos with what sounded like a claim straight from a DeVos PR piece—no, DeVos has not “spent most of her life trying to improve the quality of education for poor kids”—she went on to ask some moderately tough questions. And DeVos hasn’t gotten any better at answering tough questions since her disastrous confirmation hearing just over a year ago.
On the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who dragged her for showing up at their school to make herself look good, but not actually talking to them:
Betsy DeVos: I give a lot of credit to the students there for really raising their voices, and I think that they are not going to let this moment go by.
Lesley Stahl: They want gun control.
Betsy DeVos: They want a variety of things. They want solutions.
I … feel like they might have something to say about this. [Checks Twitter … yup.] But don’t worry, DeVos promised that she will bring a sense of urgency to the very important task force Donald Trump is having her chair, a task force that is in no way intended to run out the clock and distract from guns by talking about violent video games.
On her signature issue of “school choice,” Stahl pushed DeVos on what happens to kids left behind in under-resourced school systems thanks to DeVos’s “choice” model. It didn’t go well for DeVos, who was trying to claim that competition introduced by “choice” improves all schools, but who has also had the chance to remake the Michigan education system in her own image:
Lesley Stahl: Now, has that happened in Michigan? We're in Michigan. This is your home state.
Betsy DeVos: Michi--Yes, well, there's lots of great options and choices for students here.
Lesley Stahl: Have the public schools in Michigan gotten better?
Betsy DeVos: I don't know. Overall, I-- I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.
To say the least! Betsy DeVos, without even having an official role in government, just in her role as a major Republican donor, has destroyed education in Michigan. But here’s where Stahl really twisted the knife:
Lesley Stahl: Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they're doing?
Betsy DeVos: I have not-- I have not-- I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.
Lesley Stahl: Maybe you should.
Betsy DeVos: Maybe I should. Yes.
But as DeVos repeatedly made clear, she does not care about schools. She claims to care about individual students, while denying the role that institutions play in their lives. She says “we should be funding and investing in students, not in school—school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems.” This is a view that leads straight to homeschooling for everyone, and if you can’t stay home to homeschool your kid or if you aren’t qualified to teach every subject all the way through a high school level, oh well, you should have been born rich like Betsy DeVos. Or take the question of whether to scrap the Obama-era efforts to make sure that students of color are not punished more harshly than white students for similar infractions:
Lesley Stahl: Yeah but let's say there's a disruption in the classroom and a bunch of whites kids are disruptive and they get punished, you know, go see the principal, but the black kids are, you know, they call in the cops. I mean, that's the issue: who and how the kids who disrupt are being punished.
Betsy DeVos: Arguably, all of these issues or all of this issue comes down to individual kids. And--
NO IT DOES NOT COME DOWN TO INDIVIDUAL KIDS. It comes down to the fact—the fact—that we can look at school discipline numbers and see that racial disparities in school discipline begin in preschool. Preschool! But it’s not just that: Stahl is explicitly asking DeVos about how it is that some kids causing the same level of disruption get sent to the principal’s office and others have the police called on them, and DeVos insists it’s about the individual kids.
The good news is that Betsy DeVos remains dramatically unable to sell her views to the American public. The bad news is that she doesn’t need to, because she’s used her family’s billions to buy her way into being in charge of federal education policy.