Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's nominee for education secretary, is unfit for the job and should not be confirmed, according to Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of education at the University of Virginia.
"I was deeply dismayed by her performance in her confirmation hearing," he wrote in a column for The Washington Post. "It was, in a word, disqualifying.
"But while the answers she could not give to basic questions about education were troubling enough, I was genuinely alarmed by the answers she did give."
"On two critically important areas of responsibility for the Secretary of Education — protecting the rights of all students, particularly the most vulnerable students, and on accountability — time after time Mrs. DeVos failed her test."
He said DeVos continually backed away from any federal responsibility to protect the rights of all students.
"The law that drives the federal role in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is at its heart a civil rights law, seeking to guarantee equity in educational opportunities for all. A qualified nominee for secretary of education must believe that."
And he noted holding schools accountable for providing equal opportunities and for student outcomes is just as important.
"…to suggest that it is okay for public schools to be held accountable, but that private schools — or any other educational option that accepts taxpayer funding — would not be held equally accountable is simply unacceptable," he wrote.
"If the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions were to move her nomination forward despite her disastrous performance . . . her confirmation would set our reform efforts back years."
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