DeVos subpar

Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as education secretary is a direct slap in the face to those thousands upon thousands of dedicated teachers who go to work every day, striving to make a difference in young people’s lives.

Today, they work under some of the most challenging and difficult conditions. In so many cases, they have been expected to be counselors, social workers — and even surrogate parents.

Yet, despite being so often maligned by the media and all those experts who have never been in a classroom (and probably wouldn’t last five minutes), they still go to work and do their jobs.

And yet, we now have an ill-equipped education secretary who has publicly expressed her full support of tax dollars for private education. Those resources belong to the public-school sector and should be used to support public education and its teachers.

I am hoping against hope that DeVos will get the message about how vital public education is and how fully supported it must be to do the job of educating America’s children. It is apparent and disheartening that our president does not.

This story was originally published February 14, 2017 at 7:54 PM with the headline "DeVos subpar."