Tuesday, January 31 brought an unexpected development in the already fraught battle over the confirmation of Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary. As The Washington Post reported, written responses DeVos delivered to Senator Patty Murray, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension, appeared to plagiarize multiple sources,…
Confirmation of Donald Trump’s pick for Education secretary now depends on a single Senate vote, and one Jewish billionaire is trying to make sure that it swings against Betsy DeVos. Eli Broad, a California businessman and philanthropist, sent a letter to senators urging them to vote against DeVos’s confirmation as Education secretary. “With Betsy DeVos…
In the midst of a stormy confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, Minnesota Senator Al Franken left the nominee speechless with attacks on her suitability for the position. “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue,” Franken said, after asking DeVos whether she believes individual improvement or meeting grade-linked…
Among the many crises plaguing the presidential transition, one has special meaning for American Jews. You could almost call it a test case in the ability of the Jewish community’s expensive network of institutions to serve our needs and handle the scrapes for which they were designed. And they’re failing. If you look closely, we’re…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — An Orthodox Jewish umbrella group urged the Senate to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary and another expressed enthusiasm for her agenda, while the Reform movement expressed concerns about her support for government funding of religious schools. Agudath Israel of America said in a letter Tuesday to the Senate Education Committee as it…
Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, a charter schools advocate favored by the Orthodox Jewish community, have been put off a week as federal ethics watchdogs struggle to complete their review of the billionaire’s massive holdings. Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist and a prominent supporter of the so-called “school choice” agenda, is…
Rabbi Nathan Diament’s response to my column about Betsy DeVos perfectly reflects the short-sightedness of the Orthodox Union’s approach to this issue. The column in question was roughly 1,200 words long. Only 64 of those words addressed Orthodox organizations. Yet from Rabbi Diament’s response, you’d think the whole piece was an attack on them. In…
Donald Trump’s nominee to run the federal Department of Education could make the dreams of Orthodox Jewish education advocates come true. Betsy DeVos has been in the trenches of the public education wars for years, funding and operating advocacy groups that have worked arm in arm with Orthodox organizations to push a so-called “school choice”…
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