President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to be the Latinos' champion in education notwithstanding his disparaging remarks about Mexicans. His good intentions are however being doubted because of his choice of Betsy DeVos, the billionaire heiress, as the new Education Secretary.
DeVos, according to the American Federation of Teachers, represents everything wrong in America as pointed out by Trump. The elite society to which she belongs to, have made sure that privatized school choice got hundreds of millions of dollars. The Koch brothers and Bill Gates are among the few billionaires who have made sure that management organizations, churches and corporations were the recipients of public money in the guise of schoolo reforms.
Chalkbeat said DeVos is ot only a school voucher advocate but her children also attended Christian private schools. Her appointment shows that Trump intends to widen the use of voucher plans to encourage parents to send their children to private schools using public funds.
These billionaires have insisted that Latinos will benefit from privatized school choice. No one is however talking about the lack of high-quality public schools. On the contrary, research literature shows that in general school choice will not really provide more opportunities for social justice and equity among Latino students.
WIth the privatized school choice, NBC News said control and access lies in the hands of churches and corporation. This is not only detrimental to poor children but is also to democracy. Instead, the federal government should make sure that there is equal opportunity for all children regardless of their economic status and abilities.
NCBI said Latinos in the United States have been exposed to accumulated disadvantage when it comes to education. Unlike other students, they do not have the social and economic resources needed from the time they started formal schooling considering that most of their parents are immigrants and lack proper information on the education system prevailing in the US.
