Betsy DeVos, the cuckservative’s choice for Secretary of Education

What I know about her: born super-rich, married super-rich, Christian, devotes herself to cuckservative educational causes like school vouchers and charter schools.

Because Republicans deny HBD nearly as much as Democrats, vouchers and charter schools will not solve the real problems of education because politicians deny what the real problems are. (Republicans accept the liberal premise that there are no differences in genetic learning potential between students, and the most important problem to be solved in education is the black-white achievement “gap.”)

Those who try to measure the “success” of the vouchers and charter schools will try to determine if test scores have improved for poor, minority and “disadvantaged” kids, and I guarantee you that scores on the highly g-loaded reading and math tests will not improve. If anything, the public schools, with their emphasis on endless drilling for the tests, have maxed out any possible score increases for these kids, and higher quality instruction would probably result in lower scores.

Now, before I write any more, I want to state that I believe that most public schools suck, and that most non-religious private schools provide better education for the students. I wish there were some way that deserving middle class kids could have the opportunity to attend a superior non-religious private school.

But let’s get back to vouchers.

Liberals see public education as a valuable tool in the fight against the spread of prole sects of Christianity. If vouchers allowed parents to take their kids out of public schools, the parents who would care most about this are fundamentalist Christian parents who would send their children to a school where they teach that God created man and other such nonsense. The liberals have a valid point here.

Republicans worship at the altar of “free enterprise,” and believe that anything run by a private organization is going to be superior and more efficient to anything run by the government. But I think the reality is that public education isn’t that expensive. At all decent private schools, tuition tends to be three times the per-pupil cost of public education in the same geographic area. And those private schools also have fund raising drives on top of that, so they spend more like four times as much per student, and they don’t even have to deal with “special needs” students.

The simplest thing we could do to vastly improve the quality of public education is to separate the intelligent children from the less intelligent children. But liberals are adamantly opposed to this because they say it’s racist. And it’s not something that the cuckservatives are behind either, because the cuckservative’s greatest fear is being called a “racist.” And it doesn’t do anything to support their ideas about “free enterprise” and it doesn’t make Christian schools more powerful.

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Joey Junger writes in a comment (to a previous post):

Not that it matters much to me one way or the other, but I seem to remember you saying that you didn’t like using the term “cuckservative.” It looks like it’s part of your working vocabulary now, though. Did something change?

I guess the word is too convenient to describe the type of conservative who is wedded to “free enterprise” and Christian right stuff, while being desperate to demonstrate to liberals and the mainstream media that they are good guys, not racists or misogynists.

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Anyway, bad choice here by Trump. I suspect this was a position that he didn’t care much about, and he let his truecon advisers pick her. And at the same time he could check a gender diversity box!

Although the issues of vouchers and charter schools arouse people’s passions, what the Department of Education mostly does is manage the student loan program. A technocrat manager who could make that work more efficiently and help prevent students from being ripped off by lenders would have been a much better choice. Or imagine if Trump picked Bernie Sanders for this position! It would have been a bold gesture of reaching across the aisle, and Bernie Sanders seems to genuinely care about college students being ripped off by student loan lenders.