Ah, the irony of it all...

...that in an administration promising to "build a big, beautiful wall", Betsy DeVos would be hell-bent on tearing down a wall erected over 200 years ago:

From The New York Times

To Understand Betsy DeVos’s Educational Views, View Her Education

To Understand Betsy DeVos’s Educational Views, View Her Education

By ERICA L. GREEN
JUNE 10, 2017

Excerpts from the article:

HOLLAND, Mich. — The students formed a circle around the Rev. Ray Vanderlaan, who draped himself in a Jewish ceremonial prayer shawl to cap his final lesson to graduating seniors in his discipleship seminar at Holland Christian High School.

“We’re sending you out into a broken world, in part because of my generation,” the minister told the students. Referring to God, he exhorted them to “extend his kingdom.”

Mr. Vanderlaan could not have missed his lesson’s echoes of Holland Christian’s most famous graduate, Betsy DeVos, who proclaimed in an audio recording that surfaced in December that her education advocacy would “advance God’s kingdom.”

Holland Christian is one of several western Michigan nonpublic schools that have helped shape Ms. DeVos’s views of elementary and secondary education, and that her critics fear she will draw from to upend the nation’s public schools. The private Christian school that she attended, another that she sent her children to and a hardscrabble private religious school that she has long supported have dominated her time, money and attention.

Public neighborhood schools — the vast majority of schools in this country — were hardly present in the billionaire’s childhood or adult life.

Critics say this lopsided exposure fueled Ms. DeVos’s staunch support of privately run, publicly funded charter schools and voucher programs that allow families to take tax dollars from the public education system to private schools.

Ms. DeVos has maintained that she is “agnostic” about the type of schools that parents choose for their children. But in western Michigan, skeptics doubt professions of open-mindedness from someone who grew up in Holland — a town founded by Dutch Calvinist separatists and perceived as insular — and educated in parochial schools.

“Mary Bouwense, president of the Grand Rapids Education Association, who has taught in public schools for 25 years...“I think her agenda is shaped by her idea of what God wants for the world.”

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

Look, it's called public education for a reason. The public school system was created by the founding fathers to educate the ignorant masses, so that We, the People, could become active participants in this grand experiment of democracy.

As an added bonus, public education has provided the "melting pot" that has helped pull together the various nationalities coming to our shores to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, i.e. the American dream.

Now, especially in these divisive times, we do not need tax dollars being used to allow us, to encourage us, to segregate ourselves along sectarian lines.

We need bridges, not segregation.

So...