Up North Progressive

Betsy DeVos is a woman on a crusade. Her goal for the state of Michigan is one thing, and that is eliminating public education from the state forever. Since 2001 Betsy DeVos with her husband Dick have spent over a million dollars on supporting candidates in Michigan who vote the way they want on promoting vouchers, charter schools, and whatever it takes to weaken the state’s excellent public schools. One of the DeVos family’s eliminate-public-education-at-all-costs projects is the Great Lakes Education Project, or GLEP.

GLEP once upon a time had a pretty vibrant public presence, but recently has reduced to funding and endorsing candidates. So far they’re endorsing 33 candidates for Michigan, two of them in Northern Michigan: Frank Forster of Petoskey for the 107th district, and Ray Franz of Okenama for the 101st district. Both of these candidates are Republicans, and most on GLEP’s endorsed list are Republicans. A few Democrats are there too, which will make people stop and make the false assumption that GLEP really is bipartisan as they claim.

With the Michigan state government now in the hands of Rick Snyder and a Republican majority, many of the bullet points in GLEP’s mission statement are becoming law in the state. None of these laws do anything to improve education, but to make it more difficult for public schools to do their job by establishing punitive systems for teachers who do their jobs very well. Betsy DeVos hates that teachers get things like retirement, health insurance and tenure, and she works hard to make sure all of those things are stripped away.

Betsy these days doesn’t just work on making public education in Michigan a bad memory; she’s working hard to erase it from the United States too. With her new project, American Federation for Children, she boldly blazes forward to put an end to the tyranny of public education, and Democratic Party-voting teachers.

And that’s the real reason behind the DeVos family – and the Walton family – and so many other right wing families and their crusade to destroy the public education system our founding fathers worked so hard to establish. Children don’t vote, so they’re easy prey.