CNN
Remember those times in school when you would “forget” to do the reading for a class and the teacher would open the class with a speed round of rapid fire questions? No one was safe. Meanwhile you were sitting there like:
The the teacher would say your name and a question like “What does the green light at the end of the dock symbolize to the Great Gatsby?” And you’d be like “Um. Ah. *Cough* *Fart* It’s a fucking light, lady. It probably just symbolizes light. It’s a fucking light. Can I go to the bathroom?”
Well, that was the entirety of President-elect Donald Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos’ confirmation hearing Tuesday afternoon. If one clip were to summarize the buffoonery, it would have to be DeVos’ response to whether guns have places in schools. She replied by saying that the answer to this should be left up to locales and states because of….grizzly bears?
Citing grizzlies, Trump education pick Betsy DeVos says states should determine school gun policies https://t.co/A8pBds868b pic.twitter.com/qxS1X34aJf
— CNN (@CNN) January 18, 2017
Arguably DeVos’ most embarrassing moment came when Senator Al Franken asked education’s oft debated growth vs. proficiency question. The debate centers around whether test scores should be used to measure students’ proficiency (an arbitrary set standard) or their growth (relative to . The problem with proficiency, Franken argues, is that teachers have incentive to ignore the extremes–ie the students at the top who will not fall below the proficiency and students at the bottom, who will never reach that standard. This is a fundamental question in the education system since it deciphers which schools are succeeding and which are failing. Betsy had no fucking clue.
Bernie Sanders then grilled DeVos on her family’s extensive contributions to the Republican Party, sums that he estimates hover around $200 million. He bluntly asked, “Do you think that if you were not a multibillionaire, if your family had not made hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions, that you would be sitting here today?” After stumbling over her words, Bernie then reignited his famed ‘free college education’ debate, to which she was barely able to string together a pre-packaged answer that avoided the question like I avoid the subway cart that a homeless man shit in.
Moral of the story: If you don’t know the answer to anything, answer “I look forward to working with you..” to everything.
Buckle up, America!