Tag Archives: hearing

In case you weren’t paying attention, something really big happened in the education world two days ago. Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump’s pick for secretary of education, had her confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The hearing was actually supposed to happen earlier this month, but it was delayed “to accommodate the Senate schedule.” In other words, politics happened. But Republican leadership stuck to its word about not allowing Democratic complaints over ethics paperwork to prevent the confirmation process from moving forward, and so DeVos’s hearing went ahead. You can watch the full hearing here if you are so inclined. I’m still waiting for a credible transcript to be released. In the meantime, I’d like to talk a little about the slanted coverage of the hearing I’ve seen. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a confirmation hearing before, but I have. They tend to amount to a whole lot of rhetorical jousting by senators looking to score points against their rivals’ picks, various attempts to force nominees to make (often absurd) commitments, and a cat-like ability to avoid answering trap questions on the part of the nominees themselves. They usually get partisan—and ugly—fast. […]

Yesterday I brought news of a troubling development at the State Capitol. Today, I decided to shift to the positive — because hope for autistic children in Colorado is just a bit brighter. School choice champion Senator Nancy Spence‘s Senate Bill 130 passed one house of the state legislature, reports Colorado Senate News: Spence, a leading statehouse voice for school reform, faced months-long opposition from charter school opponents, who argued that the plan would take money away from public schools and provide an unnecessary service to children with autism. Spence maintained that the bill isn’t about taking on the public-education bureaucracy or taking funding from public schools; it’s about providing autistic children with a school that specifically serves their unique needs, she said. “We have a responsibility to do more for families struggling to address the needs of their autistic kids,” Spence said. “Children suffering from this disorder are just one small subsection of our society that aren’t being adequately served by our public schools.”