Heidi Alexander: “with this vote, the Senate will move early next week to confirm the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the U.S. Education…”

“with this vote, the Senate will move early next week to confirm the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the U.S. Education Secretary. In my judgment, she will be an excellent and important Education Secretary for this country. The No. 1 job of the U.S. Education Secretary is to help create an environment in which our 100,000 public schools succeed, because that is where 9 out of 10 of our children go. When I was Education Secretary for President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, I had the privilege of working with a man named David Kerns, who had been the chief executive officer of the Xerox Corporation. He came in as the Deputy Education Secretary at a time when he was not only one of the country's leading businessmen, but he was also the leading businessman who tried to help change public education. David Kern's belief was that it was very difficult to help children by changing public education if you try to do it from within. As all of us do, he respected the teachers, the parents, and the students who work within the public education system, but over the last 30 years, as this country has worked to try to improve our public schools, much of that energy has come from outside the public school establishment. Among those were the Governors of the country. In the mid-1980s, all of the Governors met together--in 1985 and 1986--on one subject for a whole year. The purpose was, how can we help improve our public schools?…”