At their statewide council meeting, California Teachers Association (CTA) President Eric Heins announced the 325,000 member organization’s opposition to education secretary nominee Betsy Devos. In a passionate address, he declared DeVos’s history as a billionaire political donor and proponent of for-profit schools and voucher schemes makes her a poor choice to lead the U.S. Department of Education.

Heirs to the Amway fortune, she and her husband have donated at least 200 million dollars to a single party’s legislators and candidates, to which she is on record saying she expects “quid pro quo” for the money she spends. Unfortunately those millions are meant to help dismantle the public school system in favor of private, for-profit charters and vouchers that prove no accountability for the expenditure of taxpayer monies.

Heins cited several reasons for her disqualification, including her total lack of experience in any public school system. Neither she nor her children have attended public schools. She has also contributed to anti-LGBTQ causes such as gay conversion therapy- a medical practice that nearly all clinicians have abandoned as counterproductive and ineffective.

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