DeVos equates lack of school choice with communist East Germany [View all]

[demmiblue]

In remarks to the conservative Young America’s Foundation, DeVos recalled her own travels decades ago in which she saw the stark differences between “tyranny and freedom” in East and West Germany. And she lauded President Ronald Reagan’s “purpose and principle” in fighting successfully to tear down the Berlin Wall.

“While that wall was reduced to rubble, there’s another kind of wall that needs tearing down today,” DeVos said at the gathering at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif. “This wall is just as old and just as devastating to those who — through no fault of their own — happen to live on the wrong side.”

DeVos said she was describing a figurative wall in the United States that “separates wealthy, powerful or well-connected students from those who aren’t wealthy, powerful or well-connected.”

Families who aren’t wealthy “have about as much education freedom in America today as East Germans had freedom to do anything back then,” she said.

DeVos continued the metaphor further, seemingly drawing a parallel between unions and the “evil empire,” a label that Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/devos-east-germany-california-1331702