| No Images? Click here   Earlier this week Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met privately with more than 50 teachers who had been named 2018 teachers of the year in their states. HuffPost education reporter Rebecca Klein reached out to several teachers to find out what took place at the meeting. She discovered that a great deal of "verbal sparring" occurred between the educators and DeVos over her policies which are commonly known to take money away from public schools.HuffPost also obtained a video of DeVos expressing opposition to teachers going on strike. DeVos made her comments after Josh Meibos, Arizona’s teacher of the year, asked her about when striking teachers will be listened to. In response, DeVos told Meibos that she “cannot comment specifically to the Arizona situation,” but that she hopes “adults would take their disagreements and solve them not at the expense of kids and their opportunity to go to school and learn.”Without Klein's reporting no one would have learned that public school teachers had even confronted DeVos. Here's how she got the story.How'd you get the idea to contact these teachers?I noticed on social media that a lot of the teachers who had been selected as State Teachers of the Year had posts that were somewhat critical of the Trump administration's policies. I also knew that they had a private meeting scheduled with Betsy DeVos. Because so many of them were openly critical of the Trump administration, it made me curious about what such a meeting would sound like.How open were they about the meeting with DeVos?They were pretty open. The teachers I spoke with wanted to get their message out about what teachers need right now and how federal policymakers could support education.What were the teachers most cagey about, if at all?I didn't find that they were cagey, but I did find that they wanted to emphasize that despite their differences with the Education Secretary, the meeting remained respectful and that they were grateful for the opportunity.What surprised you about what they said?What surprised me was that at least one of the teachers who seemed to have the most tense interaction with DeVos is also a dedicated Trump-supporting Republican. It shows how issues related to education and children can cut across partisan lines.Love, |
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