Betsy DeVos is personally backing some questionable “science” in a notoriously anti-science administration
To say that Donald Trump and his cabinet dismiss scientific research is an understatement; his proposed federal budget significantly reduced funding to the EPA, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and massive cuts to the National Science Foundation were only recently rejected by a House spending committee.
Most of the people that he’s chosen for environment and science-focused appointments throughout our government are unabashedly disinterested in research and innovation, and are instead laser-focused on protecting the coal and oil industries, for a start.
And there are conflicting reports on the status of the Office for Science and Technology Policy — the final three Obama-era employees of the OSTP left in early July and have stated that no one has been hired to replace them, but the White House claims there are at least 15 employees — and 7 months into his presidency, he’s yet to appoint a presidential science adviser, the de facto head of the OSTP.
It’s not a big surprise that Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is equally dismissive of the role that science and evidence-based research play in shaping American education policy.
She’s obviously a proponent of charter schools, which have time and time again been found to be ineffective at closing the achievement gap.
Though she claims STEAM to be critically important in schools, the Department of Education’s interpretation of the role that science achievement can play in states’ implementations of school improvement plans under ESSA is vague, to say the least.
And in one of her only non-education related statements to the press since taking office in January, she inexplicably spoke in support of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement earlier this spring. When asked if she believed in human-caused climate change, she cheekily responded, “certainly, the climate changes.” When pressed, she declined to comment any further.
It’s unclear why she chose to make an official statement on a topic that no one expected her to chime in on, only to turn around and refuse to talk about it when asked by the press.
She’s not bright, but she is rich, and the investments that she and her husband make are further evidence that the person who currently represents the United States’ public school system believes there is such a thing as an easy solution to a very complex problem. In 2017, she has invested as much as $5.5 million in a company known as Neurocore, which claims to be able to improve the symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, and depression by strapping you into a chair, wearing some fancy sensors, and blasting your senses with a series of images and videos that “reward” your brain for “rebalancing itself”.
Rather than adapt an environment to better suit a child’s needs or train them to develop their own coping mechanisms and soothing techniques, a distraught parent of a child with ADD simply needs to spend upwards of $2,000 on a treatment that is backed by just one peer-reviewed study.
Neuroscientists and pediatric doctors have raised some concerns with that study and with Neurocore, but DeVos isn’t crossing any ethical boundaries… yet. But a $5 million investment and 7 years on their board of directors does communicate that it doesn’t take much to impress her, and if the Department of Education is committed to promoting evidence-based practices in the nation’s schools, she’s probably not the person best suited to make those decisions.
