my husband will not be, either. okay. thank you very much. i appreciate that. thank you, senator murray. senator burr deferred to senator isaacson. thank you, chair, mr. chairman. thank you, mrs. devos, for your commitment to your state, your commitment to education and being here today. congratulations on your nomination. i have a statement and would like to ask you three questions in regard to that statement. this committee established a task force on government regulation and identified 59 specific burdensome regulations that engaged public education, pry maimarily higher education. of the 59 recommendations, 12 are totally at the office of the secretary of education, they can be validated and changed immediately. in 2015, senators bennett, king, booker, burr, alexander an myself introduced a bill to simplify the burdensome application process, financial
school-aged students has basically left the city, and the students the students there today i m sorry, with respect, i m not asking for a history of detroit. what i d like to know what i asked about was the last 20 years of school reform you ve been so involved with in michigan. yes, but you are referring specifically to the detroit schools. right. and the reality today is that 8 out of 10 students in detroit are living in poverty. nobody accepts that the results in detroit overall are acceptable. there s cheerily room for a lot more improvement. but the reality is that more than half of the i m sorry. i m not going to get a second round of questions. what have you learned about the failures of the detroit public schools and detroit charter schools that has informed your decisionmaking as the secretary of education?
universal, very inexpensive, or free childcare. would you work with me in moving our government in that direction? senator, again, i feel very strongly about the importance of young families having an opportunity for good childcare for their children. i m not sure that it s not a question of an opportunity. it s a question of being able to very often, my republican friends talk about opportunity. it s not a question of opportunity. it s a question of being able to afford it. how do we help somebody who s making 8 or 9 bucks an hour at a time we can t raise minimum wage because of republican opposition, how can we make sure the moms get quality childcare they can afford? i look forward to helping that mom getting a quality education for their child or their children so they could look forward to a bright and hopeful future. thank you very much. thank you, senator sanders.
that our public school system is not working for many of our kids, particularly those living in poverty. i think it s utterly unacceptable and the fact we don t pay attention to it, the fact we treat america s children like they re someone else s children i think is something that this generation is going to have to pay for in the future. every kid in this country should have had access to a great public school. i support parents choices among high quality public schools and charter schools, and i think plays a critical role in education. but the goal for me has never been school choice. for its own end. the goal is high quality public schools where every kid and every neighborhood can receive a great education. for a kid from a low-income fami family, there may be a philosophical, but there s no practical difference between being forced to attend a terrible school and being given a chance to choose among five terrible schools.
this is the subject that has been debated in the education community for years. and i ve advocated growth as the chairman and every member of this committee knows because with proficiency looking back teachers ignore the kids at the top who are not going to fall below proficiency and ignore the kid at the bottom, no matter what they do will never get to proficiency. i ve been an advocate of growth. it surprises me you don t know this issue. mr. chairman, i think this is a good reason for us to have more questions because this is a very important subject, education. our kids education. and i think we re selling our kids short by not being able to have a debate on it. and i didn t know of any rule about this, you know, everyone gets one question and one other senator gets a question. i don t know where that rule comes from. well, i ll tell you where it comes from, senator franken. it comes from the committee