U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy wasn’t in bed at 4:20 a.m. Tuesday — he was on the floor of the U.S. Senate invoking the specter of school vouchers to argue against voting to approve Betsy DeVos to become the next secretary of education.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on DeVos’s nomination Tuesday afternoon.
Democrats like Murphy spoke ont he floor all through the ngiht into the morning trying to convince one more Republican to vote in opposition — the one vote needed to stop DeVos’s nomination. Click on the above video to watch Murphy’s remarks.
In the end, the Senate did confirm DeVos Tuesday.
DeVos has been a national advocate and funder of proposals to use public dollars to pay the tuitions of students attending private and parochial schools.
In his floor remarks, Murphy argued against the idea that the free market works in public education.
“Vouchers will never equal the amount of money that it costs to send a student to most private schools,” Murphy argued. “It may cover the costs of the cheapest private schools, but families of means take those vouchers, supplement it with money that they already have and send their kids to private schools. So vouchers end up just taking wealthier families and moving those kids into private schools, while leaving behind kids who don’t have parents who can supplement the amount of money in the voucher to allow their students to go to private schools. And so vouchers bcome a means of both economic and racial segregation.”