title:  BUSTED: Trump’s Education Nominee Plagiarized, Which Students Are Taught Not To Do
text: How can we expect our kids to do their homework when the nominee for the top education post in the nation won t even bother doing her own homework?A Senate questionnaire is not exactly difficult to fill out. You provide your own answers to the questions asked and then your answers are evaluated by the committee tasked with considering your nomination.It s easy for anyone who is intelligent and hard-working.But rather than present her own work, Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos chose to just copy and paste her answers verbatim from other sources without citations.According to the Washington Post,In answering a set of questions from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) on how she would address bullying of LGBT students, DeVos wrote:  Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment where they can learn, thrive, and grow. That sentence is almost identical to language used by Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, in a news release announcing the administration s controversial guidance to schools on how to accommodate transgender students. Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment that allows them to thrive and grow,  Gupta said in the May 2016 release.Oh, and that s not all. DeVos also copied directly from the the department she wants to destroy.In one response, to a question about whether she would continue the practice of publishing a list of schools under Title IX civil rights investigations, DeVos said,  Opening a complaint for investigation in no way implies that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has made a determination about the merits of the complaint. That language mirrors an Education Department website:  Opening a complaint for investigation in no way implies that OCR has made a determination with regard to the merits of the complaint. DeVos committed plagiarism throughout the 62-page questionnaire. Apparently, she was too lazy to make a real effort. It s either that or she s just not smart enough to answer easy questions. Either way, plagiarism is something students are taught not to do in school and when they get caught they get punished for it by getting a failing grade on the assignment or even expulsion.But DeVos is not a student in school. She s an adult who is up for the top education post in the country. And frankly, that makes her plagiarism much worse and more embarrassing.She should immediately withdraw her name from the nomination or the Senate should reject her. It would be entirely inappropriate for the Secretary of Education to be someone who refuses to do their own homework in their own words. Surely, we want our Secretary of Education to be someone with integrity and real intelligence. Betsy DeVos has neither.Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images 