The vote on Betsy DeVos could come as early as Friday. John Merrow has written to every senator. This is the letter he wrote, which he shared on his blog, The Merrow Report.
“Friends,
“This is the letter I have sent to about 40 United States Senators, including Senator Deb Fischer, the Nebraska Republican. If you agree, please communicate with your Senators and with Senator Fischer, whose vote may well determine the immediate future of public education.
“Dear Senator Fischer,
In the 41 years I spent covering education for PBS and NPR, I never encountered anyone less qualified for leadership than Betsy DeVos, the Administration’s nominee for United States Secretary of Education.
I reported for the PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio from early 1974 to late 2015. In fact, I cut my reporter’s teeth on IDEA, the 1975 federal law originally known as The Education of All Handicapped Children Act and followed that story with great interest throughout my career.
The Charter School movement was born in 1988, when many of education’s original thinkers met at the headwaters of the Mississippi River to develop the notion. I moderated that historic 3-day meeting, which led to the first state charter legislation (Minnesota, 1991) and the first charter school in Saint Paul in 1992. From that day forward I reported on charter schools, covering post-Katrina schooling in New Orleans for six years (12 reports for the NewsHour and a 1-hour film for Netflix, “Rebirth: New Orleans”), as well as reports about charter schools in Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas, Washington, DC and elsewhere.
In 1989 I was invited to interview for the position of Education Advisor on George H. W. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council. Although I was told the job was mine for the asking, I chose to remain a reporter.
During my career I covered progressive ‘open classrooms’ and back to basics “No Excuses” elementary schools where children marched silently to their classes. I spent time with education’s radicals like John Holt and Jonathan Kozol and ideologues like Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC.
I covered the seminal 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” Secretary Ted Bell’s “Wall Charts, and the rise and fall of No Child Left Behind, the law that set off our current obsession with standardized testing.
While the federal government’s track record in public education is mixed, the past 16 years have demonstrated quite clearly that……(for the rest of the letter, https://themerrowreport.com/2017/02/02/dont-confirm-betsy-devos/)
John
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
“never encountered anyone less qualified than Betsy DeVos”
In a boastocracy (America today)
“DeVos Matters”
Diploma doesn’t matter
What matters is de boast
When climbing up de ladder
De boast it matters most
De Dunkster and de Rhee
Were boasters, we can see
And Gates and Coleman too
And really quite a few
“Stunningly unqualified” The last paragraph in Merrow’s letter bears repeating below (my emphasis).
“In her (DeVos’) testimony and her subsequent letter, she demonstrated her unfamiliarity with IDEA and the federal commitment to special needs children. Moreover, both her testimony and her track record demonstrate an ideologue’s zeal for a single-minded approach to education. Neither her words nor her deeds show a commitment to the concept of public education for all children or any understanding of the importance of well-educated citizenry to our economic security and our democratic society.”
“The importance of a well-educated citizenry . . . “ From watching these ultra-rich for awhile, it seems to me that not only doesn’t citizenry make the cut in the world view of these folks, but also citizenry, as we understand it in “a democratic society,” is anathema to their larger plans of mastering of the universe; or in DeVos zealotry, to her stated (and shameless) project of bringing about an egregiously narrow version of “God’s Kingdom.”
I should qualify the above: Education is connected at its roots with human well-being. Insofar as that well-being is a part of God’s universe (and I believe it is and that there is a great deal of mystery about it), then all education writ-small (one-on-one) and writ-large (institutional) is already involved with that universal movement, regardless of what we call it. Betsy DeVos goes one further, however, in replacing its movement with hubris and zealotry and its mystery with her narrow ideology of it.
Self-love love letter. The vast majority of it devoted to Merrow. Not impressed.
No Duane, he has to establish his credibility with the people to whom he is writing. He may not have been your favorite journalist (or mine) over the years, but he did show the ability to grow and change his opinions when confronted with the evidence. His long tenure following ed policy is important to recognize since Devos is being presented as the point person for education policy. He is well qualified to see what she doesn’t know and the harm for which she is already responsible.
With the charter school industry favored by nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos bleeding vital funds from the public’s schools, the thoughtful person will ask: “Why are hedge funds the main backers of the private charter school industry? After all, hedge funds are not known for an altruistic interest in educating children.”
Well, the answer, of course, is MONEY.
For example, look at DeVos’ home state of Michigan: There are 1.5 million children attending public elementary and secondary schools and the state annually spends about $11,000 per student which adds up to pot of about $17 billion that private charter school operators have their eyes on. If these private operators succeed in getting what DeVos wants to give them — the power to run all the schools — these private profiteers could make almost $6 billion in profit just by firing veteran teachers and replacing them with low-paid inexperienced teachers, which is what the real objective of so-called “Value-Added” evaluations of veteran teachers is all about.
But wait! There’s more!
In fact, there are many more ways that big profits are being made every day right now by the private charter school industry. Here are just some:
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.