I worked for Lamar Alexander when he was Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. There were so many things I liked about him. He is smart and funny. He plays the piano. He is my kind of conservative: he didn’t think he should shove his ideas down other people’s throats. As Secretary, he knew he had to obey the law and not intrude on the right of states and localities to make decisions. He had a gut sense that other people had good ideas.
I have a copy of Lamar’s Little Plaid Book, where he spells out his principles but I didn’t read it closely. So I didn’t know that Entry # 84 said this: “Read anything Diane Ravitch writes about education.”
Sadly, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander has forgotten #84. He is pushing vouchers in Tennessee, which will decimate the public schools in communities across the state.
This is not a conservative idea. It is a radical idea that will destabilize communities. Conservatives don’t destroy traditional institutions. They protect them.
Vouchers will be used to send children to little backwoods church schools with uncertified teachers. Instead of modern science, they will learn the science taught in the Bible. They won’t be prepared for college or life today. That’s what happened in Louisiana. Kids are getting a worse education.
Lamar! Don’t forget #84. You are too smart to fall for nonsense. Stand up for better education for all.
Your friend,
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Lame & Lamar …
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I’m glad you like him, Diane, but I think the charter/voucher push is a political alliance more than an educational one. They need to keep Republicans in the ed reform coalition, so they make a deal. Democrats get THIS and Republicans get THAT.
The schools that aren’t considered, at all, in all this high-level horse trading are existing public schools. There is no consideration, ever, of what these plans do to systems, and public schools in a given geographical area ARE systems.
In Ohio, charters pull from the lower-cost Catholic schools. It’s just fact. I knew they had to remedy that, or lose that portion of their political coalition. So they did. They vastly expanded vouchers, again, with absolutely no consideration or thought to how that would affect existing public schools in a given area. It’s mind-blowing to me. It’s as if public schools are somehow not affected by all this. The one and only time they’re mentioned is with this crazy assumption that it will be 100% positive – they will “learn” from charters or “compete” with vouchers, and everyone wins!
There is NO recognition of downside risk, no recognition that existing public schools could be harmed. It’s incredibly irresponsible.
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Chaira – your comments ring true. Charter vs Parochial vs Private vs Public. Something’s got to give. And we all know who will be harmed by these policies.
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“Conservatives don’t destroy traditional institutions. They protect them.”
Really? I’ve always thought that, at least in my lifetime, Republicans are inherently fiscally and socially conservative, and all about less government and bare bones social programs –if any. Though I didn’t see it coming, now I realize that includes public education.
Which institutions have conservatives sought to protect, besides corporations and the military, and who are some examples?
I’m confused, because I must admit that I was very perplexed every time TR and FDR were described as conservative on The Roosevelts.
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“Wherefore art thou” makes sense when Juliet says it (Romeo, why are you (must be) a Montague, and not a Capulet?) but not when referring to Lamarr
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“. . . they will learn the science taught in the Bible.”
There is science in the bible?
Or perhaps that is Diane’s point!!
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You’ve heard of the Anti-Christ? Now here the roar of the Anti-Science!
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cross posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Lamar-Alexander-Wherefore-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Alexander-Lamar_Decisions_Diane-Ravitch_Education-141003-302.html#comment514444
with this comment: “The assault on public education is done like this, in 50 states with 15,880 districts… It is insidious, and is THE PROCESS by which our democracy will be undone… let people know this is happening.”
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“The decision to accept voucher students was driven mainly by the close-knit parish’s determination not to let its school, which mostly serves low-income children, go under. It came at a time when Catholic dioceses were aggressively merging and closing schools across the country, especially in inner cities, and Dayton’s Catholic schools were among those experiencing an emotionally wrenching downsizing.
Hecker knew what an infusion of voucher students—and the public money they’d bring—would mean to a school on the financial brink.”
She is not a state hire and she doesn’t have any duty to consider what happens to the public school across the street. However. Supposedly, people who choose to work in the public sector DO have a duty to consider the whole picture.
Also? Money is fungible. If the religious entity subsidizes the religious school, and they do here, it’s 30%, the voucher/public money is going to the religious entity.
“Because of vouchers, he said, the church—which serves about 800 families—has cut its subsidy to the school by more than half. Now the parish kicks in about $75,000 annually for the school.”
http://educationnext.org/how-private-schools-adapt-to-vouchers-immaculate-conception-school/
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There is an old saying that everyone has a price. Sometimes the price is blackmail or holding a loved one hostage. It seems that Lamar’s price was found—whatever it was— and he now belongs to the other side. At this point, he probably wishes he’d never written #84.
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By 2016 Democrats will be claiming vouchers were their idea and very, VERY progressive 🙂
“Are vouchers on the horizon? Last week about 500 people–mostly affiliated with the Archdiocese of Chicago–gathered outside the State of Illinois Building to rally for school choice. They want state education money to follow children into private schools — and expect to see a related bill in the State Legislature sometime this spring.
“The Bill Gates’ of the world don’t need school choice,” said Rebeca Nieves Huffman, state director of Democrats for Education Reform. “We would love to see something that prioritizes the lower-income families.”
See how they turned that around? Bill Gates went from noble ed reform philanthropist to bad rich guy, but only when they’re lobbying in Illinois.
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/notebook/2014/09/29/66150/take-5-fewer-tenured-teachers-rehired-voucher-rally-elgin-charter-fight
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Better church schools where they learn to read and write and do arithmetic before studying Newton and the Mona Lisa which was happening to my grandson in public education. Common core is just a way to dumb down our children Remember John Dewey and Progressive Education Dewey was also an atheist and socialist and his ideas were very similar – the destruction of education. I quote – “In practice, Dewey’s theories, as modified by his disciples, have eliminated the strict rules of grammar The student learns grammar by “living” (talking) with the “group,” or by reading literature. Old fashioned drill in spelling, the ABC’s, penmanship, multiplication tables and other basics has been deemphasized in favor of “learn by doing.” The group idea is the nucleus of the progressive system. No child is permitted to forge ahead of another . This would hurt the group. Nobody is left behind because of poor work. ” Taken from “None dare Call It Treason” by John Stormer. Sound familiar ?
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So that’s why so many wealthy people send their children to progressive schools? NOT. That is very old right-wing propaganda.
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I personally am not bashing the majority of parochial schools. But there is a subset of private institutions that take the words of the bible to the extreme and teach children a science curriculum which is delusionary and ignores irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
My taxes go to support public education which is free to all children. If a parent wants an alternative they can ante up or home school. It’s not up to me to fund their other choices.
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oops…first sentence…Mike LEE
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O Letmeknow, Letmeknow. Wherefore Lamart thou? Letmeknow.
Deny thy voucher and refuse thy game,
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my disappointment
And I’ll no longer be in your Plaid-booklet
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Thanks! This is hilarious AND literary!
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Okay, let’s establish at the outset that Lamar Alexander isn’t Jim Inhofe, or Mike Less, or Ted Cruz. Alexander is what now passes for “moderate” in the Republican party.
But make no mistake, Lamar Alexander fits in well with the current crop of conservatives. Alexander is NRA-endorsed (rating of A). He has said that video games are a bigger threat than guns because “because video games affect people.” As if guns do not.
He voted against the Affordable Care Act, and still says ObamaCare should be eliminated. Mike Huckabee, the conservative Christian presidential-wanna-be, campaigns for him. So does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (score of 100 percent), which blames teachers for the the economic mess created by the policies it pushes.
Alexander thinks corporations like Hobby Lobby have the right to religious freedom. Never mind that corporations cannot go to church, much less to heaven or hell. Alexander has a long history of favoring vouchers and privatization. He was education secretary under Bush1, who wanted to be ‘the education president” and implement A Nation at Risk as national education policy. Not surprisingly, this coincided with Chris Whittle’s privatization schemes.
A serious problem arose when researchers at Sandia National Laboratories studied the claims made in A Nation at Risk and concluded that they were bogus. As Berliner and Biddle (1995) reported, “Alarmingly (to supporters of President Bush), many of its findings flatly contradicted claims then being made by administration officials.”
Because the “major findings in The Sandia Report flatly contradicted claims about education that were then being peddled by President Bush in his administration…the report was squelched” inside the education department and the federal government. But draft copies had gotten out, and eventually it was published in a research journal, but never released by the feds.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993),, concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
Not much has changed since A Nation at Risk. The critics continue with their lies. And despite the top-down, high-stakes testing “reform,” public education has performed admirably while the student population of public schools has become more diverse, and poor. As Richard Rothstein recently reported:
“The only consistent data on student achievement come from a federal sample, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though you would never know it from the state of public alarm about education, the numbers show that regular public school performance has skyrocketed in the last two decades to the point that, for example, black elementary school students now have better math skills than whites had only 20 years ago.”
The problem, of course, is that white scores have improved too. How to address that? Rothstein explains:
“The complex answer might lie in the social and economic conditions that bring many children to schools, regular and charter, unprepared to take sufficient advantage of what even the most dedicated and inspired teachers can offer… For the reformers, these are union-inspired excuses, so addressing America’s vast and growing inequalities has no place on their agenda.”
No place on the agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the Business Roundtable. No place on the agenda of the NRA. No place on the agenda of Mike Huckabee, who rejects the scientific theory of evolution and who told Pat Robertson two days ago that Obama “doesn’t want America to be the exceptional nation God made us to be.”
Lamar Alexander is not as odious as Ted Cruz. But sadly, he is now what passes for a “bright bulb” in the Republican party.
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oops…first sentence….Mike LEE
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