Okay, maybe you can’t be shocked anymore to learn that billionaires have bought politicians. Still, when you read this article in the Detroit Free Press, I think you will be as outraged as I was and am. The charter lobby has outdone itself this time. I haven’t paid as much attention to the DeVos family as I should have. Their fortune comes from Amway. Betsy DeVos started a privatization organization deceptively named the American Federation for Children. The family would like to replace public education altogether, preferably with vouchers. They are devotees of the free market ideology, though they are happy to have government subsidize the free market. One thing is clear: they despise public schools and will gladly reward legislators to agree with them.
This article was written by Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. If the DeVos family and the Michigan GOP wanted to help the children of Detroit, would they insist on eliminating any accountability for charter schools?
Henderson writes:
“Bought and paid for.
“Back in June, that’s how I described the Detroit school legislation that passed in Lansing — a filthy, moneyed kiss to the charter school industry at the expense of the kids who’ve been victimized by those schools’ unaccountable inconsistency.
“And now, through the wonder of campaign finance reports, we are beginning to see what it took to buy the GOP majority in Lansing, just how much lawmakers required to sell out Detroit students’ interests.
“The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.
“The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.
“There’s nothing more difficult than proving quid pro quos in politics, the instances in which favor is returned for specific monetary support.
“But look at the amounts involved, and consider the DeVos’ near-sole interest in the issue of school choice. It’s a fool’s errand to imagine a world in which the family’s deep pockets haven’t skewed the school debate to the favor of their highly financed lobby.
“And in this case, it was all done to the detriment of children in the City of Detroit.
“Deep pockets, long arms
“Back in March, the Senate voted to place charter schools under the same authority as public schools in the city, for quality control and attention to population need and balance, in line with a plan that had been in the works for more than a year, endorsed and promoted by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.
“But when the bills moved to the state House, lawmakers gutted that provision, returning a bill to the Senate that preserved the free-for-all charter environment that has locked Detroit in an educational morass for two decades. After less than a week of debate, the Senate caved.
“Even then, several legislators complained that the influence of lobbyists, principally charter school lobbyists, was overwhelming substantive debate. The effort was intense, they said, and unrelenting.
“Now we know what was at stake.
“Five days later, several members of the DeVos family made the maximum allowable contributions to the Michigan Republican Party, a total of roughly $180,000.
“The next day, DeVos family members made another $475,000 in contributions to the party.
“It was the beginning of a spending spree that would swell to $1.45 million in contributions to the party and to individual candidates by the end of July, according to an analysis by the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.
“The polite term for this kind of reflexive giving is transactional politics; it is the way things work not just in Lansing but in Washington, and in political circles in all 50 states.
“But the DeVos family has a singular focus on one issue, school choice. And given Michigan’s murky campaign finance laws, it’s harder to quantify what’s going on until long after it has happened.
“The substantive tragedy here, of course, is much starker.
“The legislation the DeVos family bought preserves a unique-in-the-nation style of charter school experimentation in Detroit.
“If I wanted to start a school next year, all I’d need to do is get the money, draw up a plan and meet a few perfunctory requirements.
“I’d then be allowed to operate that school, at a profit if I liked, without, practically speaking, any accountability for results. As long as I met the minimal state code and inspection requirements, I could run an awful school, no better than the public alternatives, almost indefinitely.
“That’s what has happened in Detroit since the DeVos family helped push the charter law into existence 20 years ago.
“On average, the schools don’t perform on state and national tests much better than public schools. A few outliers have reached remarkable heights. A few have done much worse. And charter advocates have become crafty liars in the selling of their product.
“They’ll crow, for instance, that nearly twice as many of their kids do as well on national math assessments as the public schools. What they don’t tout are the numbers, which show the public schools are 8%, and the charters at 15%.
“Regardless of outcome, none of the charter school establishment has been subject of a formal oversight and review that would reward the best actors and improve the worst.
“Education should always be about children. But in Michigan, children’s education has been squandered in the name of a reform “experiment,” driven by ideologies that put faith in markets, alone, as the best arbiters of quality, and so heavily financed by donors like the DeVos clan that nearly no other voices get heard in the educational conversation.
“The legislation debated this spring in Lansing was the first meaningful effort to change that — not to punish charter schools for independence, but to subject both charter and public schools to a rational means of review and improvement.
“There is no conscionable objection to this kind of basic oversight. But the DeVos family’s purchase of the souls of the GOP majority stalled progress for children in this state’s largest city.
“In all the other states where I’ve lived — Maryland, Illinois, Kentucky — it is impossible to imagine such a tightly held interest wielding that much influence.
“Why allow it?
“Beyond the substantive problem, there is the profound question of the sanctity of our political process.
“Is this how we do business in Michigan? Is this how we reach conclusions about important matters of public policy? The DeVos family isn’t breaking any law. The question we have to ask ourselves is why our laws permit this measure of single-interest dominance in politics.
“Back in the spring, I suggested that the legislators who sold out to the DeVos family be rounded up, sewn into burlap bags with rabid animals, and tossed into the Straits of Mackinac.
“My hyperbole was fueled by indignant outrage. I meant it to be. This kind of craven betrayal by public officials, so naked and with so much consequence for vulnerable citizens, ought to make all of us indignant, and outraged.
“Now that we know the other part of the story — the DeVos family’s apparent purchase of our state’s GOP — it should do more than outrage us.
“It should motivate us to make change.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This comes as no surprise. I’ve mentioned this before here, so I risk belaboring the point: Jane Mayer, in her exhaustively researched and superbly written book “Dark Money,” thoroughly exposes the DeVos family as the epitome of self-serving unscrupulousness. Indeed, Ms. Mayer quotes Betsy DeVos (I paraphrase) as saying unequivocally that she expects policy prerogatives as a quid pro quo for her campaign contributions.
Did you know Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, the private defense contractor, is a scion of this family?
Yes, Eric Prince is Betsy DeVos’ brother. He’s not a nice person.
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/24/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-under-federal-investigation/
“Founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.
What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.”
Wow, thanks jcgrim–Eric Prince is truly a prince!
Prince of Darkness, that is.
One thing local media could do in Michigan and Ohio that they haven’t done is name names. List the authorizers. List the person or persons in charge at the authorizer. When local media covers my local public school they name the superintendent and the school board members.
Michigan will be easier than Ohio because many of the authorizers are publicly-funded colleges, where Ohio’s are opaque collections of initials- no one has any idea who runs these outfits or what they do to earn their cut of student funding.
When lawmakers abandoned responsibility for public education and relinquished regulation to authorizers, the intent was they would regulate at least tangentially or indirectly thru authorizers.
List the names. People in Michigan will recognize them.
Why isn’t Detroit held up as an ed reform failure? It’s 40% charters, right? It was just “reformed” in 2012- Broad and Duncan and Rhee parachuted in to promote it. They held a celebratory event at a political shindig.
Why didn’t free markets work? Maybe someone could ask someone in ed reform. How long before ed reform is accountable for ed reform? Can they give us an estimate? It’s not “20 years”, we know that, because that’s come and gone. Is it 40 years? 50? 100?
“Why didn’t free markets work?”
Because there is no such beast. The term “free market” is a description of human economic activity. As such the “free market” has no volition, cannot act or “work” and is just a mental construct. Nothing more.
But there is magic in the misuse and abuse of language and meanings for those who benefit monetarily from the mental confusions caused by that misusage and abuse.
We need to overturn Citizens United and revamp our campaign finance laws to limit the impact of billionaires’ money. Michigan is one of several states that has so many corrupt legislators that it is impossible to introduce a bill to clean up the mess because the corporate pawns would have to vote to turn off the money faucet that serves them. We all know this won’t happen. As for the DeVos family and their influence, what do you expect from people that made millions from a pyramid scheme?
Why are Detroit charters authorized by a community college that is hundreds of miles from Detroit? What specifically do they do as far as regulating their schools? Who is the person or person who is responsible for the schools at the community college?
Those would be good questions for a newspaper to ask.
Parents, Students, and Teachers will get the public education system they deserve. The fact that it’s September of 2016 and they aren’t en masse in the streets is a strong indication they don’t deserve any better yet.
The DeVos family buys politicians primarily in the Republican Party but they do have some powerful Democrats on the payroll as well. Sen. Corey Booker -D NJ is a DeVos $ fave.
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cory-booker-black-trojan-horse-for-the-republica/
“Back in 2002, when the young Booker was running for mayor of Newark, prof Kilson described him as “an errand boy Black politician for conservative Republican power-class penetration of governing control of Black Newark.” Booker was much more candid about his political values and policy positions back then, which included: xxxxxxx (my deletion) “third-way” politics, small government, privatization of public housing and public education. Booker’s early rightwing political backers were also much more visible.
The NYT described Booker as progressive, but the fact is that his political career was launched with help from the rightwing industrial-thinktank complex. Specifically: money and connections provided by DeVos Amway billionaires, the Walton family, the Manhattan Institute and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation— the same folks who once backed crypto-eugenicist Charles Murray.
Booker was so good on the issues that WSJ’s Koch-boy John Fund endorsed Booker for Newark mayor, calling him a “potent national symbol for a new generation of black leaders who reject Al Sharpton-style racial polarization“ and noted Booker’s support for ”charter schools“ and ”school choice” (aka breaking teachers unions and turning public education over to private contractors)—because clearly that’s what black people need, and anyone who disagrees is speaking from a position of white privilege!”
Thank you for the additional information on Corey Booker, one of the most duplicitous and contemptible of so-called “Third Way” Democrats.
Henderson writes, “legislators who sold out to the DeVos family be rounded up, sewn into burlap bags with rabid animals, and tossed into the Straits of Mackinac.”
This is a good start, but it ends far to soon. My suggestion, to start, the ancient Chinese used silk and water. They would put one layer of silk over a restrained victim’s mouth and nose and then poor water on the silk. Then another layer with more water, and another, and another until the frantic victim is struggling mighty to suck in enough oxygen through all those wet layers of silk to breathe. Then they’d stop before the victim expired and move to the last but longest step that can take as much as a year. Death by a thousand cuts, a horrible, very painful lingering death.
And why just the corrupt legislators the DeVos family bought. Why not the entire DeVox family too.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
KING: What we need are more great schools, whether they’re charter schools or district schools. We know too many of our students are in schools that are struggling, and so we’ve got work to do to improve opportunities. Charters can be a part of that. That said, there are some terrible charters, and those schools should be closed. Part of the agreement in getting a charter is that the school be good or the school won’t be allowed to continue. And so we need states to step up as charter authorizers and really have meaningful accountability. But where charters are creating opportunities for students, where they’re getting much better academic outcomes, they’re going on to college at higher rates, we should celebrate that, and we should expand those opportunities.
Secretary King himself says the authorizers are responsible for the schools. That’s who they “relinquished” responsibility to. Surely we can find out who these people are who are dropping the ball. Michiganders might be interested.
You’d say “X Community College” and then a name or names. That shouldn’t be hard.
When you take the children out of the school, what’s left, empty buildings. How can you place a ranking/score on empty buildings?
You don’t create great schools by firing teachers and turning publicly owned schools over to corporations that do nothing to change the environment and socioeconomic conditions the children grow up in.
For instance, the high school where I taught the last 16 years of my career as a public school teacher was ranked a 3 on a scale of 10 with 10 being the highest. California has had a ranking system for decades and it is meaningless unless you use it to measure poverty.
One year when the score was announced and plastered on pages inside major newspapers, students laughed and challenged me about the failing school they were in.
This is what I told them. That ranking doesn’t represent the school. It represents you the students. It shows how much you learned and doesn’t show anything about the quality of teaching in the school. I said, about 5 percent of my students turn in homework and about half bother to do the classwork. The test scores reflect how much a student learns and the work and reading a student does is what leads to learning. If you don’t pay attention in class, don’t do the reading, don’t do the class assignments, don’t do the homework, then the test scores will reflect what you did not learn.
This is the harsh reality that causes too many corporate charter schools to cherry pick the students they take and keep. this is the harsh reality that explains why so many corporate charters have such high suspension, expulsion and attrition rates.
A great school comes with students that cooperate with teachers, read and do the work and these children have supporting parents.
Test scores only measure poverty. They do not accurately measure if the teachers in a school are doing their job or not. Please explain to me how in every class I taught there were students who did all the reading and work, earned A’s and went to college where they were successful while many other students didn’t do the reading and work and didn’t go to college. Some of those college bound students also earned full ride scholarships and grants to schools like MIT, San Diego, Berkeley and Stanford, but in the same class were brain dead gangbusters who did nothing to the point that they made no effort to even write their name on the piece of paper for the classroom work. The difference was almost always the parents. On parent conference night when teachers were at school from dawn to dark and left after 9 p.m. 99 percent of the parents that came were the parents of children earning passing grades that were mostly As and Bs. Where were the parents of all the children that were failing because they didn’t do most of the reading, classwork and homework? These were the same parents that often were too difficult to reach by phone.
Even this Stanford study proves that it isn’t the teachers or the school that are bad even if they are underfunded and starving for improvements in infrastructure. Dedicated teachers will go the extra mile to help children learn. That’s why the average teacher in the U.S. spends more than $500 on average annually for classroom supplies. That is almost $2 billion annually that public school teachers spend out of their own pockets to make up for the cuts in education.
The Stanford Study reveals that poverty is the problem in every country — not just the U.S.
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and mot much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantages students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in couturiers to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
What have corporations done for decades to improve socioeconomic conditions in the U.S.? Next to nothing. Instead, they have fought minimum wage laws, fought to destroy labor unions, moved jobs to third world countries, and automated jobs firing people by the millions.
The poverty is only going to get worse and if there are no community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools to teach all the children, what’s going to happen? I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Many children that live in poverty will end up on the streets with no opportunity (What’s already happening in New Orleans is a perfect example of this) to get an education and the prison population that is already #1 in the world will only grow and grow and grow as the cherry-picked, poverty pipeline feeds directly to private sector, for profit prisons hungry for more profits that can only come with more prisoners.
When the Obama Administration were pushing states to expand charters for the last 7 years, did they demand the regulation they (now) say they want?
Wasn’t the incentive based on just unlimited growth? It must have been, since they awarded Ohio millions of dollars to replace public schools with charter schools and we all know Ohio doesn’t regulate charters.
Why didn’t they condition their cheerleading and funding on sufficient regulation?
Seems way too late to demand it now.
:I posted this in another Dr Ravitch blog but just so no one misses it:
In Indiana but relevant to everyone:
ITT has shut down Merrillville campus, all other locations
Students can transfer or wipe out federal loans
Joseph S. Pete joseph.pete@nwi.com, (219) 933-3316 Updated 1 hr ago
ITT is shutting down Merrillville campus, all other locations
Buy Now
John J. Watkins
ITT, which has a campus in Merrillville, is shutting down.
ITT Educational Services Inc., which has a Merrillville campus, shut down Tuesday, shortly after a federal crackdown that prohibited it from accepting any new students with federal financial aid.
The for-profit school’s closure will put 8,000 employees out of work and disrupt the educations of about 40,000 students nationwide.
“It is with profound regret that we must report that ITT Educational Services, Inc. will discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently after approximately 50 years of continuous service,” the company said in a press release. “With what we believe is a complete disregard by the U.S. Department of Education for due process to the company, hundreds of thousands of current students and alumni and more than 8,000 employees will be negatively affected.”
ITT, which was the subject of various state and federal investigations, at one time had more than 220 students at its Merrillville campus at 8488 Georgia Street. The Carmel, Ind.-based for-profit college, which made $580 million of its $850 million in total revenue from federal aid dollars last year, had about 130 other campuses in 29 states.
The U.S. Department of Education leveled sanctions more than a week ago after finding ITT Tech failed to meet a number of accreditation standards, including student retention, placement and licensure passage rate.
“For more than half a century, ITT Tech has helped hundreds of thousands of non-traditional and underserved students improve their lives through career-focused technical education,” the college said a statement. “This federal action will also disrupt the lives of thousands of hardworking ITT Tech employees and their families. More than 8,000 ITT Tech employees are now without a job — employees who exhibited the utmost dedication in serving our students.”
U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said in a blog post that current and recently enrolled ITT students can choose to wipe away their federal loan debt and restart their education at another college, or that they might be able to transfer their credits somewhere else. The second option could make more sense for students close to graduation, but other programs might not accept their ITT credits and transferring could jeopardize their ability to have federal loans discharged.
“Whatever you choose to do, do not give up on your education,” King wrote. “Higher education remains the clearest path to economic opportunity and security. Restarting or continuing your education at a high-quality, reputable institution may feel like a setback today, but odds are it will pay off in the long run.”
Federal and state agencies have been cracking down on for profit colleges in recent years, which has resulted in the closure of Indiana Dabney University in Hammond and Brown Mackie College campuses in Merrillville and Michigan City.
Another word for the “dictionary”–villainthropists. (Which I used quite a while back, RE: Broad, Waltons & Gates.)