The natural alliance between the corporate reformers and the incoming Trump administration has been a theme of many of the posts today, starting with Peter Greene’s post about the “Faux Progressive Polka.”

 

Michael Klonsky calls it as he sees it: the corporate reformers are very comfortable with Trump, because he is singing their song about “school choice” being “the civil rights issue of our time.” Of course, he doesn’t mean it any more than the billionaire hedge funders mean it. School choice is a lot cheaper than raising taxes on the 1% to reduce poverty and to provide medical and social services for poor kids and families.

 

Mike writes:

 

It looks like they’ve dropped their phony rhetoric about charter schools being “the civil rights issue of our time.” Following the Democrat’s devastating loss to Trump, one by one, the corporate reformers and champions of privately-run charters are jumping the Dems’ ship and throwing in behind the racist, anti-immigrant Trump education movement.

 

For some, the move is nothing new. Former D.C. chancellor, Arne Duncan fave, and Waiting for Superman star Michelle Rhee for example, turned to selling her talents to the far right as soon as voters ran her and Mayor Fenty out of town. She went to work advising FL Gov. Rick Scott on school privatization and union-busting matters.

 

Now that she’s stepped down from leadership of her anti-union ed group, Students First, she’s considering leaving her new position with a national fertilizer company if Trump offers her the job as his secretary of education. Her problem is that she’s a proponent of Common Core. Trump isn’t. But either of them can easily accommodate the other’s position since Rhee sees Common Core’s value mainly in its testing provisions, enabling teachers to be evaluated, hired and fired on the basis of student test scores. There should be a basis for unity with Trump there somewhere.

 

And her scandal-ridden past, including her connection with D.C. test-cheating scandal shouldn’t bother the Trump transition team too much considering the rest of his recent scandalized appointees and advisers. Not to mention, Trump’s own $25M pay-off to make the Trump Univ. suit go away.

 

But Trump also has to placate his base. Upon hearing about his possible choice of Rhee, the right-wing group, Parents Against the Common Core, wrote Trump and open letter calling on him to cut federal funding of public schools, dismantle the D.O.E. and appoint someone like former Bush aide Williamson Evers to the top post.

 

BTW, Trump also met with Rhee’s husband KJ, the disgraced mayor of Sacramento. They have some legal problems in common. Something about teenage girls. But let’s not even go there right now. I just ate.

 

Then there’s New York’s own charter-hustler supreme, Eva Moskowitz who is now pulling down nearly a half-million a year for managing the city’s Success Academy Charters. EM met with Trump last week, but reportedly turned down the Ed Sec job. Some NY friends told me she couldn’t afford the pay cut. The Secretary of Education’s salary is a measly $186,600. Others say, she has her eyes on the NY mayor’s office. But she left the meeting on good terms, promising Trump that she would get behind his school reform plan.

 

You really must open Mike’s article to see the many links.

 

He ends his piece by asking, with all the corporate reformers falling in line, can Joel Klein be far behind? As it happens, when I was researching Betsy DeVos, billionaire, school choice advocate, and potential Secretary of Education in the Trump administration, I learned that Betsy and Joel had co-authored an article lauding the value of grading schools on an A-F scale. (see footnote 32 in DeVos’ Wikipedia entry.) Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall; the summary says:

 

DeVos and Joel Klein noted in a May 2013 op-ed that residents of Maine “are now given information on school performance using easy-to-understand report cards with the same A, B, C, D and F designations used in student grades.”

 

Giving public schools a single letter grade is a corporate reform favorite, as it is necessary for school choice. Experience demonstrates that the letter grades reflect affluence and poverty, so the schools of poor kids are slated for closing and privatization. But worse, the very idea that a complex institution can be evaluated with a single letter grade is offensive. No, it is not like a child’s report card. If a child brought home a report card with nothing but a single letter grade, parents would be outraged. No child is a single letter grade. No school is a single letter grade.

 

Klonsky nails it.