Peter Greene has done his homework and he walks us through the career of Betsy DeVos in this illuminating post. Open the piece to read it in full and to see the links to Peter’s research.
She is close to Jeb Bush. She and her billionaire family fund ALEC, the far-right group that drafts model legislation to privatize all government functions. She is a supporter of Scott Walker, scourge of unions. She funded the campaign for the emergency manager law, which allows the governor in Michigan to suspend democracy.
* While it may seem that DeVos is a charterization fan, what she would really like is vouchers, with the prospect of shuffling public tax dollars to private religious schools, new for-profit charters, and pretty much anything except public schools.
* While some choice charter fans call for a robust marketplace balanced with careful oversight to stomp on bad actors, DeVos prefers to let the wisdom of the markets rule and for little or no state or federal oversight be the rule. This has interesting implications for ESSA; the new law includes calls for federal oversight, but if the fed’s attitude is, “Yeah, whatever, do what you want,” the options available to states will become really large and, in some cases, really scary.
* In keeping with her Station in Life, DeVos has never held down an actual job. She graduated around 1980 with a business and poli sci degree, and a little less than a decade later she and her husband set up an investment management group for her to run. In the meantime, she became active as a political operative and party leader in Michigan.
* It will be no surprise that DeVos has never worked in education, and her children never attended (as near as I can discover) public school.
* If you can stomach it, here is Dick DeVos explaining how public education can be starved, broken, and replaced with a money-making business.
DeVos’s feelings about Common Core are not clear, really. She’s a friend of Jeb, but she also runs with the hard right “kill it with” fire Common Core haters. No question that more stories will come tumbling out– as they do, pay attention to folks in Michigan who have been getting beaten up by this family for decades.
But she would rather privatize public education than help it, she would like to make teachers unions a thing of the past, and she has a deep sense of her own rightness. Chalkbeat also offers the observation that DeVos is used to buying her way into policy victories, and as Secretary she wouldn’t be able to just write a check to get everyone to do her will. Or maybe she could. We don’t really know if that’s not okay in Trumplandia or not.
Well, we knew it wouldn’t be pretty. Now we can start to get a sense of just what kind of ugly it’s going to be.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shall we all go outside and vomit together?
CROSS POSTED PETER’S POST ITSELF AT
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/CURMUDGUCATION-Betsy-DeVo-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Fraud_Trump-Cabinet-161123-209.html
Should you maybe look at where the US currently ranks Globally for education?
/you had your chance; let’s try something new. I”m sure may of those inner city parents welcome an opportunity to bus their kids to a school that works.
Public employee unions are worse than pedophilia.
Well, the trumptards have found this this site. So there’s that, which is nice.
Conditions in third world nations, without unions, are abysmal. The result- the rich, avoid them.
Heard on the world news that Jeb Bush “is pleased w/the appointment pf Betsy DeVos.”
I presume that the Podesto Group is pleased, too. The firm’s CEO is the former deputy campaign manager of former Gov. Jeb Bush. (John Podesto was Hillary’s campaign manager.)
It would be nice for families and children to be able to pick a school not based on a zip code. Why do we assign children and families to schools? In the past when communities were more stable this worked ok, I guess. We don’t do it for colleges. Can you imagine being assigned to a university based on your zip code? The defense of the system is typically “this is public money!!!” Public money comes from moms and dads who might have different ideas about what is good for their children than what the school assigners think. Why is this fearful? Maybe we can decouple the idea of other options besides what we currently have, from union busting.
Because people live in communities? Because they like to walk to school? Because public education belongs to the public?
Public money also comes from the general public who have given experts their trust in establishing high quality schools for all. In urban and suburban places where there are lots of schools, parents often have a choice- lots of districts have established lottery type procedures. But in these places, there tends to be a lot of turnover in administration and staff. And so the things parents look for in schools– like is there parent involvement, or are the hallways welcoming–tend to be rather ephemeral. Moreover, in places where parents have choice, parents have tended to overlook high quality teachers or programming, in favor of test scores. In some cases, (e.g., San Francisco) this means that some parents are actually choosing schools with fewer resources and opportunities than schools that look like “bad” schools, simply because there are high concentrations of Asian students in those schools. As a result, those schools are overcrowded. Additionally, (yes, because of union rules on teacher placement) those schools don’t necessarily have better teachers, and they typically have fewer discretionary dollars. In short, parents have imperfect information when choosing schools and sometimes this has negative impact on the education system as a whole. Policy makers need to think of the whole system.
Hello Ms. Ravitch,
Yes, we live in communities. But not all of us walk to school. I love Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana, and VIrginia. I may choose to join any one of those fine communities. Why may I not choose a fine public school community for 9-12th? No voucher, no charter.
Hello Mosfe,
After 30+ years in education, I can assure you that I support whatever works to improve our schools. I am dismayed, however, that the public bundles all schools and education into one package, calling it all flawed, and this is inappropriate for a number of reasons. 1) The vast majority of public schools are doing a good job of educating children. Take a look at the many college degrees walking around out there. The majority of those people were educated in public schools and universities. 2) Much of the student failure I have seen has begun in homes where the importance of education has not been emphasized enough and parents, too busy with their own jobs and lives, simply have too little involvement in the education of their children. They expect the school to do it all. These are frequently not families with too little money, either. Parents need to make sure homework has been satisfactorily completed, help their kids review for tests, understand their child’s strength and weaknesses, attend conferences, etc. 3) Community schools create a sense of belonging in kids and bring families together in a variety of ways. 4) The logistics of school choice are difficult. People who buy a home in a “good” school district may find that there is no room for their child in the nearby school. Budgets have to be planned well ahead and are based on projected enrollment. 5) Teachers are also hired based upon enrollment needs. Good schools have stable, top quality teachers and administrators and are supported financially by the community. 5) There is not enough emphasis or spending on technical education programs. Too many kids think they are college material when they are not. These kids need apprenticeships, career education, etc. 6) Many parents can’t transport their children to and from school due to work schedules and activities. It is impractical to expect school districts to fund even more transportation costs.
I got a little off topic, but I hope you will consider these issues.
Hello Gale, thank you for your very thoughtful reply. I agree, in many places the public school system is working fine. But as a system, I would have to conclude that it is not.
Most troubling to me is the financial/social inequality built into the system. The root of this issue is the real estate tax financing. The system is publicly funded, but it is public only in the sense that it perpetuates gross public inequalities. It is unconscionable.
Our communities have changed and within the schools we regularly and still, demand that they all be what they once were. How can this be when the very framework funding and creating the schools is unequal? In this glaring gap, vouchers, choice and charters have thrived.
Community schools are very good if the communities are working. If not, they can be awful places. Then what do we do? School choice is one option and as you point out, fraught with other issues. Like you, I am for anything that works and won’t rule out choice, vouchers, rebuilding programs, etc. We should add to the list, a sort of VAT to finance public education and eliminate the real estate tax funding system entirely.
The one thing I do rule out is publicly-funded charters. Personally I believe that using tax money for corporations running schools is a disgraceful answer to a disgraceful system of inequality. But, some places may be fine with this idea in the short term because the outcomes and environment are so troublesome. (I have NYC in mind.)
Mosfe,
Years ago, when I was a conservative, I used to say, “I’m for any school that works, no matter who runs it.” I know now that is nonsense. Charters and vouchers can “work” by excluding kids with low scores or kids who might get low scores. Why should test scores become the only measure of what “works”? As we destroy public education, we lose hope for providing a better education for all children; instead, we provide a better education for some, an empty promise for some, and underfunded public schools overloaded with the kids that the charter and voucher schools don’t want.
We’ve been missing the boat, as a field, about what the unit of change must be in order to improve education. From a policy perspective, the “school” started out as the unit of change because that was the most obvious delivery unit for federal education programming. The school effectiveness studies of the 1980s reinforced the notion that “school” is a useful unit of analysis because, when controlling for demographics, some schools appeared marginally better than other schools. Key word: marginally. Future studies would confirm that the effect size for school as a whole on student learning is quite small. Much smaller than teacher-level effects. But it was too late, because NCLB gave us school as unit of accountability, and then schools got labeled, for the whole world to see, how good or bad they were based on the aggregate test scores of the students who attended those schools. The problem was, and still is, that student demographics remain the most powerful predictor of school performance, and in many urban and rural places there are very high concentrations of students living in poverty who attend the same school. Those schools look like “bad” schools relative to the schools where the demographics are more mixed. Free and Reduced Price Lunch as a proxy for economic disadvantage is problematic because we don’t tend to see just how concentrated levels of extreme poverty affect the ability of schools to meet students’ needs (because the threshold for getting a free or reduced price lunch is far above the poverty line). The reality is that schools that are labeled “bad” or “dropout factories” (in films like Waiting for Superman) overwhelmingly tend to be schools with very high concentrations of students living in extreme poverty (at or below the poverty line) who also often happen to be students living with trauma – both current, and historical. I have lots of experience with these types of schools and I can tell you with certainty that they never have enough funding to address the socio-emotional, health and academic acceleration needs of students– maybe, for School Improvement Grants that came with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act they came close, but certainly not now. We never really got to experiment with what it actually takes, resource-wise, to provide ALL children (including those with significant mental health problems and those who spent their early years sitting in car seat at a sketchy daycare facility) to succeed academically. We never really got to see whether low-performing schools are BAD schools, or whether they are simply UNDER-RESOURCED for the circumstances of their student population. There’s simply no evidence to suggest that charters or private schools can do the work of educating ALL students and maintaining their civil and legal rights under state and federal law any better than traditional schools. There IS evidence to suggest that building the infrastructure necessary to do so is time consuming and, as in the case of New Orleans, that you end up building back the bureaucracy to manage the legal stuff anyway. But these are nuances that the general public has difficult seeing/understanding– so instead we get shorthand “good schools” and “bad schools” and the destruction of the public system.