i guess my withdrawal of support for Betsy DeVos came too late. I just received a news flash from CNN that Trump offered her the U.S. Department of Education post, and she took it.
Now we will have a “reformer” who does not hide her contempt for the public schools.
She loves vouchers.
She opposes any any regulation or oversight for charter schools.
She wants privatization, perio.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Line In The Sand …
Time to saddle up!
Betsy DeVos and Laura Slover sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Are you trying to say they are PARCCing, probably in a stretch limousine, eh!!
Just one of many more hits to come. His completed cabinet and other top picks including the SCOTUS will be a horror show of rightwing/tea party gargoyles and foaming at the mouth trolls.
Diane, I read your “endorsement” of DeVos and I didn’t see it as a joke. I thought you hit your head or something.
You didn’t read it carefully. It was both tongue-in-cheek and a way of saying that we should see the “reformers” for what they are: privatizers.
DeVos wants to replace public education with vouchers. No pretense there. She draws a line in the sand. If you believe in public education, you will have to fight for it.
I’ve been fighting for it for years. Jeb Bush already released a statement praising Trump’s choice. This is NOT GOOD!
States rights is the way to make sure that kids keep getting a guaranteed, high quality public education. The federal government can’t push states around and hold to the tenets of right-wing ideology.
Diane – If she supports Common Core and Trump opposes the standards, campaigning on getting rid of them….how does this appointment make sense?!
So far, he hasn’t kept any campaign promises.
DeVos is on the board of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence, which advocates for Common Core and school choice.
Trump just pulled a fast one and betrayed the parents who oppose CC
Is this the same organization Gist is on or is chiefs for change different?
I despise the charter schools and what Cuomo, the NYS Assembly and NYS Senate has done to promote them and undermine public education. Obama, Duncan and John King have been just as bad. So all of this crying over Trump’s pick falls on deaf ears with me. The Democrats have been just as bad in New York and even nationally as the GOP. Hillary has spent most of her career as a cheerleader for the charters.
Obama drew the line at vouchers.
DeVos loves vouchers.
Once you start supporting school choice, it is hard to draw lines.
New York State has almost 400,000 students attending private schools. Cuomo has nibbled at some tax credit proposals, but these students are not publicly funded. Imagine if these students were funded wholly or partially by the same funding stream that sustains public schools? It’s a whole new entitlement program and one that could sharply reduce the growth or even the absolute level of dollars going to public schools.
I could see DeVos working to convert Title I into student “backpack” funds that are portable. Or enact regulations that allow Title I funding to continue in the current form if a state adopts regular vouchers and special education vouchers. IDEA is due for re-authorization and I am sure she will push to include national special education vouchers.
Not defending Duncan or King, but they are working with shovels to undermine public education. DeVos will use a power excavator.
She opposes any any regulation or oversight for charter schools.
Does she support testing, regulation and oversight for public schools, then? Just not for charter schools?
Betsy DeVios has the one thing Trump loves most, lots and lots of her own money to burn.
It has long been my belief that there is a faction of the political world that would like to gut public education both at the content level and financial level so that the students who emerge from those eviscerated schools will be less educated and more easily manipulated. Seems to me we will be seeing this plan in action in the coming four years.
On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “i guess my withdrawal of support for Betsy DeVos > came too late. I just received a news flash from CNN that Trump offered her > the U.S. Department of Education post, and she took it. Now we will have > a “reformer” who does not hide her contempt ” >
And she loves so-called personalized learning. Help us!
“DeVos said in the interview that a basic problem with education is that students are bored, which happens “when you check all of those new technologies at the door and go sit in rows of desks and listen to somebody talk at you for 30 or 40 minutes. Can you imagine sitting through an indifferent lecture when you know there are programs that make learning fun, resources that make information instantly accessible? I can’t.”
DeBoss, oops I mean DeVos, is not a Dewey or Montessori.
Well, it’s great if you have the infrastructure that supports all the technology. In our district, we have to share Chrome books with other teachers in our department, and most of the time the Internet crashes so valuable learning time is lost. You should have seen how successful the SBAC testing was this past school year when most of the students couldn’t log on to their accounts because the Internet was down. How is taking away technological resources going to help public schools? Oh, wait. It’s not because all she wants are charters. And, for what it’s worth, so many school districts push all the academic classes in the belief that all students are going to four-year universities right out of college and they get rid of vocational ed, so of course students are “bored.” I actually had a student tell me that if we had an auto class–he wants to be a mechanic–he’d be more interested in school.
But as many of us teachers know, we can make learning interesting and fun without it being lame, for lack of a better word. We don’t spend the better half of class periods “lecturing.” However, wait until these kids go to college and see that most of their professors lecture.
Look at what happened in Indiana. So goes the rest of the country. We have the nation’s largest voucher program, rampant charter schools, no raises, teacher evaluations bases on test scores, school letter grades based on a terrible test and a huge teacher shortage. It happened so fast that there was no chance of stopping it. Educators must fight this now, or it will be too late.
Anybody is better than Obama’s choices of Duncan and his successor.
The left has to remember Obama’s immortal words that he shoved down our throats –
“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.” – President Obama to House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, January 23, 2009. And our children were hurt by them
Umm, no not “anyone is better”. She is demonstrably worse. What does one expect, though, from THE Trumpster?
Unfortunately, we are in a time where hyperbole has become reality. Duncan was horrendous, but “anybody” is not better. In fact, many are far worse. We have to get really specific now about what is happening and what we need.
Religion enters the picture big time now, as she would like to see NO restrictions on vouchers. The teaching of science is in for a bumpy ride…as for public education, another nail in the coffin. Unions, rev your engines because the fight is on and the hurdles massive. This appointment, when put together with others, could be the biggest wall they are going to build.
“Union MEMBERS, rev your engines because the fight is on TO RID THE UNIONS OF THE UPPER MANAGEMENT TO BEGIN WITH and THEN the hurdle’s massive.
The question in my mind: Who is behind THE Trumpster that is actually directing the show? For Georgie the Least it was The Dickster Shoot Em In The Face While Hunting Illegally Let’s Make a War Profit Cheney. Who is it now? Pence? GFFF!
Is it a given that all of Trumpster’s appointments will be approved?
I would think so. The Senate is a majority Republican one, and since Trump is already known to be thin-skinned and vindictive, no Senator will want to tick him off that early in his presidency.
Sure, this is bad, but surely it’s better than having someone in the White House who spoke callously about the death of Muammar Gaddafi.
Voucher mania hits DC!
Meanwhile, 90% of the kids in the country will be attending the unfashionable and much-maligned public schools that ed reform abandoned.
It will be up to us to support our local schools. No help from the public employees at the US Department of Ed, I guess.
Diane, what do we do? I am at a loss for words and actions at the moment. 😦
Jeremiah,
Join the Network for Public Education and help us fight back in every state. Thanks to the ESSA law, the decisions are at the state level. My hunch is that Trump (or DeVos) will use the example of Race to the Top and offer the $20 billion with strings attached. In order to be eligible, states will need to pass voucher legislation.
Fight we must!
Thankfully I am a member, since 2014!
I figured that might happen. Hopefully, a lot of states will reject the offer.
It would be great to see NPE develop a resource bank that could house:
– Shareable graphics and reports about school choice and vouchers, and how great public schools are, (like Scholastic does with their reading report: http://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/downloads.htm)
“Elevator speeches” to use when talking with colleagues, friends, and family about public education and how school choice and vouchers don’t work.
Sample scripts to use when calling our senators and congressman.
Diane, I just sent NPE a bit of money, because I think you will really need it if Ms DeVos gets confirmed. The sad part is, I think you have lost your message, and I say this with great love for your fortitude and dedication to our public schools. Many people I talk to see public schools failing in their neighborhoods. They went to a public school and then to an Ivy League college, and now they see public schools that are in bad states of disrepair, have no air conditioning, and 40-year-old textbooks, and the kids who graduate go to no-name colleges that are just as expensive but fail to prepare their kids for our world these days.
I don’t know if vouchers are constitutional (I suppose it depends on the constitutions of the different states and can’t really tell how much pull the federal Ed Dept will have over this), but parents are naturally going to do what they think is best for their own kids. Many I have talked to actually like the idea that the government can help them out to send their kid to a private school, where the furniture is nice, the food tastes better, the science labs have some cool equipment, and the teachers double at the local community college and teach college-level courses.
Now, charters have a tendency to fold out of the blue and leave kids in a lurch, but some Catholic schools, for instance, actually provide a more college-ready education program for kids who want to attend a good college. But the tuition is often high, and parents who are more focused on what they think is best for their own kid don’t see a lack of diversity as a problem that reduces the quality of their kid’s education.
Parents don’t generally have the health of the whole system in mind, as we teachers do. Plus they really have expressed to me that they’re tired of fighting. I realize that’s what the reformers wanted, but I’m afraid they have won.
To speak pragmatically, I hope you take whatever money people send and refocus your message, that you live to fight another day (because Ms DeVos is a loser as a top public school educator, based on the information you’ve provided), and that you use your bravery to improve the quality of the public schools we can save. I think that’s what parents need to hear, and then maybe, just maybe, next time, even for a little while, we’ll actually get a federal education secretary who cares about the public schools and “all” schoolchildren in this country, not just the privileged ones.
If you believe in public schools, then you should not give up. See the post by the Principal from Indiana. It’s about what’s best for communities, families and individual students. We need to invest in neighborhood schools – period!
Hey Betsy, got any AMWAY products to sell America?
No, well I guess your “pay to play” voucher schemes will have to do.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/5-things-to-know-about-betsy-devos-trumps-pick-for-education-secretary/508661
Her husband is financially fixed because of the Amway company. She had NO education background at all.
Scary for our students, and public education. Educating ALL children is one of the best, and most important things we do as a country.
Vouchers. How innovative.
DeVoss wants to double down on yet another failed, “grass-is-greener” idea.
Parents who find this enticing should think twice before they enroll their child into a bare bones parochial school. You will be limiting your kids opportunities in these regressive schools.
More snake-oil on the public buck.
It’s interesting that any veneer and all pretense have been dropped after the election of what Romney and Jen Bush have described as a “fraud”. They wouldn’t go near him with a 10 foot pole. Now he’s well respected by the establishment. Truly frightening for our immediate future as educators and citizens.
Actually, this news is a Rheelief to me.
How to have an impact: contact via phone and by visiting your state Representative and Senator–personally! Tell them that you support your local public schools and that if she/he demonstrates any support for vouchers or more charter schools that you’ll place flyers at the local businesses noting that she/he has abandoned her/his local citizens and their schools.
Private and charter schools are not effective primarily because they primarily do NOT hire certified teachers–and the research is definitive that certified teachers matter!
See the book, Why America’s Public Schools Are the Best Place for Kids: Reality vs. Negative Perceptions (2012)