Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) issued a statement congratulating Betsy DeVos on her selection by Donald Trump to be Secretary of Education. The statement expressed the hope that Trump might “disavow” his hateful rhetoric. Note that the DFER statement does not mention vouchers, which is DeVos’ most cherished goal, nor does it acknowledge that DeVos paid out $1.5 million to Michigan legislators to block ANY oversight of charter schools. Nor does it refer to Michigan’s for-profit charters, which are 80% of all charters in the state. Nor does it make any mention of public schools, which enroll 94% of all public school children (excluding those in religious and independent schools, which are about 10% of the total).
The reformers are in a pickle. They can’t claim fealty to Trump, because they pretend to be Democrats. But Trump has embraced the reformer agenda, lock, stock and barrel. This statement is one way of handling their dilemma: embrace DeVos–a figure who finances the far-right and wants completely unregulated, unaccountable choice, and simultaneously chide Trump for his hateful rhetoric. Pretend to be Democrats while saluting her. Search for any gift she ever made to a real civil rights group to offset the tens of millions the DeVos has invested in rightwing groups that are hostile to equity. Let’s watch to see what other “reformers” come up with, now that Trump and DeVos are the new face of “reform” and do not hide their desire to jettison public schools.
New York, NY – In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) President Shavar Jeffries released the following statement:
“DFER congratulates Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.
“However, DFER remains deeply concerned by much of the President-elect’s education agenda, which proposes to cut money from Title I and to eliminate the federal role on accountability. These moves would undermine progress made under the Obama administration to ensure all children have access to good schools. In addition, our children are threatened by many of the President-elect’s proposals, such as kicking 20 million families off of healthcare, deporting millions of Dreamers, and accelerating stop-and-frisk practices. We hope that Mrs. Devos will be a voice that opposes policies that would harm our children, both in the schoolhouse and the families and communities in which our children live.
“Finally, regardless of one’s politics, Trump’s bigoted and offensive rhetoric has assaulted our racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, causing millions of American children to perceive that they are less than full members of our communities. We hope Mrs. DeVos will push the President-elect to disavow such rhetoric.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Democrats for Education Reform.
Why don’t we have Democrats for Reproductive Reform, Democrats for Labor Reform, Democrats for Marriage Reform, and Democrats for Welfare Reform?
Oh. That’s right, we do.
They’re called Republicans.
🙂
I’m with Lenny. Accurate comment, Liz.
Liz- bingo!
Great comment
ditto Terry Kalb: BINGO 🙂
Nailed it! I’ll add that “bipartisanship” is, like “choice” and “reform”, a mauled word.
They’ll all fall in line. It’s 20 billion from public schools to charters and private schools.
Ed reform has never advocated on behalf of kids in existing public schools. Why would they start now?
Maybe it will be good for public schools. This national “movement” is now officially irrelevant to 90% of schools.
I just wish public schools would stop hiring them. They don’t value your school! Don’t hire people who work to eradicate public schools! Charter chains would never hire people who are opposed to charter schools, yet public schools hire these people. It’s nuts.
I hope you are correct. However, the missing Title 1 money will not harm most middle or working class people. It will mostly harm those that are poor and powerless and those that are limited in English and already disenfranchised.
Any person associated with an organization founded by Kim Smith, e.g. TFA, Aspen Pahara, Bellwether, New Schools Venture Fund or funded by Gates/Walton/Spenser/Broad, should explain why he/she thinks the public should pay for branded, for-profit education and, when the answer is unsatisfactory, as it will be, the person should be rejected for any job in the public sector, IMO.
You know who will be left out of this exclusive little DC club? Public school kids.
They should all be ashamed of themselves for taking paychecks they don’t earn. They don’t support “public education”. They support charter and private schools.
Public schools need not apply for DC support. They are not a factor in these negotiations. There won’t be a single person at the table advocating for them. Not one.
They remind me so much of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Django Unchained. Predictable, but my skin crawls when I read the kind of tripe the DFERs generate.
Will people who work in public schools be allowed to enter the giant federal agency that supposedly works on their behalf?
Which adult in DC will dare to advocate for the unfashionable and much-maligned public sector schools? Anyone? Or is that a career-killer?
I wish Trump had gotten rid of the USDOE. I’m funding a completely captured entity that works AGAINST my son’s school. I resent that.
You and millions of other parents and grandparents. As Jonathan Kozol says, “Don’t just get mad. Get organized.” Trump really duped the working class who, according to what I read in the paper today, will be paying more in taxes while the billionaires pay about 14% less.
DFER doing this is yet one again WHY so many people who are disenfranchised by the Democratic party have voted for Trump.
Other non-DFER Democrats should be rallying like crazy with every press conference available to decry and admonish the DFERs, who are a bunch of bastards.
Hah! My first curse word in formal English discourse ever, and I think I applied it correctly in this context.
I think the impact of DFER which is mostly hedge fund managers, turned a lot of people away from the Democratis. They are sick of Wall St. pulling the strings of the party. Now as they can see, the Republicans under Trump will be so much worse.
Please teach us some Norwegian curse words (with the phonetic equivalent spelling). It’s only fair. I imagine that one Norwegian curse might be: May you rot in hell with Quisling. DFERs are Quislings.
Joe: I don’t know if this is curse word, but it is the most common expression in Norwegian to express dismay. Uff da! I learned from a Norwegian American friend and her elderly grandmother that said this when she struggled to get out of her chair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uff_da
The USDE provided Gates with an avenue to control public education.
The irony is the Gates were just awarded the Medal of Freedom by Obama for their disastrous interference with public education and other money dropping ideas. Bill believes in freedom about as much as Trump does because in both their worlds billionaires know best.
I saw that Medal of Freedom event and I was sickened.
as for this ”
We hope that Mrs. Devos will be a voice that opposes policies that would harm our children, both in the schoolhouse and the families and communities in which our children live.”
This is not wishful thinking. In the South it was called boot licking.
For some good news. The National Book Award went to the graphic novel MARCH by a true hero John Lewis, and his collaborators. John Lewis spoke of growing up in Alabama in a home where there were few books. At about twelve or thirteen he went to the local library hoping to get a card and check out some books. The librarian said the library was only for whites.
This is probably a replay you can find at C-Span.
John Lewis is an amazing human. It must be so surreal to him to see Donald Trump as president-elect.
Here’s the video: https://youtu.be/uqmYNOPVyO4
When does the “public schools suck!” political campaign start?
They’ll need to bash our schools plenty to sell 20 billion in vouchers.
I can’t tell you thrilled I am to pay thousands of federal employees to launch a political campaign against my son’s school. Do they really think this is why people pay them? To work as hard as they can to harm our schools?
The “public schools suck!” is never-ending. Christie never stops demonizing our public schools, the teachers and especially the unions. And NJ is highly rated. A normal governor would be bragging about NJ schools but CC has an agenda that does not include public schools.
Sounds like the inverse of the situation between the Trump campaign & white nationalist groups: it would have damaged the campaign to extend publicly a warm welcome, but privately they recognized that the support could put them over the top (turns out they were right). (So much for their denunciation of Hillary’s acknowledgment of “public” & “private” selves.) The education reformers added a statement in their congratulatory message expressing concern about the campaign’s verbal assault on “racial, ethnic, & religious minorities”; is that just lip service, or do the reformers actually not see that such an assault (& real, not just verbal) is, in practical effect, inextricably tied to their goals?
The answers to your two last questions: Yes and Yes they see it, but still can’t own up to it.
That’s what I thought – thanks for the reality check. 🙂
FYI:
From Department of Education (ED) Website this morning, 11-27-16
Below are the DOE and OSERS Mission Statements (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services)
DOE (ED) Mission Statement
ED’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.
Congress established the U.S. Department of Education (ED) on May 4, 1980, in the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88 of October 1979). Under this law, ED’s mission is to:
Strengthen the Federal commitment to assuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual;
Supplement and complement the efforts of states, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the states, the private sector, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education;
Encourage the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in Federal education programs;
Promote improvements in the quality and usefulness of education through Federally supported research, evaluation, and sharing of information;
Improve the coordination of Federal education programs;
Improve the management of Federal education activities; and
Increase the accountability of Federal education programs to the President, the Congress, and the public.
OSERS Mission Statement (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services)
Inclusion|Equity|Opportunity
OSERS is committed to the broad values of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity for infants, toddlers, children, youth and adults with disabilities to actively participate in all aspects of life. OSERS promotes inclusion, ensures equity and creates opportunity as we strive to improve results and outcomes for children and adults with disabilities.
Mission
To provide leadership to achieve full integration and participation in society of people with disabilities by ensuring equal opportunity and access to, and excellence in, education, employment and community living.
The equity issue is the main reason why Tiltle 1 funds have been used to provide supplemental instruction to poor students. How is $20 billion used for charters going to improve outcomes for poor students? We know that charters reject the neediest and most expensive students. The way it seems to me is that the students that need the most help will not benefit one iota from charter expansion under Trump’s plan.
That is when DeVos will implement the Child Labor Strategy.
Interference with political messaging…
Today’s Washington post had the following: “Steve Huffman, the chief executive of Reddit, knows he has some explaining to do.
Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, landed in hot water Wednesday after admitting that he used his administrative powers to secretly edit user comments that were critical of him on r/The_Donald — a popular, pro-Trump forum (or “subreddit”). He swapped all mentions of his own username with the names of the pro-Trump group’s leaders, meaning that expletive-laden posts aimed at him looked instead as if they were insulting the group’s leaders…”
Interesting read…
This event creates a marvelous opportunity to pressure the DNC to disavow DFER once and for all. Time to get rid of the losing strategy.
The California Democratic Party passed a resolution a few years ago declaring the DFER should stop using the word “Democratic” in their name because they were a front for corporate interests.
Nice! Let that be the model.
LeftCoastTeacher: That’s the method: Push the envelop, abuse your rights, lie about your products, poison food, market junk, cigarettes, and porn to children, fill the atmosphere with chemicals, ruin the oceans, over-fish, cut down all of the trees and kill all the animals, steal from our bank accounts and credit cards . . . on and on–so much so that reasonable people shout STOP! and so government brings down regulations to protect the public and the world from destruction of those who think they own the whole place. THEN, the method continues: complain about regulations and too-much government control.
That’s how (the method) you kill the freedoms that are supposed to come with living in a democracy.
Couldn’t public schools look at this as a positive? They won’t owe anything to the ed reform lobby or Donald Trump.
The flip side of DC politicians and operatives abandoning public schools is public schools aren’t beholden to DC politicians and operatives.
We owe these people nothing. We can reject their fads and gimmicks and expensive experiments. We don’t even have to hire any of them.
The positive is that we know who wants to destroy public schools. There is no pretense that school choice is a civil rights issue. School choice is the goal of billionaires and extremists who want to destroy public education.
DeVos will help to mobilize people who are Democrats and Republicans to defend public schools.
The danger is clear.
Your voice continues to be important, inspiring, and informative.
I agree with Liz! Unfortunately, Democrats weren’t much better when it came to supporting public education; but they would have been better than Trump and his billionaire buddies.
The Democrats were awful on public education. Who could have imagined anyone worse than Duncan? Yet, here comes DeVos. Wait to see if Duncan speaks out against her. My bet: Not.
DFER
Just so everyone is clear that the enemies of our livelihoods are fully and absolutely bipartisan.
The only question on the table right now is if Trump/DeVos will be as damaging and existentially threatening to public schools and teachers as Obama/Duncan-King. Only question.
I honestly don’t think they can be much worse than Obama/Duncan. Why? Because Obama/Duncan had a semblance of a mandate, were at least fundamentally competent, had the ability to seamlessly utilize and deploy the rhetoric of social justice and liberation and not sound insane doing so, and had direct connections to the smartest elements of the reform/privatizing world.
Trump/DeVos? Not so much. Many blue states will ignore the worst of whatever they try to carrot and stick the states in to doing, mostly because of the insane people trying to do it. DeVos is not ready for national prime time and is beholden to a neo-fascist maniac. Because they represent the right side of the political spectrum at this moment, which means they are almost entirely anti-intellectual, none of their policies and ideas will seem anything but crude government-hating, democracy-hating, union-hating, brown-people hating, and poor-people hating jabs and punches.
The democrats are faaaar more dangerous with education reform. With the republicans it’s by nature way more honest, which means way more crass and crude and impolitic and easy to reject.
So yeah, everyone is freaking out about DeVos. As if whatever reform-sympathizer HRC would have put in the position would have been better. As if Obama’s legacy on education hadnt already played out to be dreadful and heinous.
Trump is a cataclysm. A near-natural disaster of epic proportions. He is a crisis to the American experiment at every level. But lets not be ahistorical on the education front. We’ve been facing our apocalypse for like a decade at this point. The game continues for us as all. The bigger picture really does suck tho!
NYS Teacher,
Your analysis might be correct, BUT: most states are now controlled by Tea Party Republicans. They will harken to DeVos’ toxic message.
Hi Diane,
Well yes, absolutely. The Tea Party Republican-dominated states will aggressively embrace DeVos’ message…..which is the same message of Duncan/King, just without the lingo that made it irresistible to people on the broad left. Those red states will probably embrace her ideas more wholeheartedly if only because they derive from a republican rather than, you know, an Obama or HRC administration. But nonetheless, of course red states will go hard for privatizing. Thats a given.
But…..aren’t those states lost anyway from an education point of view? There was never going to be a scenario where, with their state governments being as right as they are, they weren’t going to continue to be education reform hell-holes.
The real threat that a Trump administration brings to public education and teachers is NOT via the Education Department and its Secretary, but via the assault we are about to see on organized labor in general. We focus on the Sec. of Ed. position to our peril, as its UNION BUSTING that is the main event. When the walls finally come down there, across-the-board ed. reform etc. is a given, everywhere.
In the few blue states, like California and New York, the question is going to be how reform-minded democrat governors like Cuomo will handle the awfulness coming from DeVos. Will Cuomo, for example, shun her carrots and sticks for New York State or will he embrace them as a place to find common ground?? Thats the question for blue states. As it stands, Cuomo has been as bad as bad can be re. education, teachers, and our union. Will he embrace or reject?
It serves to note that a Trump admin. and the wreckage that will come with it, will be disproportionately applied state-to-state. Solid blue states will form bubbles against the worst of a Trump Admin, and heavy red states will embrace, and then somehow blame minorities, liberals, etc. when it doesn’t play out well for them. Education is no different, broadly.
That said, ed reform is about union busting. A Trump admin will be about union busting. And that is where we have needed to keep our focus for the past decade in education…..instead we approached it as an educational-academic issue. A conflict of competing educational philosophies. It was never that. There is no coherent philosophical ground to ed reform other than privatizing the commons….this isn’t deep, and its generally not countered in academic discourse. It has ALWAYS been a labor issue. And it needs to be fought like a labor issue.
NYS teacher,
I have always been aware that the underlying agenda was union-busting. The Waltons don’t want unions in Walmart. They love vouchers and charters because they bypass unions. 93% of charters are non-union. Unions will have to fight to survive in this climate. Or become extinct.
A recommendation on semantics: Abraham Lincoln never referred to the seceding states by the name they chose for themselves. When referring to them, he always cited “the so-called confederacy.” I have used the same logic with one of the most radical elements of the contemporary Republican Party–they were the most radical until the incorporation of the fascists who refer to themselves as the alt-right. Therefore, I feel by using capital letters confers a certain legitimacy they do not deserve. I encourage everyone to learn from Lincoln and instead write and say “the so-called tea party Republicans.”
Great idea!
My Senator Booker is a member of DFER. Should I send him a letter?
CoryBooker was on the board of Betsy DeVos’s anti-union, pro-charter, pro-voucher Koch/Walton/Olin-funded org. edreform.com/wp-content/upl…