The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights issued a strong statement in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. While the so-called “reformers” like to claim that they are fighting for minority kids and civil rights, the actual civil rights organizations know that DeVos and Trump want to weaken and destroy public schools, which are open to all students. They also are aware that the origins of school choice were in the racial segregation movement of the 1950s, when the most racist governors and senators in the South rallied around the idea of school choice to protect the status quo.
The Leadership Conference issued this statement:
Dear Senator,
On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations committed to promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education. All parents and students in this country – a majority of whom are of color or are low-income[i] – want the best education, support and dignity for their own children. We stand with them and cannot support a nominee who has demonstrated that she seeks to undermine bedrock American principles of equal opportunity, nondiscrimination and public education itself.
DeVos argues her opposition to public education serves students, especially students who are the most vulnerable.[ii] We reject the notion that children are well served by the dismantling of a public school system that serves 90 percent of all American students[iii] or by the elimination of civil rights protections that require the federal government to intervene when students are discriminated against.[iv]. The civil rights community has served as agitator and critic of schools and school systems that failed to meet the needs of students of color and low income students since long before Thurgood Marshall successfully argued the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Opportunity and achievement gaps that demonstrate longstanding bias against students of color, English learners, Native Americans, girls, students with disabilities, low-income students and other marginalized students are indefensible and unacceptable and we have fought at the federal, state, local and classroom level to ensure every student the quality education to which they are entitled by law and birth. Rather than joining with us in support of accountability, oversight and intervention, DeVos instead argues for an unaccountable education system which serves only to exacerbate inequality of opportunity.[v]
While parent frustration with schools failing to meet their child’s need is real and parents have waited far too long for meaningful action by policymakers, the result of anti-public education agendas such as DeVos’ has often, as in Louisiana[vi], been worse outcomes for vulnerable students. The Michigan example, where DeVos’ impact on education policy and the proliferation of unregulated and for-profit charter schools is considerable, demonstrates clearly that this agenda does not result in the improved outcomes students, parents and communities deserve.[vii]
Equal access to education is a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. The Secretary of Education’s role as the enforcer of education and civil rights laws[viii] is central to advancing our shared vision of an inclusive and diverse system of high-quality public education that enables every student to live up to their potential. DeVos has demonstrated no previous commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunity in schools.
While she is entitled to her personal views as a private citizen, government officials are charged with enforcing our laws equally. DeVos’ connections to anti-LGBTQ organizations including those that promote dangerous and discredited ’conversion therapy,’[ix] groups that seek to limit a woman’s right to health care[x] and civil rights protections for survivors of violence,[xi] and her opposition to affirmative action policies[xii] demonstrate a lack of respect and appreciation for the diversity of our nation’s classrooms and fail to recognize a long and pernicious history of discrimination against groups of students. While we have heard little of DeVos’ record with regard to the rights and interests of English learners, immigrant students, students with disabilities and religious minorities, we are deeply troubled by the unacceptable rhetoric of the President-elect during his campaign and the absence of a record of DeVos’ support for these students.
When compared with Secretaries of Education through the history of the department, DeVos’ lack of experience stands out.[xiii] She has never been an educator or worked directly with children and families in public schools. She has never led a school, district or state agency tasked with educating students. She has never been a public school parent or a public school student. This lack of experience makes her uniquely unfamiliar with the challenges and opportunities facing the nation’s students, families, educators and schools.
The U.S. Department of Education is responsible for implementing and enforcing laws protecting students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex and disability and those laws that provide for educational opportunity from early childhood through graduate school. The person responsible for leading that department must absolutely be committed to respecting, valuing and protecting every single student in this country – without regard to LGBTQI status, family income, race, home language, gender, religion, disability or immigration status. Our nation’s laws, economy, future and children deserve no less.
Sincerely,
Wade Henderson
President & CEO
Nancy Zirkin
Executive Vice President
[iii] See: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
[v] See: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399
[vi] See: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21839
[vii] See: http://bridgemi.com/2016/12/betsy-devoss-michigan-legacy/
[viii] Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88)
[xiii] See: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2016/12/betsy_devos_would_be_first_ed_.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is pretty amazing from a former Obama Administration person:
“The fact is, about 85 percent of the school-age population attends traditional public schools, with just 6 percent in charters and the rest in private schools or home-schooled. Team Trump will soon realize that school choice is a conversation that leaves out an awful lot of kids and their parents, including many rural and suburban voters who helped elect him.”
After 15 years of ed reform, “the movement” finally noticed they offer absolutely nothing of value to kids in public schools. The promotion of privatization has a huge downside- they abandoned public schools.
You wonder how this happens- how thousands of public employees somehow omit the 85% of kids who attend public schools. That is SOME echo chamber effect. I’ve never seem anything like it.
Better late than never, I guess, but, wow. Quite the realization there. I’d look into why it took so long. It was blatantly obvious to everyone outside the club. As it turns out, an ideological position against public schools harms real, live children IN public schools – they finally made this connection.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-01-11/donald-trump-and-betsy-devos-push-public-schools-and-charters-to-team-up?src=usn_tw
Yesterday, John King stated he opposes DeVos because we need public schools. Then, he clarified his comment and stated that “public charters are laboratories of innovation.” King remains totally out of touch.
He’s been paid handsomely to be “totally out of touch”.
Oops! Freudian slip. King was subconsciously acknowledging that charter schools cannot exist without zoned publics from which charters can siphon newbies & to which they can drop-ship rejects.
Echoes of the most overrated speech in American history, Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” farewell. He knew about the problem when he was in office and could have done something but waited until he was going out the door. We really shouldn’t put much stock in the what the Duncan/King regime says now.
You have an eagle-eye. That was one para where truth was spoken, buried among a dozen paras of the usual ed-reform claptrap. Ever the optimist!
Florida ed reformers open their session with testimony that comes exclusively from national charter operators:
“For its first hearing of the year, the Florida House’s Education Committee heard from leaders of several out-of-state charter school networks. The theme, according to Mike Bileca, R-Miami and chair of the committee, was “schools that have taken excellence and scaled.”
Existing public schools in that state should give up on their lawmakers and hire a private advocate. There needs to be at least one adult who works for kids in the unfashionable public sector schools.
Has DeVos met with a single public school parent. teacher or principal yet? She might want to get up to speed on public schools in the United States. Maybe she could actually enter one or two. We’ll find her a building where the teachers don’t belong to a labor union so she won’t be offended 🙂
https://www.redefinedonline.org/2017/01/everyone-gets-better-charter-schools/
Chiara,
That is funny. Some of the top legislators have conflicts of interest because their families own charters or charter chains. Florida has seen many charter scandals. Charters open and close in Florida like day lilies.
I am thrilled that many civil rights groups have caught one of the big lies in privatization. It has nothing to do with civil rights, and everything to do with sending public funding to corporations. Charters, we know, enhance segregation, and vouchers will only exacerbate segregation. Why should we spend public dollars to enhance segregation? We should be spending our public dollars on our public schools that promote equity and access for all. Separate is never equal!
Agree, public education is one of the key civil rights issues of our time.
How many of these 200 would sign something which connects Bill Gates to the direction which DeVos is going? most would offer the excuse….do not muddy the issue and the intent.
The reality to me is……it would clarify the issue.
OK, now we’re talking.
Charter schools are government contractors, which means they aren’t any more public than all the other government contractors, like Boeing and Northrup Grumman, which maintain their private status regardless of public funding. Charters are also no more public than all of the private preschools that receive government funds, such as for low income children and kids with special needs whose services are delivered in private programs, because we don’t have compulsory education for kids those ages so public schools are not set up to serve that entire population.
The major difference between government funded charters and government funded private preschools is regulatory oversight. Private preschools must comply with NUMEROUS federal, state and city regulations that were put in place to protect children (which includes properly caring for and educating them), while charters have very minimal regulations protecting kids, if any.
Charter schools as I read charter law are not govt contractors [even tho it’s a no-brainer they actually are], & are protected from govt-contractor procurement law by the airy-fairy notion that they should be exempt from ‘bureaucratic red tape’ in order to immediately implement innovation [which they will then share w/their red-tape-immobilized brethren hahaha].
Your claim that Boeing, Grumman et al maintain non-transparent proprietary status as govt contractors is not universally true nor universally accepted: it is a thorny legal area under constant legal challenge & discussion. That is due to the tension between reqts for govtl accountability for public monies, vs needs of corporations competing for govtl contracts to protect the proprietary formulae that allow them to get the contracts.
However I totally agree that preschools accepting state-subsidized students are subject to a host of red tape which is not visited upon K-12 charters [in most states] despite the fact that those charters are funded w/a regular flowing spigot of taxpayer funds.. !?
In my 16-yr experience as an enrichment teacher to regional preschools…
Longtime private preschools are not part of the equation: they eschew state-subsidized tuition students [understanding the threat of govt strings to their locally-successful curriculum]– they get grants & fund-raise locally, so as to offer privately-funded scholarships for low-income applicants– tho their tuitions for regular applicants these days are nearly-prohibitive for the middle class.
Employee PreK/ daycares, a feature of the ’70’s/ ’80’s corporate era, have mostly disappeared. I worked a decade for a hospital-employee daycare that was declining due to ’80’s-’90’s healthcare downsizing. Their contract allowed them to enroll non-employee local kids– whom they’d never been able to attract due to ample PreK’s in the area– so they re-vamped to state curriculum to attract local state-subsidized tuition [poor] kids. The whole preK dumbed down: out w/sand/water tables & play materials, recess cut in half, in w/tables/ chairs/ “pre-reading/ pre-math” centers. Daytime enrichments like music, art, computers & for-lang were banished to ‘post-[academic] curriculum time’– i.e., post-3:30pm, long after 3-yo’s needed to go home, so those enrichments disappeared… for comparison: a pharma-employee PreK daycare I worked at for 15 yrs refused to make those concessions & will soon close… (‘Big-Pharma’ gets press but they too have consolidated/ merged; their employee PreK/daycare is mostly handled by cheap chains now).
But all is not lost in NJ PreK-land.
(1)I work at a chain-PreK which operates in the franchise mode: the quality depends entirely on the mission of the owners & the quality of their director. Despite having state-subsidized tuition students- which means they are subject to the same restrictions as the above-mentioned employee daycare– they have somehow worked daytime for-lang, music, art, science enrichments into a do-able tuition for their working-class clientele (it can be done).
(2) another client that fills the bill is a PreK/K run by a large, multi-ethnic congregation– a local Protestant church welcoming LGBTQ & mixed-race, mixed-denomination Christians (including many lapsed Catholics). Granted they’re located in a hi-income area, but utterly-middle-class congregation seems able to pony up the dough to support this reasonably-priced, superior, play-oriented PreK/K run by a director who is all about letting kids find their potential.
I did not say that companies like Boeing and Northrup Grumman “maintain non-transparent proprietary status.” I started working in ECE 49 years ago and I’ve been employed in a wide variety of public and private settings, including as the director of several preschools, both for-profit and non-profit, so I was the person responsible for signing off on government contracts and meeting government requirements. That’s because there are typically strings attached and accountability requirements in order to receive government funding. But neither the government not the companies the government outsources work to typically claim that private enterprises are no longer private just because they get public funds.
Charters are able to claim a special spot on the fence, where they can say they are either public or private, when one moniker is more expedient for them than the other. For example, they like to say they are public when they advertise and want to attract families who can’t afford private school tuition. They say they are private when they don’t think they should have to follow laws and regulations, such as when they don’t want to be audited by the government and when they want to claim school property as their own. It gives a whole new meaning to the notion of “public-private partnerships” when charter schools can say they are both, virtually whenever they feel like it.
“Philanthropy” of the richest 0.1%, religion, business and, corporate-owned government working together?
The hawkers of privatization and corporatization, positioned a false consumer choice between Gates’ Common Core schools and, creation-teaching schools, while
an educational consultant to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, is a former president of a well-known, politically-connected university, founded by an evangelical pastor.
The wealthy having been colluding with the government for years to privatize schools. The whole test and punish agenda with school closings based on scores and VAM were designed to nail public schools and teachers to the wall. They wanted to make public schools unbearable so charters look like a relief.
I hope the message gets to the public and outside the bubble because I still hear intelligent people touting that many or some charters are good. B(ill) and M(alinda) are full of sh!$ and money talks to politicians. Many are making money on these business ventures and right offs. Like Apartheid in South Africa…Citizen and investors have to divest and financially increase support for public schools.But investors are doing just the opposite.
There should be a public outcry against Betsy with 85% to 90% of children in public schools. How can that volume be silenced but during Bill’s (Clinton) reign people didn’t demonstrate outrage against the welfare cuts that hurt the most vulnerable population…the nations children. (Except maybe R. Reich)
“They” feel no real threat from “us”. These vulnerable populations can’t speak up in any meaningful way that Betsy, Don as well as the Republican and Democratic Congress will listen. “They” know anyone with real power would be at a private school. Our beloved Dem’s (I use that term loosely.) have yet to really support public education. Love Obama, but he gave us Arnie D., John K. and Race to the Top.
If we had any opportunity it was with Obama…I hope I am wrong… but there was silence in the streets with welfare “reform” and even if there is noise with this, the opportunists in Congress will not sincerely help except to save their own butts.
As we approach the 88th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. maybe some will remember his words….
“The time is always right to do what is right.” and “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Wow..didn’t mean to be so loud…I am going to meditate and like MLK…continue to choose love…
Nothing wrong with being “loud” or what I call strident in declaring against error, falsehoods, inequities and injustices. MLK didn’t stride passively to the pulpit and quietly say his peace and leave. Quite the opposite.
Passivity in the face of those errors and falsehoods, which are the foundation of inequities and injustices, is acquiescence and is a losing strategy guaranteed to allow those self-serving bastards to continue their assault against society.
IMO, Gates’ scheme is nothing more than banal cost cutting wrapped in data mining for profit opportunities.
Please include a link listing the 200 organizations which supported this letter. Thank you.
Google the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to get the names of the organizations they represent.