Mercedes Schneider has inexhaustible patience as a researcher. She tried to locate the “publications” that Betsy DeVos submitted to the Senate committee reviewing her qualifications. Some were letters to the editor. Some were press releases (did she write them?). Some were unavailable. Some were about her. It is not clear whether she or an aide wrote the opinion columns attributed to her.
A scholar she is not. A lobbyist is what she is, with a narrow and unlovely perspective on education.
Most of them reflect De Vos’ preference for any type of schooling except public schools. She doesn’t like them. There is no evidence that she ever sullied her shoes by stepping into one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A zealous, toxic plutocrat if there ever was one. The reach of these “reformers”—neoliberal liquidators of community assets—is truly staggering. “Kiddom”—whatever that is (can someone enlighten?) was posting releases from “the 74” in the name of who knowns what…
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“Neoliberal liquidators of community assets”– perfect. I will be adopting this descriptor.
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So she submitted something like a CV with her publications? And none of them are legitimate, if I understand?
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The two things I find most alarming about DeVos are her advocacy for gutting public school funding and her promotion of cheap garbage online learning in public schools.
There’s two parts to ed reform. They believe the private sector can do it BETTER, but they also believe the private sector can do it CHEAPER. They promote online learning because they believe it delivers instruction and test prep at lower cost.
This is a piece about Governor Snyders experimental model for low and middle income schools:
“The governor, speaking Tuesday night during a virtual town hall meeting, suggested public uproar over private meetings by a group working to develop a low-cost school model for Michigan has overshadowed an important discussion about increasing the use of technology in the classroom.”
The plan was to deliver instruction online and thus cut per student funding to 5k. It wasn’t about “excellence”. It was about finding a cheap public school model for low and middle income kids.
DeVos believes in this with the same near-religious fervor that she believes in the rest of the ed reform dogma. She’ll be selling online learning to every public school in the country.
In my opinion, public schools need to become much, much more skeptical of what these folks are selling. That’s power we DO have. We have the power NOT to buy what they’re selling.
http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/04/michigan_gov_rick_snyder_on_sk.html
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Right on, Chiara. If I’m not mistaken, there are already a fair amount of studies showing that online vs in-person instruction fails miserably. As a for-lang PreK enrichment teacher– who has lost whole PreKChain clients to the myth that placing a few laptops w/Rosetta Stone at the perimeter of a PreK classroom = “we offer Spanish”– I have been folowing the subject closely for 15 yrs. There have long been studies (available at ERIC) that prove the lie.
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You know what DeVos proves? It proves public school advocates were right. Ed reform IS about privatization, despite 20 years of denials from Democrats who supported it.
They should apologize to all the people they misled. They were always headed towards privatization, and DeVos is just the realization of the “movement” goal.
Look for daily attacks on existing public schools for the next 4 years. I don’t know if they’ll succeed in eradicating existing public system- public schools have turned out to be a fairly resilient public institution despite the best efforts of politicians and lobbyists to kill them off, but they will die trying.
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Here’s my dirty half dozen dozen Democrats…Who else belongs to round out the dozen?
Barack Obama
Rahm Emanuel
Dan Malloy
Cory Booker
Michael Bennet
Kevin Johnson
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Chuck,
Two more names for your list of Democrats who are champions of corporate reform:, now thinking of running for Governor
Andrew Cuomo
State Senator Michael Johnston of Colorado, who wrote the most punitive teacher evaluation law in the nation (50% of a teacher’s evaluation is based on test scores)
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DeVos has no qualifications or experience to lead the DOE. She is no better than a thief that wants to pull “a smash and grab heist” of public funds for her own biased agenda. To support her world view, she is will to destroy other people’s rights to a free, public education.
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I do not get your last sentence. Why do you think that Ms. DeVos is “will to” destroy other people’s rights to a free, public education? I have found no such statements or indications that she is going to do this.
Unlike the proposed “repeal and replace” of the outgoing president’s medical plan, the president-elect and Ms. DeVos have a proposal already developed and articulated, to replace the government/public school monopoly.
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Charles,
DeVos spends millions in political campaigns to defeat supporters of public schools and replace them with supporters of privatization and the free market. She scoffs at public schools as “government schools,” and as she said so eloquently. “Government sucks.”
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Charles, maybe you need some nuance.
DeVos/Trump’s ‘plan’ is ‘vouchers’. By definition, that means you take the pooled ed-designated taxes for a district (paid by every school-taxable entity in the district), divide by the number of students, & parcel it out to each student for them to use for homeschooling or public school or charter or private school.
The idea being, if your zoned pubsch works for you, fine, if not– & your piece of the pie [maybe plus your own supplement– & your kids’ ed-ability] — does not buy you admission to existing local privschs, the market will spring up & provide you w/some sort of charter or other lower-priced privsch you can afford.
Charles, it is not a good business model. The amount of $ any district can raise from taxes is finite. We know from business models/ experience (for example) that brick-&-mortar retail requires volume discount to keep its price affordable. A town that offers many retail choices is a rich town. A poor town offers a few box stores. The only retail alternative in a poor box-store town is the internet…
But: unlike the ability of the internet to offer global retail choice at reasonable price to any locale– we know from many studies that education via internet is so inferior to onsite in-person brick-&-mortar teaching as not to be considered a viable alternative. Though internet-ed has been shown to be a valued supplement to the brick-&-mortar classroom, many studies also show that students who pay for a year of online teaching INSTEAD OF in-person teaching lose close to & even the entire year in learning.
So vouchers may in the short run provide ‘free public education’. For example inner-city charters can offer smaller, calmer classes by comparison to large chaotic pubschs for a while… But in order to survive, charters have to hire cheap teachers & canned curriculum – so it’s not a superior alternative (as evidenced by 20 yrs stats in rust-belt states plus FL)– & w/o proper oversight [the norm in those states] they are subject to the same kind of opening/mid-year closing typical of restaurants et al small bus, forcing kids to run from school to school thus lowering quality of ed: in sum, a temporary bandaid which depends on an a stable zone pubsch to take students in when they move into a district or are not admitted to a priv/charter alternative or are dumped back into the pubschsys when the charter expels them or the charter school folds…
A voucher plan by any measure serves simply to splinter the clientele into many pieces seeking service. The “govt school sys” anathematized by voucher proponents will have to be maintained simply as a clearing-house for new arrivals, and as the place to educate those who cannot obtain admission to private alternatives [those too expensive for privates to teach, i.e., SpEd & ELL] & as a landing-place for those suspended/ expelled from charters/ privates, & as a landing-place for those whose charters/ privates have folded.
In summary, a voucher system is an incredibly expensive idea based on an airy-fairy idea of universal choice which has no real-life correspondent. Choice is very expensive.
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