Just when I thought I had read everything I needed to know about the DeVos family, along comes this brilliant investigative article by Zack Stanton of Politico. Stanton shows how powerful the DeVos family is, how it works as a tightly coordinated unit, and how it uses its vast wealth to smash the union movement, force school privatization, control the Republican Party in Michigan, and extend its reach to Louisiana, Indiana, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states.
The DeVos family, along with the Koch brothers, are the epitome of dark money, the spawn of Citizens United, which removed limits on political spending, enabling billionaires to buy state legislatures.
Dick DeVos ran for the governorship and lost in 2006. The family learned that it was better to work behind the scenes.
“Thanks to the DeVoses, Michigan’s charter schools enjoy a virtually unregulated existence. Thanks to them, too, the center of the American automotive industry and birthplace of the modern labor movement is now a right-to-work state. They’ve funded campaigns to elect state legislators, established advocacy organizations to lobby them, buttressed their allies and primaried those they disagree with, spending at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years. “The DeVos family has been far more successful not having the governor’s seat than if they had won it,” says Richard Czuba, the owner of the Glengariff Group, a bipartisan polling firm in Michigan. “They have, to some degree, created a shadow state party. And it’s been pretty darn effective.”
“Buoyed by the success in Michigan, the DeVoses have exported a scaled-down version of that template into other states, funding an archipelago of local political action committees and advocacy organizations to ease the proliferation of charter schools in Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana, among others. At the same time, DeVos-backed PACs have transformed the nature of American political campaigns. By showing the success of independent PACs that answered to a few deep-pocketed donors rather than a broad number of stakeholders associated with a union or chamber of commerce, for instance, the DeVoses precipitated the monsoon of independent expenditures that has rained down upon politicians for the past decade. In the process, they’ve reshaped political campaigns as well as the policies that result from them.
“Ten years after she watched her husband give a concession speech, Betsy DeVos was unveiled as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education. Across the country, public-school advocates and teachers’ unions expressed almost unanimous horror: One of the most effective advocates for breaking down the rules and protections for public schools and teachers would soon be the nation’s most powerful education policymaker.
“But people who’ve been watching the DeVoses closely knew they were seeing something else as well: One of the nation’s most ambitious, disruptive and downright unusual political families finally had a seat in Washington….
“The DeVos family is Dutch, thoroughly so. All four of Richard DeVos’ grandparents emigrated from the Netherlands, and today, the family continues to observe the tenets of the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination. Calvinism believes that God has decided our souls’ fates before we are born, assigning them to heaven or hell. It is a duty of practitioners to show their faith in God’s plan by displaying self-confidence, as though they know they have been chosen for blessings in the afterlife. One way to display this confidence is through entrepreneurship (one of the bedrock texts of sociology, Max Weber’s 1905 Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is expressly about the link between Calvinism and economic success)….
“Across those efforts, one constant is the DeVos family’s devout Christian beliefs, and the indivisibility they see between Christian and Calvinistic notions and their conservative politics. “The real strength of America is its religious tradition,” Richard DeVos wrote in Believe!. “Too many people today are willing to act as if God had nothing whatsoever to do with it. … This country was built on a religious heritage, and we’d better get back to it. We had better start telling people that faith in God is the real strength of America!” In the mid-1970s, DeVos made major donations to the Christian Freedom Foundation and Third Century Publishers, an outlet that printed books and pamphlets designed to strengthen the ties between Christianity and free-market conservatism; among those products was a guidebook instructing conservative Christians how to win elections and help America become “as it was when first founded—a ‘Christian Republic.
“Though they aren’t quite as large or wealthy as the DeVoses, the Prince family—even further west, in Holland, Michigan—shares one big trait in common with their in-laws: the idea that patriotism and politics are inseparable from Christianity. Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy’s mother, donated $75,000 to the successful 2004 ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan; four years later, she gave $450,000 to an identical initiative in California. Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the military contractor that gained notoriety in 2007, when its employees fired into a crowd of Iraqi civilians, killing 17. (In 2009, two former Blackwater employees alleged in federal court that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader.”)
“Throughout his adult life, Betsy’s father, Ed, donated handsomely to two religious colleges in Michigan, Hope and Calvin, the latter being his wife’s beloved alma mater in Grand Rapids. But his most important contribution—one that has shaped much of the past three decades of conservative politics—came in 1988, when Prince donated millions in seed funding to launch the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group that became one of the most potent political forces on the religious right. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder,” Family Research Council President Gary Bauer wrote to supporters after Prince’s sudden death in 1995. “He was a Kingdom builder.”
“In the 1960s and ’70s, Ed and Elsa Prince advanced God’s Kingdom from the end of a cul-de-sac just a few miles from Lake Michigan. There, they taught their four children—Elisabeth (Betsy), Eileen, Emilie and Erik—a deeply religious, conservative, free-market view of the world, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and sending them to private schools that would reinforce the values they celebrated at home, small-government conservatism chief among them….
“When Dick and Betsy DeVos are asked why they’ve chosen to mount a personal crusade for education reform, they often cite their family’s charitable giving, which puts them into contact with scholarship applicants. For years, the DeVoses read reams of personal essays filled with wrenching stories of dire finances and an abiding hope in the transformative impact of education. Those stories, the DeVoses have said, made it clear that something had to change.
“But there’s another reason why Dick and Betsy DeVos want to change America’s schools. They see it as the literal battleground for making a more Christian, God-centered society.
“In 2001, Betsy DeVos spoke at “The Gathering,” an annual meeting of some of America’s wealthiest Christians. There, she told her fellow believers about the animating force behind her education-reform campaigning, referencing the biblical battlefield where the Israelites fought the Philistines: “It goes back to what I mentioned, the concept of really being active in the Shephelah of our culture—to impact our culture in ways that are not the traditional funding-the-Christian-organization route, but that really may have greater Kingdom gain in the long run by changing the way we approach things—in this case, the system of education in the country.”
“Dick DeVos, on stage with his wife, echoed her sentiments with a lament of his own. “The church—which ought to be, in our view, far more central to the life of the community—has been displaced by the public school,” Dick DeVos said. “We just can think of no better way to rebuild our families and our communities than to have that circle of church and school and family much more tightly focused and built on a consistent worldview.”
Folks, if Betsy DeVos is confirmed, which is likely, we will have a major battle on our hands to protect public education and to maintain a separation of church and state. She is not a normal candidate for Secretary of Education. She is a religious zealot and a radical extremist. She will speak of her admiration for all successful schools, including public schools, but don’t believe it. She is a determined foe of public education.
Reading ed reformers since the announcement of DeVos, it seems like they are all in agreement of the need to privatize public schools.
The only thing they’re debating is whether the new privatized systems that will replace existing public systems should be regulated. The decision to privatize has already been made.
“The prospect of Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos leading the U.S. Department of Education has reignited an intense debate over the limits of government-based accountability for school choice providers, especially charter school organizations and private schools receiving vouchers.”
Ed reformers aren’t concerned with existing public schools. They’re concerned about how they’ll regulate their preferred privatized systems.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/01/12/oversight-or-overregulation-debating-school-choice-accountability/
“When Betsy Prince and Dick DeVos married in 1979, it brought together two powerful Dutch families with perfectly compatible values. “There’s a close-knit atmosphere of the aristocracy of West Michigan,” Demas says. “It almost brings to mind the old monarchies of Europe where they would intermarry.”
It’s times like this that we could really use an opposition Party with different views. Too bad we don’t have one.
Oh, well. Onward! “Backpack vouchers” for all!
Once we rid ourselves of the scourge of public schools and labor unions all our problems will be solved and we’ll prosper in a free market shangri-la.
Blackwater was renamed XE Services in 2009, and again in 2011 — get this, fellow scholars (no, scholars, not charter students) — was renamed to Academi. Now that sounds like a charter! I would like to see Academi go up against its vastly superior public rival, Seal Team Six. If Academi’s private mercenaries had been sent to get Bin Laden, war with Pakistan. Likewise, I challenge any private outfit to a teach-off against me, its vastly superior public rival. I’m better trained, better equipped, better prepared. If KIPP is charged with doing my job, war with Pakistan.
Below is a quote from the Brookings article that Chiara wrote about above. The first sentence is probably enough to make those here scratch their heads, but what’s even more strange is that there is no other “perspective” offered besides market-oriented, “provided by the field of economics.”
“This oversight versus overregulation debate may be viewed through a market-oriented perspective provided by the field of economics. That perspective includes a focus on school competition as the primary driver of educational quality. But information is also key to a vibrant market, and one compromise between the overregulation and oversight positions could be a system organized around the provision of information to parents and policymakers. Such a system might trust competitive effects driven by the former group will ultimately render a more productive supply of schools while verifying for the latter group that equality of access, financial propriety, and basic levels of academic quality are met.” (my emphases)
Chiara: “Off the rails” comes to mind.
I’ll re-blog some of this thread to a comments section of the Inside Higher Ed newsletter. There is an article there questioning the private-public partnerships at cash-strapped public universities: “Tragedy of the Commons” “We in higher education must act on our collective responsibility to support America’s public universities, writes Harold M. Hastings.” January 16, 2017.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/01/16/reversing-decline-state-support-public-universities-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c750bd8f80-DNU20170116&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c750bd8f80-198488425&goal=0_1fcbc04421-c750bd8f80-198488425&mc_cid=c750bd8f80&mc_eid=f743ca9d07
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/01/12/oversight-or-overregulation-debating-school-choice-accountability/
Morbidly fascinating about what the public schools are up against.
This investigative report is long and illuminating. Shows how two families were able to become wealthy = powerful through religious fervor.
Obtaining immense wealth is taken as a sure sign that God loves you and you know what is right. It follows then that you can do (no, it is your duty to) mobilize riches to buy whatever you believe in…
Perhaps, underlying all they have done to impose their world views on us, their grossest desire is to obliterate the line of separation between church and state.
Fred,
If God determines that you will be rich, then it follows that God determines who will be poor. Thus, one need not interfere in the moral order to help those whom God has chosen to be poor.
Diane: (sarcasm alert) Your logic is impeccable. DeVos would love it; God loves it; and so you must be right. (gag)
Catherine,
If DeVos is right, God willed that I expose her lack of compassion for others less fortunate. And God willed that I continue to expose Trump’s ignorance and greed. So who am I to disagree?
Diane: I am looking forward to the hearings, but wincing, in the same way we wince when we hear screeching just before the accident. I did find some hope this morning when, on MSNBC, the reporter said clearly that many voices were being raised against Betsy DeVos because she was a charter/voucher supporter, and was staunchly against public schools. I took from that that the word is getting out. Maybe someone will ask the other Congresspeople on the panel which ones had received money from DeVos.
Divine intervention explains limited social mobility.
Where most everyone one has it wrong is not understanding that we are all god.
Fred Smith: Yes, and by that reasoning, God loves the mob. But really, having gobs of money and resources shields you forever from those internal ghosts who keep raising pesky questions for that oddity in human behavior: self-reflection. If God wants it, then I need not ask or entertain any questions about what I am thinking or doing. Done.
I’m looking forward to the hearings to see who caves first.
God bless Vespucciland! Domini, domini, domini, you’re all Catholics now!
Links to Readings —
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2016/12/30/peirce-and-democracy-•-2/
Questions and Conflicts Surround GOP Mega-Donor Who May Become Our Next Education Secretary
Democrats are vehemently opposing billionaire Betsy DeVos.
By Alex Kotch / AlterNet
January 15, 2017
…DeVos played a role in the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which has allowed unlimited individual, corporate and union money into elections. EdSource’s Louis Freedberg describes how DeVos was a founding board member of an institute set on ending restrictions on money in politics that hired attorney James Bopp as its chief counsel. Bopp would go on to successfully argue the Citizens United case.
Few issues have been “more central to the DeVos family’s mission than eradicating restraints on political spending,” wrote New Yorker investigative journalist Jane Mayer in her book, Dark Money….
DeVos has donated directly to the campaigns of numerous senators who will vote on her confirmation. She and her husband Dick have given $265,000 to these numerous confirming senators over the years, and additional family members have pitched in even more.
No senators have indicated that they will recuse themselves from the vote,…
In 1997, DeVos said that she and her family “do expect some things in return” when they make political donations.
http://www.alternet.org/education/questions-and-conflicts-surround-gop-mega-donor-who-may-become-our-next-education#.WHzhKThNy40.email
Ed reformers are lining up behind DeVos:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-01-10/trump-education-secretary-pick-besty-devos-unites-school-choice-advocates
There won’t be any real debate. DC is utterly captured by ed reformers and there’s no real dissent or disagreement on privatization within ed reform.
I think the best we can hope for is to limit their influence at the local level. The flip side of DC gutting public school funding is public schools don’t have to listen to them anymore. They’ll be irrelevant to 90% of school families.
Here is Suffolk County, LI, New York I do not hear any demand for charter schools or to undermine public education. I suspect the same is true in other suburbs in NYS. Charter schools destroy the concept of local control and neighborhood/community schools. These are not public schools. They are corporate schools formed to derive profits and cheat kids out of their childhoods.
Max Weber was a total genius and wrote one of the best things ever written to explain the rise of Moneytheism in modern times —
Max Weber • The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Let me try that link again —
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/WEBER/cover.html
This is truly scary.
This is very scary. I shudder to think that the entire nation’s public school system will look like Michigan. What a travesty! These are dangerous people.