Kenneth Zeichner is Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. He writes here why Betsy DeVos should not be approved for Secretary of Education.
Betsy DeVos is thoroughly unqualified for the job of Secretary of Education. She has never attended a public school, sent her children to public schools, taught or worked in a public school district or a state education agency, overseen public education as a governor or governor’s aide, or studied the field of education. There has never been a more unqualified nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education in the history of the Department of Education.
The DeVos family’s has donated millions of dollars over the years to education causes through groups like the American Federation for Children and contributions to pro-“choice” political candidates to privatize public schools and turn their management over to corporations or religious groups. In Michigan, where DeVos has focused most of her efforts, about 80 % of charter schools are run by for-profit corporations as opposed to about 13% of charter schools nationally.
Ms. DeVos and her husband Dick who became billionaires mainly through earnings from their company, Amway, a Pyramid scheme[1] in which many people have lost a lot of money, have been very active in their home state of Michigan and elsewhere in promoting the spread of both unregulated charter schools and voucher schools.
Voucher schools involve the transfer of money from public schools to private and religious schools.
They began in the South during the civil rights era of the 1960s as a way for whites to maintain segregated schools after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools. The first modern day voucher program was started in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1989 and has transferred millions of dollars from the Milwaukee Public schools (MPS) to private groups and have made it more difficult for MPS to educate the children who remain in the public schools. Today there are voucher programs in about 30 states supporting some children living in poverty to attend private or religious schools.
The success of voucher schools in Milwaukee and elsewhere has been meager. Many voucher schools in Milwaukee have closed (about 40%) and they have not shown any consistent improvement over the performance of public schools even though 3% of their students have a disability in comparison with the public schools where 20 % of students have a disability.
In the 25th anniversary report evaluating the performance of Milwaukee’s voucher schools Patrick Wolf a Professor of School Choice at the University of Arkansas concluded “ This whole philosophy and theory of parental school choice kind of falls apart.” Instead of giving families more voice in the education of their children as is promised, voucher schools erode the power of families to influence their children’s education because they are unaccountable to the public even though they use public tax money.
There are both good and bad charter schools in the U.S. The unregulated form of charters that Betsy DeVos and her husband have promoted has been widely criticized by education experts and the public. For example, one of the leading advocates for charter schools in the U.S. and most respected education researchers, Professor Doug Harris of Tulane University, has argued in a recent N.Y. Times op-ed “As one of the architects of Detroit’s charter school system, she is party responsible for what even charter advocates acknowledge is one of the biggest school reform disasters in the country… She is widely seen as the main driver of the entire state’s school overhaul… It is hardly a surprise that the system, which has almost no oversight, has failed.”
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education rejected Michigan’s application for a grant to expand its mostly privately run charter schools citing the lack of adequate oversight. Professor Harris concludes his op-ed by stating: “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”
A strong public school system is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Public schools do not affect just the individuals who use them, but as a public good, they also influence the quality of life in the society as a whole.
There is not a single example of a successful education system in the world that has relied primarily on deregulation, privatization and market competition, the kind of reform that Betsy DeVos wants to promote in the U.S. Chile and Sweden are examples of countries where performance declined substantially after the growth of privatization in education…..
Ken Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Scotties Toy Box and commented:
Thank you for posting this. I have a friend who wrote me this morning very upset that she wanted to use public schools to usher in the kingdom of God. So not only does she want to destroy public schools by taking all the funding from them and giving it to charter schools and voucher programs, she also wants to force her religion into all schools. She wants to force all children to study her religion and only hers. Regardless if the child’s family shares her faith or not. She wants to get teacher lead prayers back into schools. She is a big supporter of intelligent design, which is another way of saying creationism. Do to lax regulation of charter schools many do not provide a good education. Some don’t even have accredited teachers. There have been many horror stories online about them. She has gotten her way for a long time and she will expect to get her way now. So what if the laws say it is illegal to do, she will try. Our children will suffer and the entire country will be less educated.
This is lengthy but is a view in which I believe we should take notice. ONLY with a STRONG responseand with the help of our Constitution do I believe we have a chance at saving our democracy.
DEMOCRACY & GOVERNMENT
Farewell, America
No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently.
BY NEAL GABLER | NOVEMBER 10, 2016
America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.
Whatever place we now live in is not the same place it was on Nov. 7. No matter how the rest of the world looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. We are likely to be a pariah country. And we are lost for it. As I surveyed the ruin of that country this gray Wednesday morning, I found weary consolation in W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939, which concludes:
This generally has been called the “hate election” because everyone professed to hate both candidates. It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us.
We all knew these hatreds lurked under the thinnest veneer of civility. That civility finally is gone. In its absence, we may realize just how imperative that politesse was. It is the way we managed to coexist.
If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.
This country has survived a civil war, two world wars and a Great Depression. There are many who say we will survive this, too. Maybe we will, but we won’t survive unscathed. We know too much about each other to heal. No more can we pretend that we are exceptional or good or progressive or united. We are none of those things. Nor can we pretend that democracy works and that elections have more-or-less happy endings. Democracy only functions when its participants abide by certain conventions, certain codes of conduct and a respect for the process.
The virus that kills democracy is extremism because extremism disables those codes. Republicans have disrespected the process for decades. They have regarded any Democratic president as illegitimate. They have proudly boasted of preventing popularly elected Democrats from effecting policy and have asserted that only Republicans have the right to determine the nation’s course. They have worked tirelessly to make sure that the government cannot govern and to redefine the purpose of government as prevention rather than effectuation. In short, they haven’t believed in democracy for a long time, and the media never called them out on it.
Democracy can’t cope with extremism. Only violence and time can defeat it. The first is unacceptable, the second takes too long. Though Trump is an extremist, I have a feeling that he will be a very popular president and one likely to be re-elected by a substantial margin, no matter what he does or fails to do. That’s because ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, rhetoric has obviated action, speechifying has superseded governing.
Trump was absolutely correct when he bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care. It was a dictator’s ugly vaunt, but one that recognized this election never was about policy or economics or the “right path/wrong path,” or even values. It was about venting. So long as Trump vented their grievances, his all-white supporters didn’t care about anything else. He is smart enough to know that won’t change in the presidency. In fact, it is only likely to intensify. White America, Trump’s America, just wants to hear its anger bellowed. This is one time when the Bully Pulpit will be literal.
The media can’t be let off the hook for enabling an authoritarian to get to the White House. Long before he considered a presidential run, he was a media creation — a regular in the gossip pages, a photo on magazine covers, the bankrupt (morally and otherwise) mogul who hired and fired on The Apprentice. When he ran, the media treated him not as a candidate, but as a celebrity, and so treated him differently from ordinary pols. The media gave him free publicity, trumpeted his shenanigans, blasted out his tweets, allowed him to phone in his interviews, fell into his traps and generally kowtowed until they suddenly discovered that this joke could actually become president.
Just as Trump has shredded our values, our nation and our democracy, he has shredded the media. In this, as in his politics, he is only the latest avatar of a process that began long before his candidacy. Just as the sainted Ronald Reagan created an unbridgeable chasm between rich and poor that the Republicans would later exploit against Democrats, conservatives delegitimized mainstream journalism so they could fill the vacuum.
Retiring conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes complained that after years of bashing from the right wing, the mainstream media no longer could perform their function as reporters, observers, fact dispensers, and even truth tellers, and he said we needed them. Like Goebbels before them, conservatives understood they had to create their own facts, their own truths, their own reality. They have done so, and in so doing effectively destroyed the very idea of objectivity. Trump can lie constantly only because white America has accepted an Orwellian sense of truth — the truth pulled inside out.
With Trump’s election, I think that the ideal of an objective, truthful journalism is dead, never to be revived. Like Nixon and Sarah Palin before him, Trump ran against the media, boomeranging off the public’s contempt for the press. He ran against what he regarded as media elitism and bias, and he ran on the idea that the press disdained working-class white America. Among the many now-widening divides in the country, this is a big one, the divide between the media and working-class whites, because it creates a Wild West of information — a media ecology in which nothing can be believed except what you already believe.
With the mainstream media so delegitimized — a delegitimization for which they bear a good deal of blame, not having had the courage to take on lies and expose false equivalencies — they have very little role to play going forward in our politics. I suspect most of them will surrender to Trumpism — if they were able to normalize Trump as a candidate, they will no doubt normalize him as president. Cable news may even welcome him as a continuous entertainment and ratings booster. And in any case, like Reagan, he is bulletproof. The media cannot touch him, even if they wanted to. Presumably, there will be some courageous guerillas in the mainstream press, a kind of Resistance, who will try to fact-check him. But there will be few of them, and they will be whistling in the wind. Trump, like all dictators, is his own truth.
What’s more, Trump already has promised to take his war on the press into courtrooms and the halls of Congress. He wants to loosen libel protections, and he has threatened Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos of Amazon with an antitrust suit. Individual journalists have reason to fear him as well. He has already singled out NBC’s Katy Tur, perhaps the best of the television reporters, so that she needed the Secret Service to escort her from one of his rallies. Jewish journalists who have criticized Trump have been subjected to vicious anti-Semitism and intimidation from the white nationalist “alt-right.” For the press, this is likely to be the new normal in an America in which white supremacists, neo-Nazi militias, racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-Semites have been legitimized by a new president who “says what I’m thinking.” It will be open season.
This converts the media from reporters to targets, and they have little recourse. Still, if anyone points the way forward, it may be New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks is no paragon. He always had seemed to willfully neglect modern Republicanism’s incipient fascism (now no longer incipient), and he was an apologist for conservative self-enrichment and bigotry. But this campaign season, Brooks pretty much dispensed with politics. He seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that no good could possibly come of any of this and retreated into spirituality. What Brooks promoted were values of mutual respect, a bolder sense of civic engagement, an emphasis on community and neighborhood, and overall a belief in trickle-up decency rather than trickle-down economics. He is not hopeful, but he hasn’t lost all hope.
For those of us now languishing in despair, this may be a prescription for rejuvenation. We have lost the country, but by refocusing, we may have gained our own little patch of the world and, more granularly, our own family. For journalists, Brooks may show how political reporting, which, as I said, is likely to be irrelevant in the Trump age, might yield to a broader moral context in which one considers the effect that policy, strategy and governance have not only on our physical and economic well-being but also on our spiritual well-being. In a society that is likely to be fractious and odious, we need a national conversation on values. The media could help start it.
But the disempowered media may have one more role to fill: They must bear witness. Many years from now, future generations will need to know what happened to us and how it happened. They will need to know how disgruntled white Americans, full of self-righteous indignation, found a way to take back a country they felt they were entitled to and which they believed had been lost. They will need to know about the ugliness and evil that destroyed us as a nation after great men like Lincoln and Roosevelt guided us through previous crises and kept our values intact. They will need to know, and they will need a vigorous, engaged, moral media to tell them. They will also need us.
We are not living for ourselves anymore in this country. Now we are living for history.
From Zeichner’s essay: “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”
watching the hearing on CSpan (5:00 pm east coast) Alexander is stacking the deck with his testimony of favoring charter schools. He compares charter schools to the GI bill…. quoting Bush’s “GI bill for kids”….
I love what Neal Gabler wrote (in Gordon Wilder’s note) and also thought while reading it: “He (Gabler) says what I am thinking” about what happened. At the same time, I found myself thinking of the actual voting–or the numbers and quality of American thought that makes up the greater context that holds what Gabler so rightly writes about. So that while I love what Gabler says for its gawdawful truth; I think the essay as a whole puts that horrible kind of thinking that he so clearly identifies (white, repressed, even stultifyingly ignorant for its actual self-defeatism), at the power source of American life where it should not and,in fact, does not live.
Of course, I may be wrong in my own thinking; but even Trump’s present numbers (low approval rate) betray the wavering of what was, earlier, not a wholehearted rejection of progressive American life, but rather an emotional and, therefore, reactionary moment in our national consciousness–thinking that may have resisted change and embraced the voices that inspired fear, therefore, been fooled once, even twice, . . . but perhaps also reflective enough at some point to realize the truth of what really is great about America and the futility of resisting it.
The old racists are dying (some not soon enough, in my estimation), and an overlapping new generation of thinkers is getting ready to bloom . . . which is not to say that Gabler’s call to action, loud and long, is not absolutely right and absolutely needed, along with the witness of the Press that he speaks of–and not just for America, as he says, but for history itself. No matter what Trump and his followers think, all still resonate with the true greatness of America, not merely in our remarkable people like Lincoln and Roosevelt, as Gabler says, but in the true good that they stood for. Trump can trample on that good and greatness all he wants but it won’t go away, and “we” won’t stop resonating with and recognizing it, regardless of who Trump shoots in Times Square.
Let’s keep fighting. But it seems to me that the numbers of the election are awake now, that minds are already turning, one at a time, and that Trump is already running out of bullets. And the elephants are leaving from more than just the Ringling Brothers Circus.
My thoughts on the confirmation hearing:
And Alexander was amazed that the hearing took so effin long, 3 1/2 hours. Well considering it is almost impossible to have put forth a more completely unqualified candidate, one should have expected just a few questions about the candidate.
And I thought overall, the Dims did a terrible job of pointing out that eminently unqualified aspect.
How many yes or no questions can one ask in 5 minutes:
Did you attend a public school?
Do your children (or have they) attend public schools?
Have you worked with a PTA/PTO of the public school your child attended?
Do you have a teaching certificate?
Have you ever taught in a public school?
Have you set foot ever in a public school?
etc, etc. etc. . . .
One could have had her proving her own lack of qualifications with simple yes/no questions. Each Dim could have reiterated some version of the same questions so that repeatedly she would have shown just how unqualified she is.
As it is, that hearing was a circus, and a bad cheap one at that.
Thanks, Ken, for your thoughtful overview of this fire nomination. We can not sit idly during this time of attack on all things just.