The following article was sent to me by education researchers Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin. Baldwin is a former teacher in Saginaw. Recently, I was on an NPR program hosted by Warren Olney with three other people, one of whom spoke on behalf of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He insisted that not a single public school in Detroit had ever been closed. This article says that the number of public schools closed in Detroit over the past 20 years is nearly 200, with more school closings ahead, all in African American communities. Meanwhile the Detroit Free Press published an article showing that the closure of neighborhood schools–DeVos’s goal–means less choice for black residents, who no longer have a school they can walk to or transportation to schools of “choice.”
DeVos leads push for school closings, only African American schools targeted
By Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin
When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder concluded that a new law that restructured Detroit Public Schools prohibited school closures until 2019, the DeVos network reacted immediately, demanding closures of Detroit schools. They enlisted elected officials who had received campaign contributions from the DeVos apparatus. Now the Governor has backed down, despite considerable legal muscle that agreed with his interpretation.
In a shocking move, the Governor has proposed the closing of 38 schools across the state, including 24 Detroit public schools (and one Detroit charter). But an examination of the list shows a disturbing pattern: all of them serve primarily African American populations.
The DeVos entity that speaks to education issues in the state, Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), quickly demanded that all 38 be shut down. They ignore the reality that in one part of Detroit, it would close all the area high schools and abandon K-8 education in a large area of the City. More fundamentally, they ignore the fact that they are accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan.
GLEP, which was set up and has been primarily funded by Dick and Betsy DeVos, has been aggressive in advocating the shutting down of public schools and replacing them with charters. The charters, in turn, have been seen as a base to get electoral support for vouchers, according to plans formulated in the mid-1990s. An amendment to the Michigan Constitution to permit vouchers was put on the ballot by the DeVos family in 2000, but it was soundly defeated.
Undeterred, the DeVos machine continues their plan to charterize Michigan public schools with no caps or accountability mandated. The charters, some placed by DeVos allies, are set up primarily in communities of color. Eighty percent are for-profit corporations, according to a Western Michigan University study. They average a thousand dollars profit off each student, out of a state foundation of just over $7,000 per student.
White school districts have been more resistant to state intervention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.
DeVos has directly used her political muscle to take a highly rated Detroit aeronautics high school and have a state subsidy for that school transferred to a DeVos-created charter high school in west Michigan. They also took the Detroit curriculum as their own. The West Michigan Aviation Academy says that the school was an inspiration of Betsy DeVos.
It remains to be seen how much the Michigan public will tolerate the dismantling of their districts. One school that is in an otherwise majority white district plans a determined resistance to the state closing plan. The East Detroit Public Schools, in a county that voted for Trump, has on its website a statement from its Superintendent that “We have no intention of allowing the SRO (from the Governor’s office-RB) to dictate the future of our students.” A school board member added that “East Detroit Public Schools will not accept the closure of any of the District’s schools by the state and will not allow the SRO to intervene at this point in our plans. School closures hurt children.”
The state is also facing lawsuits over its destruction of public schools and educational quality. They have directly controlled the Detroit schools for the last eight years and 15 of the last 18 years. Their citation of academic shortcomings they created as justification of the closings is really an indictment of state control, a subject they avoid.
The state has also dismantled four school districts across the state. All were African-American communities. Currently three of the proposed schools for closure in Saginaw and in Bridgeport-Spaulding Public Schools serve students who were displaced when their home district, Buena Vista, was dissolved. The proposed closings would subject hundreds of students to two major school dislocations.
Detroit is the model of proving that mass closures only put districts in a downward spiral. In the last 13 years 172 district schools (61%) have been closed, mostly by the state, in response to state-created debt and academic performance. Another 15 were taken and turned into the Governor’s personal school district. Closings have lead to abusive charterization and neighborhood abandonment. If closures were the solution, Detroit would be the Harvard of K-12 education.
There is a likely legal challenge to the DeVos-led dismantling of public education based on impact disparities on African American communities. DeVos has shown no reluctance to exploit this vulnerability in our social fabric as she seeks a world of profit-driven charters and vouchers that undermine over a half-century of educational progress.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“. . . means less choice for black residents, who no longer have a school they can walk to or transportation to schools of ‘choice.'”
That’s one way to kill a neighborhood.
But here’s another book to add to the list: “RIGHTS TALK: The impoverishment of Political Discourse” by Mary Ann Glendon. Best chapters: “The Missing Language of Responsibility” and “The Missing Language of Sociality.” <–The later refers to the significance of positive neighborhood networks that are hard to see but that nevertheless exist even in high-poverty or older areas of a city. This is what DeVos and the capitalist mindset TOTALLY overlook. The book was first published in 1991 and so was before the term “gentrification” came about, but I think that is what she was giving the case against.
Racism … how to destroy the neighborhoods: Take away their public schools.
This is the same urban gentrification strategy playing out in Philly, Chicago and other cities. The goal is a developer land grab near the central business district. They toss the poor to the outer reaches of the city where they place the cheap charters, buy up the land near downtown on the cheap, build selective (mostly white) charters and upscale housing. Both the developers and city are happy with profit and higher tax ratables. What they ignore is the amount of chaos they inflict on the poor. Cities get to create more separate and unequal schools as a bonus. It is an insidious form of discrimination.
retired teacher:
So if I get your drift, “chaos” is the true rheephorm spelling of “choice”?
I mean, they both start with the same two letters and share three letters in common…
😎
Yes.
The entire “education reform/choice/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The first outcry for resegregation “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
How do we fight such manipulations to enhance segregation? The courts will fight de jure segregation, but they tend to turn a blind eye to de facto segregation. The type of “reform” segregation in play is a manipulative type of de facto segregation that has been written about, but ignored in the courts. They are using the appeal of “choice” to funnel students in different directions that increase segregation.
As DeVos closes public schools, Littlefingers Donald Trump will appoint someone from his cabinet, probably Steve Bannon, to open private, for-profit prisons in those same communities. Next step, get rid of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and pass new laws so children can be tried as adults as young as age 5 starting in Kindergarten.
I can see the headlines now. Trump reduces crime by sending 5-year olds to prison so they will never have a chance to become an adult criminal.
That’s what VAMs are, algorithms that interpolate data to predict future outcomes. Big Data predicts when you will shop, what you will buy, and what you will be able to spend. $$$ If you’re
Below the
Line of
Acceptable
CommonCore
Knowledge
(B.L.A.C.K.) your school will be privatized and you will be pipelined out of sight, out of mind, A.S.A.P.
Wow. That message should be everywhere, LCT.
Michigan ed reformers had an all-privatized district. It was run by a national management company but I read that company bailed and they were looking for another.
I don’t know what happened to the town after that:
“At least one in four teachers at the new Muskegon Heights school district have already quit the charter school this year. That’s after an emergency manager laid off all the former public school teachers in Muskegon Heights because he didn’t have enough money to open school in the fall. That means there have been a lot of new, adult faces in the district.”
Why is the Muskegon Heights experiment never mentioned by national ed reform lobbyists?
They don’t discuss failed experiments? How is that “science” or “research” if only successes are mentioned?
Ask DeVos about Muskegon Heights. She won’t have a script prepared for that question.
If we’re bound and determined to privatize schools we need to discuss ALL the experiments, not just those experiments ed reformers point to as “proof”.
http://michiganradio.org/post/i-couldnt-accept-why-muskegon-heights-teachers-quit-and-how-it-impacts-students
They will never mention the “failed experiments” because it will tarnish their brand. Most of “reform” is hype and spin that fails to deliver on promises.
retired teacher: what you wrote.
And under the category of “what’s-not-so-very-old is new again”—
Among many links, see deutsch29 for edupreneur Steve Barr (think “Green Dot” and Locke HS in LA) and his words & actions in New Orleans re John Mcdonough HS. 10-18-2014, “Steve Barr Bails on McDonogh; Surplus Laptops Sold Bearing Student Data.”
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/steve-barr-bails-on-mcdonough-surplus-laptops-sold-bearing-student-data/
Keeping in mind that this is the default setting when education is treated as a few winners-many losers type of investment opportunity for eduprenuers chasing that pot of gold at the end of the $tudent $ucce$$ rainbow.
😎
Scisne. What you said.
As a relevant aside, I lived and taught in Farmville, VA (Longwood College) in the center of Virginia for four years and was able to soak up some of the history there. (A statue of a confederate solder sat in the middle of the town for a long time when I was there.) Farmville is where the Moton School is–a “black school” where the children there revolted against open segregation (and a horrible disparity of school buildings and resources) and were an initiating factor in Brown vs Board of Education case. The county closed the “white” public schools there for around 10 years and opened private schools for their white children. Know that there were some “token” Black children in attendance. They rely on those to support their denial of institutional and personal racism.
Finally, Moton school became a national historical site while I was there. But it’s a well-known fact in that area that a whole generation of both Black and White children missed out on several years of their formal education, and many are still there. Some Black families sent their children to distant family in other states to continue their education; some home schooled, and some just languished, including some poor White children who couldn’t afford to go to private school. Each story is different. But the individual stories are fantastic–when I left some years ago, the college was doing a long term project of collecting those stories.
You have to wonder though, what happens when the rat finds that it’s cornered. I’m glad the ACLU and other powerful institutions are involved and that those involved with the NAACP basically “don’t buy it.”
Today, Virginia under Tim Kaine, who in many ways, is a free market supporter, has chosen to support public education instead. He and his wife believe that the free market has no place in public education. Virginia has a few charters, but it is not one of the laissez-faire states to which charters flock.
retired teacher: I’m aware of Kaine’s work and background and am glad of it. The State offices are in Richmond, however. My experience was during 1998-2002 or so, long before Kaine’s time in office, and speaks to the attitudes of many who still live there. Though it bends towards justice, the arch of the moral universe is long? (MLK)
Are the public employees at the US Department of Education planning on getting any input from public schools parents and teachers before “reforming” our schools again?
DeVos has no interest in our schools and either does anyone in the ed reform “movement”.
Public schools serve 90% of kids. We deserve representation in the federal government.
All I have heard from any of these people is promotion of charters and vouchers and attacks on public schools.
What does DeVos offer public school parents and children? What value does she add?
I get it: public schools are unfashionable. So what? Is this about what ed reformers prefer or about reality? Show me a benefit for PUBLIC schools.
Chiara: It’s a gentrification of education.
I was thinking we could bring ordinary public school graduates to DC and show DeVos and the Senators that we’re not all failures. We could bring people from all walks of life and jobs and professions. Show Mrs. DeVos that despite what she’s been told, public school graduates make up the vast majority of the US workforce.
We’re everywhere. Most adults went to public schools.
The only place we’re NOT is at the US Department of Education. Apparently we’re excluded from top management positions in our own government.
Chiara says: “The only place we’re NOT is at the US Department of Education. Apparently we’re excluded from top management positions in our own government.” (I laughed out loud when I read that.)
Is someone writing an op-ed about this Alice-in-Wonderland thing? The last advertising I saw that concerned teachers and the inference to public education was this bumper sticker: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”
“THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT’S NEWEST FACES: Eighteen new faces are joining the Trump administration’s Education Department this week, Caitlin Emma reports. Jason Botel, executive director of the Maryland education advocacy group MarylandCAN, is coming on as a senior White House adviser for education. He’ll work closely with Acting Education Secretary Phil Rosenfelt to lead the new team. That team includes Josh Venable, who helped prepare Betsy DeVos for her confirmation hearing and is considered a top candidate for chief of staff. It also includes Jim Manning, who worked at the Education Department during the Bush and Obama administrations and led the landing team at the department during the transition to the Trump administration. Andrew Kossack, the former commissioner of the Indiana Department of Revenue and an alum of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is joining the team as well. And Stanley Buchesky, formerly a managing partner at the venture capital firm The EdTech Fund, will work on budget and finance issues. ”
Are people with experience in public schools barred from employment at the US Department of Education?
If they see “public school” on the resume does ed reform just pitch it in the trash?
Because it’s pretty ridiculous that 90% of kids attend public schools and NO ONE at the federal level comes out of those systems.
This is an ed reform echo chamber.
We should demand that public schools are included when plans are made for our schools. Why don’t we have any public school folks at the table when these decisions are made? Why are our schools consistently excluded from ed reform plans FOR our schools?
That was DeVos prepared for her cabinet hearing? Could have fooled me!
As far as getting representation for public schools, qualified educational experts are marginalized because they want to score a coup in the DOE. They don’t want a balanced representation in support of public education. Citizens need to push back and openly resist their plans.
Chiara identified 6 staff members, all male- must be Wall Street and Silicon Valley picks.
Maryland CAN, reportedly, is one of those Gates “charities”- same guy, was a KIPP executive director.
Tell me not to mention it again, and I will not. A former elected president of the st. louis school board, and also a writer, has an incredible 35,000 word history of when a Brooks Brothers executive was paid 5 million dollars to run the district as a businessman. He closed a lot of schools……. The proposed school closings were immediately seen by African-Americans as an attack on African-American communities. Lizz Brown pointed out that 15 of the 16 schools that were to be closed were schools in African-American neighborhoods (14 of them were north of the historic dividing line between black north St. Louis and white south St. Louis); Roberti and the board had purposely excluded community and black political leaders from any of the discussion that led to placing schools on the list for closure; and several of the schools on the school closing list did not conform to the putative criteria for closure.
Brown, Alderwoman Irene J. Smith, and others, argued that the schools appeared to be politically motivated as the schools marked for closure were concentrated in the strongest African-American ward in the city, the one with the highest rate of voter turnout. ‘
When July 15, 2003, arrived, nearly 1,000 people packed the auditorium at Harris-Stowe State College for the vote, filling the seats and standing in the aisles. The stage was set for what would become the launch of a protracted, multi-year battle for the future of St. Louis Public Schools. Some people came with a desperate hope of working a last minute change in the minds of board members. Some came to vent their frustration. Some came to repudiate feelings of powerlessness. They all came expecting a show.
Hecklers early on targeted the hired parliamentarian. When there was presentation on the recommendations for closing schools the roar of the heckling became so loud everywhere in the auditorium that they canceled the presentation. Later on, the closures passed 5-2…..and the arguing about disagreements in public meetings are still used today to justify the state takeover…..in spite of the fact that they inspired better people to be elected.
2003 in St.Louis was ahead of its time….and Peter Downs’ detailed account is relevant. https://focusmidwest.com/this-is-reform/
Vice President Pence @VP Jan 26
More
This is Nat’l School Choice Week. @POTUS & I are committed to making a great education possible for all our children
We went from charter-mania in DC under Obama to voucher-mania under Trump.
Once again, public schools get the shaft. Our schools are simply omitted.
“In the weeks ahead of the inauguration, as Obama’s senior education staffers prepared to hand off plans detailing implementation of the new federal K-12 law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, they assigned a team of career managers to continue working on each section; every team was responsible for relaying its section to Trump administrators.”
A new federal law that will apply to 100% of schools, but public schools are completely excluded from representation or input in DC.
Charter and private school promoters will be setting policy for 100% of schools, when they represent only 10% of students.
Ridiculous, and a measure of what an echo chamber ed reform is.
That’s what happens when billionaires and corporations buy our representatives. They no longer represent “we the people.” The only hope for democracy is to get the money out of politics and overturn Citizens United.
Overturning Citizens United and getting money out of politics won’t happen as long as Littlefingers Donald Trump is in the White House, or any Republican, and the GOP controls even one house of Congress.
I know. We need to make sure he’s a one term dictator, unless he becomes totally unhinged before that. Pence is is a lemon too, but I think he would have a better understanding of the limits of his power.
Are you kidding about Pence? He is a far right evangelical who will make Chump look good. Pence is an evil man with a good barber.
Love that barber line karla!
karla: I think the difference is between holding an extreme ideology (Pence) and being certifiable (Trump/Bannon, recent hirelings). Pence is at least a patriot of sorts and he knows the workings of government. You cannot say that about Trump, at least not with a straight face.
Don’t forget that school districts are also caving to charters and third-party marketing schemes for charters. The charter industry has a well-developed strategy for enlisting support from officials in public schools.
Case in point: In May, 2015 our local newspaper in Cincinnati announced the formation of a new $25 million non-profit “Accelerate Great Schools” for “high-quality” schools. The accelerator was organized without fanfare by committees from the Cincinnati Business and Cincinnati Regional Business, and three Cincinnati-based foundations: Farmer Family (Cintas wealth), The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation, and KnowledgeWorks (major promoter of online learning with multiple funders including Gates). Planning for the accelerator also included leaders from local charter schools, Cincinnati Public Schools, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati (a noteworthy exclusion of other religious schools).
These co-conspirators had already set the goal of the accelerator (from the website):
“Putting a charter school in all 52 neighborhoods in Cincinnati, beginning with the “creation of new high-performing schools for 4,800 more students in five years, doubling the current number of students with access to this level of quality. By 2025, we will have created new high-performing spots for 13,700 children across Cincinnati. Many of our early efforts will prioritize low-income communities that rarely have access to excellent schools.”
The calculation of “high performing” is an A or B rating from a convoluted state rating system with test scores dominant. Cincinnati has a 2016 enrollment of 35,000 and unlike many urban districts enrollments have been increasing. The accelerator’s target is about 40% of the market share in less than ten years with huge transfers of money from the public schools for the charters that the accelerator is jumpstarting with grants, and for Teach for America’s New Teacher Project to review how Cincinnati Public Schools recruits teachers.
Note that the intent is NOT to limit the charters to low-income communities.
The leadership for this operation comes from two fast-track Teach for America alumni, (one does not mention this in her Accelerator profile), a person with 14 years in financial services, managing the $5.2 million charitable giving portfolio as Vice President of Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase Foundation, for Ohio, West Virginia and Northern Kentucky.
The first CEO was recruited from Mind Trust and its Teach for America work in Indianapolis; Mind Trust is a “non-profit” cash cow for Teach for America, and a pusher of charters.
The eight-member Board of Directors of our Great Schools Accelerator has no evident expertise in education. They CEO they hired lasted about 18 months. No reason has been given for for his departure. He was recruited by Bellwether and expected to help raise money for the accelerator.
The Cincinnati accelerator follows a template for propagating charter schools that operates with the help of Mind Trust and Education Cities.
Education Cities is network of 24 cities (and 31 city-based organizations) promoting charters and online learning In all of these cities, these accelerators are aided by four deep-pocket pushers of charters: Center for Reinventing Public Education, Public Impact, Bellwether Education Partners, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Education Cities is funded by the following foundations: Broad, Dell, Gates, Kauffman, and Walton. These foundations and their leaders are not friends of public schools.
With Trump in office, the longstanding effort of these billionaire foundations to takeover public schools is certain to “accelerate.”
More discussion of the local effort, and opposition to it is here. http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2017/01/24/ceo-quietly-quits-school-accelerator/96997612/
Bribery is the way many charters infiltrate the public consciousness. They make a big splash and get lots of publicity with the assumption they are creating a meaningful “partnership.” It is really more like “Come into my web said the spider to the fly.” The officials in the Cincinnati Public Schools must be gullible or ill informed.
‘goodbye public schools, though I never, knew you at all’ Said the American elite as they blunder control of education.
“blunder” and plunder.
Another article about school closings in Detroit (and in other parts of Michigan as well):
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/detroit/2017/01/27/week-in-review-angst-fury-as-38-michigan-schools-await-their-fate/
“DeVos…expressed deep interest in digital learning and how it could expand opportunities for kids.” Note to DeVos- “You could explore digital opportunities, by looking at your carpet samples, on- line.”
DeVos’ mind, such as it is, is already developed, likely, to the extent possible so, her digital surfing wouldn’t matter. However, students can expand their abilities, and need less screen time. And, the rephormers know that, because more screen time is not what they want for their own kids.
Albion High School….where the college is. High school closed June 8, 2013. Fact.
Yet more evidence that Betsy DeVos is manifestly unsuited to be head of the DoE. It’s ironic that Harold O. Levy, head of the Jack Kent Cook Foundation, supports her in spite of her positions on public education. The Foundation is dedicated to finding and financially supporting talented young men and women from underserved backgrounds, yet Levy writes that her nomination “is a strong sign that [Trump’s] administration could increase the use of revolutionary educational technology (edtech) to dramatically improve instruction for millions of children in America’s schools.” (https://goo.gl/CmWlE8) But if there are no American schools, where will those talented students come from? If financial support for public schools continues to be drained off, how will they afford to buy all the miraculous equipment that she supposedly wants them to have? And where, I wonder, will it come from?
Will Dix,
This is extra sad because Harold O. Levy was chancellor of the NYC public schools but he then ran Kaplan, the for-profit Ed biz
Diane: This just in from EdWeek: (ALL QUOTES BELOW)
Nearly 250 Education-Related Groups Urge Senators to Reject Betsy DeVos
By Andrew Ujifusa on January 30, 2017 2:06 PM
Well over two hundred national, state, and local groups working in education have signed a letter urging U.S. senators to reject Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be secretary of education.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which previously announced its grave concerns about DeVos, issued the letter Monday, one day before the scheduled Senate education committee vote on DeVos’ nomination.
The American Federation of Teachers, the Children’s Defense Fund, GLSEN (which advocates on behalf of LGBT students), the NAACP, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals are among nationwide groups to register their official opposition to DeVos. State and local groups to weigh in against DeVos include the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, the Florida Association of School Social Workers, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and the Urban League of Greater Atlanta.
“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,” reads a portion of the letter, which was issued Monday. “This lack of experience makes her uniquely unfamiliar with the challenges and opportunities facing the nation’s students, families, educators, and schools.”
In a statement accompanying the letter, the Leadership Conference President Wade Henderson said, “Betsy DeVos has failed to demonstrate that she is qualified to do that job or that she understands what the job requires.”
DeVos is the former leader of the American Federation for Children, which backs vouchers and other forms of school choice. During her Jan. 17 confirmation hearing, DeVos denied any prior support for (and says she does not currently support) “conversion therapy” for gays, and stressed that she wanted all children to go to school in a safe, bullying-free environment.
As we wrote earlier today, the odds appear to favor DeVos, because Trump’s fellow Republicans have 52 seats in the Senate, compared to just 48 for Democrats. The GOP also holds the edge in committee seats by a count of 12 to 11.
However, DeVos has plenty of friends as well.
In a Jan. 17 letter, 150 state-level leaders, including state legislators, weighed in to support DeVos. In addition to several school choice groups, 20 Republican governors recently signed a letter saying they would look forward to having DeVos as education secretary. Former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced DeVos at her hearing, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who carries a big megaphone in state education policy debates, has also backed DeVos.
Read the full letter signed by the 248 groups below:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/01/education_groups_urge_senators_reject_betsy_devos.html?cmp=soceml-twfdbltz-ewnow
Wednesday February 1, 2017
Yuri Gripas/Reuters
2 Republican Senators Announce That They Will Vote Against Betsy DeVos
Republican Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) announced Wednesday that they would not be voting for Betsy DeVos as education secretary, potentially imperiling the nominee’s confirmation.
No Democratic senators are expected to vote for DeVos. If no other Republicans vote against DeVos, Vice President Mike Pence would be the tie-breaking vote. DeVos needs a simple majority to be confirmed.
This post takes a close look at the devaluation of black communities across the country. When students are bussed to other school districts it takes away from the aspects of the black community that are valuable. There seems to be no true way to measure the importance and the impact that having a school that you can relate to and that helps you understand and grow as a young man and woman of color. By removing students from their communities it devalues the part of their communities that students enjoy and find important. Reduced enrollment would impact the available resources that the district would have to decrease the education gap that already exists. Some charter schools also have application processes that would only allow high achieving students to be accepted. Which removes some of the most academically gifted students away from their communities.