Here are some great questions that Senators should pose to Betsy DeVos at her hearings on January 11.
http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2017/01/ten-questions-for-betsy-devos-by-russ.html
The questions were written by literacy expert Russ Walsh.
Archives for the month of: January, 2017
Russ Walsh, literacy expert, has ten questions that the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) committee should ask Billionaire Betsy.
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/01/ten-questions-for-betsy-devos.html
He sent these questions to his senators from Pennsylvania. One of his senators, Bob Casey, is a member of the HELP committee.
“Ms. DeVos, would you please state, concisely, any relevant experience you have had in public education, either as a student, a teacher, a school leader, a public school board member, a parent of a public school child, a PTA member, a volunteer in a traditional public school or as someone who once drove past a public school?
You have a long record of advocating for school choice in the form of vouchers and charter schools. What if parents’ first choice, as it is for most American families, is to send their children to a clean, safe, well-resourced, professionally-staffed, local neighborhood public school? How would the voucher and charter school schemes you advocate support this kind of choice?
In your home state of Michigan, you and the foundations you support have fought hard to make sure that governmental oversight of charter schools is extremely limited despite indications of widespread fiscal mismanagement and poor academic performance. Should charter schools be subject to the same financial and academic scrutiny as traditional public schools? If not, why not?
The Detroit Free Press has called you the lobbyist “at the center” of the current “deeply dysfunctional” school choice landscape in Detroit. Policies you have heavily advocated for and supported are on full display in that city.
How is that working out? Would you care to take the committee on a site visit to Detroit to see the impact of your good works?
Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, has called you “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward” since forever. Talk about how you will develop good working relationships with the 2.5 million teachers represented by unions.
Your family made much of its fortune through Amway, a quasi-legal pyramid scheme that, according to one suit that cost the company 150 million dollars to settle, “induces salespeople to buy thousands of dollars of overpriced products and useless success tools and then to recruit others to do the same thing in an endless chain scheme that dooms, by design, nearly all to losses.” Do you think as Secretary at DOE you might be able to use such a multi-level marketing scheme to raise needed money for public schools? Do you think pyramid business schemes should be taught in school?
In interviews you have discussed visits you have made to charter schools and the wonderful programs you saw there. Would you discuss any visits you have made, ever, to a traditional public school and talk about the programs you saw there?
Your predecessors at the federal Department of Education have faced a great deal of criticism for advocating the use of standardized testing to rate schools and teachers. Explain in detail the pros and cons of these so called Value-Added Measures, how they are calculated and whether or not you think they are a good way to evaluate teacher or school performance. Can we see the valued-added scores of the charter schools in Detroit, please?
Lightning Round. Please identify these education program acronyms:
IEP
RTI
PARCC
SBAC
CCSS
ELL
ESL
FERPA
IDEA
PAC
WPA (Oops! Sorry, that one sneaked in from the Roosevelt administration)
In the end, Ms. DeVos, as the person designated to lead the federal Department of Education, overseeing the programs and resources for the 90% of American school children who attend traditional public schools, does a viable system of public education matter to you at all? Take your time with this one, but not as much time as you have taken to sign your required financial disclosure forms.”
Noam Scheiber of the New York Times has dug deep into the political activities of Betsy DeVos and her family and produced a comprehensive analysis of the way they have used their vast wealth to impose their radical agenda on the state of Michigan.
Not it only have they led the campaignn for privatization of public education, but they have successfully fought labor unions, income taxes, estate taxes, and any effort to curb their self-interest. They even have spent money to defeat moderate Republicans. They seem to have a hammer lock on the Republican legislature in Michigan. Scheiber compares them to the Koch brothers in their use of their wealth to achieve their radical political goals. They want to restore the America of a century ago, before the New Deal.
“They have this moralized sense of the free market that leads to this total program to turn back the ideas of the New Deal, the welfare state,” Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian who has written extensively about the conservative movement, said, describing the DeVoses.”
Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray announced that the hearing on Betsy DeVos nomination for Secretary of Education has been postponed from January 11 to January 17.
Democrats were concerned that she had not been fully vetted by the government ethics office for conflicts of interest.
Mother Jones magazine posted the CIA-NSA report on Russian efforts to help Donald Trump win the presidency. As noted in the report, it does not contain the actual sources of the conclusions so as not to compromise them.
Sources whom I trust tell me that there are recordings of Russian leaders celebrating Trump’s victory and praising themselves for their success.
Folks, we have an illegitimate president who has promised to wreck our federal agencies, eliminate Obamacare without a replacement for 20 million people, wreck public education, purge the EPA and NASA of climate change researchers and funding.
#Putinspuppet
#notmypresident
The following press release was sent to radio stations, TV stations, and print media by the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Ravitch is author of many books, including Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. She is a research professor of education at New York University and served as Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to the Secretary of Education from 1991-1993 under the George H. W. Bush administration. She now blogs at dianeravitch.net.
She said today: “Betsy DeVos should not be approved by the Senate committee or confirmed by the Senate as U.S. Secretary of Education. She has no experience or qualifications for the job. She is a lobbyist for alternatives to public schools. Eighty-five percent of the students in the U.S. attend public schools. Her only plan is to weaken and destroy them by diverting public money to charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.
“DeVos is a billionaire who has never worked in a public school, never attended a public school, never sent her own children to public school. She has lived in a billionaire bubble of privilege. She has no understanding of the needs of our nation’s public schools, and she is in fact actively hostile to them. This is unacceptable. She is unacceptable.
“Our public schools are one of the cornerstones of our democracy. We have never had a Secretary of Education who was opposed to public schools. We should never have one.”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
January 9, 2017
Institute for Public Accuracy
980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
A comment posted this morning by the reader known as “Threatened Out West”
“Dear Ms. Streep:
I thank you deeply for your impassioned speech last night. It was needed and beautifully presented.
I appreciate that you mentioned that you graduated from public schools.
I would ask one thing, however. I know you mentioned that Hollywood and the media are the most vilified professions right now. Perhaps you are right. However, there is ANOTHER profession just as vilified–public education teaching. We teachers are being blamed for the problems of the world. We are told we are so bad that we are a “national security risk.” We are told that the economic collapse of 2008 was our fault. We are told that the death of Eric Garner in New York can be laid at our feet. We have been told that we are sub-par since 1983’s “A Nation at Risk.” I could go on.
Yet, we go into classrooms every day that are filthy and falling apart. We teach overcrowded classes that have students with a wide variety of needs that we strive to fulfill. We love every kid and we work countless hours to reach every kid. We provide supplies, food, clothing, for kids. We aren’t perfect, but the vast majority of us try every day.
Unlike Hollywood and the media, we never have the kind of platform to speak out that you so beautifully displayed last night. The only time teachers are in the news is when some teacher does some awful thing, which then makes all teachers guilty by association. Once in a great while, one of us may get in the news for something really heroic, but that is infrequent and usually brushed under the carpet as soon as possible.
Could you, and others with the platform that you have, PLEASE speak out for teachers? We speak out, but our platform is tiny, and we are told that we are “selfish,” and, “not in it for the kids” when we try to speak out. This week, the Department of Education will be filled by a woman who destroys us and our profession at every turn, whose supporters denigrate our professionalism and destroy our lives’ work.
PLEASE, speak for us, too.
Thank you.
A tired teacher from the west.
Richard Florida, senior editor at The Atlantic, writes here about Jane Jacobs’ 2005 book, Dark age Ahead, and says it is an eerie prediction of the Trump phenomenon. She explains why it happened and how to survive.
This is is a must-read article.
Florida writes:
“At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.
“Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.
“Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she writes….
“According to Jacobs, our own dark age is taking shape around the erosion of “five key pillars” of society.
“The first is the decline of family and community. The same politicians who call families the foundation of society undertake policies that weaken and undermine them. The replacement of extended families with nuclear ones make it impossible for many to cover the cost of housing. Falling birth rates mean a smaller workforce to take care of an aging population.
“At the same time, the broader community falls victim to market pressures, materialism, and the hegemony of brands. Jacobs points especially to the automobile as a “destroyer of worlds” that not only wastes energy and promotes sprawl, but skews priorities from public interest to self-interest.
“The second is the decline of education, which has been transformed into vocational training. Education becomes an individualistic investment instead of a public good that produces well-rounded citizens. When that happens, jobs and profit become the sole measure of progress and ultimate justification for political choices, at the expense of everything else.
“The third is an attack on science, or what she calls false analogies that mask reality. “If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific,” she writes. “It stagnates.” Objectivity and scientific progress are replaced with dogma.
“The fourth pillar is the “dumbing down” of taxes. In place of public investments that build cities and societies, taxes and government investment come to be seen as waste. The result is that all sorts of public goods—education, transit, infrastructure and the social safety which contribute to a functioning and cohesive society—start to break down. Jacobs perceptively identifies the looming “new urban crisis” of unaffordable housing, gaping inequality, escalating sprawl, and congestion facing cities as the result of this sort of attack on taxes and public investment.
“The fifth and final pillar is the subversion of the “learned professions” such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering and journalism. We cannot possibly learn every facet of the world, so professions are needed to instill trust and maintain common welfare. Doctors, for example, adhere to a Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have ethical requirements to adhere to. When such professions come under attack and their norms and functions are undermined, Jacobs notes, society falls victim to the whims of “frauds, brutes, and psychopaths.”
It all sounds very familiar.
Lloyd Lofthouse comments frequently on this blog and writes his own blog “Crazy Normal.” We know from his many comments that he is a Marine veteran and that he was a teacher for many years.
In this post, he shows another side of himself.
He hears that Trump wants to privatize the Veterans Administration. Lloyd thinks this is a terrible idea. So far, all of Trump’s ideas are terrible ideas, because he gets them from right-wing websites or Mike Pence. One is stupid and the other is evil; or both.
Lloyd writes:
It is clearly obvious to me that the Trump administration and the Koch dominated GOP plans to roll the U.S. back to a time right after Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War (1861 – 1865), back to the Jim Crow era of racial discrimination and injustice, back to a time when there was no income tax, and the federal government was weak, very weak, when it came to protecting the people and the environment from racists, liars, frauds and con-men like Littlefingers Donald Trump, who will never be my President, and back to a time when there was little to no job protection and more than 40 percent of Americans lived in poverty.
And instead of creating jobs, Littlefingers will soon be in a position, with possible support from the GOP dominated Congress to get rid of and/or bully most if not all of the 2.8 million civil servants that work for the federal government with a legal threat to legislate many of them into poverty.
The VA, for instance, employs almost 345,000 people at hundreds of VA medical facilities, clinics, and benefit offices across the country. They are mostly civil servants and few working Americans can survive on $1 a year.
This is what “draining the swamp” really means to Littlefingers, with a long history of contempt and obvious hate for the law and anyone with more power than he has, and soon he will be the most powerful person in the world with help from Russia. Littlefingers is clearly the Kremlin’s President of the United States, a clear-and-present danger.
As I have written many times, the scores on international tests have no predictive value about our economy. If they did, we would be a third world country by now since our scores have always been mediocre to very low on those tests. To learn more, read my chapter on international scores in “Reign of Error.”
Now, surprisingly, an article appears in Forbes challenging the PISA methodology and asserting that Asian nations get to choose their best students.
This false information has been used by the media and “reformers” to bash public schools and promote privatization.
Shameful. A hoax.
Diane Ravitch's blog 