Please take the time to read this letter from Carol Burris, the CEO of the Network for Public Education and the NPE Action Fund.
Carol describes NPE’s plans to continue the struggle for our public schools.
We know what the DeVos agenda is, and we know she will tout the failed remedies of corporate reform.
Make no mistake: corporate reform is the status quo! It has had the unrelenting support of the U.S. Department of Education since 2001. It has the support of a long list of billionaires and foundations. Federal policy from NCLB TO Race to the Top to ESSA is the status quo. It is policy built on the assumption that schools will get better if the state threatens teachers and principals with punishments and rewards. Many schools have been stigmatized and closed based on false assumptions. Many educators have unfairly been terminated based on flawed evaluation methods.
We want to create a strong and powerful grassroots network of defenders of public education. We want to help you connect with allies in your state, your district, your hometown.
We now have more than 300,000 members, ready to join in our crusade. Be strong and join with us. (“Somewhere beyond the barricades, is there a world you’d like to see?” Les Miserables). Is there a different, better kind of school you’d like to see? We can dream it. We can do it. But first we must survive the next four years.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One area to watch will be career and technical training DeVos is a huge promoter of for-profit schools.
The US Department of Education will steer CTE funding away from public high schools and community colleges to for-profit entities.
It could be a huge growth area for up and coming rip-offs. It’s scary how many finance CEO’s are all of a sudden interested in training for high school juniors. They see a profit somewhere or they wouldn’t all be climbing on this bandwagon.
Read the CTE proposals carefully. The CTE push will turn into a huge crony capitalist debacle if people don’t watch these folks- follow the funding.
“Cherry reinforced the truth that for-profit associate and occupational programs don’t preclude advancement into traditional four-year college programs. ”
http://www.opportunitylives.com/sens-scott-and-rubio-ready-to-work-with-trump-to-revive-manufacturing/
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One has to wonder if the passing of the ESSA and whatever it enshrined in law, will have more impact on education policy, than the person who hold the office sec. of ed., be that Duncan, King, or DeVos.
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Betsy DeVos Is Now Education Secretary, But The Fight Over Her Agenda Has Just Begun…Huffington Post
WASHINGTON ― Betsy DeVos was confirmed on Tuesday, by a razor-thin margin, after an extraordinary outpouring of opposition, to be education secretary.
But that only means one thing: she will serve as the secretary of education. When it comes to implementing her agenda for public education, the battles have only started.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who backed DeVos and is a major proponent of the voucher movement, told reporters after Tuesday’s vote that there isn’t much she can do on her own. Over 90 percent of funding for schools comes from state and local resources, he noted, so the federal government controls only a small slice of education spending.
DeVos has long championed voucher programs that allow kids to attend private schools using taxpayer money, even though those schools are often religious. Her new boss, President Donald Trump, has made the expansion of voucher programs his signature education plan, proposing to repurpose $20 billion in existing federal funds to help subsidize students going to private schools.
Asked what DeVos’ confirmation means for that $20 billion proposal, Scott said not much. “It means it still has to get through Congress,” he said. “The secretary of education cannot unilaterally make any decisions on her own. She needs to be empowered by Congress, and the fact of the matter is that we’re going to need eight Democrats, according to the current means of the Senate, in order to get anything done. That’s going to be very difficult.”
DeVos needed only 50 votes to get confirmed, but any legislation will need 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. After calls opposing her nomination flooded into Senate offices, lawmakers are well aware that pushing forward on the DeVos agenda will trigger a similar uprising, one that members of Congress would rather avoid heading into midterm elections.
Scott has his own proposal that would give federal funds to students hoping to escape their local public school. But outside of congressional legislation, Scott said he did not think the U.S. Department of Education will have substantial influence over where kids go to school.
“I think there are 29 states that have some school choice already,” said Scott, referring to programs that help subsidize private schools. “We’re only going to empower the states to do what they want to do. We can’t tell them what to do, nor should we.”
Still, there are tangible ways in which DeVos could have a major impact on K-12 education, even without Congress. She will have considerable influence over the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which works to ensure that children have equal access to education. This means she can affect the way the most vulnerable children are treated in school.
But on a macro level, students will likely notice little change under DeVos, said Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the right-leaning R Street Institute.
“If anything, the K-12 system has shown a remarkable resistance to change. We’ve seen wave after wave of education reform … but not a night-and-day transformation,” he said.
Kosar suspects that under DeVos, the federal government will choose to exercise less influence over local and state education decisions.
But as for voucher programs, he said, “How much she’s going to be able to foster the school choice movement is not at all clear to me. No doubt she’ll try to do something on that count, but there’s a limited number of levers for sure.”
Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said she remains concerned over areas where DeVos has jurisdiction. Byard pointed in particular to the Office for Civil Rights, where she noted DeVos has control over “budgeting, staffing, prioritization.” Under the Obama administration, secretaries Arne Duncan and John King Jr. issued guidance through that office that was specifically designed to protect LGBTQ students. This could be lost under DeVos.
DeVos also has influence over the implementation of some specifics under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a broad new federal law replacing the No Child Left Behind Act.
According to Byard, a “record number” of families turned to the Office for Civil Rights last year after experiencing school discrimination.
“Whatever happens in the executive branch, everyone in America still has rights under federal law,” she said. “Students will have rights, but rights without enforcement means little for our students.”
From the other side of the political spectrum, Scott sounded a similarly non-optimistic tone.
Asked how much he thought the new secretary could accomplish, he said, “Not much without congressional approval. That’s the myth from the other side, that she could somehow appropriate the resources in a way that’s inconsistent with federal law ― and that just can’t happen.”
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Don’t believe her hands are tied. With a solidly Republican Congress she can request that Title 1 and other federal funds be turned into block grants for choice. That 10% is crucial for every district that gets it.
And unlike Duncan, who had an incentive of $5 billion to push his bogus ideas on the state’s–and to get them to ask for the mandates (like Mexico paying for the Wall), Trump promised to convert $20 billion.
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Sen Scott has a point. It will take 60 votes in the Senate to stop filibuster, The chances of any substantive proposals clearing the Senate, is doubtful.
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