Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos repeats the hackneyed and erroneous claims that American public schools are failing.
She says the Obama ideas (testing, charters, and accountability) have failed, so she wants to impose her own ideas, which sound no diffferent from the failed ideas of the status quo.
American schools could use some support, not another four years of carping and disruption.
I explained in my book “Reign of Error” that the “Failing Schools” narrative is a hoax.
As of 2013, test scores on the federal tests called NAEP were the highest in 40 years of testing. For whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
The graduation rate was the highest in history, for all groups.
The dropout rate was the lowest ever recorded.
Scores on NAEP went flat from 2013-2015, possibly because of Common Core or because the test-and-punish approach had gone about as far as it could go. The flatline showed the failure of the NCLB-RTTT policies, not the schools.
We have the greatest economy in the world and the most productive workforce. Our public schools built our economy. Stop bashing our public schools, our teachers, and our students!
Please tweet @betsydevos and urge her to read “Reign of Error” or send her a copy.
I will send her an autographed copy.
Her address:
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Waste Of Energy (WOE), BDV lives in an alternate universe where all her alternative facts are true.
The word “facts” is stretching it just a bit…..it might be more of a perception through rose colored glasses with ear muffs on.
She sees what she wants to see and hears what she wants to hear.
And all the adults are below average.
The WOEbigot Universe …
Did everyone hear how Randi Weingarten wants to “work” with Betsy Devos? No surprise given Randi’s past joint press conference with ex-Michigan governor John Engler on “holding the course on Common Core” that occurred a couple of years ago.
https://newrepublic.com/article/140733/one-teachers-union-talking-betsy-devos-one-isnt-right
WHY is Randi Weingarten still heading her union? Teachers are so unhappy, but year after year there she is….
Poor Randi had her heart set on becoming the Secretary of Ed in a Clinton administration. Now she’ll have to settle for wine and dining with Betsy in the Rose Garden.
“the Weingarten”
The wine is very nice
In garden with some ice
And rubbing elbows too
Is what I like to do
Diane – she does not want to be educated. DeVos has a set agenda that she plans to implement, as her track record clearly shows. She fervently believes she is doing God’s work, even if it means destroying schools. In the long run, she believes she will “save” our children i.e. brainwash them into submission.
Diane: Excellent idea. As a relevant aside, here is a link to an Inside Education Week article about DeVos and her encroachment into higher education: “DeVos Takes On Faculty.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/24/education-secretary-criticizes-professors-telling-students-what-think?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=00ea4196f1-DNU20170224&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-00ea4196f1-198488425&mc_cid=00ea4196f1&mc_eid=f743ca9d07
FYI: I revisited this essay on InsideHigherEd to see if they posted my comment (I mentioned this site), and the comments section is gone (at 9:20/am/PST). There are noted 131 comments just from this morning. I wonder who bought IHE?
The comments are back but closed at 140. They took a while to load. Try this shorter link:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/24/education-secretary-criticizes-professors-telling-students-what-think
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
If we buy her a paperback copy, where do we mail it?
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500
Attention Donny
Thank you.
Who is Donny?
Donny Trump
Address it to Little Hands I am sure the Postal service will see it gets to VonClownstick
LOL….I love it.
Secretary Betsy DeVos
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202
Thank you.
Diane,
Nothing says more than a face to face discussion. I believe that she means well but is just misinformed by all the fake stuff out there. Can you met with her? She would be crazy to want to keep the teachers she works with in conflict with her. She is against Common Core and likes more local control of education—sound great to me. She needs to be surrounded by some level heads who will escort her around to see the magnitude of the problem and instruct her on some federal laws as well.
. I sincerely feel sorry for her as she is mobbed by dissenters who can’t articulate the problems as well as you. She needs some experts to counsel her to at least a middle ground. She is not an educator. Lets think of this as an opportunity to unite all forms of good educational methods and expose that which is not working.
Spare the rod spoil the cabinet secretary. A time out would be in order. A long time out of Public education.
I agree that a face to face discussion would be best; how might it be arranged?
Everyone should know that the call for vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are 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 a “choice.”
The entire “education reform/choice/voucher/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 1950’s voucher crusade 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 PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
Love this blog. Love hearing everyone’s comments.
Just watched Kayleigh McEnany’s interview of DeVos at CPAC. I love how McEnany retells the story of DeVos reaching out to Randi “Weingarner” at the “ATF” (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms).
Diane, you should send each of these women a copy of your book. 🙂
Thanks for all the awesome blogging!
Chris Christie could invite Ms DeVos to visit public schools in his hometown, Mendham Township, NJ. They are not failure factories. His property taxes are ~$40,000. His children didn’t attend public schools; they missed out on the experience of learning with youngsters of other religions.