Colorado Senator Michael Bennett was previously superintendent of schools in Denver. There he set off the school choice frenzy and led the parade to open charters. Now he finds himself trying to explain that he is different from Betsy DeVos. He is a Democrat, one of DFER’s champions. She is a Republican, Trump’s pick as Secretary of Education. He sold out public education. She wants to privatize it. She loves vouchers. He doesn’t. She is a choice ideologue. So is he.
See the difference? Look closer. No, closer still. I know it’s hard but keep trying.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Did I miss something? He just changed the subject to higher education where he hopes for some bipartisanship with Lamar Alexander. Good luck on that.
Exactly. Last cycle Democrats changed the subject to pre-k. This cycle it must be higher ed
For some odd reason DC Democrats don’t want to talk about public schools
I don’t know why he objects to DeVos. Because she promotes the same schemes he does but with different rhetoric?
Dems don’t want to talk about Gates’ privatization and corporatization of education because they are advocates for his agenda. Gates gave the Center for American Progress $2.2 mil.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama found the welcome mat out at the Aspen Institute. Aspen’s education programs are funded by Gates.
Diane, would you kindly clarify what kind of practically achievable school assignment process that avoids any parental choice you favor for cities like Denver, Boston, Chicago, NYC? Any available examples in the U.S. of where your favored school assignment process may have been successfully implemented in a large heterogeneously populated district would be appreciated. Thanks.
There can be choice without privatization.
Why more than 30 years ago, my parents had the “choice” of sending me to the county vocational school or my local public school. My parents had the “choice” of having me take “college-bound” classes or the lower level classes that led to a very respectable high school diploma. In some cities, the top students had a “choice” of a specialized high school for the most academically outstanding students. Every one of those “choices” were part of a system that was responsible for the kids in those “choice” schools and the ones in the zoned publics. And it was all ONE system. So the people in charge of NYC could not say “we have success!” by pointing to Stuy and Bronx Science because people would say “but what about these failing schools?”
The kind of “choice” that we have now means that politically connected CEOs can run what are lottery-based private schools OUTSIDE the system and teach whomever they can get to come and kick out whoever they can humiliate or suspend or flunk 3 years in a row and convince to leave. And then their responsibility ceases to exist! They can point to their own BASIS schools and say “we are the greatest!”
My parents would have seen the complete absurdity of that kind of “choice”. You might as well privatize the entire system and make the government pay full tuition to private schools for any kids that the private schools feel like teaching for $20,000/year. There is absolutely no difference between that and the charter movement. Vouchers for all, and anyone whose kid is not financially viable to teach for the osgt of that voucher should move to a country that values all children because the “choice” people refuse to look at what they are really trying to promote. And that is schools themselves “choosing” which kids are worthy and which are not. THAT is the kind of choice that the reformers seem to love best.
If we look closely enough, what we will see is that DFERs who benefit from charter school profiteering are now being threatened by those on the far right who will take their access to public money away as they start pushing that money toward benefiting already existing private schools.
As in all things ed reform the students who are ignored in that voucher v charter battle AND the students who will take the hit are the students in public schools.
Could we get one adult in DC who values public schools? One Senator. One high ranking member of one administration.
It’s been 17 years. We’re due an advocate.
An advocate who actually “gets” this.
I heard Warren on TV this morning saying,”How can you appoint a head of the DOE that doesn’t support public education?” Maybe she should ask her old boss, Obama, about that.
Amen. And Bennet was a very early Obama supporter/education “advisor.”
Jeannie,
Professors, you know, should learn about Rubio’s legislation introduced in March that takes faculty out of the accreditation process, replacing them with student outcome measurement. The Dems are on the same page. The Center for American Progress published a similar plan in Forbes, Nov. 2016, “It’s Time for a Quality Alternative to College Accreditation”. Gates gave CAP, $2.2 mil. from 2013-2015.
Well, since public schools, their students, teachers and advocates have been abandoned by both political parties, perhaps the best we can hope for at the moment is a falling out among thieves, with the voucher crooks in conflict with the charter crooks.
Hopefully, they’ll discredit and destroy each other, and people will start coming to their senses.
Hear, hear.
“Broadly speaking, even though I’ve spent a lot of my first term working with others in the other party, this is a moment where bipartisanship looks very hard to find. And the place I think with respect to education where I think we’re going to find it, and I’m optimistic about it, is higher education and the reauthorization of the higher ed bill. I’ve already had conversations with Lamar Alexander, who is the Republican chairman of the education committee.”
I’m sick of this dodge from Democrats. They know their ed reform ideas are nearly identical to Republicans so they simply omit K-12 schools and focus on either pre-K or higher ed.
All ed reform offers is charters or vouchers. They should all admit that.
We saw the same thing from Democrats in the Senate under Obama. Congress was actively undermining existing public schools, cheered on by the Obama Administration and Democrats dodged the whole thing with the fig leaf of pre-k
There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans on public schools
NEITHER Party supports existing public schools. There’s an elite consensus on public schools and that consensus is “end them”.
have you-all noticed Democrats in ed reform have quietly dropped their supposed ‘opposition’ to vouchers and have retreated to begging that the new “choice” systems be regulated? Public schools went right under the ol ed reform bus again and now they’re just negotiating the details of privatization. So much for that bedrock principle of the Democratic Party. It didn’t survive a month of Trump.
I told you the opposition to vouchers was phony, and lo and behold! It is!
They have adopted the entire GOP platform on public education. There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference . Vote for this one or vote for the one with the R after his name but if you’re voting on education you’re kidding yourself. They’re the same.
“I wish she would come to Denver and take a look at the work that’s been done here, both in terms of choice and in terms of trying to move our traditional schools forward.”
There’s the obligatory ed reform mention of public schools. A grudging nod to the reality that they probably can’t privatize every school in the country immediately so best pretend to be “agnostic” while you’re winding down the unfashionable public sector schools.
That’s the best we can do in DC -they sometimes will admit public schools exist. Those are the DEMOCRATS. Republicans are even worse.
We have a federal government consensus that is opposed to the schools 90% of children attend. It’s ludicrous. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a betrayal of the kids in public schools, who weren’t informed the Best and Brightest have determined their schools should no longer exist.
There goes Bennet again. He’s a DEFORMER and came from out of state with big $$$$$$ backing him. Bennet is a carpetbagger.
“That is one of the very regrettable aspects of President Trump choosing Betsy DeVos to be the secretary of education, because if she becomes the face of reform in this country, if she becomes the face of change in this country, and that becomes an excuse for not changing and not reforming our schools or our school districts, that would be a real shame.”
What IS the Democratic Party’s platform on public schools? Anyone know? Because of it’s “choice and accountability” the only thing that means for kids in public schools is testing. No one runs out to vote to enthusiastically support data collection and scolding lectures on schools as contract service providers.
If they were planning on abandoning their support of public schools one would think they would have replaced it with something other than parroting Jeb Bush.
According to Warren, the Democrats are doing “soul searching” to figure out how to reach the middle class. This is the perfect time for the NAACP, the AFT and United Opt Out to inform them, if they want support for their candidate, the candidate must be more progressive and support public education.
Yes, but first we need an AFT/UFT leadership that supports public education with more than empty rhetoric or vapid advertisements, since it has spent far too long collaborating with so-called reformers, to the great detriment of their members and the children they serve.
It’s no accident that AFT mis-leader Randi Weingarten was among the first to endorse Hillary Clinton, the worst possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and the only Democrat who could lose to a Donald Trump.
It’s been twenty years of that kind of catastrophic “leadership” from Weingarten, whose words are meaningless, and the dissembling and duplicity constant.
I agree that the AFT needs leadership that works for public education and educators.
Looks like it is time to reform the reform. Despite party, there has been an overarching push for charter schools without little consideration or examination of Denver. Denver educators scream for their input to be considered before the nation goes full blown charter. But instead of assessing our prime example, the government continues on the road to intellectual segregation. While valuable time and money is being wasted, the country could be assembling the best and brightest teachers, which is what this reform desperately needs.
Charters are recreating the dual school systems that existed before 1954.
Not based on race, but based on ability and SES
“. . . but based on ability and SES”
Yes, but not exactly on ability but what standardized test scores supposedly tell us about a student’s ability, as like you say those scores are the coin of the realm, even with that coin being pyrite and no where near golden.
Bennett is concerned that his version of privatization will take a back seat to DeVos’ vouchers. It is the battle of two wrongs, which we all know, does not make a right. He is still not looking at evidence which shows that both charters and vouchers have failed to solve our problems. The concept of choice has been elevated to a status of incontrovertible value without any evidence to support this claim. All choice system create winners and losers and they enhance segregation. The only positive results from charters come from schools that cherry pick and discard students that don’t fit their “one size fits all” mold. We cannot select our way into excellence. We must provide opportunity for all students. Frankly, public education offers more choice, efficiently and effectively than most charters. They are not for profit, and they serve and are operated by the local taxpayers. They are democracy in action. Market based solutions have been failures for the most part. Bennett should try looking at the evidence.
Schools do not improve through competition. School improvement is an evolutionary process that respects all stakeholders. School improvement is the result of responsible professionals working together to improve practice. It involves trust, study, support, implementation, discovery and evaluation, and the evaluation process is not necessarily standardized testing.
Democrats are apparently running on “data transparency” in public schools. Now there’s an exciting platform! That should bring public education voters out in droves.
You’ll need the test results to choose your contract provider and redeem your backpack voucher. Think of it as Obamacare, but for (formerly) public schools.
One of the reasons the Democrats have been so cowardly is DFER gives them big donations, and they are afraid of the charter lobby. The only way to get their attention is to show them the numbers that will make them win. They will have to want those numbers more than DFER’s cash.
It will be interesting to see if he – and his childhood friend and successor Boasberg – can safely distance themselves from DeVos and Trump. It seems to me once the drip of privatization starts, the full on flood is never far away. How and where does one draw the line between CHOICE and VOUCHERS? I’m not at all sure you can. And I’m not convinced democrats supporting privatization really want to !!
If you know any professors in Colorado, recommend they review the web info., for Gates latest incursion into higher ed., the program called Frontier Set. He’s not bothering to mask the business goal. Two state higher ed systems have signed onto Frontier Set. I presume one is Georgia. From the Frontier site, “Georgia will implement business models for collaborative course development and delivery”. Both the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities are in on the transmutation.
Things aren’t going that well in court for Ohio’s giant for-profit charter:
“The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is asking Ohio’s chief justice to remove of one of three appeals court judges hearing its case, arguing he is biased and made comments that “denigrated” Bill Lager, the founder of the school.
ECOT and the Ohio Department of Education dueled in oral arguments last week before the Franklin County Court of Appeals. The state’s largest online charter school is attempting to overturn a trial court ruling that would allow the department to use log-in duration data to determine enrollment counts for purposes of funding.”
It’s a real failure of the legislature that it got this far. They’re afraid of the charter lobby. Judges are supposed to be the last resort as regulators. In Ohio, they’re the only people who aren’t afraid of the charter lobby.
http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170418/ecot-wants-biased-judge-removed-from-its-appeal
“See the difference? Look closer. No, closer still. I know it’s hard but keep trying.”
Love it!!