Jeannie Kaplan watches with amusement as the corporate reform-led Denver School Board tries to distance themselves from Betsy DeVos.
She says, “They can run, but they can’t hide.”
You see, Denver Board of Education and superintendent, once the drip of privatization as characterized particularly by choice and charters starts, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. What starts as a drip quickly becomes a flood that is almost impossible to control. You may truly not believe in vouchers, but you have fostered an atmosphere in Denver where vouchers could be the logical outcome of Choice and Charters, intended or not. And while DFER, too, tried to separate itself from parts of the Trump/DeVos agenda, it simultaneously sent out a notice congratulating “Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.” Further, Betsy DeVos has given money to DFER which in turn has given lots of money to DPS campaigns including the Committee for Denver’s Kids cited below. You can’t always have it both ways, and even the best public relations departments cannot always convince you of their stories.
This is a problems for all the Democrats who have cheered on “school choice,” but thought they could draw the line at vouchers. Like Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, who is a major supporter of charters. Like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who wants to be President and has been a major supporter of charters. Like California Governor Jerry Brown, who never saw a charter he didn’t like. Like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who voted against DeVos, but advocates both charters and vouchers.
Once you jump on board the school choice train, it is hard to explain why you only meant charters, not vouchers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like Barack Obama who brought us Arne Duncan and John King. Like Hillary Clinton who was (and is) best friends with Eli Broad and who appointed John Podesta to her campaign. Like Rahm Emanuel. Like the vast majority of the party.
dienne77,
Bingo!
The DEMS are still scratching their heads wondering why we now have that dump.
They are like that crazy little dog that tries to distance itself from it’s own tail by running in circles.
For some reason, they are surprised every time they turn their head to find it still on their tail.
The Center for American Progress’ Forbes article citing its plan for college accreditation based on student outcomes, echoed in Rubio’s similar legislation introduced in March, says it all.
Gates gave CAP $2.2 mil. from 2013-2015.
Cory Booker is not only for charter and vouchers but served with DeVos on the board of Alliance for School Choice and gave the keynote speech at her pro-voucher organization, the American Federation for Children at least twice, and called it an “incredible organization.” http://www.dailywire.com/news/13300/hypocrite-corey-booker-votes-against-devos-two-hank-berrien
Booker was also the keynote speaker at the “Progress Party” sponsored by the Center for American Progress.
About a month ago, Booker told an Indiana student newspaper that he was against privatization. Un huh.
Booker was honored by the very conservative Manhattan Institute for his advocacy for vouchersand charters.
Of course, he was.
Booker should be inducted into the liars’ hall of shame.
Thanks for the link. Booker has his sights on a 2020 presidential run so he should not be allowed to avoid or double-speak about his involvement in education privatization or his long ties to this right wing funding machine.
https://blackagendareport.com/vouchers_hurt_students_study_says
“Cory Booker is a true believer in privatized education.”
Most of the nation’s Black Democrats opposed vouchers, as did large majorities of the Black rank-and-file, because of the scheme’s roots in Jim Crow-era white “segregation academies.” Never in history have Black Americans marched, rallied or petitioned for private school vouchers. Therefore, the corporate privatizers had to create a Black pro-voucher “movement” out of thin air — or rather, through the political “astro-turfing” power of their checkbooks. In 1999, some of the most right-wing foundations and fat cats in the nation spent millions to found the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which then tapped into additional millions in direct federal funding once George Bush won the presidency. Among the BAEO’s founders was the first-term Newark, New Jersey, city councilman, Cory Booker, a true believer in privatized education who helped operate two private schools and evangelized about forming a national movement to spread the “choice” gospel. (See “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree,” The Black Commentator, April 5, 2002.)
While rising steadily in Black Democratic politics, Cory Booker was also a star in the rightwing corporate political firmament, serving for ten years with the American Federation for Children, a leading school voucher and charter advocacy outfit founded by Betsy DeVos, and chaired by her until last year.
“Vouchers have long been eclipsed by charters as the most effective means of wholesale privatization of public education.”
Booker joined all of the Senate’s Democrats in voting against Devos’ confirmation, claiming he had problems with her positions on school safety issues. It is surely true that Booker’s efforts to distance himself from his private school voucher roots have a lot do with his presidential ambitions. But, much more importantly, vouchers have long been eclipsed by charters as the most effective means of wholesale privatization of public education. As two-term mayor of Newark, Cory Booker was largely responsible for boosting charters to one-third of total school enrollment. Charters now account for 44 percent of Washington, DC public school enrollment, while voucher schools serve only a small fraction of the city’s students.
I could never support Booker for any position. He should run in the GOP primaries
“Obama vs Booker”
Better to be unknown
In Presidential bid
Than movie often shown
Of all you said and did
Booker neglects to notice that the excellent public school education he received in New Jersey enabled him to go to Stanford University and beyond. Unfortunately, he is a neoliberal disciple of the free market which he naively believes solves society’s problems.
YES: Public school proponents must absolutely call out Booker for his talent at double-speak; his endlessly argued (but carefully arms-length) “love” for children is far, far from actual compassion.
Speculating from news articles at David Brock’s Share Blue, the Dem. hierarchy wants Booker to represent the Party. Ohio’s Democratic Party chair sent out a letter saying that Booker was the future of the party.
Booker is to Democratic party as hangover is to frat party
And, after the drinking binge, hospitalized for acute intoxication, with its life hanging in the balance. 1000 Dem. legislative, judicial and executive seats lost.
“. . . high-quality public charter schools.”
The BIG LIE of the private charter school sector repeated again, eh!
The private charter school sector believes that “high-quality” means you get rid of “low-quality” students whose parents were deluded enough to believe the lie that they welcome all students. A “high-quality charter only welcomes the “high-quality” students and recognizes the unworthiness of the others, who must be drummed out by any means necessary.
It is no coincidence that Eli Broad, Democrat billionaire charter school promoter extraordinaire, has just named as a finalist for his $250,000 prize the “highest-quality” charter of them all — Success Academy.
After all, if you don’t allow those “high-quality” charters to suspend 25% of their Kindergarten, first, and second grade children (some more than once!) how can you achieve your “high-quality” goals for the “high-quality” children who are deserving?** If your charter demonstrates “excellence” in sorting the high-quality from the low-quality children, only then does it deserve the recognition of of being truly “high-quality”.
** According to the most recent data on the NY State Report card, the out of school suspension rate at Success Academy Fort Greene when the oldest students in the school were in 2nd grade was 25%. And that means 25% of the students — a student suspended 10 or 20 times is still counted only once.
It is amusing. They’re doing the same in Los Angeles.
The new thing is to say you’re “agnostic” except that’s exactly what DeVos says, so it’s meaningless.
There’s never been that much difference between far Right reformers and “moderate” reformers. It’s all privatization. The “moderates” have moved so far Right they’re now down to defending whether schools should be regulated AT ALL.
They got absolutely rolled. I’m old enough to remember when the moderates were (supposedly) opposed to vouchers, which was six months ago.
They’ve gone further Right than Barry Goldwater ever dreamed possible.
DeVos is an agnostic?
I thought she was an Amway Sellevangelist.
It’s such a lie. They’re hugely passionate for charters and vouchers.
Only public schools get the “we’re agnostics!” treatment.
Our schools are the only “sector” that has no advocates.
Read anything ed reform churns out. If public schools are mentioned at all (they’re often completely omitted) it will be in a paragraph tacked on at the end where the writer remembers he or she is “an agnostic”.
One writer actually uses the term “default’ for public schools
90% of schools are now the unfashionable “default” system that no one is much interested in. It’s appalling.
I remember reading an anecdote from a man who was a young lawyer starting out in New Deal eraWashington, DC, who was hired to work for the newly formed National Labor Relations Board.
In the final interview, he asked his boss-to-be which side they were on: his boss said, “We’re neutral.”
“Neutral? Neutral in the battle between workers and the bosses?”
“We’re neutral,” the manager answered, “We’re neutral on the side of the workers.”
Given our class-conflicted anti-New Deal (that includes you too, Dems) era, when all victories seem to be going to the Overclass, you can flip that statement around, update it and apply it to the members of ReformWorld: “We’re agnostic; we’re agnostic on the side of privatization.”
If you track your state legislature you might be surprised how much time and energy is devoted to “choice”.
“The Ohio House voted Tuesday on a law change that would let online charter schools duck clear of the state’s main charter school quality control efforts.
It’s a complicated change – one that went unnoticed by most legislators and which still must pass the state Senate. But if it stands, the change would let e-schools avoid pressure to improve their often-failing grades or avoid simply being closed by the organizations that oversee them.”
Ohio lawmakers seem to spend 90% of their time on stuff like this- they’re either protecting charters, funding charters, or expanding vouchers.
This is in a state where 90% of kids attend public schools. It’s this AMAZING disconnect with the vast majority of kids of ALL income levels.
What did public schools get out of these folks this year? An unfunded mandate to solve the opiate addiction crisis. Hey, thanks, ed reform! That’s super! Pile on some more ill-considered and expensive mandates for public schools while showering charters and vouchers with funding
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/05/an_escape_hatch_for_ecot_or_ju.html
That opiate crisis -what a gift to the politicians. Senators Brown and Portman got mileage out of it and, now we’ve got J.D. Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy) and Mark Zuckerberg, both politician wanna be’s, in the state, milking the “crisis”. It reminds me of buzzards feeding on cadavers.
The Agnostics in DC spent the entire week promoting charters and vouchers, again.
Public schools are completely ignored, once again.
It’s pretty ridiculous that kids in public schools can’t find a single adult advocate in their own government.
If we’re the disfavored system (and we clearly are) do we still have to pay these people who contribute absolutely nothing to our schools?
What value do they add to existing public schools?
IT IS HARD to feel any sympathy for Colorado’s current “fight” to save public school money for charters as the federal government now hopes to siphon the same money away as a gift for already existing private schools. Colorado has indeed created a profiteering atmosphere RIPE for plucking: “once the drip of privatization as characterized particularly by choice and charters starts, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop….”
This is an important message that all parents and parent organizations, teachers and teacher networks and other school employees (support professionals and administrators), school board members, county commissioners, legislators, presidents and executive directors of non-profit and profit organizations in Hamilton County – Chattanooga, TN, need to hear and consider before taking a bigger bite of the “privatization apple”. Many “supporters of public education” in Chattanooga, TN, have bought into the notion of partnering with the Tennessee Department of Education, as sanctioned by the state Education Commissioner, Candace McQueen, who already has partnered and contracted with EMPOWER, Inc, (a Kaplan subsidiary, operating low performing schools in the Memphis City school takeover in recent years), to take over five Innovative Zone low performing schools in Chattanooga City, and, if successful, create a model for taking over 10 other low performing schools in the Hamilton County school district.
The transfer of Tennessee’s public school dollars into the hands of local, state, national and international profit and privateers is happening quickly in the “Scenic City” of Chattanooga.
Parents, teachers and administrators of the students in these designated schools should be especially concerned about student and school community equity and access, the future learning and teaching environment, the impending changes in the work environment and the organization culture changes, as each school shifts from a public to a private entity.
What questions or concerns dominate the thoughts of most students, teachers, parents and other school employees, as school district board members and cabinet level administrators engage with business and foundation leaders to establish the framework for a viable partnership?
Consider who is missing from the table.
Whose best interests is being represented as this partnership is being developed?
Are the teachers represented at the table by their elected teachers association or union? (I don’t think so!) And, why is the teachers association president or his designee absent from the partnership table?
The majority of teachers working in the Hamilton County school district voted for the Hamilton County Education Association to represent teachers at the conferencing table in a election held in December of 2014, and concluded conferencing with the HCDE school board administration in July 2016 by signing a three-year Memorandum of Understanding.
The teachers’ association leaders and building level representatives are “staying woke”, as Empower, Inc. and other partners gather behind closed doors to create a framework for those working at the front line to implement.
When will Tennesseans and Americans as a whole, accept the fact that the institution of public education is the foundation of our great democracy, and without public education, an oligarchy emerges stronger.
In answer to your last question- not Worthington, Ohio’s Sister John Paul of St. Michael’s Catholic School. She spoke for “freedom to choose” at a rally of privatizers, in Columbus this week. Oh, the irony.