Jeff Bryant has read Betsy DeVos’s speeches slamming public schools and extolling the virtues of public subsidy for private and religious schools. She carefully selects an anecdote to make her case. But she is late to the party. There is now persuasive evidence that students in voucher schools get worse results than their peers in public schools. In addition, many of those who use vouchers are students from affluent families who are happy to have the pyvlid foot the bill for their private school tuition.
Betsy is shilling for her extremist allies at ALEC.
“Declaring “the time has expired for ‘reform,’” she called instead for a “transformation… that will open up America’s closed and antiquated education system.” Her plan also opens your wallet to new moochers of taxpayer dollars.
“By the way, AFC, according to SourceWatch, is a “conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues.” It also grew out of a defunct PAC connected to DeVos called “All Children Matter” that ran afoul legally in Ohio and Wisconsin and still owes Ohio $5.3 million for breaking election laws.”
Bryant concludes:
“In her efforts to create the education transformation she calls for, DeVos is supremely eager to “get Washington and the federal bureaucracy out of the way,” but still wants you to pay the cost of privatizing our schools. That’s not an agenda for better schools. It’s about stealing public money.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course! She’s the QUEEN of Amway!
Thanks Diane!
I read his remarks here
https://ourfuture.org/20170523/what-betsy-devos-calls-education-transformation-is-actually-public-theft
Very interesting!
DeVos and Trump represent the corporate pirates that will rig the system in order to loot the public funds. Our young people are not their priority; the public dollars behind them is their booty.
Diane This in today’s LA Times oped (May 5, 2017
ALL QUOTED BELOW
Why do billionaires love charter schools?
BY HAROLD MEYERSON
The billionaires, apparently, we shall always have with us — even when we decide how to run the state-funded schools where they rarely send their own kids.
In the Los Angeles school board elections earlier this month, a number of billionaires, including Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and two Walton family siblings, poured millions into the campaigns of two charter-school advocates. These billionaire-sponsored candidates defeated two badly outspent opponents who took a more cautionary stance on expanding charters, lest they decimate the school district’s budget. In total, pro-charter groups outspent teacher unions, $9.7 million to $5.2 million. (In the 2016 state legislative campaigns, the charterizers outspent the unions by a far larger margin, $20.5 million to $1.2 million.)
Though a number of the billionaires who’ve involved themselves in the charter cause are conservatives and Republicans, the actual election battles they join almost always pit Democrat against Democrat — in part because nearly all big cities are now overwhelmingly Democratic. In California, where Republicans’ numbers have ebbed past the point of power, the lion’s share of billionaires’ legislative campaign contributions have gone to more centrist Democrats, who not only are reliable votes on charter issues but also often oppose environmental and other measures advanced by their more progressive colleagues.
Of all the issues billionaires could choose, why charters, and why now? One reason commonly adduced is that they’ve noticed something troubling: Public school graduates lack the skills necessary for employment. Many of those needed skills, however, are the kind that students acquire in vocational educational programs, not at charter schools.
That there are huge problems in the education of low-income students is beyond dispute — but this is hardly a recent development. The real recent development is the rising share of such students as the middle class has waned.
If the Waltons, say, decided to redirect more of their fortune to raising Wal-Mart workers’ wages, that in turn might enable hundreds of thousands of families to have more economically secure and stable lives, which could have a greater effect on student performance than charterization.
It’s hardly fair, of course, to tar all billionaire charterizers with that kind of brush. But the fact is that they have emerged as a force at a time when our staggering levels of economic inequality have become a widely acknowledged problem. That’s not just a coincidence.
Indeed, we have to go back to the economic polarization of pre-New Deal America to find a time when the super-rich felt so compelled to better the lot of the poor, as they understood it. Andrew Carnegie, who grew mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to public libraries in the process.
What Carnegie and today’s pro-charter rich have in common is a belief in individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally established standards and services.
Living in separate eras when the middle class was — and is — embattled and the gap between rich and poor was — and is — immense, billionaires have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap: raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free, funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment, reviving collective bargaining and raising progressive taxes to pay for all of that.
As the billionaires see it, it’s the lack of skills, not the dysfunctions of the larger economic system that they (or their parents) mastered, that is the cause of our national woes. Pure of heart though some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.
Harold Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect. He is a contributing writer to Opinion.
END QUOTED MATERIAL from the LA Times OpEd 05-26-17
Overall this is an amazing editorial, but not enough to inform voters, especially about this big difference:
Andrew Carnegie, who grew mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to public libraries in the process.
And he did not think that you could just abandon the library, shut it down, sell the real estate, and so on.
I think the whole exploit and make collapse syndrome is a modern invention compliments of hedge funds. They know how to target that which they plan to plunder. They have done this with numerous companies, Puerto Rico, and now they are using their wealth to buy representatives in order to topple public education. It also does not help that so many of our representatives have been hit by the Milton Friedman, free market stupid stick. The “magic” free market will solve all our problems, or so they learned in college.
Tangential topic- Hillary’s Onward Together organization launched today. The site has two pages. One with a brief mission statement and the other to donate. There’s no “contact us” tab. I wanted to know if the onward together was Hillary with Gates and Walton heirs, privatizing America’s most important common good. It’s a legitimate question given New America’s self-anointed role in creating a new vision for higher ed that looks very similar to the K-12 student outcome measures and state funding of both public and private schools associated with Gates. Secondly, the Center for American Progress which was a substantial payer in the failed Clinton presidential campaign, called for student outcome measures in Forbes, TWO WEEKS AfTER the Clinton defeat.