Erica Green of the New York Times wrote that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has “surprised” everyone by insisting that the state accountability plans must be more demanding, more “ambitious,” stronger in setting goals.
Please note that DeVos spent over a million dollars rewarding the Michigan legislature in 2016 for blocking accountability standards for low-performing charter schools in Michigan. And note also that her response to studies about the poor performance of voucher schools has been a yaw. No accountability for charter schools. No accountability for voucher schools. So long as parents choose them, that’s the only “accountability” that matters to DeVos.
She told the Senate committee that interviewed her that she is all for accountability. She didn’t explain that she supports accountability only for public schools, but not for charter schools or voucher schools. That way, more public schools can be held to impossible standards, declared failures, closed, and handed over to the private sector, where there is no accountability.
Stephen Henderson, the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, complained last December, before DeVos was conformed, that she has no respect for data and insists on shielding the charter industry from accountability.
He wrote that the Detroit public schools actually outperform the city’s charter schools, but DeVos didn’t care. In comparing ACT scores, he wrote:
“The average for Detroit Public Schools is a 16.5 — equivalent to 8th-grade competency.
“The average for charters is 15.6, with 14 of the 16 charter high schools below the DPS average.
“A true advocate for children would look at the statistics for charter versus traditional public schools in Michigan and suggest taking a pause, to see what’s working, what’s not, and how we might alter the course.
“Instead, DeVos and her family have spent millions advocating for the state’s cap on charter schools to be lifted, so more operators can open and, if they choose, profit from more charters.
“Someone focused on outcomes for Detroit students might have looked at the data and suggested better oversight and accountability.
“But just this year, DeVos and her family heavily pressured lawmakers to dump a bipartisan-supported oversight commission for all schools in the city, and then showered the GOP majority who complied with more than $1 million dollars in campaign contributions.
“The Department of Education needs a secretary who values data and research, and respects the relationship between outcomes and policy imperatives.
“Nothing in Betsy DeVos’ history of lobbying to shield the charter industry from greater accountability suggests she understands that.”
When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, we were assured that it would prevent future secretaries of education from acting like Arne Duncan, who thought he was czar of all American education, chosen by the president to close down every school with low scores, mostly in black and brown communities, and hand them over to entrepreneurs.
Guess what? Betsy DeVos is Arne Duncan in high heels. She, who has never worked a day in a public school or antwhere else, is telling public schools exactly what they must do to meet her standards. But for the private sector, there are NO standards at all.
That’s the DeVos way.
Will the Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions let her get away with rewriting the ESSA law to suit her fancy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will the Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions let her get away with rewriting the ESSA law to suit her fancy?
In a word – YES. Dems and Repubs are the same on education. Look no further than Denver
Look at Denver is right, Lloyd. Then there’s also, of course, Rahm’s Chicago.
We know there’s even more “horridness” in other states re: charters and vouchers, too.
Seems like public education and public school teachers, students, and parents are just bargaining chips. It’s really sick.
And the BIG DEMs still don’t get it. All they know about are private preppy schools at all levels. There’s a mindset of elitism and all the negatives, which go along with this “elite” mentality.
DeVos is the lynchpin to the nefarious market based plans that states will be encouraged to adopt. Evidence and the will of the people no longer matter. DeVos and Trump will ensure that public money is redirected into the appropriate private pockets. DeVos and Trump intend to loot the public funds intended for public education despite the fact there is no proven benefit to young people. This privatization will enable a mass redistribution of public money from communities and the middle class to the wealthy.
Given her record of attacks on the public sector, I think we can safely call her Cruela DeVos.
I can’t say enough about how this totally turn my stomach. There is a reason for separation of church and state. Egads…horrors!
I mean: TURNS my stomach.
I bet Arne Duncan would-be great at dunkin in highheels.
I was thinking that somebody who knows how should photoshop Arne onto Devos in a dress and heels attempting to block a high flying dunker with Betsy’s mug photoshopped onto the dunker.
DeVos, VanAndel, Trump, and their ilk are all the same. Steal as much public money as you can and claim it is for the public good.
We are in deep crap and I don’t see anyway out.
I wonder if it is just coincidence that VanAndel sounds so much like “vandal”.
For a long time now it has been obvious to me that the corporate education industry is not interested in the quality of teaching and learning. Their primary interest is in delivering public dollars to their already obese bank accounts and financial holdings. Beyond that, there is the extreme thinking that choice is freedom, and for some nut cases, religion and/or creationism based on faulty logic supported by confirmation bias is factored in, but this is only false justification for the primary reason.
The quality of teaching is not part of this agenda
Children learning is not part of this agenda
To them, children are widgets on an automated assembly line. They don’t even think of these children as humans.
But, the posturing about “teacher quality,” and “accelerating learning” does not stop, nor does the “targeting” of black and brown students. That word targeting is not exactly aspirational or inspirational, but it is part of the creepy reformy language all to easily dominating education.
They know what they are doing.
The nonstop lies and misinformation are deliberate. The idea is to overload the public with fake claims and fake evidence that alleges the target is the liar, corrupt, and incompetent. This is all done to confuse and play to the confirmation bias of the segment of voters being targeted supplying them with a deluge of (false) evidence (when fact checked). Then the voters they counted on to be there fall into line because now, without fact checking, they can point at all the false evidence as if it is real and use that to justify the confirmation bias behind their vote.
The extreme right is doing it in local elections too. Sending out a flood of fliers through the U.S. mail that makes false accusations as if they are real. I’ve seen it happening in the bay area. For every dozen fliers that land in my mailbox, only one comes from someone who hasn’t sold out to the Alt-Right billionaires funding this war of lies to fool and manipulate voters. The one who almost always loses doesn’t have enough money to match them with fliers to counter the lies and accusations.
They are also running candidates as Democrats in elections and/or primaries who are not really a Democrat. These candidates are Trojan Horses calling themselves Democrats while outspending the other Democrats and beating them. I saw this happen in Contra Costa County near San Francisco, and the real Democrat, a former teacher who was a real progressive, lost that election to a union hating candidate who was supported by the oil industry and billionaires while claiming the real Democrat was the one with that financial support.
Smithsonian Magazine ran a piece on this and explained how it works.
“How Fake News Breaks Your Brain”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-fake-news-breaks-your-brain-180963894/
Can they point to one positive thing they’ve done for one public school anywhere in the country since she took this job?
Just one. Show it to me.
Other than giving speeches promoting charters and vouchers and bashing public schools what are we paying these people for?
You’re asking the impossible, Chiara.
Has DeVos or anyone else at the US Department of Ed met with anyone who runs or works in a public school this year?
They seem to find plenty of time to promote charters and charters. When do they get input from public schools? The schools 95% of US students attend?
Alternately, if they don’t support our schools (and they clearly don’t) why don’t they just leave us alone and work full time at promoting the “sectors” they prefer?
It’s pretty ridiculous that we have an entire federal agency that ignores 95% of the students in the country. They should be able to cut staff by 95%.
Chaira, DeVos and her minons are not going to actually visit traditional public schools. DeVos knows the reception she will receive. Charters welcome DeVos with open arms. Traditionals know what she is and where she is going with education. Traditionals want no part of DeVos and her stupidity.
Why should they utilize tests etc that the public schools have to be defined by? The whole purpose was, is to make money for the already rich.
The tests with rigged cut scores are designed to “fail” enough students to provide a continuous flow of human widgets into their charter school web. No public school students should take any of the tests.
When the byotch went up before congress about accountability she sidestepped the question as well as all the questioned asked of her. It’s on video during the questioning. And the POS’s still didn’t stop her from putting her into the position.
High heels and devil’s horns
The replacement of qualifications and realistic solutions with power-elite insiders and ideology (if you can even call it that, more like an intellectual vacuum).
Betsy’s approach will be to “insist” on rigorous accountability for public schools, and work behind the scenes (by doling out millions to conservative politicians to scuttle those accountability rules from being passed in to law), then when, inevitably, the charter operators get caught with their hands in the cookie jar (see: http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article160181454.html) she will spontaneously and capriciously throw the offenders under the bus, pretending to make examples of them, and feigning that she is the arbiter of fairness and equality.
We’ve seen it happen over and over again in Michigan for the last couple of decades. No reason to think it won’t happen nationally now.
And she’s good at hiding in the shadows, staying below the radar, and getting her henchmen to pull the triggers. Tying her to this stuff is like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
So much taxpayer money is being skimmed away by charter school operators that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education reports that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets. Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its favorable 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 dollars that are intended to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets and to the bottom lines of hedge funds.
In addition to the siphoning away of money from needy schools, reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children of color; and, 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. Based on these and other findings of racial discrimination in charter schools, the NAACP Board of Directors has passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Because of the racism in charter schools the ACLU has called for a complete moratorium on charter schools.
In order to assure that tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there is no racism in charter schools, charter schools should minimally (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that the charter schools are accountable to the public; (2) be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) be required to operate so that anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
Those aren’t unreasonable requirements. In fact, they are common sense to taxpayers and to anyone who seeks to assure that America’s children — especially her neediest children — are optimally benefiting from public tax dollars intended for their education. But, after the internal scams of charter schools become exposed to taxpayers through routine public reporting, the charter school industry will dry up and disappear, and the money that the charter school industry has been draining away from America’s neediest children will again flow to those in need.
If charter schools were required to file the same financial statements that public schools file, the skimming of tax money would stop and hedge funds would move on to their next target, leaving the charter school “movement” to dry up.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
Preach!
“… chosen by the president to close down every school with low scores, mostly in black and brown communities, and hand them over to entrepreneurs. ”
Yeah, it is hard to think of anyone less qualified to run the DOE, but I have to say that I am beginning to hate the word “entrepreneur.” With every scandal uncovered in the industry, it would appear that the only risk takers are the families and their children and perhaps the teachers, especially those who lost jobs in the public schools.