Jack Schneider, historian of education, writes that Betsy DeVos is an enthusiast about markets but she doesn’t understand how markets work.
In her recent speech at Harvard, she spoke admiringly about the food trucks that have parked around the Department of Education building due to the lack of nearby restaurants. This is a silly metaphor because the government doesn’t pay for lunches, and provision of lunch is not a government responsibility.
But Schneider tears the metaphor apart for other reasons. You can go to a different food truck every day, and you can judge the food yourself, but you can’t switch schools every day, and you can’t judge a school directly, the way you judge a cheese sandwich.
His analysis is more subtle than my representation of it here. The bottom line is that choice in schooling is disruptive without necessarily improving the quality of schooling.
But Betsy is a choice and markets person, without regard to quality or accountability.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
BDV understands her market perfectly well — it’s just not the market we may think she’s in.
BDV is in the buying and selling of influence market.
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Betsy is in the flea market bidness.
She distributes em and we end up with em.
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And we the public should be in the “flee market” bidness, fleeing from the markets of Betsy DeVos and Bill Gates as fast as our legs will carry us.
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Secretary DeVos won’t mention this:
“In Detroit, enrollment numbers are up in the public school system and it’s giving the district and $11 million budget boost. But the superintendent says this is only the beginning.
For the first time in 15 years, the school district for the City of Detroit announces an increase in student enrollment. For parents like Latonya Peterson it’s a breath of fresh air.”
They’re going back to public schools because the Michigan (and Ohio) charter sector are cheap, for-profit garbage.
If DeVos and Duncan and Broad had their way there wouldn’t be any public schools left to go back to. They wanted to privatize the whole system. DeVos and Broad wanted to privatize the whole STATE. If it hadn’t have been for a handful of state legislators the entire state would consist of “the charter sector”.
If the used car salespeople of ed reform promises don’t pan out you’ll all be stuck with their privatized systems. You won’t have anywhere to go back TO. And they don’t care because they don’t live in these places they “reinvent” and they don’t send their children to public schools. Hell, most of ed reform didn’t even attend public colleges. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a school with a canned curriculum on a computer but that’s what they jammed into Detroit. And Toledo. And Cleveland. And Youngstown. Places they don’t care about- places in the middle of the country where none of them live.
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Perhaps the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charters is finally rubbing off on parents. They realize “choice” is not all its cracked up to be. As this article points out, DeVos assumes parents will always make the best “choice” for children. Poor parents are over burdened and under resourced. They often don’t have the time to be good consumers, and they can be misled by smooth talking marketeers.
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retired teacher: yes, [start] “choice” is not all its cracked up to be [end].
Like everything else about the public face of the corporate education reform crowd, “truthful hyperbole” is amalgamated with lying by omission/commission in order to sell their products and Trump reasonable fact-based objections and viable alternatives in order to sell their eduproducts.
This results in the debasement of the English language. Please peruse George Orwell’s POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE [google].
For example, there is the old saw: “What is the difference between a homeless man and a millionaire? The homeless man chooses to live under a bridge and the millionaire chooses to live in a mansion.”
Ah, so not all choices are created equal…
Which leads to an obvious, if rarely explicit, rheephorm practice. Those in pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ and the power to run the lives of others are very careful not to encourage their “clients/customers/buyers” to think too much about modifiers.
¿😧?
Like putting “realistic” or “viable” or “practical” in front of the word “choice.”
Look, just about anybody can literally go to select car dealerships to check out the $100,000 [or higher priced] custom-made luxury vehicles. But, for the vast majority, how realistic or viable or practical would it be to actually—not figuratively—buy said conveyances?
The same bidness-minded folks that sell/mandate/impose charters and vouchers and such love such aphorisms as “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and “you get what you pay for” and “how ya gonna pay for that?”
So just how are the vast majority going to get a Lakeside School [Bill Gates and his children] type of education if they don’t have Microsoft millions, er, billions, in their bank accounts?
Short answer: they aren’t, and can’t, and never will be able to, when their actual choices are not just extremely restricted compared to a Bill Gates and the crowd he runs with—
But folks like Bill Gates and the crowd he runs with buy their way into positions of authority that enforce severe restrictions of choice on the vast majority.
Get rheeal. Can’t have the hewers of wood and drawers of water getting the sort of education the allows them to compete on an equal level with those that have, by design both natural and divine, been placed in the lofty positions occupied by the better sort of people like Gates & DeVos & Duncan & Christie and other select personages.
No, the sort of “choice” peddled by the rheephormistas is like differential tax obligations. Or as the Queen of Mean herself put it: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” [Leona Helmsley]
Applying this notion to corporate education reform: there’s “choice” for them that’s got and another very different sort for them that ain’t.
Thank you and everyone else for a lively thread.
😎
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“Choice”
I choose to be rich
But poor is your choice
To live in the ditch
With traffic and noise
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SDP,
God chose Betsy to be rich. Very rich.
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Many Evangelicals firmly believe that “God helps those who help themselves”, where “help themselves” means “take as much as you want” as you would at a Casino buffet in Las Vegas.
It’s educational to watch the late night televangelist broadcasts because this is precisely the “prosperity gospel” that they preach:
“You choose to be poor, so can also choose to be rich. So, what are you waiting for?”
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Is Secretary DeVos going to mention that fact that Michigan keeps dropping in national education rankings?
Can she explain how the ed reforms she jammed thru in her own state are failing so badly? Is this the kind of harm she plans to visit on the rest of the country? She started with some solid public schools in Michigan. Can she explain why they drop in national rankings every year under ed reform leadership and dogma?
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And then there is this —
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/10/resolution_to_eliminate_state.html
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One of ALEC’s proposals is to eliminate local school boards so that companies can directly grab funds from the complicit state representatives. “ALEC continues to push a corporate-driven school privatization agenda … schools and shift power away from democratically elected local school boards. … “Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.” https://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13054/cashing-kids-172-alec-education-bills-2015
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Thanks for sharing Jon. This is horrendous. What remains of the Newark Public Schools district is in the process of being returned to local control after more than twenty years of state interventions.
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Yes, it’s “fractured” precisely because the Governerd and his Legiswhores are aggressively meddling in the constitutional responsibilities of the Michigan Board of Education.
It’s the same old Ripofflichen Disaster Capitalism. First they destroy the ability of a public institution to do its job and then they use the dysfunction they create to argue for diverting public funds to their cronies in the private sector.
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deVos was trying to explain that one does not hate public schools when we send kids to charter schools by using the analogy, “Now, if you visit one of those food trucks [near the US department of Education Building] instead of a restaurant, do you hate restaurants? Or are you trying to put grocery stores out of business?”
It may or may not be the intent but it is the result anyway. Money spent on the trucks will not be spent on restaurants or grocery stores. Same with education. Money spent on charters is money not spent on public schools. It hurts the kids in public schools.
If we upscale the use of charters then we will run public education out of town.
By the way deVos has an undergraduate degree in Business Economics. You would think that she’d know better than to say that she does not hate public schools particularly based on that analogy. But I can see why she does see education as a business. She is wrong in that, too.
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It’s pretty sad when the best thing Betsy can say about public schools is that she doesn’t hate them, but just thinks they are worse than fast food trucks.
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85-90% of families send their kids to public schoools. That includes most Republicans. Charters have been sold as a way to “save” black and brown children. Suburban parents, many of them Republican, don’t want charters.
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I find myself in agreement. Parents who have their children in excellent, quality schools, are satisfied. These families do not want to go alternate schools. This is the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
There is very little political “traction” to be had, in promoting school choice, to families who are satisfied, with their local public schools.
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The overwhelming majority of parents are happy with public schools.
Only 3% of students in Indiana use vouchers, and their test scores declined when they did.
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The fact that 85-90% of families have their children enrolled in publicly-operated schools, does not mean that 85-90% are necessarily satisfied with their publicly-operated schools.
No one can say for certain, how many families would withdraw their children from the publicly-operated schools, if all families had a choice to withdraw.
The fact is that not all families can AFFORD to pay school taxes, and pay the cost for alternate schooling simultaneously.
I pose this: If all public schools are so fabulous, and all non-public schools are terrible, then publicly-operated schools have nothing to fear (from giving families school choice).
Quality will always come out on top.
Nevertheless, there should be room for compromise. I would love to see school districts abolished entirely, and permit children from neighborhoods with low-quality schools to commute to the excellent schools, in the affluent communities. I would also like to see a “common market”, where students could even cross county and state lines, and receive quality public education at a (public) school of their choice.
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I remind you that only 3% of students in Indiana sought a voucher, and then their scores dropped in the voucher schools.
3%.
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I think it is great, that 97% of the families in Indiana, are satisfied with their public schools. This shows that the public schools, are doing their job, and delivering a quality education to Indiana children.
Nevertheless, I also think it is great that 3% of Indiana families, have chosen to seek alternate educational opportunities for their children. The overwhelming majority of school-choice families are satisfied with the quality of the education that their children are receiving in the non-public schools.
Isn’t it great, when public school parents, and non-public school parents are satisfied?
see
Click to access ED560668.pdf
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Charles,
You know nothing at all about education, and you have no humility.
You boast about your ignorance.
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In the marketplace for foods where consumers have free choice, “salty, fatty, and sweet” foods dominate. That’s why we have an obesity problem in our country. If we offer choice in education? You can figure out how the analogy will work…
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Dumb, dumber and dumbest
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Wait, I thought sugar, salt and fat are the three major food groups, and will be classified as such…
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Consider choice in TV. 1,000 cable channels to choose from, and most are akin to fast food, or worse.
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In my youth, in Lexington KY, there were two(2) television channels. That is all there was. When I moved to Bowling Green KY, there were five(5) channels, and four of those were from another state.
A firm wanted to bring in cable TV, in 1969, and there was a referendum, and the citizens voted it down. Bowling Green KY, did not get cable TV until 1981.
I agree that there is a lot “crud” on the various channels now available. But I much prefer to have the choice, than to go back to the days before cable/satellite TV.
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Charles,
I did not suggest that anyone should get rid of cable. I did suggest that there are very few of the 1,000 cable stations are more than garbage. I wonder what Newton Minow would say if he were alive today. A vast garbage dump of commercial trash?
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Television was labeled a “vast wasteland” in 1961, by the FCC chairman. see
http://time.com/4315217/newton-minow-vast-wasteland-1961-speech/
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Your wish is granted. Here is what Newton Minnow said in 2011:
Q In 2011, Minow told AdvertisingAge that greater consumer choice was the most important improvement in television in the decades that had elapsed since his speech—that by getting “vaster,” television was necessarily less of a wasteland. END Q
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But Minow told The NY Times in 2011 that there was too much violence and too many game shows, not enough news. He preferred public TV, which has now been nearly completely defunded by Congress.
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Thanks for that NYT article. Now I know why the writers at Gilligan’s Island, named the boat the “S.S. Minnow”!!
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