Mercedes Schneider’s reviews Betsy DeVos’s speech to her friend Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.
Betsy and Jeb have this in common: They both hate public schools and have devoted their life to demeaning, belittling, and attacking the schools that 85-90% of American children attend. They are in love with consumer choice, and they would like nothing better than to direct public funds to religious schools, for-profit schools, cyber schools, and homeschooling.
As Mercedes notes, Betsy (or more likely, a speechwriter) discovered “A Nation at Risk,” The 1983 jeremiad that blamed public schools for the loss of industries to Germany and Japan. The report was written in the midst of the 1982 recession, and the commissioners decided that the schools were to blame for the downturn. When the economy recovered, no one bothered to thank the schools.
Betsy devoutly believes that choice will fix everything, but “A Nation at Risk” didn’t mention choice.
And she continues to ignore the evidence of the past 25 years of choice. Her home state of Michigan is overrun with charter schools, and its standing on NAEP fell from the middle of the 50 States to the bottom 10 from 2003 to 2013. The news out of the New Orleans all-Charter District throws cold water on the Charter Movement, as New Orleans continues to be a low-performing District in a low-performing State. The evidence on vouchers continues to accumulate, and it is not promising. In the most recent voucher studies, students actually lose ground. After three or four years, those who have not left to return to public schools catch up with their peers who stayed in public schools, but that’s probably because the weakest students left.
Now that Betsy is talking numbers, maybe she will pay attention to the research on charters and vouchers and admit that her favorite panacea is not working.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
DeVos visited Okland High School while she was in our state. She was supposedly interested in the vocational peogram there. This is reminiscent of Obama’s visit to McGavock High School in Nashville a couple of years ago. Both can be seen as a political attempt to support vocational education at public institutions.
The problem for both the sides of the debate is that the commitment to the idea of good vocational education is not backed by funding it. Oakland sits in a rapidly expanding suburban area southeast of Nashville that is flush with cash. Rural areas are forced to deal with a cash shortage because funding is based on sales tax collection in the counties. Places with retail that draw market from the hinterlands can have wonderful programs and places without retail get, in the words of an old southern phrase referring to the practice of raising swine, the hind teat.
If DeVos were truly interested in the “crisis” of education, the first place she would go would be to the equitable funding of all schools. Since her first choice is to create yet another system for students that would drain needed funds from the neediest students, one has to question her veracity when she claims to care about the results of American Education.
The word “EQUITABLE” is a concept DeVoodoo DOES NOT understand, and neither does Dump and the GOP.
“A Nation at Risk” was much more a political document than a scholarly study. It helped to foment the era of “privatization” which has created more problems than it has solved. As Mercedes notes that the document stated “in American schools, pointedly ignored evidence from their own files that standardized test scores had already been rising for several years” It seems fitting that DeVos should trade one propaganda piece for her own free market propaganda madness. Every times DeVos opens her mouth, she reveals her stubborn unwillingness to accept fact, Instead, she doubles down on her free market campaign to send public funds to private entities in the name of “choice.”
DeVos’ speech is really something. Read it yourself:
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-us-secretary-education-betsy-devos-foundation-excellence-education-national-summit-education-reform
It’s composed entirely of stories about how public schools suck, are uncaring and dangerous and filled with thugs and bullies.
Ed reform is such a narrow little echo chamber they don’t even realize the US Secretary of Education spends a good part of every speech attacking public schools and smearing public school students.
She got 4 standing ovations for this speech- they LOVED the attacks on public schools.
the only thing Jeb Bush had to offer public school students and families was his A-F grading system.
Hundreds of paid lobbyists and millions of dollars and all they have to show for it is the gimmicky A- F school grading system?
Jeb Bush is behind the scenes pulling the education strings in Tallahassee. The legislature just approved a bill to create a voucher for students that are bullied. They will come up with any devious plan they can to weaken public education in the state. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/school-zone/os-hope-scholarship-bullying-vouchers-florida-20171108-story.html
I’d like everyone to imagine if the Secretary of Education had delivered a speech attacking charter schools and private schools the way she gives speeches attacking public schools.
Ed reformers would march on DC.
Yet she gives speech after speech depicting public schools as scary, dangerous, uncaring places and ed reformers give her standing ovations.
These people are anti-public schools. If your child is IN a public school you need to know that. This isn’t “science” and they aren’t “agnostics”- this is political campaigning for a very specific ideology and vision of privatized systems.
Here’s a typical DeVos story about a public school:
“Sadly, Trevor’s school was less than accommodating. They didn’t allow leeway for extra time to transfer classes nor any mechanism to catch up on missed instruction time. This 4.0 GPA high schooler saw his grades tumble and his aspirations fade.
“They really weren’t concerned about Trevor going to college,” Trevor’s mother said. “They really just wanted him to graduate high school.”
In other words, pass him along so they wouldn’t have to deal with him: a sad reality for far too many students in far too many schools.
Thankfully, Trevor and his parents discovered a blended learning charter school that allowed students to take classes online or in person.”
Now, DeVos doesn’t know this but there are some very bad charter schools in Ohio, and Michigan, and Indiana.
Imagine if she had depicted all charter schools the way she depicts all public schools?
She would have to issue an apology. But- since she bashes only public schools her political campaigning is just fine and dandy to ed reformers.
“The 1983 jeremiad that blamed public schools for the loss of industries to Germany and Japan.”
If this thinking was a laughing matter I’d be rolling on the floor roaring in bursts of mirth, but it is ignorant thinking not worthy of joy.
The loss of U.S. industries to Germany and Japan has nothing, Nothing, NOTHING to do with the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional U.S. public education system.
But it does have everything to do with World War II and the Marshall plan that followed the war to help Japan and Germany rebuilt their industries that had been bombed into oblivion. The Marshall plan was implemented to avoid another world war, because, after World War One, Germany was punished instead of helped to rebuilt and that, in short, led to Hitler, the Nazis, and World War II.
While those industries in Japan and Germany were being rebuilt after World War II, the U.S. industrial sector dominated a world ravaged by World War II supplying cars and trucks to the world in addition to everything else made in factories. For a few years, the U.S. had little to no competition.
Then the competition returned.
Such ignorant stupidity on their part deserves nothing but a roaring contempt and anger.
Speaking of school choice… I have looked over the posts on the tax “reform” bill on this blog, and I haven’t seen a reference to how the plan would help parents to send their kids to private K-12 schools.
On the K-12 side of the equation, the Republican tax proposal would allow parents to use up to $10,000 from tax-advantaged education savings plans — sometimes referred to as a 529 plan — to pay for expenses for their school, including tuition for private schools.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/11/560247071/what-tax-reform-could-mean-for-education-devos-visits-hurricane-hit-islands
Snopes points out the same thing but also mentions that the bill would help home schoolers as well, and it explains why the bill helps only the rich to make a “choice” of .
Private schools would fare much better. A revision of Section 529 of the existing federal tax code extends the applicability of so-called “529 plans” (tax-exempt savings accounts covering higher education expenses) to tuitions for K-12 private and parochial schools, as well as the costs of homeschooling.
As illustrated in a December 2017 article in Forbes, the benefits could be significant for well-to-do families who send their children to private schools:
“Consider the case of a parent who saves $4000 per year in a 529 for a child’s education in my home state of Virginia. He also deposits the $230 of annual tax savings he gets from Virginia into the account as a supplemental contribution. Our taxpayer sends his child to a Catholic school which charges $6500 per year in tuition, and then a Catholic high school which charges $10,000 per year in tuition.
Throughout the course of the child’s pre-college educational life, our taxpayer has saved $76,000 in original contributions to the 529 but had enough money in the account to spend just under $100,000 on tuition, assuming a 5 percent annual investment growth rate. Nearly $25,000 was therefore totally free, totally tax-exempt education funding. His 529 subsidized one-quarter of his daughter’s tuition bill, a bill he would have paid entirely with after-tax dollars without the Cruz amendment.”
For poorer families, however, the 529 extension would do little to make it more feasible for parents to choose private schools (or homeschooling) over public schools — public schools which may, in a few more years, face funding crises brought about by the same legislation.
The GOP believes in the magic of the marketplace and they have successfully persuaded a majority of Americans to buy into the agreeable fantasy that the unregulated marketplace will fairly and equitably allocate resources. They began selling this canard in the early 1970s and elected a charismatic soap salesman to promote the idea that “government was the problem” in the early 80s setting the stage for our current carnival barker. Instead of countering the idea that “government is the problem”, the Dems offered a “lite” version: government could be “reinvented” by forming partnerships with the private sector and outsourcing some of its work to the private sector. The seeds of the privatization movement were sown in the neoliberal era of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
“the Dems offered a “lite” version: government could be “reinvented” by forming partnerships with the private sector and outsourcing some of its work to the private sector. ”
What does this mean? Nobody said, governments shouldn’t form partnerships with the private sector.
It’s always the scale of the privatization which is the problem: too big jobs given to a private company, too big private companies.
Possible good: a public school outsources its janitorial work to a small local company.
Bad: the state of Tennessee outsources the janitorial work of all public buildings in the state to a single gigantic out of state company.
Was that soap salesman Reagan. If so, wouldn’t septic tank salesman be a better description? We use soap to clean up. We use septic tanks to hold our toxic crap.
I have written Against A Nation at Risk but I do agree with one thing it said and that was not to make scapegoats of our teachers. People that tout this flawed report tend to forget this and try to fire teachers based on standardized tests. Read the Sandia Report, 1990. It shoots holes in the A Nation at Risk Report.