Michael Feuer, dean of the graduate school of education at George Washington University, offers Betsy DeVos tips on how to make her time in office tolerable and perhaps useful.
This is his first suggestion.
“The most important goal of the agency is to help improve public schools.
“Americans have voted with their feet: Even after 50 years of debate, advocacy, and research into mechanisms designed to privatize education, roughly 90 percent of our kids still attend traditional public schools. The secretary’s prior efforts notwithstanding, vouchers have not been taken up by large shares of the public, where they have been tried the results have been mixed at best and the American public and the high court remain uncomfortable with use of public funds to support religious education.
”Given her need to set priorities she should focus on bettering public schools — a central institution in all our communities.”
He has five other ideas for her.
Given her long history of advocacy for privatization, it doesn’t seem likely that she will take his advice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That trendy yacht has sailed.
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yes, it is enroute to the Bahamas every Friday.
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Yes this is great advice for Betsy to support our public schools but this woman is intent on being a pioneer of this country. What happens when you have so much money is that the human being needs other stimulus to sooth the brain. So, when the human has acquired all the wealth imaginable, suddenly the brain seeks other pleasures or desires which suddenly become needs.
It is my opinion that Ms. Devos is driven to privatize our educational system not for the good of our country but rather to sooth her needs and desire of becoming a pioneer of American culture as being the person who “transformed” the US educational system. This way when she reaches the heavens she can look at God and smile and boy oh boy does this woman know how to smile. For Betsy’s sake, I do hope that she somehow rids herself of this huge responsibility of being the Secretary of Education for the most powerful, advanced society man has even know. She just is way over her head and she be best suited to go back to Michigan and become the midwestern homemaker God really made her to be.
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She thinks she’s doing a great job. She gave herself a good grade and dismisses all criticism as “protecting the status quo” or the work of evil labor unions.
She’s safe as houses inside the ed reform echo chamber- no one will disagree with her or challenge her there.
They’ll graduate her with honors at the end of her term as long as she doesn’t violate The Sacred Market Doctrine and she’ll go on to a long and lucrative career as a professional privatizer and public school basher. It’s the ultimate in job security. They move between Gates and Walton and the rest of the orgs and the US Department of Education easily and seamlessly. One big club.
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I don’t expect her to listen to anyone advocating for Public Education. She’s not qualified to be Sec. of Education.
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Ed reform doesn’t have any interest in “improving public schools”. They fancy themselves as inventing a new local government, which will be much better than the current public school governance because they are The Best and The Brightest.
You really have no idea how wildly ambitious (and arrogant) this “movement” is until you read their stuff.
I don’t think they’ll stop with schools. There’s no reason this ideology couldn’t be applied to any local public entity or any local governmental body. All of their (many, many) complaints about elected school boards could be applied to city councils or county commissioners. When they’re done here they’ll move to water and energy systems, land use, the whole works. Why not? All the concepts apply. Why bother getting elected when you can appoint yourself CEO of a publicly-funded entity?
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DeVos has no intention of improving public education. Her goal is to rob the public schools and shift the funding to various privatization schemes. We need to resist and block her in the court of public opinion and legal courts as well. The best service we can provide is to inform the parents and communities that support public education that they need to defend their schools any way possible.
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Trying to save DeVos from herself is like trying to offer Hitler diversity training. The other advice to those that care about public schools I would mention is the importance of voting for those that support them and attempt to vote out those on the take from the charter lobby. Billionaires will continue to pay for misleading ads about candidates, but they still only have one vote each. Even if we need to knock on doors in our respective neighborhoods, we need people to show up and vote in support of authentic public education.
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Great point. No way she will ever give a damn about helping public schools. She is on a mission from (her) God.
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Just to keep the pressure up on devos I wanted to comment on a comment Ms. Devos made regarding the program 60 minutes. Devos stated that she NEVER watched an episode of 60 minutes before and after her interview with Leslie Stahl she will never watch any other program 60 minutes runs.
Really? The program 60 minutes has been on the air since 1968 and has run every Sunday evening since that time. 60 minutes literally is an American iconic program similar to our public schools in that they are iconic.
The fact that Ms. devos has never watched an episode of this program is actually mind boggling to me but it confirms my conviction that this woman is just really out of touch with the American way so how the heck is she expected to run the iconic public school system of the US.
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You wonder if the speechwriters notice she never mentions public schools except to denigrate them or compare them unfavorably to charter or private schools.
It jumps right out at you if you’re not in the echo chamber. Maybe it’s not deliberate. Maybe it’s just such a closed circle that they literally no longer recognize the existence of public school families.
I read that 60-some % of DC (white) people use private schools. I can’t help but think that plays a major role in this odd blindness. Because it IS odd – they ignore 90% of students and that’s fine with them! No one ever says “gosh, maybe this is a tad skewed?”
I read an ed reform screed out of Florida and they were crowing about 300k charter/voucher students in Florida. There’s just no recognition of how small that is, in terms of the whole. They’ve essentially disappeared the vast majority of students in that state. They no longer exist.
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Why would the speechwriters mention public schools? They share DeVos’ desire to eliminate them.
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Like Trump, she is surrounded by like-minded people, who don’t care about public schools other than to put them down, and who want to abandon civil rights protections, and unleash the innovations in for-profit higher education, whose greatest innovation is exploiting vulnerable veterans, widows, and minorities.
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I live in WashDC metro area (Fairfax VA) Washington DC public schools have some of the lowest participation in the entire nation. In one neighborhood, (upper Connecticut Ave, NW), 73% of the children attend non-public schools.
The breakdown by race is staggering. 60% of Caucasian children attending DC public schools, is probably a low-ball estimate. see
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/08/where-private-school-enrollment-is-highest-and-lowest-across-the-us/375993/
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Charles,
No more from you about choice. You have said the same thing four or five times.
DC is nearly 50% charters. They have plenty of choice.
To no avail.
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There are long waiting lists, to get into the best of DCs public schools. One school has over 600 students on the waiting list. The Chancellor was involved in a scandal, trying to rig the system. see
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/20/587356139/head-of-d-c-s-schools-resigns-after-personal-scandal-and-amid-district-tumult
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I am very sad that the schoolchildren of our nation’s capital are not getting the education that they deserve. The system is plagued by scandals and mis-management.
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The problem in DC is not lack of choice
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Just think about this- a “movement” that supposedly spends all day working on “public education” completely missed an earthquake in West Virginia, where public schools were in such bad shape teachers had to SHUT THEM DOWN to get state leader’s attention.
They’re in open revolt in Oklahoma. Another whole state where this neglect has reached crisis stage, and STILL ed reformers won’t notice until every public school in the state shuts down.
How do work on public school issues and somehow miss this? Do they worry they’re completely irrelevant to the public school issues in whole states? Because they are! That’s clear. If whole states go under the radar someone is not paying attention.
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“Americans have voted with their feet: Even after 50 years of debate, advocacy, and research into mechanisms designed to privatize education, roughly 90 percent of our kids still attend traditional public schools.”
It seems to me they have voted with their butts — to stay put.
If they had voted with their feet, they would have left.
Other than that, the only way DeVos can save her tenure in office is to tenure her resignation (yes, I know it’s tender)
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If parents/students are not given the chance to opt-out of a publicly school system, (not given a voucher, and still compelled to pay school taxes, whether they use the public school system or not), then how can you say they are “voting”?
Only the rich can afford to pay school taxes, and also pay tuition/fees at a private non-public school.
Prisoners who stay in the penitentiary are not voting, they are stuck.
Parents/children who must pay for a public system, and are not given the alternative, to decline the public system, and receive a voucher, to select the school of their choice, are NOT voting “with their butts”. They are shackled to a system, that does not trust them enough, to select their own schooling.
If public schools are so wonderful, and non-public schools are an abomination, then why can’t we trust parents/students to choose the right path?
Is it that the perpetuators are afraid?
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Charles,
No one is forced to attend public schools. Anyone can “opt out” and choose to go to a religious or private school.
Let me remind you that this is the last time I will post a comment from you about choice. I have posted scores or hundreds of them, and you just keep repeating the same things over and over. That’s it.
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People who don’t have children pay taxes for public schools.
People whose children are grown and no longer in school pay taxes for public schools.
People who opted to send their children to religious school at their own expense pay taxes for public schools.
We don’t get to choose which public functions we want to pay for.
I don’t want to pay for the wars in the Middle East. I don’t want to pay for Trump to play golf every weekend at Mar-a-Lago. I don’t want to pay for Special Forces in Africa.
But I don’t get to choose where my taxes go.
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Charles, the main issue with regard to school choice is that people like devos want to take hard working tax payer dollars and transfer them to private institutions! Don’t you get it?
You can have all the choice you want but please do not think you can use choice with other peoples money. Don’t you get it”. Do you get it now? Use your own monies and no one will complain one iota.
Finally, if private schooling is the end all be all, lets take a look at our secretary of education Ms. Devos who is a student of private schools from kindergarten all the way up. Now I ask you is Ms. Devos the poster child for private schooling?? Would you be proud of your daughter if she was like Betsy?? Any questions?
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Technically, the American people don’t vote for ANY policy except referenda.
We vote for Representatives who vote for policies for us.
We could have voted for reps who supported charters but the vast majority of us have not because we are satisfied with the public schools.
That does not mean we think there are no problems with them, just that we think those problems are best worked out under the current system rather than creating a whole new parallel system that may not be any better than the one we have now and could actually be worse.
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Diane, the whining over school taxes & relentless efforts to lower them leaves me cold. We are 25yrs & counting in one of the highest RE-tax-paying counties in the nation. As of now, the total RE taxes we’ve paid, when divided by the 40 yrs of excellent K12 public ed my kids completed nearly a decade ago [incl the extra yr of K the town saw fit to give my youngest] calculates to an ave yr of publ sch @ $8625. A bargain for us since the ave per-pupil cost for that period is $10k.
Most of ‘our share’ of state aid goes to poor districts – & Christie cut it to almost nothing in 2010 (it’s about 4% of our budget now) – so obviously this could not be accomplished w/o all townfolk pitching in – but why not, since we all live here & depend on well-educated citizens in countless ways?
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Sadly, there is no right to equity in education. The Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), that the equal protection clause of the constitution does not apply to funding for publicly-operated schools. see
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332
Funding schools through property taxes, ensures that wealthy areas will have adequate funding, and that economically depressed areas will not have the funding, adequate to the task.
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Rodriguez was a terrible decudion.
Even worse was Citizens United
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Of course, childless people pay the same taxes as people with children. (When it comes to property taxes,etc). I am proud to support education, the public schools where I live are fine, some of the best in the nation. I support public schools, financially and enthusiastically. Of course, senior citizens, who no longer have children in residence pay school taxes, what of it?
Education is a bargain! It is more cost-effective to send children to school, than to send adults to prison, or pay welfare costs. An educated society raises our standard of living, and benefits all of us.
People who can afford to do ,and choose to do, send their children to non-public schools (or home-school) and continue to pay school taxes. This is by choice, and only those who are wealthy enough, may exercise this choice.
All citizens must participate in the common defense. The monetary costs of the Iraq/Afghanistan military actions have been very cost-effective. There has not been a terrorist attack on US soil, launched from any entity since the beginning of the actions. I am not thrilled about paying for Nancy Pelosi to fly back and forth to San Francisco, but I just “cough it up”. Ditto with paying for secret service protection for former presidents.
You get as much input as anyone else, on where your government spends public money. Your vote counts (see the special election in PA). And you may approach your political servants anytime you wish.
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All of this is true, Charles, but you do not have the “right” to post 15-20 times a day on my blog. And this goes for other readers, I will not post messages that demean teachers or public schools. You can go to the U.S. Department of Education website and many others to read those hostile attacks and add your own.
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