Archives for the month of: August, 2018
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Gail Collins on The Bane that Is Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
13

A very welcome column about our odious Secretary of Education by the brilliant Gail Collins.

The Bane That Is Betsy DeVos https://nyti.ms/2MvmgC5?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Today let’s talk about the evil deeds of Betsy DeVos.

We’ve been distracted, what with Omarosa and the Manafort trial and that $90 million military parade we were so looking forward to. At the same time, our secretary of education has been busy, working to protect for-profit colleges from their students.

Yes! We keep being told that Donald Trump was elected because working-class Americans were worried that their kids wouldn’t be able to move up in the world. And now DeVos is making it easier for those very same kids to be cheated when they try to prepare for a career.

It’s quite a story, just as DeVos is quite a gal. Probably the first secretary of education with a $40 million family yacht that’s registered in the Cayman Islands, presumably to avoid American taxes.

Is that the yacht that got mysteriously untied the other day?

Yes, it was moored in Ohio and an unknown person set it adrift, causing up to $10,000 in damage. We do not approve of this sort of behavior, people! Somebody could have gotten hurt. And the DeVos family might have been without a floating residence, except for the other nine yachts they own.

But before I permit any more distractions, we need to discuss policymaking at the Department of Education:

The Obama administration worked very hard to weed out bad for-profit colleges. The policy it finally came up with was to compare an average graduate’s debt with the average graduate’s earnings. Then cut off federal grants and loans to the schools that had a really terrible ratio. And give the students who’d gotten a raw deal a chance to get their loans forgiven.

Excuse me, but does this apply to, say, philosophy majors? My grandson is finishing up at the state university and I do not see how all these courses on Heidegger are going to get him work.

No, we’re talking about schools that are just there to prepare students for a career, whether it’s computer engineering or cooking or auto mechanics. Your grandson is in a privileged minority. If you want an American college student to worry about, Suzanne Martindale of Consumers Union says you should think less about a kid on a four-year campus and more about “someone 29 with three kids.”

Or Stephanie Stiefel, who enrolled at the now-defunct for-profit International Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa to get a B.A. that she was assured would lead to a good-paying position in interior design: “They made it seem so simple — just do well in class and finish the program.” She graduated with a 3.8 and $62,000 in debt, then discovered that the only jobs she could land were minimum-wage positions she could have gotten without any training at all. Other schools wouldn’t accept her credits when she tried to get an advanced degree. Now, 10 years later, she’s finished a tour of duty in the Army and owes $110,000. “At this point I just make the payment and cry about it,” she said.

DeVos, meanwhile, is worried about the government making “burdensome” demands on the for-profit schools. We will take a break for a minute to sigh.

Oh gosh, this is so depressing. I hate thinking about the things this administration is doing to ordinary people. Is there any chance you could distract me by working in Omarosa?

Well, be a good citizen and stay with me for a minute.

DeVos loves for-profit education — you may remember she championed an overhaul of the Michigan school system, which replaced troubled public schools with truly terrible charter schools, most of them for-profit.

So she’s chipping away at anything the for-profits don’t like. Like the Obama rule allowing aggrieved students to petition to get their loans forgiven. The new idea would pretty much limit relief to people who’ve fallen into deep financial distress. Nobody seems to have seen that one coming.

And lord knows what’s next. Amy Laitinen, at the nonpartisan think tank New America, is worrying that the department will “allow a college to outsource its program to an unaccredited provider.” Which in theory could mean that when you pay your tuition to what seems to be a legitimate school, you could find yourself bused over to Trump University for classes.

I’m so glad you got Trump University in there.

DeVos has stuffed her department with people from the for-profit education industry. The guy who’s supposed to be overseeing fraud investigations is a former dean of a for-profit named DeVry University, which paid $100 million to settle a lawsuit over misleading marketing tactics.

But you still promised me Omarosa. Find a way to work her in.

The famous memoir claims Trump calls his secretary of education “Ditzy DeVos” and vowed to get rid of her. The first certainly sounds likely. But by now we are well aware that the current president of the United States is incapable — oh, irony of ironies — of firing anybody. And I don’t want to give you the impression that Trump has any reservations about for-profit colleges that make grandiose promises to their students about future careers, while taking their money and preparing them for nothing whatsoever.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

California: Torlakson Creates a Task Force to Review State Charter Laws

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
12

Tom Torlakson, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction in California, has created a task force to review the charter school laws in the state.

California has more charter schools than any other state. The California Charter School Association is the richest, most powerful lobby in the state and has been able to stymie any overhaul of the law. The CCSA has staunchly opposed any revision of the law that might require accountability or transparency from charter schools and that would, for example, bar conflicts of interest or for-profit charters.

Governor Jerry Brown, who has been a progressive leader on so many major issues, has been a faithful defender of charter schools, vetoing any legislative efforts to update the law.

But, it now appears that the new governor will be Gavin Newsom, and he has no debts to the CCSSA, which directed millions of dollars to Antonio Villairaigosa in the primaries, who ran a distant third.

Given the reshuffling at the top, it is time to fix the conditions that allow frauds and scandals to go undetected in the charter sector.

Responsible members of the charter industry should work diligently to remove the fraudsters and grifters from their sector, as should everyone.

Charters should not have the ability to appeal from the district board to the county board to the state board, where they are certain to win approval, no matter how ill-qualified their staff.

At present, given the lack of any accountability for the expenditure of public money by charters, the state has experienced many scandals. To learn more about the woeful state of California’s charter industry, read Carol Burris’s carefully researched “Charters and Consequences.”

The Torlakson commission has the chance to get the law right, which would benefit both public schools and charter schools.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Scandal

Omarosa: DeVos Wants to Privatize All Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
51

Valerie Strauss writes about Omarosa’s new book “Unhinged” and what she says about Betsy DeVos.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/08/14/omarosa-claims-betsy-devos-wants-to-replace-public-education-with-for-profit-schools-and-that-trump-calls-her-ditzy-devos/

“A new book about President Trump by one of his former senior advisers, Omarosa Manigault Newman, claims that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants “to replace public education with for-profit schools” and that Trump has called her by the nickname “Ditzy DeVos….”

“Manigault Newman writes:

“Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools. She believes it would be better for students, but the truth is, it’s about profit. She’s so fixated on her agenda, she can’t give any consideration to building our public schools, providing financing for them, particularly their infrastructure needs.

“Manigault Newman writes that she accompanied DeVos on a trip to Florida in 2017 and that DeVos was booed while giving a graduation speech at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Florida. Graduating students heckled DeVos in large part because a few months earlier, she had called historically black colleges and universities — which were created because blacks couldn’t attend white schools — “pioneers” of school choice.

“Manigault Newman writes that after the speech, she asked the secretary how she thought she did. DeVos responded, according to the book, by saying she thought she did “great,” and then is quoted as having said the students at the Bethune-Cookman graduation “don’t have the capacity to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.” Manigault Newman then wrote this: “Meaning, all those black students were too stupid to understand her agenda.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

Nancy Bailey on Arne Duncan’s Contempt for Educators

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2018 //
35

Nancy Bailey lists the cushy jobs and boards that Arne Duncan has landed.

Who Arne Duncan is Today Speaks To His Past Role as Education Secretary

Getting into education has been a good gig for him. He’s making plenty money telling the country how terrible American education is, how awful teachers are, and why no one has as much courage as he does. He was the U.S. Secretary of Education for seven years. He had a powerful perch. Why didn’t he fix anything?

She hasn’t read Arne Duncan’s books but she knows the first line:

“He begins his book “Education runs on lies.” This is an insult to every authentic educator who will show up to teach children in the coming weeks.

“He talks about knowing poor children, but until you’re responsible for instructing thirty (or more) struggling students in an overcrowded classroom, lacking resources and support on a daily basis, you have no right to judge teachers.

“If only Duncan had been supportive. If he’d stood for teachers and their rights as they help children, maybe he would have been liked. But Duncan was a reformer’s reformer, put in place to privatize public schools.

“We never saw him fighting for better services for students with disabilities, reducing class sizes, or better public school programs to serve a diverse student body.

“Did he join teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kentucky, or Arizona as they struggled to get better public schools for their students?”

You know the answers to all these questions. He didn’t show up in Madison, Wisconsin, when Scott Walker started his war against teachers.

When real courage was required, he was Missing in Action. He is cleaning up now by defaming teachers, students, and parents.

Nancy Bailey sees the change from Duncan to DeVos as a continuum.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform

New York State Allies for Public Education to State Leaders: Don’t Punish Schools and Kids for Opting Out from Senseless Testing

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
22

New York State Allies for Public Education is an organization that represents 50 parent and educator groups across the state. It has led the opt-out movement in the state. This letter was written in response to punish schools where the “participation” rate in mandated testing fell too low. The very best response to the state’s threats and warnings would be to opt out; the more that parents opt out, the less likely it is that the state can “punish” them for exercising their constitutional rights.

Dear Board of Regents, Chancellor Rosa, Commissioner Elia and Dr. Lisa Long,

We find it reprehensible that under the guise of ESSA, NYSED is seeking to punish schools when parents exercise their legal right to opt their child out of the grades 3-8 state tests and is overreaching by requiring the collection of confidential student data. These proposed provisions of the New York State ESSA regulations show a blatant disregard for the amount of public outrage over the last several years regarding the flawed New York State testing system, unproven revised common core standards, and the unnecessary collection of personally identifiable student information.

Strong opposition to the grades 3-8 common core state tests has been evidenced by 20%- 22% of eligible students throughout New York opting out of these state exams over the past three years, despite threats from the state and individual districts and a one-sided state-initiated persuasion campaign (the Commissioner’s “Toolkit”).

Only 8% of school districts in New York met the 95% testing participation rate in 2017, and while the state has not yet released the opt out figures for the 2018 grades 3-8 tests, several news accounts reveal that the opt out number will remain high, and that the majority of school districts will not have met the 95% participation rate as a result.

In addition, it took a legislative act to stop NYSED and then-Commissioner John King from collecting personally identifiable student data in the name of inBloom, a $50 million database that was going to be used for corporate data mining purposes without parental consent.

The proposed New York ESSA regulations will allow the Commissioner to mislabel schools with opt out rates over 5% — including highly effective schools — as needing Comprehensive or Targeted Support and Improvement, with the potential of wrongfully identifying schools as needing these interventions. These proposed regulations allow the Commissioner to require schools to misuse Title I funds in an effort to increase test participation rates. Moreover, the proposed regulations allow the Commissioner to close these schools, and/or convert them to charter schools. This is a dangerous path for NYS to take.

The mere suggestion of using Title I funds for ‘marketing’ of these tests is a misuse of authority that results in the revictimization and intimidation of communities that have a long history of being underserved and disempowered. Furthermore, it should be regarded as a civil rights issue as these actions will disproportionately aim to quiet the voices of schools with high populations of students from low-income households which tend to correlate with families of color.

None of these proposed provisions are required by ESSA law, none of them will improve learning conditions or outcomes for our children, and all of them contradict earlier statements from the Board of Regents and NYSED officials that schools with high opt out rates would not be punished or otherwise targeted, and/or wrongfully labeled for interventions, etc. The intention of the 95% participation rate in the ESSA law is to deter institutional/systematic exclusion by schools not to usurp parental rights.

We strongly request that NYSED remove these provisions from the proposed regulations and refrain from punishing schools when parents assert their legal right to opt out of the state tests. Moreover, under no circumstances, should NYSED collect confidential, personally identifiable student data. The ESSA law does not require punishing schools for opt out; rather, it fortifies a parent’s right to opt out. Furthermore, the ESSA law does not require collecting individual student data for the purposes of accountability, nor should the Commissioner and NYSED.

Until NYSED embraces teaching our children through the lens of whole-child education and stop test-driven classrooms, we will continue to squander opportunities to truly help all children reach their full potential. It’s time we give the children of New York a meaningful, well-rounded education, and create a nourishing environment where children flourish because they genuinely love to learn.

Respectfully,

Lisa Rudley, Executive Director

Categories New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

Los Angeles: Union and Inexperienced Superintendent at Odds

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
27

Austin Beitner, the former hedge fund manager-publisher picked by the school board as superintendent of the nation’s second-largest district despite his lack of any education experience, is at loggerheads with the UTLA.

UTLA released this statement last night (note the return of Cami Anderson):

We are responding to the letter you sent yesterday to UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl. We are writing this letter jointly because Arlene Inouye is UTLA’s bargaining chair and, with the UTLA Bargaining Team, has urged the district to stop refusing to meet with a state-appointed mediator in a timely fashion as required by law.

In response to the mediator proposing multiple dates for August and in contrast to UTLA’s willingness to meet for mediation immediately, LAUSD is refusing to participate within a reasonable time frame. This is unacceptable and indefensible.

Two UTLA officers met with you yesterday with one goal: to get you to abide by the bargaining process and schedule timely mediation dates. No outline of an agreement was discussed in that meeting. Nor did you offer a path to a contract settlement, as your letter suggests. Instead, you continued your steadfast unwillingness to send the LAUSD bargaining team, now that we are at impasse, to mediation. Therefore, your availability to “meet anytime” rings hollow.

You have claimed that you cannot schedule mediation for 56 days because you don’t want to interfere with the beginning of the school year. Yet yesterday, on the second day of school, you had plenty of time to discuss ways to cut educator healthcare, pensions, and other compensation with a “realignment” plan created by high-priced consultants tied to the privatization movement. One is the firm founded by former Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, who aggressively imposed failed charter and privatization schemes that ended in school closings and mass firings of teachers. After a community uprising against her disastrous leadership, she resigned in disgrace. Anderson now joins your new chief of staff, Rebecca Kockler, who is tightly connected to the privatization of New Orleans schools.
You continue to talk about salary as if it is the only issue we care about in bargaining. While a fair salary increase is essential for attracting educators in response to a growing shortage, our comprehensive bargaining package provides a vital pathway for drawing families into our schools and saving the civic institution of public education. This includes proposals to: eliminate the contract language (Article 18, Section 1.5) that allows the district to unilaterally increase class sizes every year; increase the number of nurses, counselors, school psychologists, and teacher librarians; expand accountability for charter schools and co-locations; reduce the drain on instructional time from overtesting; increase investments in bilingual education and ethnic studies; empower local school leadership councils to manage school budgets and create school climate and discipline plans; end the mistreatment of early education teachers, adult education teachers, and substitute teachers; and more.

Making vague comments about small salary increases and the need to cut healthcare, while showing no willingness to bargain over our package of proposals, is not a plan to respect educators but a plan to wind down the public school district, the way you wound down so many corporate entities as a private equity profiteer.

At this point in the bargaining process — when the parties are at a deadlock on roughly 23 different issues after more than 17 months and over 130 hours of bargaining — a state-appointed mediator is the best potential path toward reaching an agreement. The California Public Employment Relations Board agrees, by virtue of their certifying our impasse and appointing a mediator.

Enough is enough. You cannot put students first when you put educators last. Your letter suggests we are not looking out for the best interests of our students, which we take great exception to. Mr. Beutner, you have never taught in a classroom, but you should know that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.

If you can’t or won’t do this, then educators, parents, and the broader community will question your ability to lead the second-largest school district in the country.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Union

Greg Brozeit: The Intellectual Roots of Trumpism

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
57

Greg Brozeit comments here frequently and teaches us as he comments:


Immediately after the election I posted a summary of a review I wrote about an essay by Isaiah Berlin on Joseph de Maistre. Here is the full piece. It ties into the subject of this post and hopefully provides some insight into the fascist mindset that is on the rise again throughout the globe:

Maistre was the intellectual father on modern fascism. I doubt that 20th and 21st century fascist leaders and politicians—even the current American incarnation—ever heard of him, but his ideas form the core of modern day reactionary political systems. Born in the Savoy kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1753, his views were strongly influenced by the experiences of the French Revolution. He served the king of Sardinia, first gaining prominence as a pamphleteer and later as envoy to Russia—the king wanted both to control and keep him as far away as possible—where he lived from 1803 to 1817 before being summoned home until his death in 1821.

Maistre strongly opposed the liberal thinkers of the 18th century with a counter-intuitive empiricism. “In place of the ideals of progress, liberty, perfectibility he preached the sacredness of the past, the virtue, and the necessity, indeed, of complete subjection, because of the incurably bad and corrupt nature of man. In place of science, he preached the primacy of instinct, superstition, prejudice. In place of optimism, pessimism. In place of eternal harmony and eternal peace, the necessity—for him the divine necessity—of conflict, of suffering, of bloodshed, of war.” He saw killing as a virtue, extrapolating the killing of animals for man’s benefits (from food to clothing to luxury) to the primal need for society to live in fear of the “hangman,” which, intellectually, is not far removed from contemporary rhetoric about “law and order.” Moreover, war is a good for society because it acts as an organizing force. The Church, Catholic in his case, does the same. Since, as Berlin articulates Maistre, “Man is by nature vicious, wicked, cowardly and bad…unless clamped with iron rings and held down by means of the most rigid discipline” he “need[s] to be curbed and controlled.”

Moreover, Maistre believed that irrationality—“the only things which last”—not rationality, explained how society behaved. “For example, he says, take the institution of hereditary monarchy: What could be more irrational?…Here is an institution of patently idiotic nature, for which no good reason can be given, yet it lasts…But far more rational, far more logical and reasonable, would be to abolish such a monarchy and see what happens.” Maistre felt the same about marriage, reasoning the irrationality of a couple falling in love and then staying together because of historical tradition. “So he goes on, from institution to institution, paradoxically asserting that whatever is irrational lasts, and that whatever is rational collapses; it collapses because anything which is constructed by reason can be pulverised by reason…The only thing which can ever dominate man is impenetrable mystery.”

Prejudice is, according Maistre, a virtue because it is “merely the beliefs of the centuries, tested by experience.” Scientists “are the people who have the least capacity for understanding life, and for government…[because] science [has a] dry, abstract, unconcrete nature, something about the fact that it is divorced from the crooked, chaotic, the irrational texture of life with all its darkness, which makes scientists incapable of adapting themselves to actual facts, and anyone listening to them is automatically doomed.” He advised the Russian czar to ban German Lutherans from entering his country because “Good men—family men, men who have traditions, faith, religion, respectable morals—do not leave their countries. Only the feckless and the restless and the critical do so. This is,” as Berlin makes clear, “the first real sermon against refugees, against freedom of spirit, against the circulation of humanity…”

Maistre was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer of Napoleon. The King of Sardinia explicitly prohibited Maistre from meeting with Napoleon because he feared the consequences of what might come out of such an encounter. And although Maistre’s views were largely confined to elites and he was much forgotten after his death, his ideas predicted the worst of the 20th century and still informs how we should view demagogues and their followers today. According to Berlin, “Maistre earns our gratitude as a prophet of the most violent, the most destructive forces which have threatened and still threaten the liberty and ideals of normal human beings.”

For those who question how the Putinism, Trumpism, fundamentalist religion, and extreme terrorism can flourish today, it might be worth learning more about Maistre. They probably won’t like what they see and read, but they’ll be better able to understand why these movements exist and why the defenders of liberal democracy (writ small) must never become complacent.

Categories Education Reform

What Is DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)? LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
33

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) was created by a group of guys who work as hedge fund managers. Some are Democrats, other are Republicans. They support charter schools and high-stakes testing. They never support public schools. They support Teach for America. They think that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students, even though research overwhelmingly shows that this method is a failure (see the recent RAND-AIR report on the flop of the Gates-funded demonstration of evaluating teachers by test scores). They believe in merit pay, even though merit pay has never worked anywhere. There is no evidence that any active member of DFER ever attended a public school, ever taught in a public school, or ever sent his children to a public school. DFER doesn’t like public schools. Like Betsy DeVos, which it pretends to oppose, DFER believes in free-market reform of schools. If I am wrong, I hope that one of these hedge fund managers contacts me to let me know.

DFER loves corporate charter chains and doesn’t like local democratic control of schools. They see nothing unsavory about out-of-state billionaires buying an election for their favorite candidate, even in a local school board election. DFER is a PAC that collects and distributes fund to candidates who support its goals.

Here is the DFER list for this year’s election. Cory Booker and Michael Bennet are perennial favorites of DFER. I don’t know if Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia is aligned with their philosophy or if DFER is trying to establish a relationship. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee in the Congress. Maybe DFER is currying his favor. His predecessor, Congressman George Miller of California, was fully aligned with DFER’s views and was richly rewarded with fundraisers, even when he didn’t have an opponent. His former chief of staff, Charles Barone, now runs the DFER office in D.C.

Suffice it to say that DFER pays no attention to research that does not support its fervent belief in charters, private management, and high-stakes testing. DFER believes in the free market, punishments and rewards for performance. That works on Wall Street. It should work in schools, even if it doesn’t.

Here is a graphic that shows the links among DFER and unsavory characters who also want to privatize public education. There is a factual error in the graphic. Political money is spent by 501c4 organizations. Those designated as 501c3 are supposed to be non-political. The non-political wing of DFER is called ”Education Reform Now.” It has a political advocacy group called “Education Reform Now Advocacy.” Of course, it advocates for high-stakes testing and charter schools. “Education reform,” in the eyes of those connected to DFER, means replacing public schools with private management that is neither accountable nor transparent.

DFER puts out a list of candidates (all Democrats) and invites its members to send them contributions. In this way, it is able to raise very large sums for friends of charter schools in Congress and in important state races, even school board races. Its mailing list includes many very wealthy people, so DFER is a major source of money for candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, and other charter-friendly Democrats.

The Democratic Party conventions in both California and Colorado denounced DFER for calling itsel “Democrats” when they undermine public schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Valerie Strauss: “Why Would Anyone Deliberately Hurt Students” Who Were Defrauded By Scam Colleges?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
15

Valerie Strauss wrote here about Betsy DeVos’s plan to remove consumer protections from students who were scammed.

“Why would anyone want to make it harder for defrauded students? Well, the Education Department says that college students are “adults who can be reasonably expected to make informed decisions and who must take personal accountability for the decisions they make.” Supporters of the proposed changes say it is too easy for students to apply for loan forgiveness and that too much public money will have to be used to repay bad loans.

“To be sure, college students are indeed adults who can be reasonably expected to make informed decisions. And adults should indeed take personal accountability for the decisions they made.

“But the proposed regulation says, among other things, that to qualify for loan forgiveness, students who claim they have been defrauded have to prove the college intended to defraud them and show that the college had exhibited a “reckless disregard” for the truth.

“That is not, for example, the standard for state lemon laws, which offer compensatory remedies to consumers who buy cars and other goods that prove to be defective. They don’t insist that the consumers prove that a car dealer or manufacturer intended to commit fraud by making and selling a flawed product.

“Let’s say DeVos, a billionaire from Michigan, decided to buy a new yacht and it turned out to have a bum engine that broke down repeatedly. Would she have to prove the seller intended to defraud her to seek replacement or some kind of compensation?

“Consumer products are not college education, for sure, but the Trump administration believes in operating schools as if they were businesses, so the comparison seems apt.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Students

Louisville: Will Dark Money Suppress Democracy in the Fight Over a State Takeover?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2018 //
8

Jeff Bryant has written a thorough investigative report of the attack on the public schools of Jefferson County (Louisville) in Kentucky. The report was funded partially by the Network for Public Education.

Louisville has one of the best integrated school districts in the nation. Its NAEP scores are better than those of other urban districts.

The only “crisis” in Louisville is caused by the election of Matt Bevin, a rabid Tea Party Governor who wants to seize control of the Louisville public schools and introduce charters.

A transplant from Connecticut, Bevin swept into the governor’s job despite the fact he had never held political office anywhere, running on a Tea Party inspired campaign was mostly self-funded with earnings from hedge funds he operates.

Bevin has taken unprecedented actions to remake the Kentucky Board of Education, stocking it with critics of public schools and Jefferson County Public Schools in particular. One Bevin appointee, Gary Houchens, an associate professor at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, is listed as a “policy scholar” for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a rightwing think tank. Another pick, Kathy Gornik, has served as board chair for the organization.

The Bluegrass Institute was founded with money from two libertarian networks, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network, and has benefited from a pipeline of dark money.

One of Bluegrass’s top issues is “education reform,” which it defines as “charter schools, tax credits, and vouchers”—all forms of “school choice” that divert taxpayer money from public schools to private entrepreneurs. The Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard G. Innes, has been attacking Jefferson County Public Schools for years. After the announcement of recommended takeover, he penned an op-ed endorsing it.

Fortunately, parents are organized and fighting back.

The parent leader is a public school parent, Gay Adelmann:

“Jefferson County Public Schools is a district of choice, [and] parents can look for schools and not houses,” says Gay Adelman, a white Jefferson County Public Schools parent with a student who attends The Academy at Shawnee, a magnet middle school and high school in the West End with a focus on aerospace. Shawnee has a student population that is 59 percent non-white and 79 percent on free and reduced price lunch, a typical measurement of poverty.

Adelman helped form the grassroots group Dear Jefferson County Public Schools that pushed to elect the current school board. She recently ran for State Senate in the Democratic party primary, campaigning on a platform supporting Jefferson County Public Schools and opposing state takeover. She lost but managed to garner 44 percent of the vote as a first-time candidate with little funding.

Bevin fired the state commissioner and hired one of his own choosing, Wayne Lewis, a charter zealot who is determined to grab control of the Louisville district.

But Bevin and Lewis face a community that supports its public schools. The recent school board elections saw public school supporters beat the Dark-Money candidates:

In the 2016 school board election, Kolb, a first-time candidate for the board, won an improbable upset victory against well-financed incumbent board chairman, David Jones Jr., the son of the co-founder of health insurance giant Humana. Kolb estimates he was outspent by up to fifteen-to-one, but he won because he and his volunteers knocked on over 13,000 doors.

Running as a one-term incumbent, current JCPS school board member Chris Brady was also targeted by big money for defeat, with over $350,000 from a local Super PAC that backed his opponent. He won anyway, he tells me, by “running on my record” of supporting the district and new leadership he helped put into place.

Jeff Bryant casts the battle for control of the public schools of Louisville as a battle for democracy:

But if the takeover of Jefferson County Public Schools is all about politics, it’s not a contest between “red vs. blue,” but whether democracy matters at all.

The pro-public schools coalition is planning a big rally on October 18 in the afternoon. I will be there and so will my friend and civil rights leader Jitu Brown of the Journey for Justice. We will be there to support the students and parents of Jefferson County.

Categories Charter Schools, Dark Money, Democracy, Louisville
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »