The District of Columbia has a voucher program that enrolls fewer than 2,000 students.
The latest evaluation of the program has shown that students do worse than their peers in public schools.
Vouchers Found to Lower Test Scores in Washington Schools https://nyti.ms/2pemnp7?smid=nytcore-ios-share
https://ies.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=NCEE20184010
Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein just co-sponsored legislation to extend the DC vouchers until 2024.
Why is Senator Feinstein supporting the GOP-DeVos agenda?
When will Congress stop funding this failed experiment?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What is wrong with this picture? Holy cow.
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Just sent an email. Her silence during the UTLA strike and this action have confirmed my suspicion that she does not support public educator or the teacher’s union.
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She has no interest in data, or no one is getting the information to her. She may have a TFA person on her staff.
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she has so clearly bought into the scam
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She does have a TFAer on staff. Abt least she did a couple years ago when we put a list together with BATs.
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Every member of Congress in a key position to affect education or Appropriations has a TFA on staff, paid by California billionaire Arthur Rock. They protect TFA and charters
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Out job is to not surrender to that staffer. Too many activists decided Feinstein wasn’t worth their time and instead backed her opponent Kevin De Leon, who had no chance and is no better in education because he is backed by Eli Broad. That essentially let Feinstein off the hook. Instead, the effort should be in exposing the issue and forcing the conversation.
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Feinstein has always been awful on education “reform” (and I think that pre-dates TFA’s existence)! Way way way back when (only long-timers will remember this), Edison Schools was the magical privatization “miracle” du jour. Edison, a for-profit publicly traded on the NASDAQ, took over and managed several dozen charter schools around the country (Edison always gave conflicting stories about how many, so because of the lying, it’s impossible to know the actual number). There was a high-profile battle in my school district, San Francisco Unified, in 2001 when our school board wanted to move to kick Edison out of the school it was running here, and Feinstein sent the district (and publicly released) a letter urging the school board to leave the Edison charter alone and let it stay in S.F. There are other areas in which Feinstein is excellent, but you get the picture.
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Got it. Sad.
The best book on Edison is Samuel Abrams’ “Education and the Commercial Mindset.”
The focus is Edison.
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Ordering it! A great (late) friend and I co-ran a “research and information” project debunking Edison from 2001 on — back then you had to be a tech whiz to put up a website, but my friend’s husband knew how.
For those who might be curious: https://corpwatch.org/article/edisons-failing-grade
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She’s a DFER (and a bit of a DINO).
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Feinstein is very, very wealthy. She doesn’t need DFER money. She was just really-elected. She doesn’t need DFER. Does she believe in charters,vouchers, the DeVos agenda?
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I don’t think she’s involved enough in education policy to be a DFER. My guess is she’s just vaguely informed and has crappy education advisers. She’s not a DINO in every area and has been extremely activist on gun control.
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Sadly, most CA Dems used to take lessons from George Miller, who used to be chair of House Education Committee. Miller loves testing and charters. DFER raised a lot of money for Miller. I was told that Pelosi deferred to Miller. But vouchers!?
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DFER likes Feinstein. She was one of their preferred candidates during her last campaign, if I remember correctly. …Hey, wait a minute, I forgot to put quotes around the ‘D’ in “D”FER. Egregiously foul oversight by me!
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I’m sure they do like her; I’m pretty sure she’s oblivious, though. One of her longtime top staffers lives on my block and is really deferential to me because both my husband and I work at the San Francisco Chronicle, so I could ask him, but there’s probably no point! (And Diane R. is correct that Dianne F. doesn’t need their money, so that’s not what’s motivating her.)
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I do not mean to dispute that. You are both always spot on.
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I see that her husband is investment banker Richard Bloom. Maybe that has something to do with her corporate mindset towards public education.
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Our big problem…democrats supporting ed reform…
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Replying to Caligirl” That has been a problem for the entire history of education “reform.” But actually, it used to go absolutely unquestioned that Democrats gushed over education “reform” and charters, and cheerfully bashed teachers and their unions*, and the “reform” sector was very, very cunning about elaborately designing a facade that made all its ploys look like they were designed by and deeply supported by liberal Democrats.
Here in San Francisco, the left/”progressive” political faction adored charters in the ’00s — whoopee, no rules! And TBH I had someone who identifies as deeply left/progressive cut me dead within the past few months after I explained to him why all charters — no matter how progressive they posture to be — are creatures of the far-right free-market privatizers, anti-public-education, anti-democracy and anti-union. But the somewhat good news is that there’s pretty much evidence and a lot of commentary that many Democrats are getting the picture. Obviously Feinstein isn’t changing her stripes, though.
*Former Rep. George Miller, mentioned by Diane above, is highly admired as a huge labor supporter, except that he loathes teachers unions and heaps them with contempt. I believe that stems from intense misogyny, since teachers unions are heavily female.
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Interesting insight about Miller.
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The more I read about Miller’s new gig at the BiPartisan Policy Center and his partner in developing a task force on education for BPC, the more I think it’s about money. The readiness of the partner, Bud McKeon, to enrich himself while in government and the April, Mother Jones article, “How a Mysterious Overseas Shell Company Used a Former GOP Congressman to Lobby for Trump and Congress”, convinces me.
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I saw Feinstein up close as a Senate staffer in the early 90s and from a further distance as a constituent for eight years. She has benefitted from being in a state where retail politics don’t matter in statewide elections or representation. Had I treated the constituents of the senator for whom I worked the same way her staffers treated me, I would have been fired. The same held true for Barbara Boxer. If constituent service and communication had mattered, more people would have seen, as Gertrude Stein once observed about Oakland, that there’s no there there (apologies to my friends in Oakland). She is a corporate chimera. Why anyone takes her seriously is a mystery to me.
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If my memory serves me, she also killed EFCA by being one of the few Democratic Senators to withdraw support. Of course, it falls on Obama who was thrilled to see it fail while pretending to be a friend of the working class.
The decision was made that the party needed corporate money more than unreliable working-class votes. The Republicans had turned politics into a debate on social issues and race and Democrats saw that as a winning ticket. Paying lip service to inequality while sleeping with corporate America and Bankers.
It is a sad thing that they turned out to be right about why voters vote. It just didn’t work for them in16.
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“Diane Feinstein” anagrams to “Definite Insane”. Just sayin’….
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Love it. Deserves a gold star and a attaboy/attagirl.
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Love anagrams!!! Donald Trump= Mal (French for bad or sick) Pond Turd
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Here is an idea. It has no foundation in anything but personal experience. It is probably wrong. But I think I am right.
I know almost no political leaders who are poor. Most representatives, even on a local level, are at a level in our increasingly class society above the average. Not so much, perhaps in the rural areas, but you can find it even there.
Having proceeded from the generations who had very little a long time ago, modern political leaders of all stripes see themselves as a step above. Many of them got superb educations from private education. Because they are normal human beings, they surround themselves with people who are like them. They converse with their own milieu, recalling this or that great teaching influence on their life, often forgetting that their position in society came because they were lucky enough to go to a school where teachers rarely exceeded a student load of 60 and most of the students were highly motivated to learn. So their picture of what goes on in public school is clouded by a lack of experience.
I know that some of this is accurate, because I have been in both worlds. I cannot say that it is pervasive, because it is impossible to be in every world simultaneously. Nor do I know whether this applies to Fienstein, whose political career is a vague fog to me. Still, the effect of electing politicians who never experience public education dooms it unless they try to understand what really goes on there.
It is hard enough for me to know what goes on in school, and I am there every day. One year a student will be somewhere between maddening and recalcitrant, the next year productive. When you ask them why, they do not know or perhaps won’t consider why. We engage in policies with which I cannot agree, and some with which I do. So it is at almost every place of business or service. How much harder it must be for those who have never had any contact with the system to understand it in all its triumphs and failures. But they could try.
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“They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others.” Jane Austin (Pride and Prejudice)
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As far as I am concerned, Diane Feinstein is the poster child for term limits.
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Agreed!
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I’m not really a fan of term limits, which I think stem from a destructive anti-government attitude — the same attitude that brings contempt down on public schools, and the same attitude that brought us Trump as president — an outsider with no experience and no clue viewed as some kind of disruptive genius. I think that same attitude — the less experience the better — also brings us TFA and the notion of non-educators as school district superintendents, U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. Also, the notion smacks of age discrimination.
I don’t know how everybody here is feeling about Nancy Pelosi right now. She’s my congressional rep and is overall too neoliberal and corporate for me, but right now I’m cheering her all-out badassery, with the twist that she’s an older woman (like others of us here) — a demographic regularly marginalized and treated with contempt, even when privileged — so I’m cheering that even more vigorously. The thing is, Pelosi just chewed Trump up and spit him out with total cool elan — and her ability to do that was directly due to her vast experience and savvy. So Pelosi in this moment is, for me, an example of why I don’t support term limits.
Feinstein, while carelessly listening to the totally wrong people on education (and she’s a product of the upper-end Catholic school system here in San Francisco that has produced much of our city’s and state’s power elite, so she has no direct experience), has also been super tough on guns, so depending on your view on that issue, some of us don’t write her off completely. And those of us who have been around for a long time (as I said, I’m an older woman) still recall her resolute bravery amid the 1978 bloodshed at City Hall when Dan White assassinated the gay icon Supervisor Harvey Milk and liberal Mayor George Moscone, so we have some residual well of admiration for her.
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Quote in the Washington Post about Pelosi, which also might make some think twice about term limits: “The House of Representatives has power and authority — and now a speaker who knows how to use it.” (which of course is because of savvy born of very long experience.)
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Pelosi’s great advantage in dealing with Trump is that she is a mother of five children. She knows how to deal with temper tantrums. She knows that you don’t give a chid what they want just because they scream and stamp their feet.
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The captain of the Titanic had more experience, than any other captain in entire White Star Line. The boat is sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic.
We have term limits on the presidency. We need term limits on congress, as well.
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I totally agree with your analysis of term limits. Totally.
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carolinesf,
Excuse this fan letter type of post, but aside from Diane herself, you are probably my favorite commenter on this blog. Whenever I see your name at the top, I know I am going to read something that is thoughtful and makes sense and well-reasoned. And I have never once been disappointed. Even if I might have a difference of opinion about your conclusions (which is rare), I always understand exactly why you would take the position you do and respect it.
I aspire (and most of the time fail) to be able to do what you do. You obviously know a lot more than I do about education issues and I am always happy when I see you are back posting more frequently.
Anyway. just wanted to say thank you. And thank you for always addressing the complexities and realities of so many issues that are not as black and white as it might seem to someone who doesn’t know as much as you do about the issue.
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Pelosi has been very effective in dealing with Trump. So why, when before, Dems had the House, Senate and Presidency, did the middle class lose so much?
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Thank you, NYC Public School Parent!
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The reason ed deform is failing- the public knows that both the little “L” libertarians and, the religious who hope to fill their coffers, have been assigned the role of useful idiots. Gates’ “…..brands on a large scale” drives the engine to his destination.
Feinstein may be slumbering in California’s sunny haven for ed deform spin.
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Vouchers also failed in Ohio (the research of Northwestern University’s Prof. Figlio). If you read the study, ignore the foreword written by its funder, Fordham. The foreword identifies a finding about competition that IMO, wasn’t even addressed in the research.
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California’s Democratic Rep. Susan Davis was featured at the Gates and Arnold-funded, “Changing Landscape…Higher Education”, 9-27-2018. The event was held at the “Bi-Partisan Policy Center” aka all of the oligarchs all of the time.
If it was really bi-partisan, the topic would have been, “Changing Landscape…Wall Street”. The financial sector drags down GDP by 2%.
Since AFT is Davis’ 2nd largest contributor, shouldn’t teachers let her know her constituents aren’t billionaires and ask her to return the donation so that they can give it
to AOC?
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It has taken forever, but I am hoping the position taken on education by a candidate will be a litmus test for many. There is a battle for a school board seat in L.A. which one candidate, who looks good on paper, has worked with charter groups, and it is proving to be a real liability. I can’t get behind ANY of the current crop of national candidates until I know their position on public education, which is why I have already crossed many (looking at you Corey Booker) off the list.
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In 1981 DC voters voted 89% to 11% against diverting public funds to private schools. Both Bush and Feinstein seem uninterested in what The People think.
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the 11% got what they wanted.
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As to aforementioned anagram–looked up “mal” (French) again–also means “wrong, evil.” Viva la France…touche!
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Folks can call Senator Feinstein’s office and tell her what you think about this. (310) 914-7300
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Thanks for the number.
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