The DeVos Plan is working!
Education funding in Michigan declined more in the past 25 years than in any other state.
Charters and choice were a substitute for funding.
Michigan’s NAEP scores dropped from the middle of the pack to the bottom 10.
DeVos and the Koch brothers will destroy American education if allowed to continue, and they do so with the help of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arne Duncan, AndrewCuomo, Jonathan Sackler, the Carnegie Corporation, and many more enablers who fight for choice, but not for funding.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The DeVos plan is to “make America dumb” and obedient to the will of the 1%. The new governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has a better idea for the state. She intends to offer universal pre-K, raise pay for teachers, offer two years of post-secondary education free, and increase nurses, counselors and reading teachers in the public schools. How much of her plan she will be able to implement remains to be seen. Whatever she accomplishes has to be better than the DeVos plan. https://www.bridgemi.com/public-sector/where-michigan-governor-primary-winners-schuette-and-whitmer-stand-issues
I think it will matter just to have a high profile advocate for public schools and public education.
Michigan hasn’t had one in decades. What they have is a huge cadre of professional public school critics. For YEARS, this has gone on.
They have now utterly dominated in Ohio for 2 decades. We had one whole generation who came up in an environment where no one in state government was advocating on behalf of the schools they attend. It was actually worse than “neglect”, because the only thing they offered was endless, endless fads and gimmicks and unfunded mandates. They were an actual net negative.
two powerful words so long missing: HIGH PROFILE
Ed reform has been especially damaging in the Great Lakes states.
We took the brunt of the bad policy and lousy advocacy.
The good news is they’ll be able to repair the damage in MI and WI now that the echo chamber is broken up- sadly, Ohio just hired the exact same people again. They all just switched chairs. The inventors of ECOT still utterly dominate the debate in Ohio. They’re still fighting to protect ECOT! They’re currently blocking efforts to repay the public schools that were robbed. It shouldn’t surprise anyone- it is the same individuals, different titles.
Think of the good that could have been done if the Gates billions had been spent on wrap-around services for the poorest of students. It’s all incalculably sad.
on eyeglasses and medical exams and treatment, on food for chronically food insecure families, on recreational facilities in poor neighborhoods with mentors and coaches, on homework help, on parent coaching, on job retraining for parents in poor neighborhoods; so many needs, so much neglect
Great story:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos loves to tell the story about a former teacher named “Jed.”
Here’s how it goes. Jed, a once-passionate public school teacher, was told to “keep it down” at school because his class was having too much fun learning. He left the profession, DeVos likes to suggest, because he didn’t have enough autonomy to teach as he wished. If only there were fewer federal mandates and more flexibility, DeVos often says before pushing for more school choice.
Politicians and public figures often trot out anecdotes about everyday people whose experiences illuminate a larger issue. But DeVos has referenced “Jed” quite regularly. She has used the Jed anecdote in three speeches since 2017, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal and when testifying before Congress. She most recently spoke of him on Monday in a speech she gave to the American School Boards Association.
But who is Jed? The real-life Jed, HuffPost discovered, is actually mortified by the attention.
“I hate knowing she is using my words to further push her agenda, which is the antithesis of me,” said Jed Dearybury, who was a finalist for South Carolina Teacher of the Year in 2014. “Honestly, it makes me mad as hell. It makes me want to fight harder.”
Jed is not feeling very “empowered”, being cynically used to push this agenda.
Betsy DeVos is the lead professional public school critic. Too bad she never gets around to offering anything of practical value to any public school, anywhere.
Weren’t these folks supposed to “improve” public education? When do we get to that part? Is there some reason we’re paying tens of thousands of them to tell us over and over how public schools suck?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/betsy-devos-jed-teacher_us_5c524d60e4b0ca92c6dd1812
Many of these charter schools are very narrowly focused on test prep–they basically throw out the curriculum and do test prep 24/7 because that’s the accountability measure that matters, and in such schools, teachers are highly constrained and scripted; they certainly aren’t empowered. Folks like DeVos are very far removed from the realities on the ground and haven’t a clue what they are talking about.
This is pathetic. If he weren’t a poor teacher, then he would attempt to sue her or at the very least have a cease and desist order issued. If this is not the description of defamation of character I’m not sure what it would be.
If the Jed story is accurately related by DeVos (apparently it is not), it would serve as a good argument for higher pay to assure good teachers who can behave independently, better trained administration that knew when to let a good teacher teach, more investment in education so that class size could be decreased, and a host of other policies DeVos opposes and has worked against in Michigan. She stands for the people who shuts up and kicks out innovative teachers.
Here’s Colbert’s withering take on Devos’ trying to defend de-funding Michigan schools: (“It’s a system called ‘Stupid.’ “)
OMG. Hilarious!
🙂
Please add Cory Booker to the list of DeVos supporters above–his education policies and her’s are virtually identical.
He just announced for President this morning.
Yes. He needs to be challenged on this. Such a challenge to his views would be a high-profile win for the anti-Ed-Deform forces because it would get a lot of play in the press. Something to think about.
CNN was gushing all over the idea of Booker running. It was sickening to watch. Union members need to speak up and object to Booker.
Yes, Warren and Booker need to be called out on this issue– hard. Especially Booker. There are articles out today in bith EdWeek and Chalkbeat relating his shameful rah-rah record for everything from vouchers & DeVos & DFER and charters and One Newark, Cami Anderson – style, & the worst of Obama/ Gates’ top-down imposition of ed-deform accountability. And he is not ashamed of any of it!
I am not a one-issue voter– & am somewhat mollified by some of his Senatorial positions– but anyone with this history on education policy cannot be counted on to stand firm on pro-public-goods issues.
Booker should change parties and run for President as a Republican.
Booker is owned by WallStreet.
Call it what you want, but we are fighting a Cold Civil War between the Alt-Right-Always-Wrong billionaires and the rest of the people, and sometimes that struggle even gets bloody.
To whom may be interested in SIB (Social Impact Bond):
First of all, I appreciate the link provided by bethree5. Here it is:
https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/01/26/stanley-druckenmiller-and-paul-tudor-jones-the-billionaire-networks-behind-harlems-human-capital-lab/
All that I can recall in this link as follows:
1) Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a mechanism by which to shift financial risk from service providers to investors
2) Social Finance therefore specifies that the investment is from non-government bodies, whereas the Young Foundation envisages that public bodies could be potential investors.
3) Pay for Success projects that provide employment services to formerly-incarcerated individuals in order to increase employment and reduce recidivism.[53]
re•cid•i•vism (rĭ-sĭd′ə-vĭz′əm) n.
The repeating of or returning to criminal behavior by the same offender or type of
offender
4) Katrina Stevens, former senior advisor on ed-tech to the US Department of Education and now head of Learning Sciences for Chan Zuckerberg, consulted on both projects.
Jones connects New York to Chicago via Robert Dugger who ran Tudor Investment Corporation between 1992 and 2009. During that period, Dugger co-founded the “Invest in Kids” working group with Jim Heckman in Chicago and Art Rolnick out of Minneapolis. Jones contributed a million dollars towards the effort. Rolnick, a senior economist with the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, facilitated the development of outcomes-based government contracts in partnership with Steve Rothschild at Twin Cities Rise. All three men have connections to INET.
In 2017, Weinstein left Robin Hood Foundation to head a new consultancy to match “smart givers” with “high impact” non-profits. The organization, ImpactMatters, has a small board with an interesting range of experience. Paul Brest is one of these board members. A long-time professor of law at Stanford, Brest took on the role of Co-Director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, an incubator for impact investing and digital innovation, late in his career. He currently teaches courses in the business school on strategic philanthropy and impact investing. There are also connections between Brest and the pay for success initiatives in Santa Clara County. Brest co-taught a law school practicum on structuring social impact deals with Keith Humphreys that focused the Partners in Wellness SIB model.
In short, all MASTERED MIND lawyers, ULTRA RICH corporate, all consultants for both Investment Corporation and US Department of Education, THEY CORRUPT by drafting the law, promoting INNOVATIVE PROGRAM in order to LOOT TAX PAYER FUND and to MISLEAD NAIVE PUBLIC through made-believe front line corporate philanthropy who will have TAX DEDUCTIBLE (= NO LOSS TO THEM IN THE END, BUT LOOTING TAX PAYERS FUND). Sigh! That is how it work for “”THE U.S. Department of Labor awarded nearly $24 million in grants for Pay for Success projects””
I hope that all teachers will have time to digest and to be smart up to learn all TRICKS from corrupted CORPORATE regarding their SLOGAN, such as: “”to match “smart givers” with “high impact” non-profits”” or their sounding organization, such as: “”The organization, ImpactMatters, has a small board with an interesting range of experience.””
Back2basic
Apparently, DeVos and other people who share her view of the world do not live in communities. Her comment, satirized above by Colbert, about the focus needing to be on the individual student shows something fundamental to the thinking of education reformers that places them in a sort of Hegelian opposition to the paridigm that has been public education. Her comment suggests the conservative ideology that I have responsibility only to my kid. It leaves out the obvious, that WE have the responsibility to all the KIDS in the community.
The conflict between being responsible to your family and to your children and being responsible to a broader community is often played out in contradictions. A parent who is a strong supporter of public education may choose, if possessing of the means, to send their child to a private institution. This is a personal decision. Inserting public money into this decision deliberately attempts to rob the community of individuals who would be a boon to that community.
The irony of DeVos’ policies is that she herself seems to belong to communities she prizes. Perhaps irony is the wrong word. This appears from the outside to be a deliberate attempt to choose her community, which is not restricted geographically but monetarily, over communities that must be local, bound often by the economic restrictions on travel (to a job, to an educational institution, to a library). Thus we pass from the ironic to the pernicious. Surely she sees that she and her like-minded policy pushers are making decisions that seek to strip away the few from a community and degrade the community in the process.
Can you tell us where the Michigan funding figures you used came from? I looked at the US Census’ Public Education Finances edition for 1992 and Table 19 shows per pupil revenue that year was $6,637. In the latest Census data for 2016, which is like the Public Education Finances report but now comes direct in Excel spreadsheets, Table 11 shows Michigan’s total revenue was $13, 818. Using the very neat Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator, that 2016 figure in constant 1992 dollars works out to $8,055, so Michigan, at least according to the Census, didn’t see a funding decline.