This is a stunner.
Jennifer Berkshire writes in The New Republic that Cory Booker flew to Michigan in 2000 to help promote vouchers, at the request of Betsy and Dick DeVos. They put a referendum on the state ballot to change the Constitution to allow vouchers. They asked for Booker’s help, and they got it.
Booker was a young Newark city councilor when Dick and Betsy DeVos brought him to Michigan to play pitchman for Proposal 1, a 2000 ballot question that would have made private school vouchers a right enshrined in the state constitution and competency testing mandatory for Michigan’s teachers.
The referendum went down to a crushing defeat, by a vote of 69-31.
When DeVos was nominated by Trump to be Secretary of Education, Booker feigned outrage and voted against her.
Berkshire, in her inimitable style, reviews Booker’s role as a champion of school choice and an ally of Betsy DeVos.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Guess whose support Booker wanted!
The huge ed reform push in the Great Lakes states was coupled with public school funding cuts. It was a double whammy.
Ed reformers were vocal advocates of funding for charter and private school students, but we didn’t hear a peep out of them (even the ‘progressives’) when PUBLIC school student funding was cut.
It was almost like conservative ed reformers made a deal with Democratic ed reformers- we’ll fund charters and vouchers if you won’t oppose cuts to public schools. The students who were ignored in all this high-powered horse trading were students in public schools.
For the last decade the ONLY people who have been advocates for kids in PUBLIC schools have been teachers unions. Without them public schools wouldn’t have even had a seat at the table.
It’s amusing how DeVos herself doesn’t even point to her work privatizing public schools in Michigan. Instead she points to Florida. She created Michigan ed reform. Why doesn’t she bring it up?
She doesn’t bring it up because the “results” are weaker public schools, an unregulated chaotic and corrupt charter sector and a series of expensive gimmicky fads that have been tried and then abandoned.
I was shocked by how hostile the Obama Administration was towards public schools.
I defy anyone to show me any difference between Betsy DeVos’ anti-public school rhetoric and politicking and Arne Duncan’s.
That they did this during a huge recession when public schools were reeling due to budget cuts is unfathomable to me. They do know there are students in those schools they were attacking, correct? I know none of them attended public schools or use public schools but their war on public schools necessarily involved a war on public school students. That they hit them at the time they most needed advocates in the federal government, when every state was using them as a piggy bank to prop up budgets with reduced tax revenue during the recession, is just unforgivable. Maybe they didn’t know, having rarely entered a public school.
While I was so excited to hear Pres. Obama speaking during his run up to being elected in 2008, I remember worrying with other teachers: we were all shocked that he would repeatedly say “bad teachers” — we knew there was rot, but how not to vote for it?
How much is media blocked from serious discussion of public education….how does it happen…..can anything be done about it? Or is it just something I am imagining?