Beto O’Rourke has beefed up his campaign staff with the addition of Carmel Martin, who was Assistant Secretary for Budget and Policy in the Department of Education during the Obama administration.
Martin is a supporter of high-stakes testing and charter schools.
When my book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, was published, she joined me on a panel at the Economic Policy Institute, where she defended Race to the Top.
It will be interesting to hear what Beto’s education policy is, if he moves above 5% in the polls.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I attended a Beto event held at a small coffee shop in New Hampshire and asked Beto about this. He said he supported accountability for charters and thought that they should continue getting federal money – then he added, “But only the non-profit charters”. I tried to explain that the non-profits are often run in the background by for profits, but the message didn’t get through.
You should have gotten up and walked out to send a message to everyone in the room. If it was me, I would have said loudly, “You don’t get it, and there’s no way you’ll get my vote.”
“Beefed up”? More like dumbed down.
Anyway, this addition to his campaign staff tells you all you need to know about Beto’s education policy. Whatever Obama did, Beto will do more.
Public education has already suffered enough. We don’t need another smooth talking neoliberal dictating policy. People should just say “no” to Beto.
These privatizing ideologues should be rejected. We’ve been at so-called reform for twenty years and have nothing of substance to show for it. There is no point to continuing privatizing hypocrisy. The more we continue with this dog and pony show the harder it will be to change course.
According to the RCP average, O’Rourke is at 3.6 today.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html
FiveThirtyEight places O’Rourke in 7th place behind Joe Biden in 1st, Kamal Harris (2nd), Cory Booker (WHAT!?!) in 3rd place, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.
This ranking is based on endorsements:
The 2020 Endorsement Primary
Which Democratic candidates are receiving the most support from prominent members of their party?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-endorsements/democratic-primary/?ex_cid=rrpromo
Beto will have to check with his wife + her family as they are big $ supporters of charters.
His father-in-Law is a billionaire—real estate
Toast. . .
What is Beto?
Beato O’Rourke seems to be, is allegedly a corporate neo-liberal fake Democrat who is ranked 6th in the filed for the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination with a 3.6% share of polling data at RCP.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html
Arne Duncan two point oh
Meanwhile….Bill Gates just finished speaking at the Economic Club of Washington DC. You can see the performance here. https://www.c-span.org/video/?462005-1/bill-gates-speaks-economic-club-washington-dc
Here are a few things I noted. He urged people who might have the money “to give to a good cause,” and specifically mentioned charter schools.
He claimed that improvements in K-13 education were flat (meaning test scores), said that most states had adopted the Common Core, and indicated that he thought the Common Core should have standardized content taught in every state
He said that the US spends more on K-12 education than any other country, a lie. The lie is based on old OECD data for 26 countries.
The more important point Gates SHOULD have made using OECD data is this: US spending per student over a decade (2005-2015) was a mere 5% higher, compared to the OCED average of a 23% increase.
In other words, Gates the data, data, guy ignored the impact on US school budgets of the 2008 economic meltdown. see the latest OECD data here https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
At least he thinks climate change is real. He seems to think that science, technology, and bipartisan policies can/should solve the problems. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Gates has learned nothing from his multiple failures.
He spent millions pushing charters in Washington State. Four have closed due to lack of demand. A CREDO evaluation showed they don’t get better results than public schools. Gates’s Precious charters enroll 3,300 students. Public schools enroll 1.3 million. Less than 1%
I don’t appreciate that this guy that so many people see as “the smartest guy in the room” is handing out misinformation about expenditures on public education. Gates’ false assertion will be repeated over and over by the echo chamber, the media and lobbying groups.
Beto on his education policy: Man, it’s some gnarly skateboarding classes and like totally whatever Wall Street tells me to say, dude.
Nailed it
Beto’s plan is NO PLAN.
Beto is a “ sound-byte.” FRAT BOY comes to mind.
Does she have some kind of positive plan or agenda for the public schools 90% of students attend, or is this another ed reformer who offers absolutely nothing to public school students and families, other than telling them to enroll in charter or private schools?
The ed reform Democrats have to offer something than other than promotion and marketing of their (preferred) charter schools. That’s not an education plan.
I am tired of public school students being treated as a disfavored “default” group – where no one lifts a finger on their behalf. That’s not fair to them and there are a LOT of them-many, many more than attend charters and private schools.
Ask ed reform Democrats and former Obama hires what they contributed to PUBLIC schools. If the answer is “charter schools”, keep looking. You can do better than that.
The Obama record on public schools is terrible. Public schools lost every year he was in office. The economy crashed and instead of defending public school students from the coming budget cuts, the Obama team piled on.
How much time and money did they waste on the ridiculous teacher measurement schemes from the Harvard economist? Years and billions. They may as well have piled that money up and burned it. It did absolutely nothing for any public school student, anywhere.
“where she defended Race to the Top”
Aie yie yie. Arne Duncan’s plan for blackmailing cash-strapped states into support for the coring of U.S. public education and thus enforcing, contrary to law, a de facto, default curriculum map (for that’s what the Common [sic] Core [sic] is)
–Arne “Dribbles” Duncan, who turned the U.S. Department of Education into a subsidiary of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Many years ago, I taught in an all-girls Catholic high school. The nuns were great–learned, compassionate, and kind. Our resident priest, however, was an aged drunk. He would get on the PA system early in the morning and say inspiring things like, “Girls, life is like a game of football. You gotta get out on that field and carry that ball.” (that’s verbatim)
The dummies always go with the sports metaphors.
Say no to Beto. Don’t abide Biden.
Beto – Obama light, all the great neoliberalism but less filling.
Drunk With Money and Power Lite
Surgeon General Warning: Consumption of this beverage may cause systemic societal health problems.
Obama wasn’t very filling either. Great symbolism for a head of state. Little substance for the leader of the executive branch.
This is about Cass Sunstein, not education, but it perfectly describes all of the Obama ed reformers:
“We know that a technocratic, cost-benefit-focused approach to government works to the detriment of visionary change. We know that the old neoliberal binary—state bad, market good—is simplistic and no longer squares with a reality in which many of our greatest tyrannies emerge from a rapacious and meekly regulated private sector. Most importantly we know that the Obama presidency, the guiding hope to so many market-friendly liberals, ended with rising inequality, stalled social mobility, a spiraling climate disaster, and the Trumpian revolt against expertise. Sunstein ignores all of this.”
They shouldn’t ignore it. Technocratic market-based “fixes” for students and schools have been tried- we tried them the last 20 years, through three consecutive presidents.
They have to come up with another idea. If they don’t, someone will and they probably won’t like how that turns out.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154236/sameness-cass-sunstein?utm_content=buffera3be4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
This is from WaPo. Of course, funding K-12 could include a lot of charters, vouchers and virtual ‘schools’.
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…And today, at an all-day conference the Economic Policy Institute is staging called “Taxing the (Very) Rich,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will announce a new plan to impose a 10 percent surtax on income above $2 million. He intends to pair it with a provision to end the “stepped-up basis” treatment of inherited assets, which helps shield the ultrawealthy from income taxes. Van Hollen will propose dedicating the resulting revenue to “fully fund the federal commitment to K-12 education,” spokeswoman Bridgett Frey says in an email.
“Senator Van Hollen believes we need to ensure we have a fair tax code that asks the very wealthy to pay their fair share — and make a clear case for what we would do with that new revenue,” she writes.