Perhaps Betsy DeVos knows that the Trump administration’s days in power are winding down. She is throwing $46 million in federal money at New Hampshire in an effort to destroy the state’s public schools. This grant will double the number of charter schools in the state. Most of the state is rural or small towns. The largest city in the state is Manchester, with a population of about 100,000, with 14,000 students.
The Congressional delegation and legislature are Democrats but the Governor Chris Sununu is a conservative Republican who appoints the State Board of Education and the state commissioner of education. The latter, Frank Edelblut, homeschooled his seven children. Edelblut has proposed a program called “Learn Everywhere,” which would compel districts to pay for programs offered by for-profit or non-profit non-school providers. Edelblut has a vision of deschooling or unschooling, disestablishing public schools. He is like Betsy DeVos, only worse. Governor Sununu’s State Board narrowly approved ”Learn Everywhere.” Edelblut says public schools will “save money,” because they will cut programs and lay off teachers. Public money will flow to private providers and there will be less for public schools. He likes that. A state legislative committee is trying to block Learn Everywhere, saying that the state can’t tell districts how to spend money.
DeVos is helping Edelblut undermine the NH public schools.
The New Hampshire Department of Education is getting $46 million from the federal government to expand public charter schools over the next five years.
The DOE says it will use the money to help new charter schools with start-up costs and increase professional development for charter school staff.
Charter schools have been slow to grow in New Hampshire. Over the past 15 years, the State Board of Education has approved 33 charters, and 28 schools are now operating. With this new grant, the DOE says it plans to add 27 new schools over the next five years, with a particular focus on serving poor and at-risk students.
The grant money will be used to help schools with start-up costs, rather than ongoing operational costs, which are covered by a combination of state funding and external fundraising.
The state has no income tax or sales tax, which means schools are funded by property taxes. The property owners will bear the cost of two separate school systems, even if they would rather support their community public schools.
Meanwhile, folks in New Hampshire have some questions about who will pay for the charters after the federal start-up money is spent. They point out that the state’s few ”high quality” charters do not enroll many students eligible for free-reduced price lunch (i.e., low-income.) Commissioner Edelblut is thrilled with the chance to defund public schools.
No Democrat should support charter schools. They are an integral component of the rightwing effort to privatize public funding.
There is no great need for private charter schools in New Hampshire. Most of the people are not poor and minority. It’s been proven that private charter schools are not the solution even for poor, minority communities. Since New Hampshire has many rural school districts, pumping money into privatization is a clear attempt to destabilize public schools. This is why the federal DOE slush fund needs to go.
retired teacher,
Again, your comment is spot on.
Hope Donald Graves’ and Don Murray’s spirit haunts her.
https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2013/05/he-changed-how-children-are-taught-write
http://www.seacoastnh.com/don-murray-taught-writing-by-writing/
Posted at OEN. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Betsy-DeVos-Floods-New-Ham-in-General_News-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis-190907-716.html#comment744006
with this comment
BTW, although you will get the latest in the war on public schools at OEN, there is a paucity of writers discussing education (what learning looks like and what is required), and nothing about the assault on public schools… which is easy to understand when you realize the power-elite that want an ignorant citizenry owns the media.
This wonderful article “Who should be writing about education and isn’t?” https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/03/who-should-be-writing-about-education-isnt/ looks at how elite media outlets address education. He points out that even in the New Yorker, where the 63% of the 38 articles about medicine were written by doctors, in the meager 17 articles about education; not a single one of them is written by a professional educator, nary a classroom teacher or educational researcher among the authors.
Rose says: “ this disparity in authorship, this absence of people closest to the remarkable act of educating, has come to represent for me a much bigger issue having to do with the place of education in our society, for the example I offer with the New Yorker is, to some degree, replicated in other elite media outlets.”
(To pick two examples of omission, life-long teachers and writers Deborah Meier and Vivian Paley, both recipients of door-opening MacArthur “Genius Grants,” have never graced the New Yorker’s pages.” )
Because Rose writes specifically about the New Yorker magazine—a comment from its editor, David Remnick, is at the end. *Rose is a highly respected education scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles, and the writer of almost a dozen books, including “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,”
This appeared on Rose’s blog. http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com
(which he gave Strauss permission to publish):
Many corporations do everything they can to marginalize educators. Most of the pro-public education articles worth reading come from independent bloggers.
and here is the enabler of the demolition of democracy “Mitch McConnell sinks to new lows in enabling Trump’s Corruption”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/06/mitch-mcconnell-sinks-new-lows-enabling-trumps-corruption/?wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
Anytime anywhere learning is not a new concept.
It has long been promoted by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and by KnowledgeWorks.org (EIN 31-1321973) a non-profit with ties to United Way and an interest in social impact programs, also known as pay for success contracting.
THE CEO of KnowledgeWorks was paid in $585,587 in tax year 2016-2017. Life in this “non-profit” pays off.
Of course, “any time, anywhere learning” had been the motto and theme-song of fans of digital learning, especially when coupled with badges awarded for “competency” in this or that easy-to-identify chuck of knowledge or skill-set.
Digital badges are being promoted by the MacArthur Foundation and Clinton Foundation in addition to Mozilla and Microsoft and internationally by IMS Global (Instructional Management Systems Global). https://www.macfound.org/programs/digital-badges/
The Obama administration was a big fan of Anywhere Anytime learning. See the illustration on page 4 in this document: https://tech.ed.gov/files/2017/01/NETP17.pdf
Who’s doing the “accrediting” here?
As we so often see w/ the ultra-conservative “small govt” [wink, wink] party, they’re all about local control until they finally get the reins. Then it’s, remove locals’ authority—but not their responsibility for the results of state-mandated crackpot libertarianism.
“Allowing private organizations to offer public school credits” is an oxymoron.
How do public school students get to & from “Learn Everywhere” vendors to take their “classes”?
“To enact real, scalable change in education— just as Whole Foods did with the organic food movement —entrepreneurial parents and educators will need to imagine and implement new models of learning.”
I have a range of cartoons running thro my head to illustrate this one.
How about… Speech bubbles for two tomatoes with kid-faces [seen aerial view in their huge tomato cart which is dwarfed by the 43kSF Whole Foods store]:
–There’s going to be a fight later in Organic Local!
–Great! Let’s throw ourselves!
Or maybe, same scene, new speech bubbles:
–Mom says we have to take our AP courses at the cannery
–[Speechlessly weeps]
bethree5
Here is one example of what the futurists have in mind. The last several pages show who is being consulted and who is being ignored as an expert in education. Accreditations and credit-giving is here portrayed as a big problem. I have been following the future scenarios from KnowledgeWorks for some time. They are forwarded by Katherine Prince whose experiences with the Open University in Great Britain she keeps pushing for all, including in one noteworthy TED Talk her own child.
Some of the collaborators on this document ( listed at the end) are probably known to many on this blog, The report speaks of elevating “traditional teachers” but really views almost everyone in a community, or accessible by tech, as a person who has expertise that can should be tapped for “education.”
There is a noteworthy distain for credentials and a belief that many people are able and willing to educate the next generation without the necessity of credentials or much regulation or actual payment for services. In earlier versions of these future forecasts, KnowledgeWorks proposed “Learning Sherpa’s” as proxies for teachers. https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/forecast-5/
If you have the time and concentration there is also much about the “future of learning” as an economic investment and the use of technologies for social control. This well-illustrated and disturbing report is from Wrench in the Gears. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/09/06/the-mixed-realty-commute-education-for-the-telepresence-gig-economy/
Thanks Laura. I didn’t dare sign in for the full KnowledgeWorks ppr & clog my inbox w/their 2xwkly emails. Their exec summary sounds like breathless sales jargon describing airy-fairy nothings, so I’m glad you gave your take on it. Sounds to me like it’s designed to extract funding from deep-pocketed hard-core-libertarian movers & shakers? (Or did I really not get it?)… I put WrenchIntheGears’ latest in favorites, to be read as soon as I work up the courage 😉
There is a strong movement for more school choice in the Granite State. see
https://www.schoolchoicenh.org/
New Hampshire people are pushing for school choice, charters, home-schooling, etc.
Why not have a referendum to find out what the people of New Hampshire want?
Nothing in your link shows that there is a groundswell of support for vouchers and private charters. NH has been targeted by rightwing libertarians like DeVos, and a handful of locals like Frank Edelblut want to destroy community public schools.
New Hampshire does not have provisions to bring such questions directly to the people, in the form of referenda. see
https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_ballot_measures_in_New_Hampshire
Only constitutional amendments (and a few other items like sweepstakes/liquor) can be decided directly by NH voters.
The Granite State has an elected legislature, to determine public policy on matter such as education and educational choice.
Then let the legislature decide.
Not DeVos and Edelblut. Both are extremists.
Some missing context: While DeVos-Edelblut got NH $46 million for charter schools, Gov. Sununu vetoed the state budget on 6/27. The budget would have increased public school funding by $140 million. Why veto? To cut business profits taxes. The budget is currently at impasse, so a continuing resolution is in place, expiring ~9/30. Under the status quo, NH public school funding will DECREASE by $7.5 million.
NH’s constitution requires that the state fund an adequate education for every child and that the rate of taxation be uniform. NH fails on both accounts and has for decades. The state provides only $3,650/student, the least in the U.S.A. Poor towns are taxed through the nose just to hold a school together while wealthy towns spend generously with a low tax rate.
Democratic Governor John Lynch last tried to solve the “problem” by amending the state constitution. Fortunately, he failed.
A popular uprising would certainly help.
see http://anhpe.org/ and the NH School Funding Fairness project on Facebook for more info. Or, if you like data, look here: http://bit.ly/NHTaxes