Patents in Wisconsin are furious that Betsy DeVos came to their state to tout vouchers while ignoring the vast majority of students, who are enrolled in public schools.
Heather DuBois Bourenane, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, says that the state has had vouchers for 30 years with unimpressive results.
Despite pressure from rightwingers like Scott Walker and DeVos, Wisconsin parents prefer their public schools.
Betsy should just go away.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s impossible to make up stuff this absurd. No satirist can equal it. Ditzy DeVoid descends in a cloud of security guards, prattles cluelessly, and then, poof, is gone—back to whatever la, la land of yachts and whatnot she inhabits.
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Rubio should have held out for $1 million. He would have got it.
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Senators come pretty cheap these days. I hear you can get a six pack for that price.
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DeVos is the worst thing to happen to public education. I can thank Rubio, who was vacillating over voting on her appointment, then made up his mind after getting a $100K donation.
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Duncan may have been the worst, but there is quite a competition for the title of Worst Secretary of Education. We’ve had some real winners in that office.
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Au contraire, DeVos is the best thing that’s happened to public education, at least in the last several decades. She’s simply doing what Duncan, et al. have done before her, but she’s so brazen and outrageous about it that people are finally forced to sit up and take notice. Anti-rephorm sentiment (anti-vouchers/charters/privatization/testing/etc.) is the highest it’s ever been.
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saddest reality: she must be truly abusive for the nation to put two and two together
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Just so public school families and supporters know, this is what you’re all paying tens of millions of dollars for in DeVos’ anti-public school and anti-public school student political campaign:
“I also think of my recent visit to an Indiana prison. The warden told me that the biggest problem there is not violence or discipline. It’s illiteracy.
Then there’s the story of a father whose son, a recent high school graduate, was honored in the local newspaper. Dad’s pride turned to disappointment after he discovered his son couldn’t read or comprehend the article. So, dad marched over to the high school principal’s office with his son and newspaper in tow and asked his son to read the article to the principal. He couldn’t. Then the father pointedly asked the principal how he could’ve graduated his son—or anyone—who can’t read.
There are still too many who don’t know how to read. There are still too many who don’t know how to add, subtract, divide, or multiply. And too many have no power to do anything about it.
That’s because the education cabal puts other issues above what’s right for students.
Mixed-up priorities are borne out in the numbers.
Consider that American taxpayers spend—on average— about $13,000 per student, per year. With an average class size of 21 students, that adds up to $273,000 per classroom, per year. We know the average classroom teacher makes about $60,000 annually.”
She and her enormous, lavishly expensive, publicly-funded “team” are traveling depicting all public school students as future prison inmates and urging lower funding of public schools.
This is really unfair to public school students. Constantly depicting all of them as failing in order to promote this “movements’ ideological goal of eradicating public schools is just brutal politics. They should stop.
And we’re all footing the bill for this “work” and NOT ONE ed reformer stands up to her.
The echo chamber all clap along in unison to this smear of every public school student. They are LOUSY advocates for public school students. They can’t even stand up to an appointee of the most unpopular President in my lifetime.
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/sec-devos-calls-new-birth-freedom-milwaukee-birthplace-education-freedom-kick-2019-back-school-tour
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Betsy is a special kind of special. She is so clueless, she doesn’t know she is clueless.
In Wisconsin, recently removed Scott Walker is largely responsible for the terrible state of public schools in Wisconsin. He did everything in his power to damage public school.
He is a charter member of the “dis-honor roll” for support of public education.
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She’s not clueless….Betsy DeVos knows exactly what she’s doing. Betsy Is a shrewd business woman.
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No. She is absolutely clueless about public education and the needs of students. Nothing this woman has done in regards to public education can be defended.
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I think what Lisa is saying is that ignorance is not the problem. It’s not that she doesn’t know, it’s that she doesn’t care. She’s evil, not clueless.
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I agree that she is evil.
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She is Cruella DeVos. She knows what she is doing. She is using her office as a wrecking ball for the common good. She is a brainwashed ideologue.
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She is not brainwashed. That assumes that someone else is making her do so much harm to the public schools.
She does it because she believes she is on a mission from God.
Her God is all about money and the profit motive.
Not my God.
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If she is such a good Christian then she should know her Bible. We only need to look at Mark 10:13-16 to know that she is the devil in disguise. Greed is her God.
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Is the ed reform echo chamber okay with the fact that DeVos is bashing public schools and public school students all over the country, and are they okay with the fact that this PUBLICLY funded agency deliberately excludes public schools and public school students on their campaign tours?
They’re all on board for that? Not one dissenter? It’s A-OK with “the movement” that the US Department of Education no longer serve students and families who attend public schools?
If they criticize DeVos are they kicked out of the club? Or were public school students traded away (again) to secure more federal cheerleading and funding for charter and private schools?
Who works for public school students? Why don’t our students deserve advocates in the federal government?
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Here’s what’s amazing. Something like 85-90% of people in this country use public schools. An equal percentage graduated from one.
Yet this giant, lavishly funded and endlessly hyped “ed reform movement” offers NONE of those families or students ANYTHING of value.
They serve about 6% of people. And there are TENS OF THOUSANDS of paid, full-time charter and voucher cheerleaders both in the private sector and public sector.
They exclude 94% of students and families and this is not only accepted in ed reform, it’s celebrated.
Maybe we could think about hiring some people who will agree to work on behalf of public school students, given that they are the vast majority of students. Or, we can continue to hire and pay these people, who work for the 6% who attend the privatized schools they prefer and promote. That seems like an easy hiring decision.
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I feel as if Wisconsin public schools students are protected from the DC crowd who parachute in there to smear and gut their schools because they have a pro-public school and pro-public school STUDENT governor.
They didn’t re-hire the ed reformer in Wisconsin, Scott Walker. They fired him, in fact, and hired a governor who ran specifically on restoring public schools.
That’s why the DC crowd have to go there- the state level government no longer recites the slogans.
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Vouchers in Milwaukee have been a total failure, as have charters.
They have ruined the public schools but do not produce better results than the underfunded public schools.
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I have an easy question for ed reformers: if you offer nothing of value to public school students, advocate to cut their funding, and depict them all as violent low achievers who are headed to prison, can you really call yourself “student advocates”?
Wouldn’t it be better for public school students if you just stayed away from their schools completely? Do we really need this group of political operatives working against the efforts of parents and teachers in public schools?
Since you offer nothing positive to our schools and students, perhaps you would consider not actively harming them? Just stay in DC. We’ll save some money and there isn’t a single public school student who will miss your absence. They’ll probably benefit – they won’t have to pose for photo ops with politicians and interrupt their class time.
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I tell my son who is a public school student that Sec. DeVos did not attend public schools, did not send her children to public schools and indeed has never held an ordinary job of any kind that involved a competitive hiring process. She got the job she has because she purchased political clout, or she would NEVER have been hired.
She is the last person they should look to as an expert on their schools or their future careers, so they should disregard her relentlessly negative depictions of public schools and public school students. They’re not in the billionaire class. None of this political sloganeering applies to them.
They can trot out Ivanka wearing a hard hat as much as they like. These people may as well live in a different country than the rest of us. They don’t know our schools, our communities or our students. Their negative opinions about public school students are ignorant and politically motivated and should be politely disregarded.
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“Saint Thomas Aquinas
We want to thank Assistant U.S. Education Secretary Johnny Collett @JCollettOSERS for visiting @STAsaints today and guiding him through our classrooms during his Back-to-School tour. ”
Shame that none of these public employees with the vast resources of the federal government and their multi-million dollar tour costs cannot manage to locate a single strong public school or successful public school student in the entire country.
Their depiction of public schools and public school students as all “failing” isn’t accurate, and it isn’t fair to public school students. Luckily they’re completely irrelevant and useless to 99.999 of students in public schools in any of these places, so none of our kids will notice.
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All of Betsy’s political appointments are engaged in this phony “education freedom tour” to tout charters and vouchers.
What Democratic candidate other than Andrew Yang can support the DeVos agenda of privatization?
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Yes, Betsy the Brainless DeVoss should leave, but what circle of Dante’s Hell should she move to?
A. Circle 4 for Greed
B. Circle 8 for Fraud
C. Circle 9 for Treachery
D. All three
If you select “D”, how will she live in three circles at the same time?
I have a suggestion. We slice her brain into three equal parts, one for each circle.
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Libertarians plan for vouchers to destroy public education. Taxpayers angered at propping up Catholic Churches while the number of parishioners declines, will throw the baby out with the water. In 2017, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that. “vouchers are the dominant source of funding for many parishes.”
And, the Sentinel wrote in 2019 that parents of students in a Catholic school network are asking where the $16 mil. the taxpayers were forced to provide for vouchers went. Three years after a local parish school joined the network, extracurricular activities were cut and 1/4 of the teachers left.
The Catholic Church has hefty legal bills. Are taxpayers paying restitution to victims for a decades long cover-up of priest abuse?
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