Politico Morning Education writes that Trump has chosen billionaire Betsy DeVos as a campaign surrogate, despite the fact that she is the most disliked member of his Cabinet. No doubt he hopes for DeVos campaign money but also wants to stick his thumb in the eye of teachers and supporters of public schools. DeVos campions charter schools and vouchers. She despises public schools.
DEVOS HITS THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: Long a target for the left and protesters, DeVos is being deployed as a political asset for Trump. She will be among more than 80 surrogates campaigning for him at caucus locations across Iowa on Feb. 3, the campaign announced. Two days later, she’ll be with Vice President Mike Pence and senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Feb. 5 at a “Women for Trump” event in Camp Hill, Pa.
— Joining DeVos in the Hawkeye state will be several other agency heads, governors, and members of Congress and the state legislature, along with other campaign officials and advisers. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. will also be on hand for what the campaign is calling an “unprecedented” surrogate operation.
— “This will be the strongest, best funded, and most organized presidential campaign in history,” said Brad Parscale, Trump 2020 campaign manager. “We are putting the Democrats on notice — good luck trying to keep up with this formidable reelection machine.”
— DeVos visited Iowa in March for a closed-door meeting in the state Capitol to pitch her proposal for Education Freedom Scholarships. Iowa Democrats at the time blasted the plan, saying it would undermine public education, the Des Moines Register reported, and the proposal hasn’t gotten traction on Capitol Hill.
— Iowa has a tax credit scholarship program, but it’s not considered a school choice leader. Its charter school law is considered weak, ranking in the bottom five of state laws for accountability, flexibility, funding equity and other metrics, according to a new report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
HAPPENING TODAY: DeVos will join Pence in delivering remarks at the Wisconsin School Choice Student Showcase in celebration of National School Choice Week.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A cartoon re “Women for Trump”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/voting-in-trumplandia/
Brilliant! Couldn’t have put it better!
Do they ever do any actual work in that administration? Besides traveling the country telling public school students they’re all failing and need to switch to charter and private schools?
Why would any public school family in their right mind want these relentlessly negative people anywhere near their children? Do us all a favor- stay in DC. There isn’t a public school student in this country who would notice if all of them stopped coming to work. They’re irrelevant to our students and our schools, that’s when they’re not actively undermining them.
Is it part of the US Department of Education’s mission to undermine children who attend public schools? Why are we paying 10,000 people for this “work”? If they don’t have anything positive to contribute, and they don’t, just stay in DC. We’ll pay them to stay there.
Michigan voters affirmatively rejected an ed reform governor in the last election. They did all the ed reform experiments- for 20 years- looked at the ed reform track record and rejected them.
Their public schools were tanking. They decided to hire some public employees who weren’t opposed to the schools their children attend and would actually contribute some effort towards them. Seems reasonable, right?
Ed reformers have actually suffered a string of losses in states- MI, WI and PA. Tried. Rejected.
They also lost in Louisiana and Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, people rejected paying public employees who actively undermine their children and their public schools. They couldn’t figure out why they were paying for that. I don’t know why anyone would.
I hope the selection of DeVos as Trump’s campaign surrogate backfires on the Republicans. DeVos is a polarizing figure. It is an opportunity for the Democrats to rally public school advocates and parents to defend their public schools by voting against Trump and DeVos. It may be a chance to highlight the abject failure of school choice and privatization along with all the misuse of public money.
I’m reading “SG.” In November of 2016 NPE had 22,000 members. After the election of Trump and the appointment of DeVos, membership shot up to “350,000 within days.” DeVos may have deep pockets, but so many people despise her.
Mike Pence
Mike_Pence
Heading to Wisconsin with
BetsyDeVosED
tomorrow for an event celebrating National School Choice Week! Every child across America deserves a great education and when parents have the right to choose the education their child needs, students are more likely to succeed!
Public school students will be deliberately excluded, as they are at all US Department of Education events, except those events relating to school shootings or bullying or drug abuse.
Which tells you all you need to know about how these folks see your children. These ridiculous snobs believe public school students are all bullying, low performing drug addicts, which is why they spend each and every work day undermining public schools.
And you pay for all of it. Tens of thousands of dollars a day to send them on the “public schools suck” tours.
Is it now the official US Department of Education policy to exclude public school students, or just an informal policy?
Can you credibly say you “work” on education if you exclude 90% of children and families because you’re ideologically opposed to the existence of their schools?
Can’t we fire 90% of them? If they’re only serving 10% of students not sure why I’m paying 100% of employees.
Meanwhile, ed reformers in Ohio are frantically slapping some duct tape on the public school funding they blew up with their massive voucher expansion:
https://www.wksu.org/post/what-led-weeks-school-choice-conundrum#stream/0
Why are public school kids in this state always the dead last priority? How is it possible that 90% of students are completely ignored until the day before deadline?
Can we possibly find public employees who are actually interested in our schools and plan to do some work for them?
Columbus wouldn’t have done anything at all- the only reason they put half a day’s work into this is superintendents dragged them to the table.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
If Devos is campaigning for donny, then every public educator should vote for anyone besides donny. Since donny and betsy have shown such contempt for public schools.
So who’s paying for this? Is Trump paying or are the taxpayers footing the cost?
LOL..of course the taxpayers are footing the bill….lol
Two days later, she’ll be with Vice President Mike Pence and senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Feb. 5 at a “Women for Trump” event in Camp Hill, Pa.
Pence is going to be surrounded by women. Hope Mother is with him.
Apparently Pence is a man who can’t be trusted around women not his wife.
Mother (his wife) will be there to make sure he behaves.
This is great news! I expect Ms. DeVos will be as effective for Trump as Sarah Palin was for McCain!
Perfect.
Ol Betsy was touting tax credits yesterday at a Federalist Society conference in Jeff City, MO yesterday. See:
https://www.komu.com/news/betsy-devos-speaks-about-education-at-federalist-society-convention?fbclid=IwAR1TG4H1HguXfi9v_jmgPZOwvMOCz5-7PDMacCH3UUVnnJF9iLQuj8kWXNE
From the article: “One retired educator, Duane Swacker, said DeVos “bad-mouths” the public education system despite 90% of U.S. students being enrolled in public schools.
“All she does is talk about trying to get more for the 10% and most of those people already don’t need it.”
Swacker stood and turned his back during DeVos’s speech as a form of protest. He said Betsy DeVos hasn’t done anything with public education. As a former teacher, Swacker said he’s tired of hearing lies and is ready for real action.”
And I was quoted in the news report, just click on it.
Of 200 in attendance most, about 165 were white male lawyers (and/or law students). About 35 at most were white female lawyers (and/or law students). There was one African American male lawyer in attendance.
Overall, folks were quite nice, well it is the Show Me State (plus the cameras were rolling so lawyers know not to act out. Heard the same lies from the edudeformers on the session that focused on tax credits/vouchers. As I told two of the presenters, whom I’ve battled before at forums: “What I heard in their presentations were lies, damned lies an cherry picked statistics”. Same old BS from the deformer crowd.
Good for you, Duane!
You called BS on the Queen of BS.
Congratulations, Duane.
Now Betsy will have her security detail following you into the restroom for pee-er review.
Duane E Swacker: “Swacker stood and turned his back during DeVos’s speech as a form of protest.”
GOOD FOR YOU!!!! More people should show her the same type of ‘respect’.
Good Duane! Did anyone follow your lead?
Kudos to the reporter for actually paying attention to Duane and for quoting him.
I suspect most would not even have noticed, or even if they did, would not have reported it.
Good job, Duane! I hope DeVos turns voters off, and she becomes a liability to the orange menace.
Drext727,
Not that I know of. It was a very conservative staid crowd of mostly male white lawyers (all but one African American lawyer) and the cameras were rolling. They know how “properly act” and show deference to their superiors. I don’t.
SDP. The reporter (an African American Mizzou photo journalism student) didn’t actually see me as she was set up behind a column. Everyone in the House chambers though could see me. I happened to walk by her after she was done interviewing others and asked if she was a phJ student and if she saw me. She said no, but it would be great if I would answer some questions to give “the other side” of the story. Real nice gal-sent her an electronic copy of my book.
Duane,
You rock!!!!
an interesting role modeling: people SHOULD stand up and turn their backs to her
Here’s to you! May DeVos get to know the backside of all good men.
“Betsy DeVos” anagrams to “Seedy tv S.O.B.” Just sayin’….
Creepy. Digital stuff is NOT making life better. It has reached people who can abuse it.
……………………………..
Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists
Left and right agree on one point. The president’s re-election campaign is way ahead online.
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
Jan. 29, 2020
“In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.”
Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state.
Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear:
We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters.
How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics? With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.
Geofencing is just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary.”…
That is seriously creepy.
So is this correct?: The police have to get a warrant to trace location of an individual cellphone, but businesses & private individuals may do it at will?
Did some quick research: Apparently the police don’t need a warrant to track specific individual cellphones. A company named Securus is offering this service to their customer base, which consists of law enforcement departments. Their main line of work: managing prison phone systems.
“Digital stuff is NOT making life better. It has reached people who can abuse it.”
Its not merely an accident.
It’s often actually designed for misuse and even abuse.
Google’s entire business model is premised on collection and misuse (if not abuse) of personal information. They save and analyze people’s searches, web site visits and even GPS locations for reasons known only to Google execs.
And Amazon tracks people’s purchases and undoubtedly locations.
SomeDAM Poet: I read some time ago that Amazon charges different prices to different people. Apparently they track what you pay and decide that certain customers are wealthy and can pay more.
I don’t know if this is true, but it doesn’t surprise me if it is happening.
At least on Amazon we know we’re being tracked. I’ve found it highly impractical to stop using them completely, but I now use the only if I can’t find any other reasonable alternative. I’ll even pay a couple of dollars more to avoid them.
It’s worth noting that Democratic strategists are not freaked out by what amounts to digital spying on and manipulation of voters , but by the fact that Trump is ahead in the digital game.
Presumably, these Democratic strategists just wish they could have the same advantage.
The Exxon-DeVos
The Exxon-DeVos
Is running aground
And “total” is loss
And oils abound
The damage is done
And cleanup expensive
For policy’s dumb
And very extensive
Did some quick research: Apparently the police don’t need a warrant to track specific individual cellphones. A company named Securus is offering this service to their customer base, which consists of law enforcement departments. Their main line of work: managing prison phone systems.
Our Orange IDIOT wants to be a tinpot dictator. Whatever happened to press conferences? Ruling by Twitter is pure nonsense.
……………
Thom Hartmann’s blog
What’s It To Be? A Tinpot Dictatorship or Advanced Democracy?
Mike Pompeo lied to a reporter on the air, and then screamed obscenities at her afterwards. A few days later, he refused to allow another reporter from NPR on the state department airplane in punishment. Donald Trump just praised this behavior, Saying “You did a good job on her,” as if it was some sort of a physical assault.
If Thomas Jefferson was right that a Free Press is the strongest defender of democracy, our democracy is now officially at a very, very weak point. Every American should be horrified by this behavior in the White House and State Department and should speak out in social media and any other venue available against this administration’s latest attempt to muffle a Free Press.
Combined with the fact that the White House has stopped having press conferences altogether, the Trump administration is behaving like a tinpot dictatorship rather than an advanced democracy.
-Thom
This is off topic, but one that infuriates me. I lived overseas during 9/11 and carried a copy of my passport just in case we Americans were warned to leave Malaysia. We were told that if we had to leave, it might be at a moment’s notice.
In Wuhan, China the US should not be charging $1,000 per person and not allowing families to leave together. “Chinese spouses and other family members of Americans were not eligible for Wednesday’s flight.” Leave Americans in an area that isn’t safe and they can’t purchase food.
Sounds like the Trump administration. He can go golfing as often as he wants but Americans whose lives may be in danger don’t matter. Don’t have money for evacuating them.
…………………………………..
Americans Trapped in Wuhan Aren’t Angry at the Chinese Government. They’re Angry at Their Own
But around 1,000 Americans remain trapped in modern history’s largest-ever quarantine — involving some 50 million people in 17 cities — as infection rates continue to soar. Wuhan’s subway has been shut down, private vehicles banned from the city center, and the Lunar New Year holiday extended. Supermarkets test customer’s temperatures at the entrance and refuse to admit any with a fever.
Still, priority on Wednesday’s flight was given to staff at the local U.S. consulate and their families. The few remaining seats were available at inflated costs of $1,000, say Americans living in Wuhan, prompting anger among those who felt abandoned by their government.
“For the average person, that plane ticket really wasn’t available,” says George Goodwin, a biology teacher from Reno, Nev., who worked for the U.S. Center for Disease Control before moving to China. “Many people were very frustrated as the announcement [of the flight] made it seem this is going to be the savior of all Americans in Wuhan. Except it really isn’t because most of us can’t go.”
For Steece, the situation is complicated by the fact that his wife is a Chinese national and son, Colm, is less than one month old, and so still hasn’t been registered as a U.S. citizen. Chinese spouses and other family members of Americans were not eligible for Wednesday’s flight.
“I’ve actually been a little bit annoyed at the p–s-poor treatment,” says Steece, who before moving to China served five years with the U.S. National Guard. “Why is it that American citizens have to pay $1,000 and not have our families come with us? It’s bulls–t.”
It’s a similar situation for Benjamin Wilson, 38, a restauranteur in Wuhan from Alexandria, La. Although Wilson’s seven-year-old daughter, Jasmine, has an American passport, his wife is a Chinese citizen. Even were there room on Wednesday’s flight, Wilson couldn’t bring himself to split the family up at this difficult time.
“It’s sad when other governments are offering evacuation for Chinese spouses and children as well,” he says. “While with our government, we’ve heard about the rumor of a plane coming — I have not seen any information directly from the embassy myself — but then there was not enough space for everyone.”
The E.U. said it would co-finance the transport costs for two aircraft to evacuate citizens out of Wuhan, according to a statement Tuesday, with the first aircraft scheduled to depart from France on Wednesday morning and the second later this week. Other nations—including South Korea, Japan and U.K.—will reportedly send in charters to evacuate citizens from Wuhan in the coming days.
Several Americans trapped in Wuhan told TIME they had made repeated calls to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing but only got recorded messages pointing them to out-of-date website posts. Even those who managed to secure a seat on Wednesday’s flight were left with the tricky task of reaching the airport themselves—a significant challenge with no public transport running and private cars banned from the street.
To date, there’s no news of another flight to get Americans out of Wuhan, as unconfirmed reports suggest the city could remain on lockdown until April. Those stuck in their homes don’t know how they will be able to afford essential supplies with workplaces closed and no means to earn money.
https://time.com/5773546/americans-trapped-wuhan-coronavirus/?utm_source=emailshare&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share-article&utm_content=20200129
I just read in WaPo that more planes are evacuating Americans in China.It’s about time. How are Americans stranded in Wuhan going to get to the airport? All transportation has been cut. The WHO hasn’t yet figured out that this is an international emergency? Good grief.
……………………………………….
U.S. plans new evacuation flights as coronavirus cases in China grow by more than 1,000 per day
The United States has announced new flights to Wuhan, with many Americans in the city expressing frustration over being stuck there. Some 50 million people in Hubei Province have been restricted to their region as authorities try to stem the spread of the virus. Japan has already sent a second flight to Wuhan, and a third is planned.
With experts saying a vaccine is still a long way off, more international cases of the illness appeared on Thursday. Australia, Vietnam and South Korea all announced new coronavirus infections, while India and the Philippines had their first ones.
The World Health Organization will reconvene its emergency committee Thursday to determine whether the coronavirus outbreak amounts to a public health emergency of international concern, as the total number of people infected in mainland China surpassed those infected with SARS during the 2002-2003 epidemic. Here’s what we know so far:
● The death toll has risen to 170 in China, with more than 7,7oo confirmed cases of infection as of Thursday morning local time — an increase of more than 1,500 from the previous day.
● About 100 cases have been recorded outside mainland China, and four other countries have reported person-to-person transmission of the virus.
● Roughly 200 Americans evacuated from Wuhan landed in California on Wednesday….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-coronavirus-live-updates/2020/01/30/1da6ea52-4302-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html