Democrats for Education Reform is a group of Wall Street hedge fund executives that decided that schools would improve if they were privatized and adhered to business principles, like pay for performance, no unions, testing, accountability, and private management. DFER likes mayoral control and state takeovers, not elected school boards. Above all, it is mad for charter schools, which honor the principles of business management. DFER has not been dissuaded by the failure of charters to produce better results than public schools. It has not been moved by the charters’ practices of skimming, exclusion, and attrition. It ignores the cascade of charter scandals.
Peter Greene explains the origins of DFER here. The billionaires who founded DFER knew it did not have to win converts within the Republican Party, which embraced privatization. Its target was the Democratic Party, which had a long history of support for public schools.
Peter wrote:
DFER is no more Democratic than my dog. There’s not enough space between their positions and the positions of the conservative Fordham Institute (though I think, on balance, Fordham is generally more respectful of teachers). But for the privatizers to be effective, they need to work both sides of the aisle. Also, RFER would sound too much like a pot advocacy group.
So they’re not really Democrats. And they don’t want to reform education– they just want to privatize it and reduce teachers to easily replaced widgets. And they aren’t particularly interested in education other than as a sector of the economy. I suppose I have no beef with their use of the word “for,” as long as they put it with the things that they are really for– privatization and profit. So, Apoliticals Supporting Privatization and Profit. ASPP. Much better.
To learn more about DFER, read the BadAss Teachers report.
Campaign cash changes minds, DFER knew. And it soon had an impressive stable of Democratic electeds on board. When Andrew Cuomo first ran for governor of New York, he quickly learned that the path to Wall Street required a commitment to charter schools, which meant a visit to DFER offices. He has been a faithful ally ever since.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Demons? Dregs? Dolts? Dilettantes? Deplorables? Desperados? Delinquents? -ickheads?
YES! YES! YES!
I can’t stand DFERS. They have made a deal with the devil.
We here at RFER assert as undeniable the fact that even Wayne’s World stoners would make better education decisions than have been made by Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, John King, Mike Bloomberg, the Waltons, [fill in the long list of Deformers/Disrupters].
You are all the same. Too much of an ego not to accept findings that are not in research reports.
Sorry. I haven’t any idea what this means.
I don’t know either.
Bob, probably you don’t read comments on posts you comment on.
I have been saying numerous times that many kids disengage from learning to read or shut down from learning to read because:
they are taught the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants wrongly.
they are not told at the onset that letters represent for than one sound.
there are some clowns who say that one should not teach letter names to kids.
Democrats or Republicans are all the same. The Americans have an ego which prevents them from discussing issues brought to the table for discussion.
This is why kids are leaving school as illiterates for decades.
Have an open mind and discuss issues raised.
I actually do read the comments on posts that I comment on, for the most part. LOL. I have been discussing issues in education for some 40 years now, pretty much daily. LOL. I understand that there is a debate about teaching letter names among folks in the phonics community, but I’m not profoundly schooled in the arguments on both sides. I’m not convinced that learning that the name of the letter F is “eff” impedes the learning of the phoneme /f/ and would point out that the alphabet (that series of letter names) has other purposes–for example, in specification of orthography. I’ve never seen a basal reading program that didn’t teach that letters can represent more than one sound, and I have, literally, seen hundreds of them. I suspect that you are not saying that there is no difference between, say, Bernie Sanders (D) and Donald Trump (R) but, rather, that Democrats and Republicans, increasingly, can’t talk with one another. That’s true. I have a hard time having a civil discussion with someone who supports caging children and using secret police to tear gas moms in yellow shirts exercising their right to assemble and their freedom of speech.
And about Dr. Ravitch’s nonresponse regarding these issues that you raise, let me make a point. I’ve read Dr. Ravitch, much to my edification and pleasure, for many decades. She doesn’t typically involve herself in debates about specific pedagogical techniques. She does often say something like, “I don’t tell people how to teach. I’m a historian. I report about what educators and education policy makers do.” And while I have a great interest in child language acquisition, this is not my primary focus either. I mostly deal with the teaching of writing, literature, language, speech, and drama to older children. You probably want to be having this discussion with folks who are particularly interested in/engaged in phonics pedagogy.
Thank you Bob for your response.
I am not talking about any particular way of teaching.
What I have been saying is that the way schools are teaching the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants is the main reason why kids shut down from learning to read.
You cannot teach buh-ah-tuh for bat.
It should be /b/ /a/ /t/.
You should not teach consonants with extraneous sounds which is what is happening in most schools around the world.
If the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants is taught correctly then no kid will be confused.
Bob, this is not a way I recommend teaching but the way it ought to be taught.
As for letter names, there are many who insist that letter names should not be taught.
My latest post is on this and you may read it at https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/08/john-walker-and-stephen-parker-vs.html
If you say that teachers do tell the kids on the onset that letters represent more than one sound than so be it.
Thank you for your kind indulgence.
As for Ravitch not responding to my comments, it is my opinion that as a researcher she should have at least said something similar to what you have said.
I wish you well.
Diane Ravitch, you dare say you don’t know either?
I have tagged you on Twitter several times and you don’t respond and say you don’t know.
Read my blog posts with your name and also on Twitter where I had tagged you.
As a research professor, I am disappointed that you do not respond to comments on your blog.
I have written to you the 3 main reasons as to why kids are unable to read in English but are able to read in Malay.
What in the world are you doing as a researcher (former or present) when presented with information that can help to reduce if not eradicate illiteracy?
Here’s my favorite quote from D-FER’s Whitney Tilson:
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WHITNEY TILSON : “(Public school teachers) are gutless weasels and completely disgraced themselves in siding with the unions against meaningful reforms of a public school system that systematically, all over the country, gives black and Latino students the very worst teachers and schools, thereby trapping black and Latino communities in multi-generational cycles of poverty, violence and despair.” (July 30, 2011 blog post)
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My SECOND favorite Whitney Tilson quote is an example of the keen stock advice that he’s paid to provide wealthy investors: (from his Wikipedia page):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_Tilson
WIKIPEDIA:
When Google went public in 2004, Tilson stated in a 2004 Motley Fool article:
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WHITNEY TILSON : “Google with the same market cap of McDonald’s (a stock I own)?! HA! I believe that it is virtually certain that Google’s stock will be highly disappointing to investors foolish enough to participate in its over-hyped offering — you can hold me to that.”
Note: Since then (as of 10/18/13) Google has gone on to give its investors a return of over 1050%.
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With expertise such as that in his own field, it’s so reassuring to know that the Whit-ster’s applying his same brilliant acumen and applied insight to “reforming” public education.
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While we’re at it, here’s some more teacher quotes demonstrating (or commenting about) teacher bashing.
Let’s start with anti-corporate reformer Leonie Haimson (who’s not teacher bashing, but talking about who is):
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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LEONIE HAIMSON: “Scapegoating teachers has become the mantra of the so-called reformers. From Katie Haycock claiming (with no evidence) that the problems of low-performing schools are primarily due to poor teaching, to the recent cover of Newsweek, proclaiming that the ” Key to saving American education” is to “fire bad teachers,” with these words repeated over and over on the blackboard, this simplistic notion notion infects nearly every blog, magazine, and DC think tank, including this one.
“In what other sphere would we make this claim? Is the key to reforming our inequitable health care system firing bad doctors? Or the key to reducing inner city crime firing bad cops? No. But somehow this inherently destructive perspective is the delivered wisdom among the privateers who populate and dominate thinking in this country.”
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From corporate reformer Kati Haycock: (originally at NEWSWEEK—since deleted by NEWSWEEK) but still available at
http://www.eduwonk.com/2010/08/unmasking-the-blame-the-teacher-crowd.html
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KATI HAYCOCK: “But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don’t want to compete in the job market.”
— Kati Haycock, President of Education Trust, (Newsweek, 9/1/08)
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And finally… From Michelle Rhee
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/crusader-of-the-classrooms/307080/
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ATLANTIC MONTHLY: “One of the other concerns I’ve heard voiced about alternative selection models is that the teachers aren’t making a thirty-year, or even a ten-year commitment.”
MICHELLE RHEE: “Nobody makes a thirty-year or ten-year commitment to a single profession. Name one profession where the assumption is that when you go in, right out of graduating college, that the majority of people are going to stay in that profession. It’s not the reality anymore, maybe with the exception of medicine. But short of that, people don’t go into jobs and stay there forever anymore.”
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: “So you feel like teachers can be effective even within a short term?”
MICHELLE RHEE: “Absolutely, and I’d rather have a really effective teacher for two years than a mediocre or ineffective one for twenty years.”
ATLANTIC MONTHLY: “One thing that I’ve encountered personally in talking to a lot of veteran teachers is this idea that programs like Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows de-professionalize education. They see it as a kind of glorified internship.”
MICHELLE RHEE: “I’ll tell you what de-professionalizes education. It’s when we have people sitting in the classrooms—whether they’re certified or not, whether they’ve taught for two months or 22 years—that are not teaching kids. And whom we cannot remove from the classroom, and whom parents know are not good. Those are the things that de-professionalize the teaching corp. Not Teach for America, not D.C. Teaching Fellows. That, I think, is a ridiculous argument.”
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Put yourself in the shoes of a university student considering entering his university’s Education Dept. and undertaking a career in teaching.
Are you going to spend and/or incur debt in a range of $100,000 – 300,000 for tuition/room & board/other expenses, then face all of that?
Holy crapulence! That first quote alone should disqualify Tilson from ever having anything to do with education ever agenda. And then it gets worse! I knew something about them, but hadn’t read these. And right before dinner too! My appetite is spoiled and now I have to get drink to calm down. To them teachers are as disposable as toilet paper.
…again, not agenda, although that might have been a Froodian (at least that’s how Barney Fife pronounced it) misspelling.
I do believe the D in Dfer because we saw up close how democrats in big cities signed on to ed deform. And there hasn’t been a definitive move away from Obama/Biden admin anti public school policies. Dfer is still in the game.
Campaign cash wins allies, for sure. But, historically, school choice was a Republican idea. Even now, it is Betsy DeVos’s personal crusade.
I believe the D & the F stand for grades their members would get as human beings who really care about children other than their own.
DFER as the abomination it is, would be better exposed if they weren’t permitted to raise money at the Act Blue site.
Rhee used to raise money for her charter and voucher advocacy at Change.org, which called itself then a progressive site.
I’m just going to set up an organization called Value Investing Congress For Higher Taxes, and Whitney Tilson’s hedge fund conglomeration, Value Investing Congress, will accept me as a hedge fund manager and take whatever advise I give them, right? Calling myself Value Investing makes me part of the hedge fund club, doesn’t it? Oh wait, I just remembered I can’t legally appropriate the name of an already established organization. Value Investing would sue me. That’s right, now I remember, you can’t legally just take the name of an already established organization, for instance, the Democratic Party, and make it your own without their express consent. If you set up a political action committee and put Democrat in your name, you could be sued. You should be sued. Oh, yeah.
Especially if you publicly misrepresent the values of the organization the name of which you hijacked.
A few years ago, the CA Dem party passed a resolution condemning DFER for using the D when it represents corporate interests.
The national Democratic Party needs to take a lesson from the California Democratic Party, take ownership of itself, and take action to root out the hedge fund billionaires’ moles who clearly see Democrats as their enemies.
Justice Democrats should replace establishment Dems as the party of the people. And, organizations like the BiPartisan Policy Center should be prohibited by law. It would serve its founder right who is also the Board chair at CAP.