Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.
His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.
He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.
He just cares about destroying public schools.
He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:
Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.
In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.
Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.
It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.
Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.
The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.
In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.
As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.
Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.
Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.
Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.
That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….
Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.
Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.
This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.
Yes, please! Let’s “reimagine” schools. Get rid of the stupid standardized testing and sweep the common bore curriculum into the dust bin. And for goodness sake, please free the teachers to do what they do best…..teach children.
Oh yes.
After two years of disruptions, what we need are a lot more disruptions. That’s why I am introducing my new Parent-Youtube Influencer Compact, which uses some of our state education dollars to fund an innovative program in which parents have a real alternative to the tired, failed learning stuff in school model and can go straight to the sources for advice on the latest makeup trends and ingesting weird stuff challenges.
Our studies, funded by the Gates Foundation, have shown that in our failed public schools, which follow the old model of teaching stuff to students, children are spending only about one-third to one-half of their school year taking pedagogically useless standardized state tests, completing practice tests for the standardized tests, participating in data chats with their teachers, reviewing their data walls, working through test prep curricula, and doing test practice exercises in textbooks and online curricula that have been dumbed down to include mostly practice exercises for state test questions. That’s why, this legislative session, we shall be introducing our truly disruptive new SUM IT UP™ program which consists of ALL SUMMATIVE TESTING ALL THE TIME, PreK-college.
But we’re not stopping there! This exciting new program is just a prelude to the introduction of our most exciting, most disruptive approach yet: replacing students themselves with spreadsheets containing data randomly generated by software from Shepherd Holistic Instruction Technologies. No longer will school decision makers have to wait for feedback. They can simply open their Data Dashboard, click on a teacher name, and the program will generate as many completely random numbers, or, collectively, as much data, on that teacher as the administrator wants to see! Then, based on these random numbers, the program will automatically assign a Teacher Performance Score from A double plus good to F! It even generates pink slips!!! (The unions are going to hate that!) Best of all, studies show that this method of random number generation for teacher evaluation is EVERY BIT AS VALID as are scores from existing state standardized tests!!!!
Love these ideas? We’ve got a million of them. Oh, and check out our new Disruptive Innovations logo. Yup, that’s a big bull moose on the train tracks! Neat, huh?
Excuse me. That was a typo. I meant the Grates Foundation.
Grating, you see, is like grit, but more so.
With so many options, I wonder how many young people will get lost in an unaccountable maze of choice. How many children will end up lonely and depressed without access to co-curricular activities as humans are social animals? How many young people may end up being abused with no way for them to get help? Jeb Bush gets my vote for the “golden grifter” award.
pitch men will pitch anything as long as anyone pays ’em to pitch it …
Jeb Bush spewage, verbal gymnastics/acrobatics, from above: Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children. end quote
Good grief, what a pile of horse manure, did he even write it himself?
Side note: Anna Kasparian of The Young Turks recently did an excellent take down and explication of school choice, charter schools and school privatization. She noted that the real impetus behind school choice was to destroy our public schools and thereby eliminate teachers’ unions. It was as if she had been reading from the Diane Ravitch Blog. Sam Seder is also up to speed about what school choice and school reform are really about.
Would love to see Diane on this program!
Ms. Diane,
I’ve met you several times and I wanted to thank you for your continued effort to help and support public education. As an elected school board member in Georgia, we’ve been attacked again and again by a local politically drive group, the GRA (Georgia Republican Assembly). We serve as non-partisan elected officials and these folks keep attacking us. We’re now being opposed by this group and they are sponsored by the 1776 PAC group. This group is also funding Cherokee County as well as Forsyth County. The GRA made a resolution a few months back to withdraw their children from all public schools and yet, they fight for our seats. If you could give us any information or wisdom, it would be most appreciated. We will continue to fight and protect our public school system. We don’t teach CRT and they know it and yet they continue to campaign on this false narrative.
Disaster capitalism at its finest. Parents hiring teachers? What could possibly go wrong?
Here’s the thing. It kind of worked in areas where parents had some wealth and decided to “pod” school their children. Parents would pool their $$$ and hire a certified teacher to come in and teach the “old fashioned way”. The kids actually got an education free from the common core curriculum, free of standardized testing and free of numerous hours tied to a computer screen….and in less time than the typical school day. Now, if public school systems would ditch the expensive garbage and get back to the business and basics of really educating children, more parents wouldn’t have to search for “choices” OR hire dissatisfied/disgruntled former public school teachers to pod/home school their children.
The key is “wealth”, or more to the point, very small homogenous population of kids. But real public education, by definition, isn’t homogenous. Many of our OUSD schools are highly diverse. Which parent(s) decides who to hire? For 30 children? Do they get to pick the curriculum? What if other parents don’t agree? IMO can’t be scaled up effectively and would result in a quagmire of infighting.
Ed reform has done nothing for public schools since the pandemic but promote charters and private schools.
Am I suprised Jeb Bush has not a single idea to benefit any public school student anywhere? Not at all. It’s consistent throughout the echo chamber.
The pandemic is just another opportunity to push the same agenda they had prior to the pandemic- privatizing public education.
It is the only “innovation” they have ever had.
If your goal is privatizing public schools, hire these folks. If your goal is retaining public schools and supporting them and improving them, hire outside the echo chamber.
I hate to disagree with Diane, but I think we ignore Jeb Bush at our peril. the right wing has consistently made its presence felt by attack. The Middle has responded by hoping the right will go away. We need to attack, not ignore. Jeb’s brother attacked public schools with Teddy Kennedy as an accomplice. Jeb could rise from his ashes once again to plague us if we do not show him up to be a fraud.
But of course, you all knew that.
In education, Jeb Bush, like Arne Duncan, is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s been a decades-long slog dealing with his brilliant ideas for education. You know, ideas of the sort of quality you would get from, say, Donald Trump discussing nuclear physics.
Nobody knows nuk-you-ler fizzics like Donald Trump!
In the words of Donald J. Trump on Jeb – Low energy
When Betsy Devos took office for Secretary of Education many publications used the same photo which was a bull dozer running over the buildings signaling the end of public education. However the bull dozer has stalled and now they are working on the engine
LOL
He never did get over not being the third Bush into the Whitehouse did he?
It was great to get out of the Bushes, finally, or so I thought. But then, Trump.
There is always someone worse.
May you never experience that in the case of Trump.
I think that the next one will definitely be worse. Thing the same utter amorality as Trump but with intelligence and knowledge. We’re in for a very rough time.
Yes, that’s what worries me. Someone who would cheerfully push Trump under a bus, sacrifice a few others and their followers on the way, play very firm but fair public card to win over the undecided.
And then they get into the Whitehouse…..with their Nixon playbook tucked away; a piece of paper inside, in their own handwriting the words…’This time we get it right,’
Yup. The next one won’t be as stupid as Trump is. He won’t have Milley and Esper and even, in the end, Barr to keep him in check. And he’ll probably have the House and the Senate both, in addition to the Extreme Court. Lord help us.
Looking from the Outside and over the relatively short history of the USA as a nation (from a Euro perspective), with its ingrained sense of independence of the individual.
Whoever The Republican might be, if they try and hold the whole nation down with a tight visible fist and talking like Trump to only their voting constituency in the long run they are playing with fire.
Five time zones. 270 million + adults. Multi-cultural / racial. Vast open tracts coupled with large urban sprawls. No history of centralised authoritarian rule to fall back on. A federated system in which states or regions or cities are capable of independent action. Easy access to fire arms. In the wrong circumstances at least two low-key insurgencies could run.
They can hold all the cards, it still won’t ensure the playing table stays steady.
In the turbulences of the 1960s to 1970s the majority of the population voiced concerns but tended to stay out of the street stuff. Over this past decade the fracturing has led to a heightening of the polarisation, and not just along neat Mason-Dixon lines either.
Some of elected folk those fond of polemics would do well to read the history of Ulster and the communal violence.
The only way to hold the whole of the USA is to play the long, soft game.
Arguably The Civil War never did finish. No nation can count on ‘It couldn’t happen here’
The USA is still Europe’s child, and family habits don’t fade.
You see very clearly. It is very possible that the fascist wing in the United States will have complete control by 2025, BUT these people have no notion how far beyond them the majority of people in the country are, especially the young ones. I tell people, fasten your seatbelts. Severe turbulence ahead. Case in point: all the major Repugnican wannabes for 2024 want to scale back Social Security and Medicare, and when they hold all the reins, they can do this. Imagine the response. Our color revolution moment right here in the U.S.
Of course, they will respond with violent repression. This will be met with even more protest. This could get very ugly indeed.
I say, be careful what you wish for, Pugs.
Indeed Bob.
Five years ago I was saying to my daughter I could see the USA separating along legalistic lines, states and big cities pressing for more self-government and central government having to give in.
Since 2016 turned in to 2017 I began to worry about another option – The Ulster Option, two communities locked into cycles of violence and recrimination; the entire UK lived and in many forms suffered through that, until 1994, and even afterwards the threat ever loomed.
These White Panic people are bigger fools than I’d thought possible back in 2016.
The Ulster option. A chilling and spot-on observation!!! We need more like you who see this clearly.
Thanks Bob for your kind words.
On the whole, a few years down the road I would rather be proven wrong.
Lord yes. Me, too. Never have I so wanted to be wrong.
We can but hope Bob.
It’s instructive to listen to the Steve Bannon podcast. He’s certain that his faction is going to win it all soon and then prosecute and imprison all its enemies, and he says this outloud, the way the said, outloud, on the same podcast, that his faction was going to overturn the 2020 election by a) getting the Supreme Court to throw it back to the legislatures, b) keeping the results from being certified, or c) installing alternate electors. The whole plan there for anyone to hear before it happened.
By now you would have seen my rather gloomy prognosis of what could go wrong and the parallels of the UK experience.
If he keep on mouthing off like that then Bannon might live to regret it, when he finds out his side aren’t the ones with the monopoly on violent solutions.
Not sure. There are people who thrive on this. Chaos makers.
I seem to recall a few guys in Germany in the 1920s who started out like that…..
Didn’t work out so well for them.
The Art of the Deal, children’s edition. Haaaa!!! That’s hilarious. By Kimberly Gargoyle? uh, Gilfoul? Hmmm, having trouble with her name.
She’d be the one who gave that ‘loud and unhinged’ speech at the Republican 2020 convention?
Yes, I think she’d suit the task
“The largest disruption to our nation’s education system” throughout most of US modern history was caused by Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Jeb’s brother President Dumb but Polite, David Coleman who doesn’t give a shit what other people think, the Common Core crap, The Republican Falsest Party, neo liberals, libertarians, the Koch brothers, ALEC, et al.
Remember this article from 2010? He just won’t stop as long as there’s a dollar to steal from public education funds. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/jeb-bush-digitial-learning-public-schools/
Digital learning was a disaster during the pandemic. No buyers today.
The edudeformers have no sense of shame whatsoever.
So, what’s the difference between Jeb Bush endlessly reinventing “As we unbundle [public] education …,” on the far right, and now Ibram X. Kendi endlessly droning “identify, disrupt, dismantle racist [public education] structures,” on the far left?
This morning, I learned of a KIPP influence with the latter in the style of The Leadership Academy, New York. And it all smacks of uprooting public education so as to then plant it in Kendi’s Black racialist ideology and deceptively said to be “equity.”
Maybe Jeb and Ibram should team up.
Go ahead . . . try to destroy and disrupt a public school system in every locale in the US . . . of which 90% of students in the US attends. It all seems like a brilliant idea until after a year away from their local public schools, parents send their children back to the local public school. This has occurred over and over again in PA. Students return after a year in a cyber charter more ignorant of basic literacies than could have been imagined, and that often explains public school students’ lower text scores. Thanks Barack, Bill Gates, KIPP, A. Duncan, the Walton Family, your local Chamber of Commerce, and ALEC.
“A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic…”
Yeah, Jeb is following Rufo’s Satanic recipe: build and project universal distrust against public schools, employing however much brutality and ruthlessness are needed in the process.
I think we should frame the differences between them and us in Tolstoyan terms: War and Peace.
They, the neoliberals and their fundamentalist twins, want to wage war, they think and act in terms of war. Everything is a fight and battle for them, and they make up the rules as they go—after all, existing rules and laws can and should be broken during war time. They consider public schools as factories that produce disciplined soldiers for the battle of life.
We, on the other hand, want to maintain peace, want to protect peace. We view public schools as safe havens of learning where kids are prepared for a peaceful life where people are not soldiers but friends who trust each other.
“The whole plan there for anyone to hear before it happened. “ … Just like Hitler and Mein Kampf.