Archives for category: ALEC
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Valerie Strauss: ALEC’s Pathetic, Warped “Report Card” on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2017 //
13

In education, ALEC is the axis of Failed ideas. It writes model legislation for states to kill unions, reduce the teaching profession to at-will temps, and replace public schools with charter and vouchers. Its sponsors are big corporations. Its members are 2,000 state legislators who want to be corporate puppets.

Valerie Strauss writes here about the ALEC report card. What matters most to ALEC is whether your state has charters, vouchers, cyber charters, homeschooling and for-profit schools. What matters least is whether students are learning anything.

Betsy DeVos is ALEC’s spokeswoman. Coincidentally, Secretary of Education. She parrots their line. Choice. No unions. Choice. No job protections for teachers. Choice. No collective bargaining. Choice.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

St. Louis: Who Is Rex Sinquefield?

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2017 //
22

Rex Sinquefield is a self-made billionaire in St. Louis. He grew up poor, unlike most of today’s billionaires. He lived in an orphanage. Having pulled himself up from rags to riches, he thinks that everyone else should do the same. He has a passion for protecting his wealth, cutting public services, and reducing taxes. He has no compassion for those less fortunate than himself. None.

Here is what you need to know about him.

“Sinquefield is doing to Missouri what the Koch Brothers are doing to the entire country. For the Koch Brothers and Sinquefield, a lot of the action these days is not at the national but at the state level.

“By examining what Sinquefield is up to in Missouri, you get a sobering glimpse of how the wealthiest conservatives are conducting a low-profile campaign to destroy civil society.

“Sinquefield told The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that his two main interests are “rolling back taxes” and “rescuing education from teachers’ unions.”

“His anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-public education views are common fare on the right. But what sets Sinquefield apart is the systematic way he has used his millions to try to push his private agenda down the throats of the citizens of Missouri.

“Our review of filings with the Missouri Ethics Commission shows that Sinquefield and his wife spent more than $28 million in disclosed donations in state elections since 2007, plus nearly $2 million more in disclosed donations in federal elections since 2006, for a total of at least $30 million.

“Sinquefield is, in fact, the biggest spender in Missouri politics.

“In 2013, Sinquefield spent more than $3.8 million on disclosed election-related spending, and that was a year without presidential or congressional elections. He gave nearly $1.8 million to Grow Missouri, $850,000 to the anti-union teachgreat.org, and another $750,000 to prop up the Missouri Club for Growth PAC.

“However, these amounts do not include whatever total he spent last year underwriting the Show-Me Institute, which he founded and which has reinforced some of the claims of his favorite political action committees. The total amount he spent on his lobbying arm, Pelopidas, in pushing his agenda last year will never be fully disclosed, as only limited information is available about direct lobbying expenditures. Similarly, the total amount he spent on the PR firm Slay & Associates, which works closely with him, also will not ever be disclosed. These are just a few of the tentacles of his operation to change Missouri laws and public opinion…”

Sinquefeld has lobbied to eliminate limits on campaign contributions and to eliminate state income taxes and property taxes. He has a special passion for eliminating teacher tenure, gutting teachers’ unions, and promoting vouchers.

“Nowhere are Sinquefield’s destructive intentions clearer than in his campaign against public education.

“I hope I don’t offend anyone,” Sinquefield said at a 2012 lecture caught on tape. “There was a published column by a man named Ralph Voss who was a former judge in Missouri,” Sinquefield continued, in response to a question about ending teacher tenure. “[Voss] said, ‘A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said how can we really hurt the African American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives? And what they designed was the public school system.’ ”

“Sinquefield’s historically inaccurate and inflammatory comments created a backlash from teachers, public school advocates, and African American leaders, who called it “a slap in the face of every educator who has worked tirelessly in a public school to improve the lives of Missouri’s children.”

“The statement would be easy to write off as buffoonery if it didn’t come from Sinquefield, who has poured millions from his personal fortune into efforts to privatize education in the state through voucher programs and attacks on teacher tenure.”

The jewel in his crown is the Show-Me Institute, a libertarian “think tank” that he funds to supply advocacy and research for his ideas.

Got the idea? A billionaire who hates the public sector.

Categories ALEC, Billionaires, Privatization

The Progressive: Inside ALEC’s Attack on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2017 //
20

Chris Taylor, a Democratic State Assemblyman from Madison, Wisconsin, joined ALEC so he can learn what the far-right advocacy group is up to. He attended the recent conference in Denver where Betsy DeVos spoke.

He wrote about what he learned here.

He writes:

The issue of the moment for ALEC is public education—that is, undermining it. ALEC members are foaming at the mouth for the now-endless opportunities to further privatize public schools, long a central goal. When he was governor of Wisconsin in the early 1990s, Tommy Thompson implemented the first state voucher scheme in the nation—an idea he acquired from an ALEC conference.

Taylor describes DeVos’s speech.

And he adds:

DeVos, like most of the people at ALEC, dismisses the collective good in favor of the individual benefit. Our public education system was designed to collectively educate the masses, in hopes that democracy would thrive. Her priority, and ALEC’s agenda, are otherwise.

After bashing the federal government and federal program, her answer for change is…get ready…a federal program to promote school choice, charters and vouchers!

Proponents know their universal voucher scheme, where public dollars flow directly to families rather than to schools, makes it impossible for a public-school infrastructure to survive. How do you maintain public school facilities and staff when you have no guaranteed funding?

For ALEC, it is all about tearing down our public-school infrastructure so corporate privatization efforts can move in and make a buck.

Proponents of privatization have abandoned their claim that vouchers offer better education, so now they are selling choice for the sake of choice.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire Interviews Nancy McLean on the Racist Origins of “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2017 //
30

In a new podcast, Jennifer Berkshire interviews Nancy McLean–author of the much-acclaimed book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America–on the origins of school choice.

Here is an excerpt:

Jennifer Berkshire: There’s a fierce debate right now about the racist history of school vouchers. But as you chronicle in Democracy in Chains, the segregationist South was really the testing ground for conservative libertarian plans for privatizing what they called “government schools.”

Nancy MacLean: This was the moment, the crucible of the modern period in which these ultra free market property supremacist ideas got their first test, and it is in the situation of the most conservative whites’ reaction to Brown. What was interesting to me, in finding this story and seeing it through new eyes, is that Milton Friedman, I learned, had written his first manifesto for school vouchers in 1955 as the news was coming out of the south. That was after several years of reports on these arch segregationists, saying they were going to destroy public education and send kids off to private schools. Friedman wrote this piece, advocating school vouchers in that context. He and others who were part of this libertarian movement at the time, I was shocked to discover, really rallied in excitement over what was happening in the south. They were thrilled that southern state governments were talking about privatizing schools. They were applauding this massive resistance to the federal government and to the federal courts because they thought it would advance their agenda.

Berkshire: The economist James McGill Buchanan, who is the subject of your book, was the architect of a plan to privatize Virginia’s schools, including selling off its school buildings and even altering the constitution to eliminate the words “public education.” He was basically making the same argument that school choice proponents continue to make today, that public schools were a “monopoly.”

MacLean: Two students from the economics department at the University of Chicago, James McGill Buchanan, who is my focus, and a man named Warren Nutter, who was Milton Friedman’s first student, started pushing these voucher programs in the South and pushing them very opportunistically. They wanted to take away the requirement that there be public education in the constitution, which would then enable mass privatization. Friedman himself actually came down to University of North Carolina in 1957 to a conference designed to train these new arch free market economists, and he actually made schools the case in point, so he was really pushing for this in the South at the moment that it’s happening. Ten days after the court ruling, Buchanan and Nutter issue this report calling for, essentially using the tools of their discipline to argue that it would be fine for Virginia to privatize its schools and sell off these public resources to private providers. In other words, what they were doing is using this crisis to advance their what some people would call neo-liberal politics or ultra free market politics or breaking down the democratic state. There’s many ways of describing this, but whether they were or were not consciously racist or most motivated by racism, I don’t know, and it’s kind of almost not relevant. The thing is, they did not care at what they could tell would be the impact on black students of their pushing this agenda, and they capture that in saying, “Letting the chips fall where they may.”

Berkshire: Much of your book centers on Virginia at mid century, in the years leading up to and following the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Yet the story you tell feels so relevant to today. You argue, for example, that what we’ve long viewed as a battle over segregation was also a fight over who pays for public education.

MacLean: Actually, what the white leaders always said is that black residents weren’t paying enough taxes to have better schools in this situation of segregation, which was, of course, a total source of frustration to the black parents, because they said, “How can we make bricks without straw? If you don’t give us education, how can we get better jobs in order to pay more taxes?” I just raise that, because the way that I look at Brown and the fight over schools in this book is a little different from what we’ve heard over the years, in that it draws attention to the public finance aspect of racial equality in the schools, and shows how even back in the time of the cases that led up to Brown vs Board of Education, these issues of taxes were always foremost. These white property holders, these very conservative white elites in Virginia, who suppressed the vote of all other citizens, really did not want to pay taxes to support the education of any but their own children. In that sense, I think it’s a really contemporary story. It has such echoes of what we’re hearing now.

Berkshire: I’m a devoted chronicler of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is an heiress to the right-wing libertarian vision that your book is about. One of my great frustrations is that people decided early on that DeVos is a dimwit and so they don’t challenge her ideas, where they come from or how extreme they are.

MacLean: I have to say I think that intellectual condescension is the achilles heel of the left, particularly right now with the Trump administration and DeVos. There’s a sense that, “Oh, these people are stupid,” rather than, “No, these people are working with a completely different ethical system than the rest of us and a different philosophy, but it’s a coherent one and they are pursuing their goals with very strategic, calculating tools.” That’s also why the right is so focused on the teachers unions. It’s not because they are only concerned about the quality of education and think that teachers are blocking that. First of all, this is a cause that hated public education—what they would call government schools; they don’t even want to say public education—before there were teachers’ unions. We can go back and trace the lineage of that. Today, with so many industrial jobs destroyed or outsourced or automated, our main labor unions are teachers’ unions, and teachers’ unions are really important forces for defending liberal policy in general, things like social security and Medicare as well as defending public education. In targeting teachers’ unions, they’re really trying to take out their most important opponents to the plans, the kind of radical plans that they’re pushing through.

Berkshire: DeVos actually spoke to the conservative group ALEC a few weeks ago and she quoted Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement “there is no society” to make her case for a libertarian vision of education that consists of individual students and families vs schools and school systems. Universal free public education, paid for by tax dollars, is among our most “collectivist” enterprises when you think about it.

MacLean: They hate the idea of collectives they would call them, whether it’s labor union, civil rights, women’s groups, all these things they see as terrible, and any kind of government provision for people’s needs. Instead, they think that ultimately, each individual, and then they sneak in the family because of course no individual could live free of being raised by a mother and parents. In their dream society, every one of us is solely responsible for ourselves and our needs, whether it’s for education or it’s for retirement security or it’s for healthcare, just all these things, we should just do ourselves. They think it’s a terrible, coercive injustice that we together over the 20th century have looked to government to do these things and have called on and persuaded government to provide things like social security or Medicare, Medicaid, or college tuition support or any of these things.

Berkshire: Unlike some of the other causes that you just mention, the push to privatize public education has support among Democrats too. What do you make of this?

MacLean: Part of what’s happened with the Democrats that’s very sad I think is that once the spigots of corporate finance of elections opened and democrats are trying to stay competitive with republicans in this, they have gone overwhelmingly to the financial sector for contributions. There are so many hedge fund billionaires who are interested in transforming the education industry because it is such a vastly huge potential source of cash, right, that could go into new, private schools. There’s this whole education industry that’s developed, and a lot of democrats are really connected to that agenda. Corey Booker would be a case in point, and I’m sure you know about his work, but many other democrats. Obama and Arnie Duncan and all these other folks I think are destroying their party’s own base and capacity to fight back against this horrible, anti-democratic agenda by attacking public education and teacher’s unions as they have.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Katherine Stewart: The Racist, Fundamentalist Roots of the Attack on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2017 //
25

Katherine Stewart, author of the book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children,” writes in the New York Times about the historical origins of attacks on democratic public schools.

When the DeVos crowd and rightwing think tanks refer to “government schools,” they are drawing their rhetoric from a dark and ugly history, tainted by racism, anti-Catholicism, and hatred of democracy itself.

Trump, DeVos, the religious right, and conservatives today promote “school choice” so children do not have to attend “government schools.” But where did this language come from?

She writes:

Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.

One of the first usages of the phrase “government schools” occurs in the work of an avid admirer of Dabney’s, the Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge. Less concerned with black paupers than with immigrant papist hordes, Hodge decided that the problem lay with public schools’ secular culture. In 1887, he published an influential essay painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”

But it would be a mistake to see this strand of critique of “government schools” as a curiosity of America’s sectarian religious history. In fact, it was present at the creation of the modern conservative movement, when opponents of the New Deal welded free-market economics onto Bible-based hostility to the secular-democratic state. The key figure was an enterprising Congregationalist minister, James W. Fifield Jr., who resolved during the Depression to show that Christianity itself proved “big government” was the enemy of progress.

Drawing heavily on donations from oil, chemical and automotive tycoons, Fifield was a founder of a conservative free-market organization, Spiritual Mobilization, that brought together right-wing economists and conservative religious voices — created a template for conservative think tanks. Fifield published the work of midcentury libertarian thinkers Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Murray Rothbard and set about convincing America’s Protestant clergy that America was a Christian nation in which government must be kept from interfering with the expression of God’s will in market economics.

Someone who found great inspiration in Fifield’s work, and who contributed to his flagship publication, Faith and Freedom, was the Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. An admirer, too, of both Hodge and Dabney, Rushdoony began to advocate a return to “biblical” law in America, or “theonomy,” in which power would rest only on a spiritual aristocracy with a direct line to God — and a clear understanding of God’s libertarian economic vision.

Rushdoony took the attack on modern democratic government right to the schoolhouse door. His 1963 book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” argued that the “government school” represented “primitivism” and “chaos.” Public education, he said, “basically trains women to be men” and “has leveled its guns at God and family.”

These were not merely abstract academic debates. The critique of “government schools” passed through a defining moment in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when orders to desegregate schools in the South encountered heavy resistance from white Americans. Some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private “segregation academies” for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes. Dabney would surely have approved.

Religious fundamentalists and evangelicals today have picked up the use of the term “government schools.” DeVos funds the leading fundamentalist organizations that see the public schools as godless. Religious groups are suing in states like Indiana to allow religious activities within the public schools. Secularism is their enemy.

When these people talk about “government schools,” they want you to think of an alien force, and not an expression of democratic purpose. And when they say “freedom,” they mean freedom from democracy itself.

The advocates of “school choice” bask in this tradition. Recall that Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, looked forward to the day when there were no more elected school boards. Advocates for private management of schools funded with public money–such as ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council)–hail mayoral control, state takeovers, and privatization, anything to undermine and destroy democratic control of public schools.

Remember this history. It matters.

Categories ALEC, Democracy, History, Racism, Religion

ALEC’s Hilarious Report Card on The States

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2017 //
26

ALEC is the fringe-right American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates for school privatization and elimination of unions, due process, and the teaching profession. Its hero is Betsy DeVos, who is working daily to bring ALEC’s extremist agenda into the mainstream.

ALEC publishes an annual report card on education, evaluating the states not by test scores or quality of education or results, but by the degree to which they have privatized their public schools and diverted funding to nonpublic schools.

The world according to ALEC is upside down.

The number 1 state is Arizona, even though it has low scores on NAEP and a very low high school graduation rate.

The number 2 is Florida, also with an abysmal graduation rate.

Number 3 is Indiana, where privatization reigns supreme, and spending is low.

The District of Columbia, one of the lowest performing districts in the nation, with the biggest achievement gaps, ranks number 6.

Far behind D.C. and other contenders is Massachusetts, with the nation’s highest test scores and a graduation rate of 89%.

Why, according to ALEC, the state of Alabama and the District of Columbia are far, far better than Massachusetts.

And even funnier, ALEC says the worst state in the nation is Nebraska. It has no charter schools, no vouchers. It has a graduation rate of 94%. Just awful!

The ALEC report card is the direct opposite of the Network for Public Education report card, which graded states in relation to their support for public schools. ALEC’s #1 state, Arizona, received an F. ALEC’s #51 state, Nebraska, came in second in the nation.

What a hoot!

Categories ALEC, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization

Jennifer Berkshire: The Public Rejects DeVos-ALEC Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2017 //
2

Jennifer Berkshire asks a crucial question: Just how far right can Betsy DeVos go before the public rises up to quash her extremist agenda?

Never in modern history has there been a more unpopular, more polarizing Cabinet member. She is unpopular because her goal of defunding public education and showering public funds on religious and private schools is unpopular.

To understand what DeVos wants, you need only look at what ALEC wants. Arizona tops the ALEC report card, because it is the Wild West of school choice. Whereas Massachusetts is usually considered the best state in the nation for education quality and excellent teachers, it ranks far behind Arizona on the ALEC report card, at #32. To ALEC and DeVos, Arizona is #1, despite its low graduation rate (25 points below that of Massachusetts), its teacher shortage, and its perennially underfunded public schools. You see, Arizona has more choice than Massachusetts, and choice is a far higher goal to ALEC and DeVos than school quality.

The DeVos-ALEC project (shared by the Koch brothers and others on the fringe right) is the destruction of not just public schools and unions, but of the middle class and the American Dream of social mobility.

“DeVos wasn’t listed among the ALEC headliners this year, a line-up heavy on conservative has-beens like Newt Gingrich, William J. Bennett and Jim DeMint. But among this crowd she’s regarded as a conquering heroine. That’s because the right-wing in Michigan just realized a decades-long dream and a top priority for the DeVos family: not only did they succeed in making Michigan, the cradle of industrial unionism, a right-to-work state, they also killed teacher pensions. New teachers in the Mitten state, where teacher salaries dropped for the last five years in a row, will now fund their own retirement. ALEC called the move a win for teachers and taxpayers, but didn’t mention the part where taxpayers will have to cough up at least $255 million to “fix” a problem that the anti-public school crowd largely created. Ending teacher pensions, one of the last remaining benefits the state’s once-powerful teachers unions could offer their members, will only hasten the unions’ demise. In the words of the old Mastercard commercial: “priceless.”

“In a new book that examines the work of ALEC and other corporate lobbies in all fifty states (“The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time“), economist Gordon Lafer argues that the singular fixation upon crushing teachers unions is about much more than mere money. In virtually every community, schools represent the largest employer, providing something that is increasingly underheard of these days: decent wages, good benefits and the prospect of a retirement that doesn’t involve collecting cans. The presence of these large employers—schools, public universities, hospitals—raises the expectations of the public about what’s possible, Lafer argues. “ALEC’s vision of the future is actually really bleak,” Lafer told me recently. “That’s why so much of their legislative focus is on limiting what people are entitled to, especially in education.” The relentless effort to rid the world of teachers pensions, says Lafer, is also about lowering the expectations of everyone else.

“ALEC’s agenda for remaking public education in all 50 states can be distilled down to a single word: unpopular. Actually, make that two words: extremely unpopular. There is no constituency for blowing up the schools, swelling class sizes, replacing teachers with tablets and lowering the standards of who can teach. There is no real constituency for shifting money away from public schools to private religious institutions, which is why ALEC-backed voucher programs in states like Wisconsin and Indiana mostly benefit students who’ve never attended public schools. The key to enacting a deeply unpopular agenda, as any ALEC-ster worth her salt can attest, is to keep the public as far away from it as possible, which is why DeVos’ hat tip to local control in her speech was so laughable. The states where ALEC has come closest to realizing its dream of defunding schools, shifting public monies into private coffers and crushing teacher unions are also the ones where efforts to preempt local democracy and shrink the voting franchise are in full flower.”

Berkshire doesn’t let Democrats off the hook. Party leaders have been enablers of the attacks on public schools (think Arne Duncan, Andrew Cuomo, Dannell Malloy, Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker). Berkshire writes:

“The irony is, of course, that the school privatization experiment that’s well underway in Denver has been the work largely of “progressive” education reformers, Democrats for Education Reform chief among them. The local teachers union is weak and getting weaker, not because of DeVos and the right wing but because of anti-union Democrats. DeVos isn’t a fan of the Denver model—charter choice, in her view, is a weak substitute for the real deal: publicly funded vouchers for private religious schools. Her visit to Denver shone a spotlight on ALEC’s extreme education agenda. Now it’s up to Democrats who’ve embraced school privatization themselves to explain how they’re different.”

Charters were on the ballot last November in Massachusetts, where the public rejected their expansion by a resounding margin of 62-38%.

Vouchers have been put on state ballots many times. The public has never supported them. DeVos and her husband sponsored a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000, and it was overwhelmingly defeated, by a vote of 69-31%. The most powerful antidote to the DeVos privatization project is the vote. Like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz, who melted, her libertarian dream dissolves when tested at the ballot box.

Parents and educators in Arizona are gathering signatures to throw water on their legislature’s efforts to expand vouchers. They need to collect 120,000 signatures to do so (the legal requirement is 75,000, but organizers know that they must have far more than the minimum to withstand legal challenges.)

DeVos and ALEC threaten our democracy, and the only tool that can beat them is the method of democracy: the vote.

If you don’t like what DeVos wants to do to your schools, get active. Join the Network for Public Education. Join your state and local citizens’ groups (NPE can connect you). Practice the arts of democracy to save democracy. Participate. Vote.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Privatization

Jack Covey Analyzes Betsy DeVos’s Speech to ALEC

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2017 //
12

Jack Covey (pseudonym) teaches in Los Angeles and frequently comments on this blog:

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BETSY DEVOS: “Through (ALEC’s) leadership, your respective states have truly become the laboratories of democracy our Founders intended. Thank you for putting their vision into practice.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Yeah let’s go back to the late 1700’s … “We really need our nation’s schools to be run by privately-managed, money-motivated business with no governmental oversight, or preferably no regulation whatsoever, where they will have carte blanche to steal and embezzle and line their pockets with public money.”

SAID NO FOUNDING FATHER EVER.

In fact, here’s what Founder Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison, another founder:

“The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not laboring.

… the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one.”

That’s not very ALEC-friendly rhetoric.

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BETSY DEVOS: “Parents have seen that defenders of the status quo don’t have their kids’ interests at heart.”
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That’s right.

A bunch of money-motivated billionaires and millionaires out to privatize public schools, and profit from that privatization supposedly care more about the education and well-being of children that the the teachers who are in the classroom several hours a day, every ding-dong day of the school year.

UTLA’s Randy Child’s put it best, “These (defenders of the status quo) allegations come straight from Bizarro World, where the richest and most powerful people in the U.S. are cast as a plucky band of selfless rebels fighting for the civil rights of poor children of color, while dedicated and overworked teachers who can’t afford a house or pay for their children’s college tuition are imagined to be the greedy overlords of the old order.”

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BETSY DEVOS: “I was reminded of something another secretary of education once said. Her name was Margaret. No, not Spellings – Thatcher. Lady Thatcher regretted that too many seem to blame all their problems on ‘society.’ But, ‘Who is society?’ she asked. ‘There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” – families, she said – “and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.’ ”

“The Iron Lady was right then, and she’s still right today!”
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That’s right. It’s every man(woman) for himself (herself.) It’s really easy to say that when you’re both born into a billionaire family, and then marry in to a different billionaire family.

Finland has the highest achieving school system on Planet Earth, and they do everything the exact opposite of what Devos recommends, and bases its system on the philosophical and political principles that are he diametric opposite of Devos’ / ALEC’s.

If, according to Devos and Maggie Thatcher, that’s such a wrong approach, why are the Finn’s doing so well?

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: “This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students, not the other way around.”
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Yeah, that’s what public school teachers AND administrators think and say all the time:

“The students are here to service US the teachers and administrators, not the other way around,”

… SAID NO PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER OR ADMINISTRATOR EVER.

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BETSY DEVOS: *”There are those who defend a system that by every account is failing too many kids…”
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Nope, nope, nope. Nope-ity nope, it’s not. When you break out data for the middle and upper classes, the U.S. system ranks at the top of the list.

“… by every account … ” Really, which “accounts” are you referring to.

All the polls indicate that parents’ satisfaction with their own individual children’s public schools is sky high.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: ” … there are those who know justice demands we give every parent the right to an equal opportunity to access the quality education that best fits their child’s unique, individual needs.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

This is from a woman who backs the rights of charter schools and voucher-funded private schools to discriminate against, and bar from entry — or kick out AFTER entry — special ed children, second language learners, or whatever group is too costly and bothersome to educate, and will negatively impact the bottom line, whenever those school operators see fit.

Again, it’s every man for himself.

Indeed, as a condition of participating in her proposed voucher program, parents have to waive their rights to sue the charter or voucher-funded school if those operators later on fail to provide legally mandated services, and/or kick out those parents’ children.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: “That, of course, doesn’t always sit well with defenders of the status quo. But despite the teachers unions’ not-so-veiled threats and millions of dollars, can anybody name a single legislator who has lost a seat for voting to support parents and students?”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

That’s what they call a “loaded question”, in this case one where the premise is false. Their definition of “voting to support parents and students” is actually “voting to privatize and advance the interests of money-motivated privatizers.” When fully informed about this, there have been many occasions when voters threw out such people.

Just take a 30-minute drive from where Devos is giving her speech — to JeffCo (Jefferson County) Colorado — to see where this kicking out of corporate reformers is exactly what happened.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: “Without Congressional action or authorization, the last administration rushed a new Borrower Defense to Repayment rule into effect and put taxpayers on the hook for an estimated cost of up to 17 billion dollars. While students should have protection from predatory practices, schools should also be treated fairly.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

No, no, no. The first part of that last sentence is a bald-faced lie. She’s offering ZERO — repeat — ZERO protection for students, and giving predatory schools free reign to prey upon those students.

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: “We’ve pushed the pause button on both of these poorly written regulations. While they might have been well intentioned, they would cause more harm than good. Most importantly, they would fail to serve students, institutions and taxpayers well.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

So all 19 of those attorneys general suing Devos and the U.S. Dept of Ed. over these actions are wrong, but Devos and her ALEC allies are right?

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
BETSY DEVOS: “Our work will not be done until every child in America – every single child – has an equal opportunity to a world-class education. The rising generation is 100 percent of our future, so they deserve nothing less than 100 percent of our effort.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

You can’t celebrate Maggie Thatcher’s every man for himself, dog-eat-dog, rat-eat-rat Survival of the Fittest political philosophy at the beginning of your speech, and then, at the end of that same speech, state that you’re goal is to make it so that “every child in America – every single child – has an equal opportunity to a world-class education.”

The former directly contradicts and is opposed by the latter. If there are gong to be X number of winners, that means that there are also going to be approximately the same X number of losers. Setting “dog eat dog” up as your political ideal is most definitely NOT consistent with the goal or an aspiration that “every” child must be provided for. Indeed, that is exactly the type of call for a collective well-being of the “society” as a whole that Devoss earlier pro-Thatcher statements condemned… the same “society” that Betsy and Maggie claim does not exist. There’s no such thing as society, just individuals.

Again, Finland is the tops in the world, AND THEIR POLITICAL AND EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY IS THE POLAR OPPOSITE OF THIS AYN RAND-IAN FOLLY. Shouldn’t there schools be dead last and total failure, if what Devos and ALEC claim to be true is true.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Privatization

Jeannie Kaplan: Denver Activists Mobilized to Say a Loud NO to DeVos, Corporate Greed, and Privatization

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2017 //
0

Jeannie Kaplan, who served on the Denver school board for two terms, has been a sharp critic of the district’s devotion to charters and high-stakes testing. She has documented time and again that ten years of “reform” has produced nothing positive for students. Presently, the school board’s seven members are all corporate reformers. She hopes that this will change as parents and educators join together to fight DeVos, Corporate Greed, and Privatization.

The appearance of Betsy DeVos at the ALEC annual meeting was the setting for a protest that involved a thousand motivated activists.

Jeannie describes the joyous event here.

She felt the stirrings of the spirit of resistance from her 1960s youth. Ordinary people were standing up to corporate power and rightwing extremism and loudly saying, NO.

Why such emphasis in Denver? Because Denver has been at the center of the failing “education reform” movement for the past 12 years. And while many “reform” organizations keep trying to make Denver Public Schools look successful, the academic outcomes continue to be dreadful, opportunity gaps and segregation of schools keep increasing. Four of seven seats are up this November. Supporters of real public education, lead by Our Denver Our Schools are working hard to get these four candidates elected. Their election could stem the failing “reform.”

Xoxhitl (Sotchi) Gaytan, District 2, Southwest Denver

Dr. Carrie A. Olson, District 3, Central Denver

Tay Anderson, District 4, Northeast Denver

Robert Speth, At-large

And in spite of the incumbents’ attempts to distance themselves (one incumbent actually appeared at the rally long enough to have his picture taken with his anti-DeVos sign) from DeVos/Trump, here are some of the similarities:

* DeVos and the DPS Board support the privatization of public education, funneling public money to schools that are privately administered and serve corporate interests.
* DeVos and the DPS Board support punitive school closure policies based on high stakes testing forcing schools to compete to stay open.
* DeVos and the DPS Board support policies that have resulted in increased segregation and poor academic outcomes for students of color, children facing poverty and homelessness, English language learners and students with disabilities.
* DeVos and the DPS Board put the needs of competition and corporations before the welfare of kids and the communities in which they live.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Denver: Protestors Slam DeVos Before Her ALEC Speech

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2017 //
10

NPR wrote about the protest awaiting Betsy DeVos in Denver. Apparently she is speaking today, although that fact is on neither the ALEC agenda nor the Department of Education website.

She is the first Secretary of Education to address this extremist group. The Koch brothers and Dezvos family foundations are among the funders of this anti-government group.

Curiously, NPR described the protestors as “left-wing activists and teacher groups.” Why not supporters of public schools and educators?

Curiously, the story does not use the adjective right-wing to describe ALEC, which is funded by extremists of the radical right and major corporations, with the goals of eliminating gun controls and environmental regulations and privatizing education for profit.

The picture tells a better story than the words.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Privatization
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