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Gary Rubinstein: What TFA Said about the DeVos Appointment

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2016 //
11

Gary Rubinstein entered teaching via Teach for America, but unlike most TFA recruits, he made teaching his career. He is also TFA’s most incisive critic, sometimes a critical friend, other times a critic of TFA hypocrisy.

In this post, Gary deconstructs TFA’s statement on Trump’s nomination of choice zealot Betsy DeVos. TFA, like other reform organizations, is in a dilemma because they want to be on the side of social justice, but they also want to be on the side of the new administration, which will be very good indeed for TFA. More charters mean more jobs for young recruits. Billions of dollars for school choice are heading the way of the “reformers,” and it is hard for them to seem sad about that. Gary wishes the TFA statement had included a few good words on behalf of public schools and on behalf of teachers. It didn’t.

The TFA statement includes 11 policy priorities, and Gary analyzes each of them. He wishes TFA had called on DeVos to stop the teacher bashing. It didn’t. He wishes it had called on DeVos to protect the funding of public schools while promoting choice. It didn’t.

Read the whole post for links and analysis.

Gary concludes:

Accountability has been used as a weapon to fire teachers and close schools throughout the country based on highly flawed metrics. Obama and Duncan did a lot of damage with this one and maybe TFA feels that they used it in a fair way, even if I don’t. But that same weapon in the hands of Trump and DeVos should be something that TFA should be concerned about. I don’t think that this was something that TFA needed to ask the new Secretary to be vigilant. Based on the contempt she has shown for public schools and teachers over the years, it’s pretty clear that DeVos will use her power to try to make it even easier to fire teachers and close schools. This could have a negative effect on not just all the TFA alumni who are still working in public schools, but also for the ones who are at the few charter schools that try to keep their most needy students and whose test scores suffer for it. In the bigger picture, I think that having DeVos too strong on accountability will negatively affect so many students in this country.

Finally there’s policy number nine about using “evidence and data” to ‘drive’ “teacher improvement and development over time.” This is code for trying to use test scores and value-added metrics to rate teachers, no matter how inaccurate those metrics are.

More telling than the policies TFA chose to include on this list is the ones they chose to exclude. Knowing that DeVos is planning to use her power to divert funds from the public schools (and charter schools too) for vouchers for private schools, perhaps TFA could have asked that she not cut funding to schools. Knowing how much contempt DeVos has shown toward public school teachers, TFA could asked her not to bash teachers so much. Knowing that DeVos has funded reform propaganda sites like Campbell Brown’s The Seventy Four, TFA could have suggested that she spend time in public schools and see what great work is being done.

There’s a lot they could have said to help stave off the at least four year battle everyone in non-charter schools is going to have to fight daily. Instead they padded their valid concerns about discrimination with a bunch of reform code.

Of their nine policies that TFA is urging DeVos to consider (three of the eleven are basically saying, make schools safe for all students), six of them are things that she was already on board with. It’s the TFA way of saying “We are already in agreement with you on most things so you can trust us and work with us to help you out in general.” They seem to care more about their own survival and the continuation of Duncan’s reform strategies than they do about the potential damage that the Trump / DeVos duo can wreak on the children of this country.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Teach for America, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Please Give Generously to the Network for Public Education and Help Us Protect Our Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2016 //
8

Today is #GivingTuesday. Please give whatever you can to the Network for Public Education and help us as we fight efforts to privatize our public schools.

The Network has generated nearly 75,000 emails to members of the Senate, urging them not to confirm Betsy DeVos, who supports charters and vouchers, not public schools.

Please open this link and add your name. Share it with your friends. Our goal is to reach 100,000 emails. We can do it.

It is wrong to appoint a Secretary of Education who opposes public schools. Her nomination should be opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike. Republicans are supposed to be protectors of tradition and community values. Public education is a central American tradition. Republicans serve on local school boards and state school boards. They too should vote to oppose DeVos’ radical attack on public education.

“When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”

― Garrison Keillor, “Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America”

Please stand up against the vandals who would destroy the mortar that holds the community together.

And please give generously so we can fight on your behalf and on behalf of America’s children.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Resistance, Vouchers

Jane Mayer: Who Is Betsy DeVos?

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
15

Jane Mayer is the New Yorker writer whose latest book is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

 

She wrote a short bio of Betsy DeVos, whose family she has studied, in that they are billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. We all need to know more about her because Trump has chosen her to be the next Secretary of Education, although she is not an educator. She is a major donor to the Michigan Republican party and perhaps the biggest donor to voucher programs in the nation.

 

It would be hard to find a better representative of the “donor class” than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her father-in-law, Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.1 billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees at the Kochs’ donor summits, and as contributors to the brothers’ political ventures. In 2010, Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two “great partners” who had contributed a million dollars or more to the tens of millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that year’s campaign cycle.

 

While the DeVoses are less well known than the Kochs, they have played a similar role in bankrolling the rightward march of the Republican Party. Starting in 1970, the DeVos family, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, began directing at least two hundred million dollars into funding what was then called “The New Right.” The family supported conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; academic organizations such as the Collegiate Studies Institute, which funded conservative publications on college campuses; and the secretive Council on National Policy, which the Times called “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” The Council’s membership list, which was kept secret, included leaders of the Christian right, such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly, and anti-tax and pro-gun groups….

 

In 1980, the DeVos family contributed heavily to the election of Ronald Reagan, and DeVos, Sr., was named the finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Two years later, he was removed, after calling the brutal 1982 recession a “cleansing process,” and insisting that anyone who was unemployed simply didn’t want to work. That same year, DeVos and his Amway co-founder, Jay Van Andel, were charged with criminal tax fraud in Canada. Eventually, Amway pleaded guilty and paid fines of twenty-five million dollars, and the criminal charges against DeVos and his partner were dropped. …

 

The marriage of Dick DeVos to Betsy Prince only increased the family’s wealth and power. Her father, Edgar Prince, had made a fortune in auto-parts manufacturing, selling his company for $1.35 billion in cash, in 1996. Her brother Erik founded Blackwater, the private military company that the government infamously contracted to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its mercenaries killed more than a dozen civilians in 2007.

 

DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach the wall between church and state on education, among other issues.* (The Washington Post reports that Betsy DeVos has been an elder at Mars Hill, in Grand Rapids.) Betsy, who served as the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party in the late nineties and again in the early aughts, spent more than two million dollars of the family’s money on a failed school-vouchers referendum in 2000, which would have allowed Michigan residents to use public funds to pay for tuition at religious schools. The family then spent thirty-five million dollars, in 2006, on Dick DeVos’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat Jennifer Granholm, then the Democratic governor of the state. After that campaign, the DeVos family doubled down on political contributions and support for conservative Christian causes. Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos’s mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.

 

Think of the role of the U.S. Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos.

 

Will it issue a bullying curriculum? How to do it? How to avoid getting caught? What excuse to use if you are caught?

 

Will it issue advice on how to avoid becoming homosexual? Will it compile a list of providers of “conversion therapists” for students who are gay? Will it advise teachers on how to spot gay students and how to punish them?

 

Will DeVos lobby to bring back prayer in the schools? But only Christian prayer, of course.

 

Lots of challenges ahead if she is confirmed.

 

Join the campaign to stop her from being confirmed. Write your senators and urge them to vote NO on DeVos. She is not qualified or fit to be Secretary of Education.

 

This is not a job for someone who despises public schools and does not respect the traditional separation between church and state.

 

 

 

 

Categories Academic Freedom, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Trump

Detroit Free Press: How the DeVos Family Bought the Michigan GOP and Stiffed the Children of Detroit

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
13

Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, wrote a blistering article about the DeVos family’s purchase of the Republican members of the Michigan legislature in return for their abandonment of any oversight of Detroit’s woeful charter schools.

 

The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.

 

 

The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.

 

There’s nothing more difficult than proving quid pro quos in politics, the instances in which favor is returned for specific monetary support.

 

But look at the amounts involved, and consider the DeVos’ near-sole interest in the issue of school choice. It’s a fool’s errand to imagine a world in which the family’s deep pockets haven’t skewed the school debate to the favor of their highly financed lobby.

 

And in this case, it was all done to the detriment of children in the City of Detroit.

 

Deep pockets, long arms

 

Back in March, the Senate voted to place charter schools under the same authority as public schools in the city, for quality control and attention to population need and balance, in line with a plan that had been in the works for more than a year, endorsed and promoted by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.

 

But when the bills moved to the state House, lawmakers gutted that provision, returning a bill to the Senate that preserved the free-for-all charter environment that has locked Detroit in an educational morass for two decades. After less than a week of debate, the Senate caved.

 

Even then, several legislators complained that the influence of lobbyists, principally charter school lobbyists, was overwhelming substantive debate. The effort was intense, they said, and unrelenting.

 

Now we know what was at stake.

 

Five days later, several members of the DeVos family made the maximum allowable contributions to the Michigan Republican Party, a total of roughly $180,000.

 

The next day, DeVos family members made another $475,000 in contributions to the party.

 

It was the beginning of a spending spree that would swell to $1.45 million in contributions to the party and to individual candidates by the end of July, according to an analysis by the Michigan Campaign Finance Network…

 

The legislation the DeVos family bought preserves a unique-in-the-nation style of charter school experimentation in Detroit.

 

If I wanted to start a school next year, all I’d need to do is get the money, draw up a plan and meet a few perfunctory requirements.

 

I’d then be allowed to operate that school, at a profit if I liked, without, practically speaking, any accountability for results. As long as I met the minimal state code and inspection requirements, I could run an awful school, no better than the public alternatives, almost indefinitely.

 

That’s what has happened in Detroit since the DeVos family helped push the charter law into existence 20 years ago.

 

On average, the schools don’t perform on state and national tests much better than public schools. A few outliers have reached remarkable heights. A few have done much worse. And charter advocates have become crafty liars in the selling of their product.

 

They’ll crow, for instance, that nearly twice as many of their kids do as well on national math assessments as the public schools. What they don’t tout are the numbers, which show the public schools are 8%, and the charters at 15%.

 

Regardless of outcome, none of the charter school establishment has been subject of a formal oversight and review that would reward the best actors and improve the worst.

 

Education should always be about children. But in Michigan, children’s education has been squandered in the name of a reform “experiment,” driven by ideologies that put faith in markets, alone, as the best arbiters of quality, and so heavily financed by donors like the DeVos clan that nearly no other voices get heard in the educational conversation.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Mercedes Schneider: Why DFER Praised Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
23

It seemed odd to see that Democrats for Education Reform praised the nomination of Betsy DeVos, the hard-right crusader for vouchers and for unregulated, unaccountable charter schools.

 

Why would they do that? Why would any progressive Democratic group (ho, ho) endorse a woman known for her support of anti-gay, anti-progressive, pro-evangelical, white Christian causes?

 

Mercedes Schneider explains: DeVos gives money to DFER. Not a lot, by DeVos standards. To right-wing groups, they give millions. To DFER, not so much. They sell out cheap. They praise a woman who is by no means a progressive, appointed by a president-elect in league with white supremacists and neo-Nazis–and call themselves “Democrats for Educational Reform.” Ironic. Sad. Embarrassing. Absurd. What would you call it?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Trump

Nancy Flanagan: DeVos and the Hoax of Charter Schools in Michigan

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2016 //
9

Nancy Flanagan, retired NBCT teacher and current blogger, explains in a comment what has happened in Michigan, where she lives:

 

 
I live in Michigan, where the charter movement was an outgrowth of Betsy DeVos’s inability to get a voucher law through, resulting in her turning to charter schools (DeVos family paid–twice!–to put failed voucher initiatives on the ballot). Initially, 25 years ago, the goal was conversion charters–making Christian (not Catholic) education free for white parents in western Michigan, by putting up a new sign and moving Bible Study classes to the end of the day, as an “elective.” A few education progressives took advantage of the law to start high-tech schools (very sexy, at the time), including one in Henry Ford Museum. Charters were all about serving the privileged kids and the promising kids, with new, out-of-the-box thinking.

 

It wasn’t until the DFER Democrats came along, promoting charters as a “civil rights” initiative (just about the time the admin turned over), that charters could also be positioned as a cheap and promising strategy for “saving” kids in troubled urban districts. Connecting charters to the civil rights movement was a brilliant (although utterly failed) strategy, because the charter model produced nothing of consequence in urban education, except financial malfeasance.

 

People who live in states where charters are very limited and relatively new immediately perceive–because we have plenty of evidence now– all the things that are wrong with the charter movement. You have to go to a state where the policy has been in place for 25 years–like Michigan, which has 300+ charter schools–to see what advanced-stage charter syndrome looks like.

 

Jay Mathews is just stuck in the past, following an old (but seductive) narrative. And he has plenty of company–witness the terrible, deceptive coverage of education (and the policies of major candidates) in the 2016 election.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Hoax, Michigan, Privatization

DFER Congratulates DeVos, Enemy of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2016 //
48

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) issued a statement congratulating Betsy DeVos on her selection by Donald Trump to be Secretary of Education. The statement expressed the hope that Trump might “disavow” his hateful rhetoric. Note that the DFER statement does not mention vouchers, which is DeVos’ most cherished goal, nor does it acknowledge that DeVos paid out $1.5 million to Michigan legislators to block ANY oversight of charter schools. Nor does it refer to Michigan’s for-profit charters, which are 80% of all charters in the state. Nor does it make any mention of public schools, which enroll 94% of all public school children (excluding those in religious and independent schools, which are about 10% of the total).

 

The reformers are in a pickle. They can’t claim fealty to Trump, because they pretend to be Democrats. But Trump has embraced the reformer agenda, lock, stock and barrel. This statement is one way of handling their dilemma: embrace DeVos–a figure who finances the far-right and wants completely unregulated, unaccountable choice, and simultaneously chide Trump for his hateful rhetoric. Pretend to be Democrats while saluting her. Search for any gift she ever made to a real civil rights group to offset the tens of millions the DeVos has invested in rightwing groups that are hostile to equity. Let’s watch to see what other “reformers” come up with, now that Trump and DeVos are the new face of “reform” and do not hide their desire to jettison public schools.

 

 

New York, NY – In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) President Shavar Jeffries released the following statement:

 

“DFER congratulates Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.

 

“However, DFER remains deeply concerned by much of the President-elect’s education agenda, which proposes to cut money from Title I and to eliminate the federal role on accountability. These moves would undermine progress made under the Obama administration to ensure all children have access to good schools. In addition, our children are threatened by many of the President-elect’s proposals, such as kicking 20 million families off of healthcare, deporting millions of Dreamers, and accelerating stop-and-frisk practices. We hope that Mrs. Devos will be a voice that opposes policies that would harm our children, both in the schoolhouse and the families and communities in which our children live.

 

“Finally, regardless of one’s politics, Trump’s bigoted and offensive rhetoric has assaulted our racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, causing millions of American children to perceive that they are less than full members of our communities. We hope Mrs. DeVos will push the President-elect to disavow such rhetoric.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Trump

Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos and the Value of Child Labor

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
20

Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family give generously to many charities and think tanks, mostly skewed to libertarian, free-market, white Christian causes. One of their recipients is the Acton Institute. The Acton Institute has recently gained a lot of unwanted attention because of an article posted on its blog called “Bring Back Child Labor.” The post got so much attention that the author changed the title to “Work is a Gift Our Kids Can Handle.” In it, the author bemoans the fact that children don’t have the experience and the hardy character that is gained from working.

 

The author Joseph Sunde believes that what children are lacking today is the discipline of work. He quotes another author (Jeffrey Tucker) who recommends working in a fast-food restaurant, for example, as good character formation. Sunde asks:

 

In our policy and governing institutions, what if we put power back in the hands of parents and kids, dismantling the range of excessive legal restrictions, minimum wage fixings, and regulations that lead our children to work less and work later? (This could be something as simple as letting a 14-year-old work a few hours a week at a fast-food restaurant or grocery store.)

 

Now, I didn’t have time to do due diligence on the Acton Institute, but fortunately Peter Greene did.

 

He writes:

 

Acton is a member of the State Policy Network, the Heritage Foundation’s loose collection of right-wing and libertarian thinky tanks, but unlike some of their strictly political brethren, Acton is all about the religious aspects. While they don’t quite rise to the level of “greed is good,” they do rise to the level of “capitalism is God’s most blessed way of sorting out the world.” (My words, not theirs) The Institute puts out several print publications, including Religion & Liberty and the Journal of Markets & Morality….

 

Yes, coal mining and middle school football– pretty much the same thing, especially if your program involves playing games that last ten hours a day, seven days a week. Yes, Carnegie, Rockefeller and other Giants of Industry used to stand in front of their workers and declare, “I really value you as people,” and then finish with “So why would you want me to pay you more money?” Yes, we all remember those stories where Rockefeller and Trump and DeVos sent their children off at a young age to work in the mines because they wanted their children to be ennobled.

 

This is, simply speaking, nuts. This is one step short of saying, “Slaves were actually quite happy in their lives, with a noble purpose to fulfill.”

 

Sunde goes on to say that in modern times, the ennobling world of unskilled labor doesn’t require twelve hour workdays and unsafe conditions. And Tucker fills in the rest:

 

“If kids were allowed to work and compulsory school attendance was abolished, the jobs of choice would be at Chick-Fil-A and WalMart. And they would be fantastic jobs too, instilling in young people a work ethic, which is the inner drive to succeed, and an awareness of attitudes that make enterprise work for all.”

 

Right. Rich folks are making their kids work for minimum wage at WalMart all the time, so they’ll be better people with strong work ethics.

 

Look, I am a big fan of work. My dream world is not one where everyone sits around on their ass and the money just rolls in by magic. I will even confess to a bias, a tendency to think less of people like Trump or DeVos who have never actually done any real work, but have gotten rich by playing games with other people’s money and the fruits of other people’s labor.

 

But this is some Grade A Bettercrat bullshit. The line of reasoning for DeVos and her friends is simple– some people in this world really are better than others, and those people should be in charge, should be making decisions without being hemmed in by government and certainly not by uppity Lessers who form unions and otherwise thwart the proper order of things. Capitalism is God’s way of showing us who the Betters are (they’re the ones with the money) and so any government mandates that force us to spend our money on Those People– well, that’s not just bad politics or bad economics, but it’s immoral. The state has no business thwarting God’s will. Not that the Betters will turn their backs on the Lessers– not at all. It is a Better’s job to help Lessers find their rightful place, so that they can be happy in the work that God has made them for, which is to serve the interests and needs of their Betters. Our modern society is contentious and unhappy because government, often in the hands of evil bolsheviks and their ilk, has upended God’s natural order of things, making everyone unhappy. If we could just get the Lesser children back in the mines and their parents working quietly for whatever their Betters think they should get, everything would be okay again. (That’s why we call it Right To Work– we are re-establishing Lessers’ right to work the way nature intended them to.) And if we can’t get them back in the mines as children, at least we can put them in schools where they learn hard work and discipline and compliance and, God help them, grit, because that’s what the children of Those People will need (and who knows– every once in a while, we may find one who is made of Better Stuff and deserves to be elevated by Betters’ largesse). The only Civil Right people need is the right to happily know their proper place. America would once again be great.

 

This is what we have headed for DC. Lord knows, it’s not a brand new philosophy, and it has been informing plenty of ed reform up till now. But now it’s likely to become a steamroller that pushes aside well-meaning reformsters (yes, I think there are such things) and crushes the notion of a one-tiered education serving all American students– as if they were not divided into Betters and Lessers.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Childhood

Jersey Jazzman: What Can We Learn About Betsy DeVos from Her Husband’s Charter School

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
5

Betsy DeVos likes to point with pride to her husband’s charter school. See, she implies, I know what I am talking about. My husband started a charter school called the West Michigan Aviation Academy, located at the Gerald Ford Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the DeVos family lives.

 

Jersey Jazzman found that there is another side to the story. 

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school has one of the lowest shares of special education students in its county.

 

Understand that Betsy DeVos is absolutely fine with this. In her opinion, we would be better off segregating children who “struggle” from those who do not….

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school enrolls relatively few Limited English Proficient students….

 

We can debate whether it’s a good idea to isolate many of these students from the rest of the community. But we all have to agree — unless we’re totally ignorant of the realities of school finance — that schools serving more students with special needs must have more resources. One would think, therefore, that a school like WMAA, with its relatively small special education and LEP populations, wouldn’t be spending nearly as much as the other high schools in the area.

 

One would be wrong….

 

Dick DeVos’s charter school spends more on salaries for all employees per pupil than almost every other high school in its county. Hmm… well, Betsy DeVos says she wants to pay “good” teachers more. Maybe all that extra money is going into instructional salaries…

 

Or not….

 

Despite its high spending on total salaries, Dick DeVos’s charter school spending on instructional salaries is fairly typical. Which leads me to wonder: where is all that extra money going?

 

It is not going to pay highly experienced teachers. Like other charter schools in Michigan, DeVos’s charter school has a large proportion of inexperienced teachers.

 

Teachers gain the most in effectiveness over the first few years of their careers; yet nearly half of the teachers at Dick DeVos’s charter school have less than three years of experience. 

 

The takeaway:

 

High spending schools, enrolling proportionally fewer students with special needs, taught by inexperienced teachers. That’s Betsy DeVos’s vision for American education — just ask her husband.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, English Language Learners, Funding, Privatization, Special Education, Teachers

Yes, Betsy DeVos Can Privatize Large Numbers of Public Schools, with the Help of Red States

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
50

Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, attempting to assuage fears that Betsy DeVos would privatize American schools. If she tries to promote privatization, she is likely to face “disappointment and frustration,” as Carey put it. He believes that the decentralization of American public education will prevent her from imposing privatization. I disagree with Carey, because we have seen state after state, district after district, where “reformers” have passed legislation for charters and vouchers, intended to undermine public schools without the consent of the governed. Massachusetts and Georgia, the only states that voted on whether to have more charters, decisively voted NO. The point of Carey’s article seems to be to persuade readers that charters are swell and vouchers will never happen, that DeVos can’t change much, so relax, privatization is not a threat. Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Trust me.

 

The New America Foundation, Carey’s employer, has received nearly $10 million from the Gates Foundation since 2009. Not surprisingly, it regularly defends charter schools and the Common Core standards. It  has even urged colleges to adopt the standards now.

 

 

Carey previously worked at Education Sector and Education Trust, both Gates-funded and charter-friendly. He tells us that “charter schools are public schools, open to all, accountable in varying degrees to public authorities, and usually run by nonprofit organizations.” Savvy readers of this blog know that charter schools declare that they are private organizations whenever they are sued or when their teachers try to form a union, but they are “public” when it is time to collect government money. They choose their students. They exclude children with severe disabilities and English-language-learners. They kick out troublesome students. In many states, charters are deregulated, unsupervised, and non-accountable. Carey has written favorably about the for-profit Alt-School chain of technology-based private schools (which would be eligible for Trump’s vouchers). Carey joined Eli Broad and every national “reform” group (including TFA, 50CAN, DFER, etc.) to endorse the Obama administration’s plan for “reforming” teacher education. After the 2008 election, he called on Democrats to embrace such “progressive” reforms as charter schools and test-based accountability.*

 

Carey says not to worry about DeVos’ passion for privatization because most states won’t be able to afford the cost of a universal voucher system. Trump says he will free up $20 billion from existing federal programs, but expects states to chip in another $110 billion. That won’t happen, Carey says, because “states don’t have that kind of money lying around.” Local school districts will resist the diversion of their property taxes. And besides, Betsy DeVos’ state laboratory of free-market reform–Michigan–is hardly a success. 80% of the charters there operate for profit, and Detroit is still a mess, despite a Wild West of charters and competition. Nor have vouchers proved to be a success.

 

Larded throughout the article is subtle praise for charters. He points out that expansion of charters was voted down in Massachusetts “despite strong evidence that the state’s well-supervised charters produce superior results for low-income and minority schoolchildren.” No mention of the reason that liberal Massachusetts rejected charters: the districts with charters did not want to sacrifice their public schools to the growth of charters, and the districts without charters wanted to protect their public schools. Organized groups of parents rang doorbells and told their friends and neighbors to support their public schools. The defenders of public education were outspent 2-1 by out-of-state billionaires like the Waltons and Michael Bloomberg, but they defeated the charter question by a vote of 62-38%.

 

Carey exemplifies the new line of “reformers”: charters run by private corporations and private boards are “public” but vouchers are a bad idea. The problem with this logic is that once you start down the road of school choice, it is hard to know when or how to stop. The Obama administration’s advocacy for charter schools greased the wheels for vouchers, some form of which now exist in about half the states.

 

Yes, we do have to worry about DeVos and Trump’s privatization agenda. If the state is a deep red state, with a Republican governor and a Tea Party legislature, like Indiana and many more, the state may grab whatever the feds offer and supply vouchers to anyone who wants them to use for any purpose, including home schooling and low-quality religious schools. DeVos may open the floodgates to unregulated, for-profit charters, allowing anyone to open a charter who wants to, regardless of their experience or qualifications (like Florida, Michigan, and Nevada). School choice does not have a record of success; charters get mixed results, at best, and vouchers have a record of failure. Even when they produce higher graduation rates, they simultaneously have astonishingly high attrition rates.

 

Join with the Network for Public Education to fight the DeVos nomination. Democrats, Republicans, and independents must stand together in opposition to this raid on public money. Separation of church and state is part of our heritage as Americans. Public schools that enroll all children–not just those they want–are part of our democracy.

 

When the federal government turns against public education, as the Trump administration promises to do, that is unprecedented. We don’t need to be soothed and promised that its threats to public education are not real. They are real. They build on the opening to school choice created by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the think tanks that they have underwritten as part of their “policy advocacy.”

 

Parents and educators and concerned citizens must mobilize to oppose the Trump privatization agenda.

 

*I had my own unfortunate brush with Carey in 2011; I didn’t realize he was a key player in the “reform” movement, and I agreed to an interview. He published a mean-spirited screed about me, taking pot shots at my scholarly works and claiming that I changed my philosophy of education because Joel Klein did not give my partner a job. At the time, I was closeted, and Carey managed to “out” me. My partner already had a high-level job at the Board of Education when Klein arrived and was not in need of a job. So long as she worked at the Board, I was constrained from criticizing Klein or Bloomberg, whose policies of disruption did little to improve education. Once she retired, I was free to write and speak my mind. Yes, they helped me to see the deep flaws of corporate reform, of putting non-educators in charge of schools, of intimidating experienced educators, of trying to run schools like a business, of making test scores the basis for all decisions, but not for the reason Carey and Klein asserted.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers
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