Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, has written the first review of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S SCHOOLS.
He liked it!
He calls it “spiritually uplifting” and describes it (accurately) as a “fight to save the commons.”
Enjoy!
Mercedes Schneider writes here about Betsy DeVos and her not-innovative idea of a “backpack full of cash.”
Betsy used the metaphor to refer snidely to a disguised voucher. It is a common metaphor among rightwing advocates of privatization. Betsy didn’t realize she was using the title of a popular documentary, shown in hundreds of communities across the country as a warning about privatization.
(If you want to book a screening of Backpack Full of Cash, go to the website.)
The film-makers, Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow, borrowed the term from choice advocate Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, who has dreamed for years about defunding public schools by strapping the child’s cash in a backpack and sending the child to a charter school, religious school, cyber charter or home school, the less regulated the better. Anything will do for the backpack of cash except a public school.
Betsy didn’t know the etymology of the term but loved the idea of taking money away from public schools and giving it to any entrepreneur or grifter who wanted it.
Read the post to learn the not-sad fate of the rightwing’s favorite bad idea.
Nancy Bailey explains here that if you are dissatisfied with your public school, blame the Disruption Machine, the ones who call themselves “reformers,” like Betsy DeVos.
They have run public schools into the ground for the decades.
They have imposed their malevolent ideas and policies on public schools, with no accountability for their mistakes.
She writes:
Frustrated by public schools? Look no further than the corporate education reformers and what they have done to public education.
Education Secretary DeVos and her corporate billionaire friends have been chipping away at the fabric of democratic public schools for over thirty years!
The problems we see in public schools today are largely a result of what they did to schools, the high-stakes testing and school closures, intentional defunding, ugly treatment of teachers, lack of support staff, segregated charter schools, vouchers that benefit the wealthy, Common Core State Standards, intrusive online data collection, and diminishing special education services.
Big business waged a battle on teachers and their schools years ago. The drive was to create a business model to profit from tax dollars. Now they want to blame teachers for their corporate-misguided blunders! It’s part of their plan to make schools so unpleasant, parents will have no choice but to leave….
I student taught in an elementary school in Detroit, in 1973. Schools were certainly not perfect, but my modest school did a good job.
The third-grade teachers were excellent reading teachers. They organized rotating small groups of students based on their skill needs decoding letters and words. There were no data walls. No child appeared to compare themselves unfavorably to other children.
Students were encouraged to read, did free reading, lots of writing, and had access to plenty of books. The school had a nice library with a librarian who often read beautiful and funny stories to the class. They spent time studying social studies, science, and art and music. Teachers worked closely with the PTA and reached out to parents.
There was no testing obsession. Students didn’t fear failing third grade. They were continually learning, and most liked school. There were twenty-two students in the class.
Teachers did their own assessment, and they discussed the results with each other at their grade level meetings. The school had a counselor and I believe a nurse stationed at the school. We worried about the students and addressed concerns about issues like why some showed up without mittens in the cold weather.
Students did class projects to help remember what they learned in their subjects. For science, we created a rocket out of a huge cardboard box. We painted it and spent time studying the solar system. Children took turns sitting in the rocket pretending they were astronauts.
This school had an excellent Learning Center where teachers could share materials to cut down on costs. They had a nice collection of resources for every subject.
My supervising teacher was kind, well-prepared, and tough. She expected daily written lesson plans which she reviewed with me before I taught. She was an excellent mentor!
Where’s that school today? I wish I could go back and visit, but it closed years ago, razed and turned into a housing development. It was shuttered like 225 other public schools in Detroit!
Peter Greene writes here about the budget approved by Congress for the Department of Education.
There is good news and bad news. Peter Greene thinks it’s mostly good news. I’d say there is both.
Congress did not appropriate a penny for Betsy DeVos’s top priority, her $5 billion request for vouchers (aka “education freedom scholarships”). Sorry, Betsy, nada. Even Republican Congressmen and Senators represent public school parents.
But Congress appropriated $440 million for Betsy’s charter school slush fund, otherwise known as the federal Charter Schools Program. The CSP is a swamp of fraud, waste, and abuse, as the Network for Public Education demonstrated in its “Asleep at the Wheel” and “Still Asleep at the Wheel” reports, which showed that more than $1 billion in federal funds were wasted on charters that either never opened or closed not long after opening. The House (controlled by Democrats) wanted to cut CSP to $400 million (which is $400 million too much), but the Senate (controlled by Republicans) negotiated it back to level funding. The CSP was created by the Clinton administration in 1994 to help start-ups, mom-and-pop or teacher-led charters that needed some extra funding. Betsy has turned it into a big fat plum for corporate charter chains like KIPP and IDEA, which are not start-ups and which are already richly endowed with funding from billionaires, most of them right-wingers. At present, the federal government is the single biggest funded of charter schools in the nation, even in states that don’t want them or need them, like New Hampshire, where Betsy gave the state $46 million to double the number of charters, but the state legislative fiscal commission rejected the money. Congress showed its lack of concern for accountability; that’s for the little people.
Peter Greene writes:
Trump asked for a 10% cut to the department and the elimination of twenty-nine programs. That didn’t happen (though it’s worth noting that many Trump appointees like DeVos have figured out that you can cut spending in your department by simply letting positions stand empty).
There is more money for Title I. It’s about a 3% increase, while Democratic candidates are calling for increases of 200% to 300%.
The Charter Schools Program– the fund that has wasted a billion dollars on charter school waste and fraud– will stay art current levels, with neither the boost the GOP wanted nor the cut that Democrats called for.
And special ed funding will once again not be increased to its full, required level. This makes forever years for Congress to stiff the states on the granddaddy of all unfunded mandates. Thanks a lot, Congress.
Peter Greene writes here about Erica Green’s excellent coverage of Betsy DeVos’s testimony to Congress about student debt.
He says you have to pay close attention to her words to understand that she is not greedy, she is not dumb; she knows exactly what she is doing.
He writes:
“Here’s an absolutely DeVosian quote from the proceedings:
“I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
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| Ah yes– the smirk. |
“This is DeVos– she knows what’s right, and she’s going to stand up for it. And’s what is right is that Those People shouldn’t be able to get away with not paying their debts. Those People should not be allowed to stiff their Betters. Because you know that Those People are probably lying about how badly they were hurt, anyway, because Those People are always trying to get things they don’t deserve. This “anyone who raises their hand and files a claim” characterization that DeVos has been using is such a flip way to dismiss the damage done by for-profit collges, an d here it matters what DeVos doesn’t say– she doesn’t say that there are people out there who played by the rules, tried to bootstrap themselves to a better life through education, and got fleeced, and we should provide those people some real relief. She has never seriously acknowledged that harm.
“But that takes us to the other DeVosian value that’s on display here.
“Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.
“Businesses fleecing customers is not outrageous. What’s outrageous is government interfering with the operations and practices of businesses. There is an extra layer of irony here– the Obama administration actually was pretty damn slow to take any useful action against Corinthian, and even helped bail them out for a time, and any good Obama-bashing Trumpian might hammer that point home, but DeVos can’t see that because for her there is no greater sin than interfering with the operation of a business.
”She’s made variations of that point again and again, all the way back to the confirmation hearing when she couldn’t imagine any misbehavior that would prompt her, as a government official, to step in and say “Stop!” Businesses matter more than people.”
Michigan has been Betsy DeVos’ Petri dish for school choice for 20 years. The state theoretically has no for-profit charters but in reality, 80% of its charters are run by for-profit management companies.
Michigan also has the largest number of charters that received millions from the federal Charter Schools Program but never opened. These are “ghost schools.” Carol Burris identified them in the NPE report Asleep at the Wheel.
Reporter Allison Donahue investigated to see where the money went.
The study highlighted how the money was spent at four of Michigan’s “ghost schools”: The Harris Academy, The Great Lakes Anchor Academy, Cultivating Growth and Warren Classical Academy.
Although the inspiration to open these charters differs from developer to developer, a common thread was found within these ghost schools’ invoices ─ for-profit consultants and education management organizations.
Betsy DeVos gave Michigan another $47 million to add more charters, but the state board of education rejected the grant. However the state attorney general said the state education Department was required to disperse the funds.
DeVos wants more charters-in Michigan, Alabama, New Hampshire, Texas, everywhere— and as the saying goes in D.C., she is shoveling the money out the door as fast as she can.
Needed or not, here come more charters!
Betsy DeVos gave New Hampshire $46 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to double the number of charter schools in the state. She uses the federal funding of $440 million as her slush fund to rapidly expand charters.
[CORRECTION: I ORIGINALLY WROTE THAT NH REJECTED $25 MILLION; THAT WAS AN ERROR. NH REJECTED $46 MILLION.]
In 2018, Democrats won control of the state legislature.
This morning, the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee voted 7-3 to table the federal grant. The members of the committee were concerned about the impact of more charters on existing public schools.
New Hampshire is experiencing declining enrollments as the population ages and birth rates decline. It is an odd time to increase the number of schools competing for a shrinking pool of students.
Betsy DeVos awarded $25 million to Alabama to grow some charter schools. She gave the money to an organization called “New Schools for Alabama,” which is supposed to launch 15 new charters over the next five years. Where there is money, there will always be takers, even where there is no need. This year, two charters are in the incubation stage. One is in Perry County, which has only two K-12 public schools, declining population, and low funding. The charter will be a nail in the coffin for one of those two public schools.
Larry Lee writes about what Betsy DeVos has done:
And if one number can illustrate the plight of this school system it is 137. That is where the system ranks in terms of local revenue per pupil. Which means out of 137 systems in the state, it is dead last. By comparison, its neighbor to the west, Marengo County, gets $1,300 more per student from local sources than Perry does.
Andre Perry led a charter chain in New Orleans. He became disillusioned. As a black scholar, he questions the Walton-funded effort to portray black support for charters as monolithic, which it is not.
Perry wrote in response to the controversy that occurred when pro-charter demonstrators disrupted a speech by Elizabeth Warren in Atlanta. He is aware of the white Republican money behind the demand for more charters.
He wrote:
Warren needs to learn from black voices — but the charter school movement is not ours to defend.
Organizations such as the charter school advocacy group Families for Excellent Schools have orchestrated statewide campaigns using dark money to influence state ballots to increase the number of charter schools, hiding who’s actually behind the movement. The Associated Press reported in December 2018 that an advocacy group that received $1.5 million from the Walton Family Foundation, one of the biggest funders of education reform, paid for 150, mostly black parents from Memphis to travel to Cincinnati two years prior to protest at a meeting of the NAACP. The parents sought to lobby against an NAACP proposal — which the organization passed despite the protests — to call for a moratorium on charter schools. They denied that the Walton Family Foundation asked them to carry out the protest.
This political season, black people cannot afford to be human shields for white leaders who don’t have the legitimacy to enter black communities on their own.
Perry notes that most Democratic candidates, notably Sanders and Warren, have abandoned charters.
He writes:
This reversal of position by Democrats is a sign that members of the party are listening to black communities….
Over the course of more than two decades, charter school expansion resulted in a significant loss in black-held jobs and a reduction in black political power in several black-majority cities. Black teachers were fired en masse in New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Newark, N.J., decimating the black middle class there.
Hundreds of millions of dollars directed towards electing pro-charter candidates ultimately empowered Republicans in many states. The pro-charter group Students First realized that its funding of Republican candidates had backfired. The association of the charter cause with the Republic party lead to the defeat of pro-charter proposals. Democratic voters showed they will not support movements that bolster the Republican Party — the same party that refuses to check Trump’s blatant racism. Democrats who support the idea of charter schools should make it clear to Republicansthat they will not tolerate a charter system that offers improved academic performance for some black students only by harming the communities in which those students live.
However, Democrat reformers developed a bad habit of accepting this Faustian bargain, and staying silent in red states on issues like jail expansion, cuts to higher education and attacks on organized labor because dissent ran the risk of slowing the proliferation of charters. Yes, black families want and need choice, but the current charter school movement is too tightly braided with Republican causes; a defense of one is a defense of the other.
To embrace charter schools in 2020 is to embrace Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump and other Republicans who stand to gain more politically from charter support than black communities have gained in jobs and educational benefits. Black kids lose when Democratic educational reformers act like Republicans.
Perry quotes the EdNext poll, noting that the publication is “pro-reform.” It is more accurate to acknowledge that EdNext (on whose board I once served) is a very conservative, pro-charter, pro-voucher publication funded by rightwing foundations. Frankly, polls about charters are worthless because most people admit when asked that they aren’t sure what a “charter school” is. If they don’t know what a charter school is, how can their view—positive or negative—signify anything?
Perry is right to point out that the Dark Money behind charters has a different agenda than most black parents. The Waltons and DeVos and their allies in ALEC want to bust teachers’ unions and privatize public schools. Perry is right to peer behind the curtain and see whose interest is served by the well-funded attacks on public schools.
He writes:
The funders of charter schools continuously put black parents and teachers in the position of fighting against their own interests. White-led philanthropy and education groups will eventually abandon public policy experiments when it is no longer popular, politically expedient or, in some cases, lucrative. For-profit charters are in education ostensibly for the money.
Some black charter leaders feel they must defend the schools because black children attend them. But we don’t need to fall into that trap. We can defend black children and workers without defending charter schools. Black people need systemic change. We can’t allow the cry for charters to drown out the demands for school financing reform, better work conditions, higher teacher pay, universal pre-K, free college, teachers’ training and recruitment programs, stronger labor protections and workforce housing initiatives.
Politico reports that Betsy DeVos thanked her ideological bedfellow, ALEC, for its help in framing proposals to defund public schools (aka vouchers, opportunity scholarships, tax credits, education savings accounts, a rose by any other name, etc.).
ALEC is the far-right extremist libertarian organization that hates public schools, gun control, unions, environmental regulations, and anything else that infringes on the right of corporations to pursue profits without regard to consequences. ALEC is also a strong supporter of charter schools.
DEVOS IS SCHEDULED TO THANK ALEC FOR EDUCATION FREEDOM SCHOLARSHIP SUPPORT in a speech to the council’s conference in Arizona today, the Education Department said. The proposal, which has found little traction in Congress, would create a new $5 billion federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations to pay for students to attend private schools or expand their public education options.
— DeVos is a longtime friend to ALEC’s group of conservative state legislators. The secretary’s addressed the group’s conferences before, and drawn protests with a push for local control of education issues.
— Arizona unionists have planned extended protests at ALEC’s conference, and have been aware that DeVos would be visiting.
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