Archives for category: Betsy DeVos
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Politico: Trouble Staffing the Department of Education

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2017 //
11

You have heard of rats deserting a sinking ship. Have you ever heard of anyone trying to get on a sinking ship?

Here is more about why all those offices are empty at the Department of Education.

Politico reports:

EDUCATION DEPARTMENT HIRING HITS A WALL: The task of staffing the Education Department with fresh political faces appears to have hit a wall. Dozens of individuals have dropped out, frustrated by the drawn-out, rigorous hiring process. Those in the pipeline are wondering what’s taking so long. And fewer folks are throwing their hats in the ring, doubting whether the Trump administration’s pledge to dramatically expand private school choice options for working class families will ultimately go anywhere, according to multiple sources plugged into the hiring process. “The White House looks so chaotic, I think people are starting to wonder if you will be able to do much” on education, one source told Pro Education’s Caitlin Emma.

– Amid the chaos, the Hill doesn’t seem interested in funding the president’s school choice budget proposals and it’s unclear if the White House will get behind a plan to expand private school choice through tax reform – a huge lift for Congress and the administration. Folks who support private school choice are “increasingly pessimistic,” the source said. “There still seems to be people in the pipeline that could get through. But it seems like no one new is getting in line.”

– Education Department press secretary Liz Hill said, “We are making progress on staffing and more announcements on are on the horizon soon. The notion that the secretary doesn’t have an agenda is ridiculous. The secretary is championing a robust agenda to reduce the federal role in education, expand school choice and empower parents, retool the Higher Education Act for the 21st Century, and modernize [Federal Student Aid] to better serve students and taxpayers. The secretary hears from those inside and outside the government who are excited about her agenda and are ready and willing to help advance it.”

– Political vacancies will make it more difficult for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to figure out and implement an agenda. At least a quarter of the Education Department’s political vacancies have been filled, but a number of potential hires have been held up, thwarted or vetoed by the White House or Education Department, sources say. The Office of Government Ethics, in particular, has presented enormous hurdles. For example, the rigorous financial expectations set out by the Office of Government Ethics prompted Allan Hubbard, an economic adviser during both Bush administrations, to drop out of the running for the Education Department’s No. 2 job in early June. Rumored names of a potential front-runner for that position have yet to surface.

– A lack of senior political hires has failed to attract other talent, compounding the problem, sources say. And the political hires now at the Education Department have way too much on their plate. President Donald Trump has only formally nominated two individuals for politically appointed, Senate-confirmable positions: Sen. Lamar Alexander aide Peter Oppenheim as assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs, and Florida attorney Carlos Muñiz as general counsel. Jim Blew, director of the education advocacy group, Student Success California, is the front-runner to become the Education Department’s assistant secretary of the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development – but has yet to be formally nominated.

– A White House spokesman declined to comment on personnel issues, but stressed the Trump administration’s education accomplishments to date. For example, the spokesman pointed to the president’s decision this week to donate his quarterly salary to the Education Department for a STEM-focused camp, among other things. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Secretary DeVos has increased stakeholder engagement and rolled back harmful restrictions to ensure America’s schools are helping students,” the spokesman said.

Categories Betsy DeVos

Why the Empty Offices at the U.S. Department of Education?

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2017 //
8

Stephen Dyer writes here about the curious fact that Trump and DeVos have failed to appoint any assistant secretaries in the Department of Education. His post includes a list of the agencies that are currently leaderless.

There is no Deputy Secretary, there is no Undersecretary. DeVos has assembled a few aides, but none that require Senate confirmation.

Dyer says this gives her a free hand to do whatever she wants. Of course, as Secretary, she would have the same free hand to do whatever she wants even if all the assistant secretaries were in place.

But there may be another reason to leave positions at ED empty:

For years now Republicans have made the Department of Education their favorite bureaucratic elimination target.

Even Rick Perry remembered he wanted to eliminate the Department during his infamous “Oops” moment during the 2012 debate season.

It appears that Trump has decided to let the Department wither on the vine, consolidate the power in the hand of a single person who is historically under qualified for the position and (like his comments on Obamacare this week), just let the Department die.

While I have certainly disagreed with federal interference in education policy over the years, I believe there is a role for the Department to play, especially when it comes to funding. Many areas of the country fund their education systems less effectively than others. The federal government can help equalize that difference to a great degree so that all Americans, regardless of where they live can achieve the American Dream.

After eight years of micromanagement by Arne Duncan (7 years) and John King (1 year), states will not miss the heavy hand of the feds.

DeVos’s slipshod review of state ESSA plans shows that she is not about to give up her desire to use the federal role to bully states and districts. But she is uniquely unqualified to tell any public school system what it should be doing. And the ESSA law says she should keep her hands off.

Before someone else points it out, I will note that the State Department is also running without leadership below the level of the Secretary Rex Tillerson. Perhaps Trump wants to eliminate the State Department too. Is Trump engaging in what Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state”?

Categories Betsy DeVos, U.S. Department of Education

Betsy DeVos Invests More Money in Neurocore, Which Claims to “Cure” Autism with BioFeedback

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2017 //
26

Michael Stratford of Politico reported that Betsy DeVos has enlarged her stake in a controversial company called Neurocore, which claims that its biofeedback methods cure a range of ills, including ADD and autism.

I don’t have a link to share with you. I read the story but don’t have a subscription.

On her financial disclosure form, DeVos acknowledged that she has an investment in Neurocore worth between $5 million-$25 million. In her latest purchase, she added between $250,000-$500,000. She stepped down as a member of the board but was not required to sell her shares. According to the New York Times, she and her husband are the chief investors in the company.

It is bizarre that DeVos was not required to divest her holdings in this company, which is a direct conflict of interest with her role as Secretary of Education. She oversees the spending of billions of dollars for special education. She signed an agreement that she would do nothing to affect her financial involvement in this company, but that is insufficient. The Secretary of Education should not hold stock in a company whose value will be affected by decisions she will inevitably make.

The reviews of the company and its claims by outside experts raise questions about DeVos’s judgment. Her refusal to divest her holdings raise questions about her ethics.

The New York Times contacted medical experts to inquire about Neurocore and determined that none of its studies have been peer reviewed.

A review of Neurocore’s claims and interviews with medical experts suggest its conclusions are unproven and its methods questionable.

Neurocore has not published its results in peer-reviewed medical literature. Its techniques — including mapping brain waves to diagnose problems and using neurofeedback, a form of biofeedback, to treat them — are not considered standards of care for the majority of the disorders it treats, including autism. Social workers, not doctors, perform assessments, and low-paid technicians with little training apply the methods to patients, including children with complex problems.

In interviews, nearly a dozen child psychiatrists and psychologists with expertise in autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., expressed caution regarding some of Neurocore’s assertions, advertising and methods.

The Washington Post sent a writer who had written a book on learning science to experience the program, then to check with medical experts. He was underwhelmed.

He wrote:

SO WHAT DOES IT SAY that our education secretary is backing Neurocore?

For one, it seems that feeble science doesn’t bother DeVos. The budget document released by her department on Tuesday emphasizes that education decisions should be informed by “reliable data, strong research, and rigorous evaluations.” But like her boss, President Trump, DeVos apparently isn’t one to let evidence get in the way of what she wants to do. A recent study of school vouchers by DeVos’s agency showed that one program dragged down math scores by as much as seven points. Still, DeVos champions voucher programs, dismissing her opponents this past week as “flat-earthers.”

We don’t yet have any indication that DeVos intends to introduce neurofeedback into the nation’s public schools. But her enormous investment in Neurocore is ethically inappropriate. It means she has a financial stake in a particular approach to education. Some brain training companies promote themselves specifically for the classroom, and a few K-12 schools have begun partnering with brain training companies. Oaks Christian School in California provides neurofeedback with the help of an outside vendor, and Universal Academy in Dallas recently signed a contract with the firm C8 Sciences (which promises that it “can close the achievement gap in low performing schools and enhance focus, memory, and self-control to greatly improve academic outcomes!”). For his part, Murrison denies that Neurocore has any plan to go into schools. But the company’s marketing clearly targets children — and their distressed parents.

And certainly the DeVos family has used its connections before to open doors for Neurocore. DeVos’s father-in-law owns the Orlando Magic, and the basketball team has hired a division of Neurocore “to reach performance levels not previously achieved,” according to the company. Quarterback Kirk Cousins’s brother works for Neurocore, and the Washington football player swears by neurofeedback. “I see brain training as being that next thing, the next frontier,” he says on one of the company’s promotional pages.

At the very least, DeVos appears to be dangerously naive about what it takes to help people learn — especially children with special needs.

He concluded that Neurocore is “a Trump University for people with cognitive struggles.”

Jan Resseger wrote in plain language that DeVos had invested in “quack medicine.”

It is a curious that a woman who is a multi-billionaire is still investing, still looking to get even richer. Five billion or so is not enough.

But it is downright alarming that the ethics officer at the U.S. Department of Education did not direct her to divest herself of her financial stake in this company, whose net worth is directly affected by the actions of the U.S. Secretary of Education.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Special Education

The New Republic: DeVos Is Making “School Choice” Toxic for Democrats

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2017 //
48

Graham Vyse, an editor at The New Republic, shows how Betsy DeVos has created a fissure within the Democratic party over school choice.

By her passionate advocacy for charters, vouchers, and every other alternative to public schools, she has put pro-school choice Democrats like Cory Booker into a bind. Booker has vociferously supported both charters and vouchers, yet as a Democrat with hopes for the future, felt compelled to vote against DeVos. It is somewhat amusing to watch him and others try to put distance between themselves and DeVos when she is carrying out the same ideas they have publicly espoused. Any Democrat who is aligned with DeVos on any part of her repugnant agenda should change parties.

“The ground definitely is more fertile,” said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. “I think President Trump’s support of choice does make it difficult. It might make people think twice about it, and especially DeVos’s selling of it…. You’re definitely starting to see a shift.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s education agenda and criticism from civil rights groups “might have made it easier for those who oppose charters to oppose them more vociferously.”

Brookings Institution fellow Jon Valant made a similar case in February, writing that “the Trump administration’s support of charters and choice may be distracting from—and contributing to—an emerging political threat to school choice programs, especially charter schools: renewed skepticism from Democrats.” In other words, with her extremist position on school choice, DeVos may be harming the very movement she helped build.

The recent report by the NAACP calling for regulation of charter schools is another straw in the wind, a very large straw, suggesting that the Democrats’ embrace of school choice is politically hazardous.

DeVos is a gift to those of us who have warned for years that privately managed charters is a decisive victory for privatization and a significant step away from democratically controlled public education.

The message of her tenure in office is that school choice is a radical rightwing strategy that defunds public schools.

She gives Democrats a new opportunity to separate themselves from the favorite cause of the Walton family, the Koch brothers, and the Republican party.

As the recent Democratic gubernatorial primary in Virginia showed, candidates who support public schools without qualification can energize their base of teachers and parents. Democrats who favor any form of privatization will be unable to call upon that base.

If Democrats hope to win back a significant share of House seats in the 2018 election, they must put support for public schools at the top of their agenda. That’s where the voters are.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Democrats, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jose Luis Vilson: Betsy DeVos Is Not My Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2017 //
4

Jose Luis Vilson, teacher and blogger in New York City, writes his view of the Secretary of Education here.

He writes:

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke to the American Legislative Exchange Council on July 20 about school choice and her vision for dismantling federal support for our public schools. In her speech, DeVos praised the drive to privatize education through charter schools, voucher programs, and tax credit scholarships that cover private-school tuition. She hailed “new waves of legislation” that brought charter schools to Kentucky, education savings accounts to North Carolina for special needs students, and a similar savings-account program in Arizona for every student.

She went after the American Federation of Teachers, for being “defenders of the status quo” who don’t have “kids’ interests at heart.”

She criticized the AFT because “They have made clear that they care more about a system—one that was created in the 1800s—than about individual students.”

[Here is a bit of information for Betsy DeVos: the Constitution was created in the 1700s, and most of us think it is a good document.]

Vilson writes:

But let’s be clear: at the root of DeVos’s approach is the devaluation and eventual abolition of the public sphere, which often goes together with tax cuts for the wealthy.

First, the status quo is not, as DeVos puts it, the people protesting her outside her offices and wherever she appears in public. If anything, policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top moved school privatization directly to the center of education decision-making in this country. The bipartisan effort to disrupt public education created the pathway for Trump’s agenda to shake it up some more. Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) set the stage for Trump, inviting school-choice evangelists including Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz and former Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to meet about education before eventually calling up DeVos.

Second, as the Education Secretary in 1971, Thatcher became known as “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher” for abolishing milk programs for children over seven years old. She was also popular for using dog-whistle rhetoric against black and ethnic minorities, claiming that Afro-Caribbeans gave cannabis to babies and different cultures would dilute England’s strong democracy. Given Thatcher’s history with trade unions, DeVos blew her own barely audible whistle to those who oppose teachers unions. This is not an accident.

DeVos’s mythological interpretation of what the founders wanted is worth noting as well. Certainly they had a lot to say about the importance of education and public schools. Thomas Jefferson also asserted that governments shouldn’t be allowed to manage schools. But there’s a difference between working with thirteen states generally struggling to stay afloat and a fifty-state country that’s one of the most powerful in the world. That’s why amendments exist. But DeVos skipped that part of civics. Just as importantly, states’ rights as the founders intended it allowed white plantation owners to keep enslaved peoples as property, whether they went to free land or not. How does one support freedom of choice by pointing at policies that literally kept entire peoples in captivity?

Make no mistake: this is no benign blueprint for public schools.

The whole raison d’être for public education is to ensure that all students get an education. As New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones astutely stated in a rebuttal to DeVos, “PUBLIC education is, at its heart, about the common good. Meaning one student’s gain should not come at another student’s loss.” It’s as if DeVos believes she runs the Department of Individualized / Personalized Opportunities and not the U.S. Department of Education, a department created specifically for “strengthening the federal role in creating equal educational opportunities for all.” Because public schools serve approximately 90 percent of eligible pre-K through twelfth grade students, the U.S. Department of Ed plays a vital role in the direction that our schools take.

For sure, public schools have had deep, institutional problems with inequity and injustice. We must acknowledge the ways our country perpetuates systemic racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia through schools. This country harms so many of our children through curriculum, funding, and unstable bureaucracy that still works as a reflection of our general social stratification. Progressive activists ought to keep in mind the plethora of frustrated parents of color who will intently listen to hedge fund billionaires offering better resourced schools. We do an injustice by not acknowledging that as we work to create better public schools.

None of these points should give someone like DeVos a platform for dismantling one of the strongest pillars of our country’s social safety net.

DeVos also took time to speak directly to teachers after a week of meetings with some of our best and brightest. She used the last part of her speech to express support for teacher autonomy, which sounds good. She is correct that the last ten-plus years of education reform have led to scripted lessons, overemphasis on standardized testing, and the muffling of teacher voices. But DeVos is effectively weakening the chair in which she sits. This includes a Trump executive order giving her office 300 days to look for examples of federal “overreach” in education, which doesn’t do much in the way of actual legislative action, but show the direction this administration would like to go in. DeVos’s appetite for deregulation, defunding, and negligence (masked as incompetence) bodes ill for a department created specifically to help our country right these wrongs.

This, along with any number of absurd news items coming out of the Department of Education these days, give me reason to say DeVos and her boss need to resign effective immediately. She is no one’s secretary of education. She serves the 0.01 percent of folks who stand to profit from ultra-conservatism.

She already has the lowest approval rating of any Trump appointee, and, like Thatcher, she continues to bring the hammer to our most fragile policy pieces with little care for public accountability. When you’re that wealthy and thatdismissive of the actual job you were hired to do, it starts to look like you were hired to eliminate the department you lead.

DeVos proves every day that she has earned her position as the least popular member of Trump’s Cabinet of Horribles. All of them are there to destroy the agency they head. She is off to a fabulous start in her program of destruction, elimination, and sneering.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Privatization

Scientific American: Vouchers Don’t Produce Better Results So Why is the Trump Administration Pushing Them?

By dianeravitch | Video
July 25, 2017 //
14

Veteran journalist Peg Tyre reviews the research on vouchers in Scientific American and finds little reason for the Trump administration to add federal support to a national voucher program. Despite any sound evidence, Trump and Betsy DeVos have made vouchers the centerpiece of federal policy.

“Because the Trump administration has championed vouchers as an innovative way to improve education in the U.S., Scientific American examined the scientific research on voucher programs to find out what the evidence says about Friedman’s idea. To be sure, educational outcomes are a devilishly difficult thing to measure with rigor. But by and large, studies have found that vouchers have mixed to negative academic outcomes and, when adopted widely, can exacerbate income inequity. On the positive side, there is some evidence that students who use vouchers are more likely to graduate high school and to perceive their schools as safe.” [Voucher schools have very high attrition rates, so the weakest students are gone before senior year in high school. See here.]

“Until now, only a handful of American cities and states have experimented with voucher programs. Around 500,000 of the country’s 56 million schoolchildren use voucher-type programs to attend private or parochial schools. The results have been spotty. In the 1990s studies of small voucher programs in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, found no demonstrable academic improvement among children using vouchers and high rates of churn—many students who used vouchers dropped out or transferred schools, making evaluation impossible. One study of 2,642 students in New York City who attended Catholic schools in the 1990s under a voucher plan saw an uptick in African-American students who graduated and enrolled in college but no such increases among Hispanic students.” [A higher proportion of the mothers of the African-American students in the study, critics found, had attended college, had a full-time job, and had a higher income, compared to the mothers of African students who did not use the voucher. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.105.399&rep=rep1&type=pdf, p. 16.]

Tyre reviews the voucher research in various cities and states. Here is a recent study:

“In a 2016 study of Ohio’s Educational Choice (EdChoice) Scholarship program, which has used public money to supplement the tuition of 18,000 students at private and parochial schools, researchers used longitudinal data from 2003 through 2013 to examine academic outcomes of students who used vouchers and those who were eligible but did not transfer to a private school. (Because the Ohio voucher program requires children who use taxpayer money to take state tests, apples-to-apples scores were readily available.) They found that when children transferred out of their public schools through the program, their math scores—and to a lesser extent, their reading scores—dropped significantly and stayed depressed. “I was surprised by the negative—it’s a big negative,” says study co-author David Figlio of Northwestern University. He speculates that the negative outcome might have occurred because top private schools opted out of the voucher program because they did not wish to make students take state tests. As a result, voucher students were left with mostly subpar options. “A lot of the reason that parents are interested in sending kids to private schools is that there is too much testing in public,” he says.

“Better-performing students were the ones who used the voucher program, the study found. Interestingly, students who were left in Ohio public schools actually did better on standardized tests once the voucher program got under way, suggesting that public schools might have responded to the increased “competition” by teaching a curriculum aligned to the standards to be tested—or by doubling down on test preparation.”

After looking at the spectrum of voucher research, Tyre concludes:

“Voucher proponents say parents, even those using tax dollars to pay tuition, should be able to use whatever criteria for school choice they see fit. A provocative idea, but if past evidence can predict future outcomes, expanding voucher programs seems unlikely to help U.S. schoolchildren keep pace with a technologically advancing world.”

Categories Betsy DeVos

Arthur Goldstein’s Twitter War Against Smears and Stupidity

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2017 //
31

Arthur Goldstein, veteran teacher of ESL at Francis Lewis High School in New York City, is one of the best teacher bloggers in the city, state, and nation.

He writes here about his disappointment with Neil deGrasse Tyson, after reading his tweet smearing the nation’s public schools. Arthur points out that Tyson is singing Betsy DeVos’s song and playing into the hands of the Flat zearthers he denounces.

Did Tyson notice?

Maybe he will google his name, see this, and respond to Arthur. Someone who is a scientist should be more careful about making blanket statements without checking the evidence.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Fraud

Education in Florida–Betsy DeVos’s Model for the Nation–is in Chaos

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2017 //
11

Valerie Strauss summarizes here the mess created in Florida by former Governor Jeb Bush’s harsh accountability policies and the legislation passed recently to enrich the charter industry at the expense of public schools across the state.

She begins:

“The K-12 education system in Florida — the one that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos likes to praise as a model for the nation — is in chaos.

“Traditional public school districts are trying to absorb the loss of millions of dollars for the new school year that starts within weeks. That money, which comes from local property taxes, is used for capital funding but now must be shared with charter schools as a result of a widely criticized $419 million K-12 public education bill crafted by Republican legislative leaders in secret and recently signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott — at a Catholic school.

“Critics, including some Republicans, say the law will harm traditional public schools, threaten services for students who live in poverty and curb local control of education while promoting charter schools and a state-funded voucher program.

“The law creates a “Schools of Hope” system that will turn failing traditional public schools into charter schools that are privately run but publicly funded. The law also sets out the requirement for districts to share capital funding.

“The man behind the Schools of Hope initiative was Republican House Speaker of Florida Richard Corcoran, whose wife founded a charter school in Pasco County. But as this recent Miami Herald opinion piece notes, a number of Republican lawmakers in the state legislature have financial stakes in the charter industry. “Florida’s broad ethics laws are a joke,” wrote Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago.”

School districts are planning to sue to stop the implantation of the charter industry’s raid on public school budgets.

When you read about this mess, bear in mind that this is what DeVos wants to inflict on the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud

Mike Klonsky: AFT Twitter War with DeVos

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2017 //
9

Mike Klonsky writes tonight about the Twitter war between AFT and Betsy DeVos.

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2017/07/devos-in-twitter-war-with-aft.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+mikeklonsky+(SmallTalk)&m=1

Betsy has the nutty idea that a public education system somehow is bad for individual children. She favors individual children.

Right, so do we all.

But for some indiscernible reason, she is in charge of the nation’s educational system, which she abhors. Maybe she should resign and make way for someone who believes in the job.

Categories Betsy DeVos

Why Is DeVos Hiding from the Press?

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2017 //
23

James Warren wonders why Betsy DeVos is steering clear of the media.

Typically, the Secretary of Education speaks to the annual meeting of the Education Writers Association. But she declined.

She had something better to do, something more important than meeting with education writers.

“Instead, she surfaced at a session of National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence.

“A long way from home in Holland, Michigan, maybe she needed her carburetor checked and an oil change. It was simpler than talking to journalists.”

Categories Betsy DeVos
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