Archives for category: Betsy DeVos
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DeVos’ Choice to Lead Civil Rights Office Complained about Affirmative Action

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2017 //
4

ProPublica, which just won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative reporting, writes here that Betsy DeVos’ choice to lead the crucial Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has a curious history for someone in that role. Jackson will run the agency on an acting basis until an Assistant Secretary is chosen. She will eventually be a Deputy Assistant Secretary, which does not require Senate confirmation. Based on her writings, ProPublica describes her as anti-feminist and anti-affirmative action. It is not clear what her definition of civil rights is, and whether they deserve protection.

As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.

“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”

Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.

Her appointment “doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who led Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Department of Justice.

“I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil rights issues.”

On Wednesday, DeVos formally announced Jackson’s position as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, a role that does not require Senate confirmation. The 39-year-old attorney will act as assistant secretary in charge of the office until that position is filled. DeVos has not yet selected a nominee, who would have to receive Senate confirmation. As acting head, Jackson is in charge of about 550 full-time department staffers, who are responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints each year.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights

Valerie Strauss: Why Does California Allow Charters to Open Where They are Not Needed?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2017 //
5

Valerie Strauss read the report prepared by Gordon Lafer for “In the Public Interest” about California’s lavish spending on facilities for charters where they are not needed. She reported here.

She writes:

The report says that “nearly 450 charter schools have opened in places that already had enough classroom space for all students — and this overproduction of schools was made possible by generous public support, including $111 million in rent, lease, or mortgage payments picked up by taxpayers, $135 million in general obligation bonds, and $425 million in private investments subsidized with tax credits or tax exemptions.” These amounts are based on only a portion of the state’s charter schools for which data was available, so the true funding amounts given to charters in communities that don’t need more classrooms “is almost twice as great.”

In California, traditional school systems can’t build new schools if enrollment demands it because of the way the state decides when it will give state bond funds to build a new school. According to the report, it does this by comparing existing classroom space with the student population projected over the next five years. Charter schools don’t have such a requirement.

They don’t need the permission of the local school district to open a charter. If they are turned down, they can appeal to the county school board. If they are turned down again, they appeal to the state board, which rubber-stamps almost every charter application with out regard to need.

The rationale of the charter industry is the same as that of Betsy DeVos: choice is an end in itself. It doesn’t matter if the charters offer better education; it doesn’t matter if they don’t get better test scores. All that matters is choice. DeVos agrees. So does Donald Trump. Choice, choice, choice, whether needed or not, whatever it costs.

Categories Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider Explains Why Betsy DeVos Never Mentions the School Where Her Mother Briefly Taught

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2017 //
5

Mercedes Schneider has been reading the archives of the local newspaper in Holland, Michigan, where the DeVos family reigns.

She learned about the brief teaching career of her mother in the local public school.

She learned the name of the school.

She has a picture of the school.

She knows the fate of the school. It was closed, after a century as the heart of the community.

Read her post to learn why it was closed.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Michigan, School Choice

More on DeVos’ Decision to Cancel Protections for Students Lenders

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
3

From Politico Education (yesterday):

CONSUMER AND LABOR GROUPS BLAST DEVOS’ DECISION TO SCRAP OBAMA-ERA OVERHAUL OF STUDENT LOAN SERVICING. On Tuesday, DeVos halted Obama-era plans to overhaul how millions of student borrowers pay back their federal loans including new consumer protections for borrowers and contract provisions aimed at boosting the quality of federal loan servicing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), called the change a “gut punch” to the nation’s student loan borrowers because the policies would have made it harder for companies to cheat borrowers. Persis Yu, director of National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, said DeVos is walking away from “common-sense protections.”

— Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers called the move “just another clear example of Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration putting the interests of predatory profiteers over the needs of the little guy — in this instance, the millions of people trying to go to college or acquire career skills without being crippled by debt.”

— In a memo, DeVos wrote that it was necessary to scrap the plans because of “a myriad of moving deadlines, changing requirements and a lack of consistent objectives” and a need to move forward “with precision, timeliness and transparency.” The Obama administration’s plan had called for a streamlined loan servicing platform in which borrowers make payments through a single web portal, rather than going through individual loan companies. The first phase of that project was initially slated to be finished by the end of 2016 but was delayed until this past February.

— “This increases the stakes for the CFPB to write clear rules to solve the problems in the loan servicing market,” said Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s former student loan ombudsman, who criticized the decision. “If the Education Department won’t use its buyer power to clean up bad practices, law enforcement has to step in.”

— The Education Department did not consult with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helped craft the policy guidance, before withdrawing it, according to a CFPB spokesman. “Borrowers deserve to be treated fairly and should be able to repay their debt without having to deal with illegal loan servicing practices,” the spokesman told Morning Education. “The CFPB will continue to find ways, working with all of our partners, to support and protect the 44 million Americans with student debt.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Betsy DeVos Withdraws Protections for Students from Predatory Loan Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
16

In an inexplicable move, Secretary of Education DeVos canceled rules–some of which date back to the first Bush administration–to set standards for student loan agencies.

This benefits the industry that fattens on student loans, but it will harm students.

The New York Times editorial board asks “Whose Side is Betsy DeVos on?” I think we know.

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is inexplicably backing away from rules that are meant to prevent federal student loan borrowers from being fleeced by companies the government pays to collect the loans and to guide people through the repayment process.

“On Tuesday, she withdrew a sound Obama administration policy that required the Education Department to take into account the past conduct of loan servicing companies before awarding them lucrative contracts — and to include consumer protections in those contracts as well.

“The department is doing the loan industry’s bidding at a time when student debt has crippled a generation financially and the country’s largest loan servicing company, Navient, is facing several lawsuits accusing it of putting its own interest before that of the borrowers it is supposed to help.

“A suit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims that Navient saved itself money by steering borrowers into costly repayment strategies that added billions in interest to their balances. But as Stacy Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg reported in The Times on Monday, states’ lawsuits are especially damning with respect to Sallie Mae — the company that spun off Navient in 2014.

“The Illinois and Washington attorneys general argue that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, saddling people with private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them. The two attorneys general — part of an investigative coalition of 29 states — argue that borrowers deserve to have these tainted private loans forgiven.

“The scenario outlined in the court documents bears a frightening resemblance to the subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago — when mortgage companies caused millions of borrowers to lose their homes by steering them into risky, high-cost mortgages they could never hope to repay.

“The Illinois and Washington lawsuits argue that Sallie Mae used subprime private loans to build relationships with exploitative schools that then helped the company make more federal loans to their students. Those loans were the jackpot for the company, the lawsuit argues, because they were guaranteed by the government, which steps in to reimburse the lender when a borrower defaults.

“The defaulted private loans destroyed the financial lives of students. But they benefited the schools — which sometimes made deals with Sallie Mae to subsidize the losses — allowing them to comply with federal rules requiring that no more than 90 percent of a school’s revenue can come from federal financial aid. The case shows the dangers inherent in letting companies service federal and private loans simultaneously.”

Will it make America “great again” by impoverishing a generation of students?

I thought she was a Christian. What would Jesus do? Didn’t Jesus throw the money-lenders out of the Temple?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Students

Dana Goldstein on the Florida Voucher Schools and Special Education

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
8

Dana Goldstein is a noted education journalist who joined the New York Times shortly after Trump’s inauguration. As she writes, she began to focus on vouchers since that would be the focus of this new administration.

Betsy DeVos has held up the Florida voucher program as a national model, so Goldstein went to Florida to learn about the McKay Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers for students with disabilities (Jeb Bush wanted vouchers for the general population, but his referendum to change the state constitution was rejected by voters, and the voucher legislation he passed anyway was overturned by the courts, leaving only the McKay program in place.) Thirty thousands students with disabilities are enrolled in the program.

Goldstein writes that the McKay voucher program has a hidden cost: students relinquish their state and federal rights when they leave the public schools for a private school. Many parents are unaware that they abandon their civil rights protections under the IDEA law when they leave the public schools.

Vouchers for special needs students have been endorsed by the Trump administration, and they are often heavily promoted by state education departments and by private schools, which rely on them for tuition dollars. So for families that feel as if they are sinking amid academic struggles and behavioral meltdowns, they may seem like a life raft. And often they are.

But there’s a catch. By accepting the vouchers, families may be unknowingly giving up their rights to the very help they were hoping to gain. The government is still footing the bill, but when students use vouchers to get into private school, they lose most of the protections of the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

During Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearings, she spoke glowingly about the Florida program. Senator Tim Kaine asked her what she thought about students forfeiting their rights under federal law, but she was unfamiliar with the federal law. She thought that the provision of services should be left to the states, and Sen. Kaine was surprised that she did not realize that students with special needs were protected by federal law.

As Goldstein notes, many parents are disappointed with the services provided by their public school, but when they get to the voucher school, they discover they no longer have the rights they were used to.

In the meantime, public schools and states are able to transfer out children who put a big drain on their budgets, while some private schools end up with students they are not equipped to handle, sometimes asking them to leave. And none of this is against the rules….

Legal experts say parents who use the vouchers are largely unaware that by participating in programs like McKay, they are waiving most of their children’s rights under IDEA, the landmark 1975 federal civil rights law. Depending on the voucher program, the rights being waived can include the right to a free education; the right to the same level of special-education services that a child would be eligible for in a public school; the right to a state-certified or college-educated teacher; and the right to a hearing to dispute disciplinary action against a child.

It’s not just Florida. Private school choice programs in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wisconsin also require parents to waive all or most IDEA rights. In several other states, the law is silent on the disability rights of voucher students.

One of the children she profiles is attending an online charter school and getting visits from specialists two-to-three times a week. What he does not get is the social interaction with other children.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Florida, Special Education, Vouchers

Trump’s Budget Cuts Will Crush the Dreams of Low-Income Students Who Want to Go to College

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
21

This article was written by An Garagiola-Bernier and published in the Washington Post.

She had a difficult life, growing up in a low-income home, dropping out of high school to help pay expenses, then suffering a debilitating disease that made it impossible to work and required multiple surgeries. She relied on charity to get by, but eventually enrolled in a community college. She made it to Hamline University, where she has a scholarship awarded by the John Kent Cooke Foundation. But she could not have made it to where she is today without the help of multiple federal assistance programs for low-income students like her. Those programs are now jeopardized by the proposed budget cuts.

She writes:

President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos never had to worry about the cost of a college education for themselves or their children. They never had to skip meals because they couldn’t afford to buy food. They never feared becoming homeless because they couldn’t afford a place to live.

Unfortunately, I — like millions of other low-income people — have had these worries. Not because we are lazy, ignored our school work or are not very bright. We simply didn’t have the good fortune of Trump and DeVos to be born into wealthy families. Many of us have had other bad breaks as well.

In my own case, I dropped out of high school to work at a low-wage job to help my mother pay mounting bills. Later, I was stricken with a disease called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that made it impossible for me to work for seven years and required me to undergo 12 surgeries, leaving me and my husband struggling to get by with our three children. I turned to a charity to pay my enormous medical bills. Disabled, with little education, my employment opportunities were dismal.

Fortunately, I found my way to community college and then transferred to Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., where I am now a student. My life was transformed when I received a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship that provides me with up to $40,000 a year for my education at Hamline. But most low-income students aren’t as lucky.

I resumed my education after many years out of school because, like the vast majority of low-income students, I want to make something of myself, get a good job and leave poverty behind. I am told the best way to do this is to get an education beyond high school.

But instead of helping us to further our educations, President Trump recently proposed his “America First” budget that calls for a 13 percent cut in the Education Department budget, amounting to $9 billion.

In higher education, Trump has proposed taking $3.9 billion in surplus funds from Pell Grants for low-income students to use for other parts of government; $200 million in cuts to other programs that help low-income students pay for and succeed in college; cuts to the Federal Work-Study program that pays students to hold part-time jobs; and elimination of the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants for low-income students.

Two particularly effective programs that prepare low-income students for college and help them graduate would be hit hard — one called GEAR-UP (the acronym stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) would be eliminated, and a group of programs called TRIO would be cut. TRIO got its name from three initiatives that date to the 1960s.

How can Trump “make America great again” by denying access to higher education to those students who are low-income?

How is he “putting America first” if he closes the doors of opportunity to those who were not born rich like him?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Funding, Higher Education, Poverty, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

National Education Policy Center: Failing Cybercharters Continue to Grow

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2017 //
11

Despite the significant research demonstrating the failure of cyber charters, they continue to expand, according to a new study by the National Education Policy Center.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was an investor in the worst of the cyber charter chains, the for-profit K12 Inc. started by Michael and Lowell Milken and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It is not clear whether she divested. She has said she will encourage the growth of cybercharters, because any choice made by parents (she believes) is best for children.

Check out the NEPC report:

Find Documents:
Press Release: http://nepc.info/node/8564

NEPC Publication: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2017

Contact:
NEPC: William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
Virtual School Performance: Gary Miron: (269) 599-7965, gary.miron@wmich.edu
Virtual School Research Base: Michael Barbour: (203) 997-6330, mkbarbour@gmail.com
Virtual School Policy: Luis Huerta: (212) 678-4199, huerta@tc.columbia.edu
Virtual School Policy: Jennifer King Rice: (301) 405-5580, jkr@umd.edu

More NEPC Resources on Virtual Education

BOULDER, CO (April 11, 2017) – Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2017, a three-part report released today by the National Education Policy Center, provides a detailed inventory of full-time virtual schools in the U.S. and their performance, an exhaustive review of the literature on virtual education and its implications for virtual school practices, and a detailed review and analysis of state-level policymaking related to virtual schools.

The growth of full-time virtual schools is fueled, in part, by policies that expand school choice and that provide market incentives attractive to for-profit companies. Indeed, large virtual schools operated by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) now dominate this sector and are increasing their market share.

Although virtual schools benefit from the common but largely unsupported assumption that the approach is cost-effective and educationally superior to brick and mortar schools, there are numerous problems associated with virtual schools. School performance measures, for both full-time entirely virtual and full-time blended virtual schools, suggest that they are not as successful as traditional public schools.

The virtual education research base is not adequate to support many current virtual school practices. More than twenty years after the first virtual schools began, there continues to be a deficit of empirical, longitudinal research to guide the practice and policy of virtual schooling.

State policymaking in several key areas – such as accountability, teacher preparation, and school governance – continues to lag.

An analysis of state policies suggests that policymakers continue to struggle to reconcile traditional funding structures, governance and accountability systems, instructional quality, and staffing demands with the unique organizational models and instructional methods associated with virtual schooling. Accountability challenges linked to virtual schools include designing and implementing governance structures capable of accounting for expenditures and practices that directly benefit students.

The report’s policy recommendations include:

The specification and enforcement of sanctions for virtual schools and blended schools if they fail to improve student performance.
The creation of long-term programs to support independent research on and evaluation of virtual schooling, particularly full-time virtual schooling.
The development of new funding formulas based on the actual costs of operating virtual schools.

Find Virtual Schools Report 2017, Alex Molnar, Editor, on the web at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2017

Categories Betsy DeVos, K12 Inc., Virtual Charter Schools

Media Mattters Calls for Journalists to Investigate Devos’s Department of Education

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2017 //
30

Media Matters has issued a call for an investigation of the staffing of the U.S. Department of Education. The call is directed at reporters, since there is little likelihood that either house of Congress would investigate one of its major donors.

Some of the staffers working directly for DeVos are known to have posted racist or homophobic remarks. Several have conflicts of interest. Several are imported from Jeb Bush’s team at his Foundation for Education Excellence. All seem to be from the rightwing “echo chamber” that DeVos and her fellow crusaders inhabit.

None has any known qualifications for working in the Department of Education.

Most major positions remain vacant, other than the appointment of an anti-Clinton lawyer with no relevant experience to run the Office of Civil Rights.

Categories Betsy DeVos, U.S. Department of Education

Gayle Green: Corporate School Reform and the Cynical Manipulation of the English Language

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2017 //
22

Gayle Green is a professor of English at Scripps College. She is writing a book about the corporate reform in higher education.

In this article, she describes how corporate reformers have taken guidance from Orwell’s “1984” in their deliberate distortion of language to mask reality.

She writes:

“In this post-truth age that’s done away with facts, George Orwell’s 1984 has soared to the top of the charts. But in the world of public education, it’s been 1984 for quite some time. And we didn’t even need the clumsy apparatus of a totalitarian dictatorship to bring it about. All we needed was some slick PR and smiley corporate faces and a media ready to spit back the buzzwords they’d been fed – failing public schools, no excuses, accountability, choice, access for every child, closing the achievement gap – repeating them so often that they passed for truth.”

In the current dystopian world of public education, the new Secretary of Education is the leading enemy of the nation’s public schools.

DeVos should be no surprise. She is the culmination of nearly two decades of creeping privatization.

“But DeVos should come as no surprise: she is the culmination of the way things have long been headed. No Child Left Behind, signed into law in January 2002, brought to us by George W. Bush and the moneyed interests he represented, arrived in clouds of rhetoric about “access” and “civil rights.” It announced itself as “an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, choice, flexibility, so that no child is left behind.” But this was never about reform or access or leveling the playing field: it was about opening up public education as a market, siphoning off tax dollars to charters and for-profit vendors, shifting public funds from a system that had public oversight and control to private interests. Education was a rich, untapped market with billions of federal dollars there for the taking. Schools, panicked at having their survival based on standardized test scores, invested heavily in testing technology. Multinational testing corporations, publishing companies, ed-tech ventures rushed in with their wares: software for administering tests, test preps, pre-tests, post-tests, tests scoring, lesson plans, teaching modules, assessment devices; entire new industries sprang into being….

“It’s been quite a feat, transforming teachers, who were once our friends and allies, to the enemy. A real sleight of hand, getting the public to trust those altruistic billionaires over those greedy, opportunistic teachers. Trust a billionaire to have the public’s interest at heart – that spin worked so well it landed us with Trump. But in the world of 1984, two plus two equals five: “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by [the Party’s] philosophy.”

Put kids in front of computers, increase screen time, increase class size – and call it personalized. Depersonalized might be a better word – or perhaps personalised, for Pearsons, the multibillion-dollar transnational corporation that’s siphoned off untold billions of federal money. When teachers protested that students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend not to test well, having not had the benefit of tutors and test-prep programs, GWB said they were making “excuses,” showing “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Yet it’s painfully clear that using test scores to determine the survival of schools only further disadvantages the disadvantaged, and, far from leveling the playing field, tilts it even more. “No excuses” became a mantra of corporate reformers, an excuse for shutting down public schools and moving in with charters, an excuse to ignore poverty and blame teachers for conditions that make teaching impossible – conditions assured by inequities that billionaire reformers have themselves brought about.”

Hundreds of schools have been closed. Thousands of teachers drummed out of their profession. Philadelphia’s Rescue Plan devastated the public schools. Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 came and went with more public schools closed, more children sent to privately managed charter schools. “Choice, choice, choice,” the corporate reformers say, but neglect to mention that the schools make the choices, not the families. The one choice that is off the table is the neighborhood school.

“The confounding of language at its most basic level reduces us to a state of civic catatonia: we can’t think about these issues, let alone discuss them or act against them, when they’ve been so obfuscated, when words have been so twisted.”

The deliberate distortion of language has enabled a corporate coup, the selling out of public education to billionaires and entrepreneurs.

This is an article you can send to your friends who want a short summary of one of the biggest scam of our lifetimes.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Testing
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