Archives for category: Betsy DeVos
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Peter Greene: Betsy Drew the Wrong Lesson from the Failure of Obama and Duncan

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
17

Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.

Greene writes:

“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.

“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”

“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”

Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.

If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Vouchers

Carol Burris: How Charter Schools Use Money and Political Clout to Take Over Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
10

Carol Burris writes here about the struggle between the parents of the John Wister Elementary School in Philadelphia and the rich, powerful Mastery Charter Chain, which longed to take control of Wister.

Philadelphia has been under the control of a “School Reform Commission” since 2001; three of its five members are controlled by the governor. Its superintendent is a graduate of the unaccredited Eli Broad academy. It is worth your time to read the timeline of the state takeover of Philadelphia. The state took over because the district’s finances were in poor shape and its test scores are low. Guess what: 16 years laters, its finances are in poor shape (due to state underfunding) and its test scores are low.

In years past, parents had the right to vote on whether to go charter. But that right was taken away because parents didn’t always vote yes.

The parents organized to fight off Mastery, which is run by a non-educator and which practices stern discipline, the “no-excuses” philosophy.

The Mastery Charter School chain, known for its tough discipline and “no-excuses” philosophy, was already running more than 10 schools in the city. CEO Scott Gordon’s background was in business. He founded a home health-care company and marketed cereal before starting Mastery. Just the kind of guy who should be running schools, right?

The parents resisted. For a brief moment, they got a reprieve.

Then the big money kicked in along with the political connections, and Wister was handed over to Mastery.

Charter schools are not public schools. The charter industry is rapacious and greedy. It is never satisfied. It wants more. Arne Duncan was on its side; John King, who founded his own no-excuses charter school, was on its side. Betsy DeVos is its champion.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Philadelphia

Betsy DeVos, Religious Extremist: Watch This Video Before It is Deleted

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2017 //
102

Betsy and Dick DeVos funded the Student Statesmanship Institute in Michigan, which literally indoctrinates young students into what it considers a “Biblical world view.”

This video lasts for several minutes. Don’t stop watching at pauses. It is likely to be deleted soon. Save it if you can.

Listen to the leader praise Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin for their ability to brainwash the young. Watch the students chant their allegiance. Hear the leader express the hope that the young people indoctrinated into Biblical values will one day fill the Michigan legislature, both chambers.

Do not be fooled. DeVos and her family are funders and patrons of the Religious Right. They are intolerant. Did she defend federal protection of the rights of transgender students? I doubt it. The students in this video are taught certainty, not respect for the views of those who are different.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Religion

Lily Eskelsen Garcia Writes a Letter to Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2017 //
7

Betsy DeVos called Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the president of the National Education Association. She said, let’s talk. Lily wrote her a letter laying out some conditions before talking or meeting.

Read Lily’s letter here.

http://lilysblackboard.org/2017/02/betsy-devos-called-sent-letter/

Here are her conditions:

“It’s important for educators, parents, and communities to know where you stand on some of the most critical work of the federal Department of Education. We must ask you to give us the substantive answers that we did not hear you give to the senators at your hearing on issues critical to our students:

1. Do you agree that all schools receiving public dollars must be held to the same accountability and transparency standards?

2. Will you agree not to privatize funding for Special Education of Title I?

3. Will you stand with educators and protect our most vulnerable students from discrimination, including LGBT students, immigrant students, students of color, girls and English language learners?

4. Will you focus, as educators are focused, on the civil rights of all children, regardless of their ZIP code, by challenging the inequities so many face in equal access to programs, services and support?”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Privatization, Unions

The Promise of Public Schools: We Are in Danger of Losing It

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2017 //
53

Nicole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for the New York Times magazine, aptly describes the perilous condition of public education, as the privatization movement moves in to kill public education. The very idea that schools should operate like businesses and that families are “consumers,” eats away at the promise of public education.

In the days leading up to and after Betsy DeVos’s confirmation as secretary of education, a hashtag spread across Twitter: #publicschoolproud. Parents and teachers tweeted photos of their kids studying, performing, eating lunch together. People of all races tweeted about how public schools changed them, saved them, helped them succeed. The hashtag and storytelling was a rebuttal to DeVos, who called traditional public schools a “dead end” and who bankrolled efforts to pass reforms in Michigan, her home state, that would funnel public funds in the form of vouchers into religious and privately operated schools and encouraged the proliferation of for-profit charter schools. The tweets railed against DeVos’s labeling of public schools as an industry that needed to adopt the free-market principles of competition and choice. #Publicschoolproud was seen as an effort to show that public schools still mattered.

But the enthusiastic defense obscured a larger truth: We began moving away from the “public” in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places. Parents have pushed for school-choice policies that encourage shopping for public schools that they hope will give their children an advantage and for the expansion of charter schools that are run by private organizations with public funds. Large numbers of public schools have selective admissions policies that keep most kids out. And parents pay top dollar to buy into neighborhoods zoned to “good” public schools that can be as exclusive as private ones. The glaring reality is, whether we are talking about schools or other institutions, it seems as if we have forgotten what “public” really means.

Public schools were supported by all, because they were for the benefit of all, whether or not they used the schools themselves, whether or not they had children.

Early on, it was this investment in public institutions that set America apart from other countries. Public hospitals ensured that even the indigent received good medical care — health problems for some could turn into epidemics for us all. Public parks gave access to the great outdoors not just to the wealthy who could retreat to their country estates but to the masses in the nation’s cities. Every state invested in public universities. Public schools became widespread in the 1800s, not to provide an advantage for particular individuals but with the understanding that shuffling the wealthy and working class together (though not black Americans and other racial minorities) would create a common sense of citizenship and national identity, that it would tie together the fates of the haves and the have-nots and that doing so benefited the nation. A sense of the public good was a unifying force because it meant that the rich and the poor, the powerful and the meek, shared the spoils — as well as the burdens — of this messy democracy.

The New Deal fostered a strong public sector, but it also was ridiculed and condemned by a small minority who resented the effort to include everyone in good works. This minority sowed the seeds of the libertarian, free-market, anti-government movement that is now controlling the federal government and many states.

She reminds us that the movement away from public schools began with segregationists who wanted to keep their all-white schools. Betsy DeVos speaks for them when she lauds school choice.

Even when they fail, the guiding values of public institutions, of the public good, are equality and justice. The guiding value of the free market is profit. The for-profit charters DeVos helped expand have not provided an appreciably better education for Detroit’s children, yet they’ve continued to expand because they are profitable — or as Tom Watkins, Michigan’s former education superintendent, said, “In a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

Democracy works only if those who have the money or the power to opt out of public things choose instead to opt in for the common good. It’s called a social contract, and we’ve seen what happens in cities where the social contract is broken: White residents vote against tax hikes to fund schools where they don’t send their children, parks go untended and libraries shutter because affluent people feel no obligation to help pay for things they don’t need. “The existence of public things — to meet each other, to fight about, to pay for together, to enjoy, to complain about — this is absolutely indispensable to democratic life,” Honig says.

If there is hope for a renewal of our belief in public institutions and a common good, it may reside in the public schools. Nine of 10 children attend one, a rate of participation that few, if any, other public bodies can claim, and schools, as segregated as many are, remain one of the few institutions where Americans of different classes and races mix. The vast multiracial, socioeconomically diverse defense of public schools that DeVos set off may show that we have not yet given up on the ideals of the public — and on ourselves.

Make no mistake: Betsy DeVos is a dedicated enemy of public schools. She threatens to destroy the educational system that produced the most powerful economy on earth. She must be resisted at every turn.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Please Help Educate Betsy DeVos!

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2017 //
26

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos repeats the hackneyed and erroneous claims that American public schools are failing.

She says the Obama ideas (testing, charters, and accountability) have failed, so she wants to impose her own ideas, which sound no diffferent from the failed ideas of the status quo.

American schools could use some support, not another four years of carping and disruption.

I explained in my book “Reign of Error” that the “Failing Schools” narrative is a hoax.

As of 2013, test scores on the federal tests called NAEP were the highest in 40 years of testing. For whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.

The graduation rate was the highest in history, for all groups.

The dropout rate was the lowest ever recorded.

Scores on NAEP went flat from 2013-2015, possibly because of Common Core or because the test-and-punish approach had gone about as far as it could go. The flatline showed the failure of the NCLB-RTTT policies, not the schools.

We have the greatest economy in the world and the most productive workforce. Our public schools built our economy. Stop bashing our public schools, our teachers, and our students!

Please tweet @betsydevos and urge her to read “Reign of Error” or send her a copy.

I will send her an autographed copy.

Her address:

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Graduation rates, Privatization, Reign of Error, Testing

DeVos to Conservative Conference: I Will Replace the Bush-Obama Failed Ideas with My Own Failed Ideas

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
41

Betsy DeVos gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), explaining that the programs created by George W. Bush and Barack Obama had failed, and she would replace them with her own ideas. She did not point out that her own ideas have failed too. Just look at the mess she has made of Michigan, where the state’s rankings on the federal test (NAEP) have plummeted, and where Detroit is a mess thanks to the miasma of school choice.


DeVos argued Thursday that education is failing too many students, pointing to “flatlined” test scores (presumably on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also called the Nation’s Report Card) and more than 1.3 million youth who drop out of school each year. The Obama administration’s $7 billion investment in overhauling the worst schools, called the School Improvement Grant program, didn’t work, DeVos said, making reference to a study by the administration that found no increase in test scores or graduation rates at schools that got the money.

“They tested their model, and it failed miserably,” she said. She emphasized that she was not indicting teachers.

She has said that she wants to return as much authority over education as possible to states and districts, and intends to identify programs and initiatives to cut at the Education Department. She has also made clear that she intends to use her platform to expand alternatives to public schools, including charter schools, online schools and private schools that students attend with the help of public funds.

“We have a unique window of opportunity to make school choice a reality for millions of families,” she said. “Both the president and I believe that providing an equal opportunity for a quality education is an imperative that all students deserve.”

Her own model of vouchers has not a single success to its name: evaluations of voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, and Indiana have found no gains for the students enrolled in voucher schools. Parents are happier, but that’s not a good reason to destroy public schools.

The overwhelming majority of charter studies have found that charters perform no better than public schools unless they exclude children with disabilities, English language learners, and behavior problems. When the charters kick them out, they go back to the public school, which must take them.

Cybercharters have been proven to be disastrous failures in every state. In Tennessee, the Tennessee Virtual Academy is the lowest performing school in the state. Ohio boasts the cybercharter with the lowest graduation rate in the nation, called Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

DeVos does not have a single innovative idea. It is the same old retreads of the privatization movement.

I recommend that she read “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools,” where I patiently demonstrated, using data from the U.S. Department of Education that American students as of 2013 had the highest test scores in our history–for all groups, white, black, Hispanic, and Asian; the highest graduation rates in history; the lowest dropout rates in history.

The scores flatlined from 2013 to 2015, and that may have been because of the application of the Common Core standards and the disruptions foisted upon the schools by Obama and Duncan for the past eight years.

DeVos has proven that she is unqualified to be Secretary of Education. She is not dumb, she is just ignorant. She should do some reading and break free of her ideological contempt for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization, Testing

DeVos Family Fight Over Transgender Students?

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
8

According to the media (which the president assures us is lying, corrupt, dishonest, and “the enemy of the American people”), Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos objected to the president’s decision to remove federal protection for transgender students. She expressed concern for the harm that might occur to the students, but was overruled by the president and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/us/politics/devos-sessions-transgender-students-rights.amp.html

What a family fight there must have been when the news got out! The DeVos family were among the original founders of such anti-LGBT groups as Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. DeVos family foundations have given millions to them and sit on their boards.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/static.theintercept.com/amp/trump-education-nominee-betsy-devos-lied-to-the-senate.html

I wonder what the family said when they learned that Betsy was defending trannies. Did they believe it? Were they surprised? Was it true?

During the campaign, Trump said he didn’t care what bathroom his gay friends used. Caitlyn Jenner visited Trump, and he reassured her.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/04/28/politics/caitlyn-jenner-bathroom-trump-tower-donald-trump/index.html

It seems that Jeff Sessions has the power to overrule both DeVos and Trump. Or were we all hoaxed?

Categories Betsy DeVos

Lindsay Wagner: North Carolina Is Already a DeVos World in Education

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
11

Veteran education journalist Lindsay Wagner writes that anyone who wants to know what Betsy DeVos will do to schools need look no further than North Carolina. It has already happened there.

North Carolina was taken over by the Tea Party in 2010 and has gone on a rampage to privatize education and defund public schools. The legislature wiped out its very successful investment in teacher preparation–the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program–and replaced it with Teach for America. The Teaching Fellows made a five-year commitment and most became career teachers. TFA come and go within 2-3 years. Same cost, different results. One produces well-prepared career teachers, the other produces education tourists.

Charters, vouchers, cybercharters. North Carolina has it all.

Devos’ philanthropic efforts and her work running the American Federation for Children (AFC) have helped pave the way for North Carolina’s own school voucher program, which allows low-income families to use taxpayer-funded $4,200 vouchers each year for tuition at private, mostly religious schools that are not held to robust transparency and accountability standards and can discriminate against those who don’t pass a religious litmus test or identify as LGBTQ by barring them from enrolling.

In 2012, Democratic and Republican North Carolina lawmakers who were on board with the idea of school vouchers received more than $90,000 in campaign donations from AFC. The next year lawmakers enacted the school voucher program, which started out with an annual state commitment of just $10 million.

Then after winning a court case challenging the constitutionality of the program, lawmakers voted to significantly expand the school voucher program even though they had no data before them to indicate one way or another whether students leaving public schools using vouchers were actually doing better at private schools. The school voucher program is now scheduled to grow to $145 million annually by 2027. Between now and then, North Carolina will have spent nearly $1 billion on an unaccountable taxpayer-funded program.

The state’s top recipient of school vouchers, Trinity Christian School in Fayetteville, has received nearly $1 million in taxpayer funds since 2014. Last week it was reported that the state Department of Revenue arrested Trinity Christian’s athletic director following an investigation that turned up enough evidence to charge him with embezzling hundreds of thousands of employee tax withholdings over a seven year period.

It’s an unsurprising turn of events given that the state hasn’t enacted strong oversight measures for the school voucher program. Virtually anyone running a private school can receive publicly-funded school vouchers—most schools don’t have to routinely provide a look at how they balance their books or provide any robust evidence that their students are learning.

Now that DeVos is no longer just a private fundraiser pushing school vouchers at the state level but is now the federal education secretary, can she “voucherize” the entire public education system in the United States? No, not alone — besides, most of public education is financed at the state and local level. President Trump’s proposal to pour $20 billion into vouchers is contingent on state and local actors matching dollars and then some. As Vox’s Libby Nelson explains, DeVos could find some other creative ways to get federal dollars into voucher-like programs, but really the onus is on state legislatures to move the voucher agenda.

But if North Carolina’s steady march toward a school voucher program that continues to expand with very few accountability and transparency measures in place is any indication, DeVos has levers outside of her role as federal education secretary to try to keep the momentum going for state-born school voucher programs. And that is worth watching.

Charter schools

DeVos favors charter schools as well, although we’ve heard less about those from her as of late. Nonetheless, charter schools have been part of her philanthropic efforts over time and charter school advocates in North Carolina are enthusiastic about her confirmation as education secretary.

From 1997 until 2011, North Carolina experimented with charter schools, keeping a cap on how many can operate here at 100 schools. Charters are public schools too, but they are given more latitude in hiring and management practices and can do innovative things with their academic offerings—all in the name of improving education writ large.

But in 2011 something changed. Lawmakers did away with the cap on how many charter schools can operate here and since then, the charter school sector has grown at a fairly rapid rate—now at 167 schools. One effect of this expansion has been an an ever-increasing squeeze on public school budgets, which has in turn touched off a years-long fight at the legislature on how public dollars should flow to charter schools.
Meanwhile, resources and increased oversight have not grown concurrently with the charter school sector’s expansion, however; still a tiny group of people in Raleigh is charged with overseeing what is now approaching double the number of charters. And, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), recent legislation weakens charter school accountability and oversight and allows bad schools to stay open longer than they should be allowed.

A number of charter schools have suddenly closed in recent times, sometimes leaving students without an academic home in the middle of the school year. Poor governance and financial problems most commonly plague charters, and robust accountability and transparency measures still seem to be lacking as the industry experiences rapid growth. For-profit charter chain operators can run these schools and shield how they spend tax dollars behind a curtain—and lawmakers haven’t done much to force them to be more transparent.

The Tea Party leaders in North Carolina are thrilled with her selection as Secretary of Education. They have invited her to come and see how they have implemented all of her failed ideas. She has given generously to the political campaign’s of the state’s very rightwing senators.

As a result of DeVos efforts—along with those of other school privatization advocates—hundreds of millions of public dollars now flow to school vouchers, charter schools and virtual charter schools.

So when she does come to visit, it will be more like a welcome home party for DeVos. North Carolina has been her playground for years.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Hello, Betsy DeVos! Watch This Video!

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2017 //
8

Ms. DeVos:

The state of Michigan, as you know, plans to close 38 schools, most of them in Detroit.

Please watch this powerful documentary about school closings in Detroit, how they disproportionately affect black children, how they disproportionately affect children with special needs.

Detroit is littered with closed schools.

Don’t you realize that closing schools destroys communities and disrupts the lives of children who have high needs?

Please tell us what you intend to do to stop this madness.

The schools are not failing; our society is failing.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Detroit, Michigan, Special Education
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