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Nikhil Goyal: Can Public Schools Survive Trump’s Billionaire Wrecking Crew?

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2016 //
45

Nikhil Goyal is a prodigy who wrote his first book when he was only a teenager in public high school. Happily, he uses his considerable skills as a researcher to analyze the Trump “billionaire wrecking crew” that is planning to tear down our nation’s public schools.

Donald Trump, a self-described billionaire, wants billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos to take over the Department of Education. These two ultra-rich people have never attended public schools. Nor have they sent their kids to them. Yet they will likely accelerate the bipartisan dismantling of public education as we know it.

Private foundations, billionaires and Wall Street hedge fund managers have funneled billions of dollars either directly into the education system or the political process to influence policy. These groups are often staunch advocates of pro-market policies such as charter schools and school vouchers, which allows parents to send their kids to private schools using public money. DeVos has been described as “the four-star general of the voucher movement”…

Over the past two decades, as members of the ultra-wealthy rightwing DeVos family, Betsy and her husband, Dick, have been discreetly using their immense fortune to underwrite many of the major local and state crusades to privatize public education.

They helped pass Michigan’s first charter school law, pushed a failed Michigan school voucher referendum, helped get hundreds of pro-voucher and charter candidates for public office elected, proliferated charters, weakened teachers unions by advocating for right-to-work legislation in Michigan and warded off a proposed Detroit charter oversight commission in a state where 80% are run for profit with minimal accountability.
There are several flaws with vouchers. Their logic is based on empowering the individual over the state, rather than making systemic changes to funding, curriculum, assessment and teaching to achieve a high-quality, humane and equitable public system for all. Vouchers also siphon funds away from a cash-starved public system.

What’s more, studies have shown that school choice experiments in Chile and Sweden exacerbated existing inequalities. If we are to improve educational outcomes for all children, decades of research show that we must address the miserable social and economic conditions that profoundly affect schools: poverty, homelessness, inadequate healthcare, unsafe drinking water, food insecurity and gun violence. Reformers such as DeVos are not keen on the state redistributing their wealth to cure those ills…

The problem with this is that many charters are deeply segregated, push out low-performing and misbehaving students, and have been accused of “financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” totaling more than $200m in a single 12-month span. Moreover, the Obama administration preserved and expanded Washington DC’s private school voucher program, which was originally launched by former president George W Bush.

DeVos will find many allies across the aisle in Washington, from Senator Cory Booker (who served on the board of the Alliance for School Choice, of which she was chairman) to the Center for American Progress to Democrats for Education Reform. At least she is forthright about gutting public education, as she wrote in an editorial urging to abolish and replace Detroit’s public schools with a free-market system, whereas Democrats hide behind the guise of “civil rights” and “educational opportunity”.

Unfortunately, the Obama years sowed the seeds for DeVos to finish the task. Without well-organized resistance, it will happen.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Trump, Vouchers

The Trump Team of Billionaires: It Takes a Thief

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2016 //
17
  1. The Washington Post reports that the Trump cabinet will be the wealthiest ever assembled. Since Trump equates money with success, he surrounds himself with other super-rich people. The theory is that the people who have rigged the system will know how to fix the system.

Kind of like Andy Borowitz’s joke about Trump picking El Chapo to run the Drug Enforcement Agency.

“When George W. Bush assembled his first Cabinet in 2001, news reports dubbed them a team of millionaires, and government watchdogs questioned whether they were out of touch with most Americans’ problems. Combined, that group had an inflation-adjusted net worth of about $250 million — which is roughly one-tenth the wealth of Donald Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary alone.

“Trump is putting together what will be the wealthiest administration in modern American history. His announced nominees for top positions include several multimillionaires, an heir to a family mega-fortune and two Forbes-certified billionaires, one of whose family is worth as much as industrial tycoon Andrew Mellon was when he served as treasury secretary nearly a century ago. Rumored candidates for other positions suggest Trump could add more ultra-rich appointees soon.

Many of the Trump appointees were born wealthy, attended elite schools and went on to amass even larger fortunes as adults. As a group, they have much more experience funding political candidates than they do running government agencies.

“Their collective wealth in many ways defies Trump’s populist campaign promises. Their business ties, particularly to Wall Street, have drawn rebukes from Democrats. But the group also amplifies Trump’s own campaign pitch: that Washington outsiders who know how to navigate and exploit a “rigged” system are best able to fix that system for the working class.”

Categories Billionaires, Trump

Jane Mayer: Who Is Betsy DeVos?

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
15

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Lots of challenges ahead if she is confirmed.

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Categories Academic Freedom, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Trump

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

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
13

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Deep pockets, long arms

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Now we know what was at stake.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

DFER Congratulates DeVos, Enemy of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2016 //
48

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

Laura Chapman: Beware the Privatizers! New Names, Same Goal

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
57

I am not in the region but this Nevada initiative looks like it is spawning a lot of backscratching arrangements for consultants and evaluators

 

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/state-board-examiners-oks-contract-research-firm-evaluate-success-school-reforms

 
When I poke around on local news reports, I see that “Opportunity 180” is focussed on charters for Clark Co Nevada. A trip to the “Opportunity 180” website shows that outfit is part of the national network of “Education Cities,” but with three “local” foundations supporting the charter initiative.

 
Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. There is the Broad Foundation, not exactly local. If you want to see where else this intended capture of public schools is being engineered, go to the Education Cities Website http://education-cities.org/who-we-are/

 
There you will find the 31 “city-based organizations” in 24 cities where nonprofit organizations seek control of public schools. For Las Vegas, Nevada, 180 Opportunity is listed. The bottom line, evident in the funds for 180 from the Broad Foundation, is that this is a national movement.

 
Education Cities are cities where unelected nonprofits, foundations, and civic groups are organized for the purposes of controlling the governance of public education, substituting their judgment for policies and practices forwarded by professionals in education, elected school boards, and citizens whose tax dollars are invested in public schools.

 
The national work of Education Cites is supported by the Broad Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. http://education-cities.org/who-we-are/our-contributors/.

 

Here are the cities and the local groups that want the power to govern your schools.

 

Arizona, Phoenix, New Schools for Phoenix
California, Los Angeles—Great Public Schools Now
California, Oakland—Educate 78 & Great Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center & Rogers Family Foundation
California, Richmond—Chamberlin Family Foundation
California, San Jose—Innovate Public Schools
Colorado, Denver—Gates Family Foundation Donnell-Kay Foundation
District of Columbia— Education Forward DC & CityBridge Foundation
Delaware, Wilmington—Rodel Foundation of Delaware
Illinois, Chicago—New Schools for Chicago, Chicago Public Education Fund
Indiana, Indianapolis—The Mind Trust
Louisiana, Baton Rouge—New Schools for Baton Rouge
Louisiana, New Orleans—New Schools for New Orleans
Massachusetts, Boston—Boston Schools Fund & Empower Schools
Michigan, Detroit—Excellent Schools Detroit & The Skillman Foundation
Minnesota Minneapolis—Minnesota Comeback
Missouri Kansas City—Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Nevada Las Vegas—Opportunity 180
New York, Rochester—E3 Rochester
Ohio, Cincinnati—Accelerate Great Schools
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia—Philadelphia School Partnership
Rhode Island, Providence—Rhode Island Mayoral Academies
Tennessee Memphis—Hyde Family Foundations
Tennessee, Nashville—Project Renaissance
Wisconsin, Milwaukee—Schools That Can Milwaukee

 
This is an example of philanthrogovernance by stealth, except for customer friendly branding of initiatives including words such as forward, accelerate, great, new, innovate, empower, now, and so on.

 
Be aware that United Way organizations are being co-opted as providers of choice for any wrap-around services needed in this new and privatized “ecosystem” of schooling.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform

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

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
5

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

One would be wrong….

 

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

 

Or not….

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The takeaway:

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2016 //
50

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

SATIRE! Betsy DeVos, Education Reformer and Charter Champion, Should be Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
67

Betsy DeVos is a billionaire school reformer in Michigan. She funds charter schools and voucher schools not only in Michigan but across the nation. A few years back, her American Federation for Children gave its annual award to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for crushing the unions in his state and to D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee for advancing the school-choice views of AFC.

I endorse Betsy DeVos.

[SATIRE ALERT!]

 

I don’t agree with any of her ideas about school reform, but I think it would be refreshing to hear candid advocacy for privatizing and eliminating public schools instead of privatizers pretending that they want to “improve public schools.” They don’t. The privatization movement should be unmasked as the rightwing, anti-public school movement that it is.

I oppose privatization. I oppose turning public schools over to private corporations. I oppose for-profit schooling. I oppose schools run by for-profit management. I oppose vouchers.

I support community-based, democratically controlled public schools, staffed by certified and well-prepared teachers.

I believe that most parents like their public schools and don’t want them to be privatized. We saw clear evidence of that sentiment in Massachusetts and Georgia, where voters resoundingly rejected efforts to private public funding for public schools.

I endorse DeVos not because I want her ideas to prevail but because I want them exposed to the clear light of day and rejected because they are wrong for democracy, wrong for children, and wrong for education.

Learn more about DeVos here.

It would be refreshing to see privatization in its honest clothes, not disguised as a “civil rights” movement (led by billionaires and Wall Street and hedge funders). Honesty is the best policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, School Choice, Vouchers, Walker, Scott

Peter Greene: “Reformers” Lose Their Progressive Facade

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
16

Peter Greene notes the terrible pickle that the “reformers” are in. They were trying so hard to prove their bona fides as leaders of the “civil rights movement of our time,” trying so hard to claim that they really were pushing school choice “for the kids,” trying so hard to call themselves progressives…and Donald Trump, the arch reactionary, has embraced their cause. The hedge fund managers, the billionaires, and the corporate titans pushed charters and school choice, and Donald Trump wants charters and school choice too! He goes a step further, and he wants vouchers too.

Peter Greene calls the current state of affairs the “Faux Progressive Polka.”

Their dilemma is laid bare: Real progressives support public schools, not school choice. School choice was the battle cry of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and today school choice is promoting greater resegregation and at the same time, defunding public schools that serve all children. The voters in Massachusetts saw through the facade. The NAACP saw through it too.

Now Trump’s embrace makes it harder for the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires to pretend to be progressives. They aren’t and they never were.

To understand Greene’s argument, you must first read Rick Hess’s post-election article, in which he claimed that education is so far to the left that it can’t begin to understand the right. He had an audacious analysis of what he calls the split among Democrats about education:

Hess writes:

One of the reasons that right-left differences get ignored is that people in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, the fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and the union-establishment. What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party’s more traditional, New Deal wing.

Greene writes:

If reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania. He is not the Queen of Rumania.

Some of us, like Greene and me, have called out the “reform” movement as a mighty hoax, a pretense of liberalism powered by billionaires, financiers, and rightwing think tanks. The same phony lingo about “closing achievement gaps” and “equity” has been used by rightwing governors, as they replace public schools with charter schools and vouchers. Ideologically, it is hard to decipher the “sides,” but one thing I can say with certainty is that the effort to privatize public education and eliminate teacher unions is not a project of Great Society liberals.

Greene continues:

But now everybody has to confront a grim reality– Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn’t really understand it). What’s a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump’s likely ed policy.

There are any number of explanations– Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.

So what’s the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?

But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America– none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it’s guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it’s really beside the point.

Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it’s heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet to show real quality.

And then there’s the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.

We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability– so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.

What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they’re totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it’s a real moral dilemma.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers
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