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Questions for Billionaire Betsy DeVos on Her Confirmation Hearings on January 11

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
60

Senate committee hearings on the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education are scheduled for January 11 in the Dirksen Office Building.

 

She has made campaign contributions to four members of the committee that will interview her, so it is likely that her approval is a foregone conclusion.

 

However, members of the committee of both parties should be prepared with good questions to draw out her experience, her background, her ideology, and her views.

 

Here are a few for members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to consider:

 

  1. Do you intend to pay the state of Ohio the $5.2 million that you owe for campaign finance violations?
  2. Are you aware of the widespread fraud and profiteering in the charter industry in Michigan?
  3. If you are Secretary of Education, what would you do to reduce fraud, waste and abuse in the charter industry?
  4. Why do you support cybercharters when research consistently shows that they deliver a substandard education, with low tests scores, high attrition, and low graduation rates?
  5. Why do you oppose regulation and oversight of charter schools?
  6. Do you believe that students who use public funds to go to religious schools should be subject to the same standards and tests as students  in public schools?
  7. Do you think that Thomas Jefferson was wrong when he recommended a separation of church and state?
  8. Should religious schools that accept public funding be required to hire certified teachers? If not, why not?
  9. Do you think that Detroit is a good model for the rest of the nation? It has more children in charter schools than public schools, and charter schools do not get better performance than public schools.
  10. Do you think that Milwaukee is a good model for the rest of the nation? It has vouchers, charter schools, and traditional public schools, yet is one of the lowest performing urban districts, only slightly ahead of Detroit, which is at the very bottom on NAEP.
  11. Do you know what NAEP is?
  12. What programs of the U.S. Department of Education are you planning to change?
  13. What is your knowledge of federal funding for higher education? How would you change it?
  14. What do you know about federal funding of students with special needs? How would you change it?
  15. About 85% of American students attend traditional public schools. Other than urging them to go to nonpublic schools, what ideas do you have to improve their schools?

 

Please suggest your questions.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

DeVos and the Charter Fraud in Michigan: $1 Billion Down the Drain

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
16

Michigan has one of the worst charter sectors in the nation, according to the Detroit Free Press, which conducted a year-long investigation of charters in the state. The people of Michigan pay $1 billion a year for a sector in which 80% of the charters operate for profit, in which there is neither accountability nor transparency, in which conflicts of interests don’t matter. Billionaire Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick and other members of the DeVos family control education issues in the Republican-dominated legislature with their generous campaign contributions. Governor Rick Snyder is DeVos’s personal puppet. And the state continues to waste public money on failing schools because they are privately run. No regulation needed!

 

This is Billionaire Betsy DeVos’s idea of how education should work!

 

The Detroit Free Press writes:

 

Michigan taxpayers pour nearly $1 billion a year into charter schools — but state laws regulating charters are among the nation’s weakest, and the state demands little accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent and how well children are educated.

 

A yearlong investigation by the Detroit Free Press reveals that Michigan’s lax oversight has enabled a range of abuses in a system now responsible for more than 140,000 Michigan children. That figure is growing as more parents try charter schools as an alternative to traditional districts.

 

In reviewing two decades of charter school records, the Free Press found:

 

Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records. No state standards for who operates charter schools or how to oversee them.

 

And a record number of charter schools run by for-profit companies that rake in taxpayer money and refuse to detail how they spend it, saying they’re private and not subject to disclosure laws. Michigan leads the nation in schools run by for-profits.

 

“People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

 

According to the Free Press’ review, 38% of charter schools that received state academic rankings during the 2012-13 school year fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all schools in the state performed better. Only 23% of traditional public schools fell below the 25th percentile.

 

Advocates argue that charter schools have a much higher percentage of children in poverty compared with traditional schools. But traditional schools, on average, perform slightly better on standardized tests even when poverty levels are taken into account.

 

In late 2011, Michigan lawmakers removed limits on how many charters can operate here —opening the door to a slew of new management companies. In 2013-14, the state had 296 charters operating some 370 schools — in 61% of them, charter boards have enlisted a full-service, for-profit management company. Another 17% rely on for-profits for other services, mostly staffing and human resources, according to Free Press research.

 

Michigan far exceeds states like Florida, Ohio and Missouri, where only about one-third of charters were run by a full-service, for-profit management company in 2011-12, according to research by Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron, who has studied charters extensively.

 

While the Free Press found disclosure issues with both for-profit and nonprofit companies, the state’s failure to insist on more financial transparency by for-profits — teacher salaries, executive compensation, vendor payments and more — is particularly troubling to charter critics because the for-profit companies receive the bulk of the money that goes to charter schools. In some cases, even charter school board members don’t get detailed information.

 

Without that, experts say there is no way to determine if a school is getting the most for its money.

 

Authorizers in Michigan receive 3% of the state tuition money for every student who attends a charter school they authorize. That means millions of dollars flow to the authorizing groups, who have no responsibility or accountability. Anyone can open a charter school in Michigan. Charter schools can fail and be reauthorized. Charter operators can run failing schools and get to open new ones. Success is unimportant. Michigan is a free-for-all with public money.

 

State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants

 

In Michigan, anyone and everyone can apply to open a charter school. There are no state guidelines for screening applicants.

 

And in many cases, authorizers have given additional charters to schools managed by companies that haven’t demonstrated academic success with their existing schools.

 

Central Michigan University, for example, gave two additional charters to schools managed by the for-profit Hanley-Harper Group Inc. in Harper Woods, before its first school had any state ranking and despite test scores that showed it below statewide proficiency rates in reading and math. The school’s first ranking, released last year, put it in the 14th percentile, meaning that 86% of schools in Michigan did better academically.

 

“We have a product, yes, we are trying to sell and constantly working to make … better and better and better,” company founder Beata Chochla, who has run several small businesses, including janitorial and home health care, told the Free Press in an interview.

 

Ferris State University has authorized a fourth Hanley-Harper school, expected to open this fall in Oak Park.

 

“We were convinced they had a good plan,” Ferris State’s interim charter schools director Ronald Rizzo said, adding that critics who believe an operator should have a successful academic track record before adding schools are “welcome” to their views.

 

Authorizers also have been slow to close poor performers. Among the oldest and poorest performing schools in metro Detroit:

 

■ Hope Academy, founded in Detroit in 1998, ranked almost rock-bottom — in the first percentile — in 2012-13.

 

■ Commonwealth Community Development Academy, founded in Detroit in 1996, ranked in the third percentile.

 

Both schools are authorized by Eastern Michigan University, which said in a statement that it is not satisfied with either. Yet just last year, EMU renewed Hope Academy’s charter.

 

The article includes a list of recent charter scandals:

 

■ A Sault Ste. Marie charter school board gave its administrator a severance package worth $520,000 in taxpayer money.

 

■ A Bedford Township charter school spent more than $1 million on swampland.

 

■ A mostly online charter school in Charlotte spent $263,000 on a Dale Carnegie confidence-building class, $100,000 more than it spent on laptops and iPads.

 

■ Two board members who challenged their Romulus school’s management company over finances and transparency were ousted when the length of their terms was summarily reduced by Grand Valley State University.

 

■ National Heritage Academies, the state’s largest for-profit school management company, charges 14 of its Michigan schools $1 million or more in rent — which many real estate experts say is excessive.

 

■ A charter school in Pittsfield Township gave jobs and millions of dollars in business to multiple members of the founder’s family.

 

■ Charter authorizers have allowed management companies to open multiple schools without a proven track record of success.

 

Want to get rich quick? Move to Michigan and open a charter school.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

The Rotten State of Charter Schools in Michigan: A For-Profit Bonanza, Sponsored by the DeVos Family

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
16

The confirmation hearings for Billionaire Betsy are scheduled to begin on January 11. It is assumed that she will breeze through because the DeVos family gives so much money to Republican politicians. That is usually enough to get a wealthy donor given an ambassadorship, but it is not typically the case for cabinet positions. Members of the president’s cabinet are expected to have some experience in the department and sector where they will take charge of federal policy. Billionaire Betsy has none. Her only involvement in education is as a lobbyist for private school choice. Since some 85% of children in the U.S. attend public schools, this means that she is totally out of touch with public education, for which she has repeatedly demonstrated hostility and contempt.

 

If she had her druthers, every child in America would attend a religious school, preferably evangelical Christian, to further her religious goals.

 

She and her husband tried and failed in 2000 to change the state constitution in Michigan, which forbids spending public money on religious schools. Voters turned down the revision overwhelmingly, by 69-31%.

 

So Billionaire Betsy and her husband went all in for charter schools, the next best route to privatization. They stood firmly against any regulation of charter schools, and the result–according to a year-long investigation by the Detroit Free Press in 2014–is a sector that is dominated by for-profit charters, that has low quality and poor performance, and that wastes $1 billion of taxpayers’ dollars every year. (I will explain in the next post why I am not including a link to the DFP series about the incompetence and corruption of the state’s charter sector.)

 

Here is one of dozens of stories of charter school corruption.

 

A husband and wife team (the Cancilliaris) started multiple charter schools; she was a teacher, he was a contractor. They were charged with self-dealing and conflicts of interest for steering millions of dollars to their private, for-profit companies. But the law is so weak on conflict of interest that almost anything goes. He was paid $200,000 as facilities director; she was paid $250,000 as program director, while also running an off-site textbook company that she and her husband founded.

 

 

In 2008 and again in 2012, Central Michigan raised questions about insider dealings, mostly involving the Cancilliaris; Mike Witucki, the former Flat Rock schools superintendent whose company, Helicon Associates, was brought in to manage the Summit schools; and the schools’ lawyers. At issue:

 

■ Companies founded by Witucki and Dino Cancilliari received millions of dollars in school funds for janitorial and tutoring services.

 

■ Emma Street Holdings, another company founded by the two men, provided loans and sold real estate to the schools.

 

■ Lawyers for the schools’ boards incorporated several of the Dino Cancilliari and Witucki companies, but CMU said they failed to disclose those relationships to the boards.

 

■ A company owned by Dino Cancilliari and his brother got construction contracts worth millions of dollars.

 

■ Helicon Associates paid Alison Cancilliari for consulting work, even as the two schools, with her at the helm, paid Helicon fees for managing the schools.

 

An expert on ethics says she sees ‘conflicts of interest at every turn

 

John Austin, president of the Michigan Board of Education, which makes education policy and advises lawmakers, said “self-dealing and personal enrichment of one’s self and family members in operating a public school would not stand the light of day at a local school board meeting.”

 

Diane Swanson, a professor of management at Kansas State University who specializes in ethics, said she sees “conflicts of interest at every turn.”

 

Swanson said dealings like those at Summit “make it look like the chartered schools are set up to funnel money into private hands. … I have serious concerns whether the primary stakeholders are really being served: the children, parents and the state itself.”

 

Two years ago, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers rated charter laws and said that Michigan has one of the worst charter school laws in the nation. 

 

Of particular note, the report said Michigan’s standards for renewing a charter are too low, the law doesn’t provide for automatic closure if a school is academically failing and doesn’t include minimum quality standards for authorizers. It also said the law doesn’t require authorizers to produce an annual report on the academic performance of its schools.

 

In brief, a public school with low test scores may be closed and turned over to a charter operator. A charter schools with low test scores will never be closed.

 

That’s Billionaire Betsy’s idea of the way education should run. Anyone who steps up is eligible to get a charter. For-profit companies run 80% of the schools. With no accountability, no transparency, no oversight, no conflict of interest laws.

 

Call your Senator. Call his or her office in Washington. Call her/his office in your state and/or district. Say NO to DeVos.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, Michigan, Privatization

Los Angeles Teachers Plan a Tweetstorm Against Trump and DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
17

The UTLA is organizing a tweet storm in opposition to Trump, DeVos, Walmart, and Broad.

 

The hashtag is #schooltrump

 

Please support them!

Categories Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Trump

Jeff Bezos Loves Charters and Privatization

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
24

Who is Jeff Bezos? Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. He is a billionaire. He loves charters and privatization of schools. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post, which had been a bastion of liberal thought under the ownership of the Graham family.

 

Bezos did not introduce charter-love and teacher-bashing to the Washington Post. While the news staff always played it straight, the Post editorial board was madly in love with Michelle Rhee during her stormy tenure. In their eyes, Rhee could do no wrong. She was their Joan of Arc. Even now, after a decade of Rhee-Henderson control, the Post still worships Rhee, as this article by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt showed.

 

When Bezos bought the Post in 2013, investigative journalist Lee Fang revealed in The Nation that Bezos is a generous supporter of school privatization.

 

Lee Fang wrote:

 

“There’s one area where Bezos has been hyper-active, but it is largely unknown to the general public: education reform. A look at the Bezos Family Foundation, which was founded by Jackie and Mike Bezos but is financed primarily by Jeff Bezos, reveals a fairly aggressive effort in recent years to press forward with a neoliberal education agenda:

 

• The Bezos Foundation has donated to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit organization that funds attack advertisements against teachers’ unions and other advocacy efforts to promote test-based evaluations of teachers. Education Reform Now also sponsors Democrats for Education Reform.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided $500,000 to NBC Universal to sponsor the Education Nation, a media series devoted to debating high-stakes testing, charter schools and other education reforms.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided over $100,000 worth of Amazon stock to the League of Education Voters Foundation to help pass the education reform in Washington State. Last year, the group helped pass I-1240, a ballot measure that created a charter school system in Washington State. In many states, charter schools open the door for privatization by inviting for-profit charter management companies to take over public schools that are ostensibly run by nonprofits.

 

Other education philanthropy supported by the Bezos Foundation include KIPP, Teach for America and many individual charter schools, including privately funded math and science programs across the country.”

 

Lee Fang says there is one good result of Bezos taking over the Post. It used to be controlled by for-profit Kaplan University and avoided negative coverage of the sham industry.

 

He wrote:

 

“For now, the change in ownership will probably only benefit the Post’s education coverage, given the newspaper’s long relationship with Kaplan, which helped prop up the paper’s finances for years while the Post either largely ignored the issue of for-profit colleges or sent its executives to Capitol Hill to lobby against better oversight of the industry.

 

“Part of the ugly history of the Post is its reliance on a predatory for-profit college called Kaplan University. Though Washington Post blogger Lydia DePillis seemed to whitewash this relationship yesterday by referring to Kaplan as only a “lucrative test prep business,” in reality, Kaplan University was one of worst for-profit colleges in the country.”

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, School Choice

Owen Davis: How Pearson Made a Killing from the US Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
17

Journalist Owen Davis explains in this article how the giant British education publisher Pearson made a killing as American politicians went gaga for standardized testing.

it is important to bear in mind that annual standardized testing is neither necessary nor customary. No other nation requires every child in grades 3-8 to take standardized tests every year. The US didn’t do it either until after the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. NCLB was a bonanza for Pearson and other testing companies. They beefed up their lobbying operations to make sure that the testing industry was well protected in DC and in state capitols. One of the architects of NCLB, Sandy Kress, went home to Dallas and became a well-paid lobbyist for Pearson.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Pearson, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: Is the Tennessee ASD Falling Apart?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
10

Gary Rubenstein has been following the evolution of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, one of the biggest corporate reform programs in the nation. It started with great fanfare in 2011, using Race to the Top funding. The plan was to take control of the state’s lowest performing schools and turn them over to charters. The founders promised to vault these schools from the bottom 5% in the state to the Top 20% in five years. It hasn’t happened. Now big-name charter chains are bailing out.

 

“By making such a grand proclamation of what they were going to accomplish, the ASD invited a lot of scrutiny. After a few years there was a Vanderbilt analysis that said that students in the ASD were not making very much progress. In November 2014, Green Dot abandoned their plans to take over a high school. This started a parade of high profile charter operators leaving or reducing their stake in the ASD. In March 2015 a bizarre thing happened. YES prep, the charter chain that Chris Barbic started, at the last minute abandoned their plans to open a school in the ASD. In October 2016 Gestalt Charter Schools announced that they will stop running their two schools which included Humes, one of the original six ASD schools. Their other school, Klondike Elementary School, will actually close next year because of this, the first ASD school to be shut down. And most recently, just a few weeks ago, the gold standard of charter schools, KIPP Charter Schools, announced that they will pull out of KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools. Watching the ASD unravel does make me look quite prophetic when I predicted this in my open letter to Chris Barbic back in 2012.

 

“One thing that was good about the ASD experiment was that these charter schools were taking over existing schools so that they would truly have the ‘same kids’ that they always claim to have when they compare themselves to the nearby ‘failing’ schools. In this way the ASD made it more difficult for these charter schools to do as many of the tricks they do elsewhere to choose the students who will raise their test scores. The fact that all these high profile charters are turning around and fleeing the ASD just shows what a fraud these charter chains are when they are stripped of the smoke and mirrors that they have used to build their influence and fame.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Tennessee

Will Indiana’s Choice Program be the Model for the Trump-DeVos Plan?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
20

http://www.journalgazette.net/food/the-dish/Indiana-s-vouchers-wow-GOP-16999984

 

Mike Pence is a devout believer in school choice and privatization of public funds. The Indiana state constitution specifically prohibits spending public funds in religious schools but the state courts ruled that the public money went to families, not to the religious schools that actually received the money. Now Indiana is a national model for the privatization movement, although the public was never asked to vote on this dramatic abandonment of public schools.

 

Indiana lawmakers originally promoted the state’s school voucher program as a way to make good on America’s promise of equal opportunity, offering children from poor and lower-middle-class families an escape from public schools that failed to meet their needs.

 

But five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.

 

The voucher program, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing, serves more than 32,000 children and provides an early glimpse of what education policy could look like in Donald Trump’s presidency.

 

Trump has signaled that he intends to pour billions of federal dollars into efforts to expand vouchers and charter schools nationwide. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for education secretary, played an important role in lobbying for the establishment of Indiana’s voucher program in 2011. And Vice President-elect Mike Pence led the charge as the state’s governor to loosen eligibility requirements and greatly expand the program’s reach.

 

Most recipients are not leaving the state’s worst schools: Just 3 percent of new recipients of vouchers in 2015 qualified for them because they lived in the attendance area of F-rated public schools. And while private school enrollment grew by 12,000 students over the past five years, the number of voucher recipients grew by 29,000, according to state data, meaning that taxpayer money is potentially helping thousands of families pay for a choice they were already making.

 

Most recipients qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, according to state data, but a growing proportion – now 31 percent – do not.

 

Opponents argue that vouchers are not reaching the children most in need of better schools. They also assert that voucher programs violate the constitutional separation of church and state by funneling public dollars into religious schools, including those that teach creationism instead of the theory of evolution.

 

Indiana’s program survived a legal challenge in 2013, when a judge ruled that the primary beneficiaries of the vouchers were families, not religious institutions.

 

Growing larger

 

The Indiana General Assembly first approved a limited voucher program in 2011, capping it at 7,500 students in the first year and restricting it to children who had attended public schools for at least a year.

 

“Public schools will get first shot at every child,” then-Gov. Mitch Daniels said at the time. “If the public school delivers and succeeds, no one will seek to exercise this choice.”

 

DeVos, who had lobbied for the program as chairwoman of the American Federation for Children, hailed its passage and proposed that other states follow Indiana’s lead. Two years later, Pence entered the governor’s office with a pledge to extend vouchers to more children.

 

“There’s nothing that ails our schools that can’t be fixed by giving parents more choices and teachers more freedom to teach,” Pence said during his inaugural address in 2013.

 

Within months, Indiana lawmakers eliminated the requirement that children attend public school before receiving vouchers and lifted the cap on the number of recipients. The income cutoff was raised, and more middle-class families became eligible.

 

When those changes took effect, an estimated 60 percent of all Indiana children were eligible for vouchers, and the number of recipients jumped from 9,000 to more than 19,000 in one year.

 

The proportion of children who had never previously attended Indiana public schools also rose quickly: By 2016, more than half of voucher recipients – 52 percent – had never been in the state’s public school system.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Indiana, Privatization, Vouchers

Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Opposes Charter Schools for All the Right Reasons

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
4

Kentucky is one of the few states that did not have any charter schools until the Republicans swept into power. Republicans have longed for school choice, because choice and competition are baked into free-market ideology. Besides, their neighboring state Tennessee has charter schools. They didn’t care that Kentucky’s students perform better than those of Tennessee on the National Assessment of Educational Performance. The Republicans in Kentucky want the same failed ideas as everyone else.

 

The school board of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, passed a resolution saying that they don’t want charter schools. They want to protect and improve their public schools, not destroy or privatize them. They don’t see the point of a dual school system.

 

In the resolution, the board expressed concerns about charter schools siphoning money from public schools, lacking similar transparency and accountability standards as public schools, and failing to help at-risk students.

 

“The Elizabethtown Independent Board of Education opposes any Charter School legislation that will establish a separate system of state-authorized public charter schools that are funded through a funding formula that unilaterally takes critically needed funds from the local school districts and redirects them to charter schools, thereby debilitating the significantly underfunded existing system of funding for public education for all Kentucky students,” the resolution states.

 

The board held a discussion on charter schools before unanimously passing the resolution.

 

“We know with very good confidence that charter schools will continue to defund what is already underfunded,” said Tony Kuklinski, a board member. “They will take taxpayer money, money from the people we represent, and put it into a private enterprise for personal gain with no substantial data to support a better education system than a public school system.”

 

Kuklinski added that once the charter schools fail or decide to close shop, children will return to public schools undereducated.

 

“We already have things in place where if we don’t meet certain requirements and standards that the state has implemented, there can be sanctions up to and including the state coming in and taking over a school district,” he said…

 

Kentucky is one of seven states that does not have charter school legislation. Other states without charter schools are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.

 

 

Hardin County Schools Board of Education Chairman Charlie Wise, who also opposes charter schools, said the district will discuss and consider writing a similar resolution next month once new board members have been sworn in.

 

Congratulations to the Elizabethtown school board, which is far wiser than the Kentucky legislature.

 

Here is hoping that your courage and resolve spreads to many other school districts across the state and that it wins bipartisan support from every citizen in every school district. Everything in your resolution is correct. Charter schools are under private management; they are NOT public schools. If you sue them for excluding your children with special needs, they will tell the judge that they are a private corporation, not a “state actor.” They will drain resources from your local public schools, because the legislature has no intention of replacing the money you lose when kids are lured away with false promises. If charters are opened in your district, your public schools will lose money, teachers, and programs. Stay the course. Don’t let the corporations or representatives from ALEC bully you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Kentucky, Privatization, Resistance

Education Lingo and How It is Used to Mislead the Public

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2017 //
50

Emma Brown has an informative article today in the Washington Post about education lingo and its misuses.

 

Advocates of vouchers call them “opportunity scholarships” or “education savings accounts” or something else, because the American public doesn’t like vouchers. There have been many referenda on vouchers, and they have been defeated every time. When Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick sponsored a referendum on vouchers in Michigan in 2000, it was rejected by 69-31%. The most recent referendum was in Florida in 2012, when Jeb Bush tried to pull the wool over the eyes of voters by calling his voucher amendment the “Religious Liberty Amendment,” hoping the public was dumb enough to be deceived, and it was defeated by 58-42%. Maybe had it been called “the Education Voucher Amendment,” it would have gone down by 70-30%.

 

Thus, privatizers use a different term: school choice.

 

“School choice” was long tainted because of its origins with segregationist white southerners.

 

Reform is now a tainted word as well because it is a cover for privatization.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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