Excellent video on DeVos focusing on failure of charter schools in Detroit/Michigan, her support of for-profit charters; privatization agenda. Less than 10 minutes long; well produced; interviews with parents, film clips, etc.
Please circulate, especially to people who will call Senators on Health, Education, Labor Committee. DeVos hearing is this Tuesday.
Facebook link:
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OC7wZbwzM&feature=youtu.be
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.
The Salt Lake City Tribune published an impassioned opinion piece by educators in opposition to billionaire Betsy DeVos.
Here is a part of the article:
Now is the time to contact your members of Congress to proclaim — unequivocally — that the hope for the future of our children is directly connected to support for public education. President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as the next secretary of education delivers a severe blow to the future of public education. While her statements indicate a desire to provide all parents the opportunity to choose the best schools for their children, a deeper look into her promotion of unregulated, for-profit charters and vouchers indicates a very different agenda.
From the Reagan administration through the Obama administration, a market-based agenda has spread an often-inaccurate narrative — leading Americans to believe that our public schools, teachers and students are failing miserably. This story was used to steamroll the country with privatization mandates while shifting billions of tax dollars to those who manufactured the narrative.
This is a fine article that echoes both research and common sense.
Stop Billionaire Betsy before she does to the nation what she has done to Detroit.
K12 Inc. is the largest provider of online charter schools. This sector is probably the worst part of the charter industry. CREDO reported last year that for every 180 days of online enrollment, a student will lose 180 days in math, and 72 in reading.
At its shareholder meeting on December 15, a group of shareholders proposed that the corporation become transparent as to how much it spends on lobbying.
As reported on Valerie Strauss’s blog, shareholders wanted to know more:
At a meeting scheduled for Thursday, shareholders are going to ask for a vote on whether the company should be required to publicly disclose details about its lobbying efforts in various states. The Arjuna Capital shareholder resolution asks that K12 prepare an annual report showing:
Company policy and procedures governing lobbying, both direct and indirect, and grass-roots lobbying communications.
Payments by K12 used for (a) direct or indirect lobbying or (b) grass-roots lobbying communications, in each case including the amount of the payment and the recipient.
K12’s membership in and payments to any tax-exempt organization that writes and endorses model legislation.
Description of the decision-making process and oversight by management and the board for making payments lobbying payments.
It is not known whether their efforts to get the company to disclose its lobbying activities were successful.
One of the proponents of transparency is Bertis Downs, who owns K12 Inc. stock and is a member of the board of directors of the Network for Public Education. He is a public school parent in Athens, Georgia.
Strauss wrote about him:
The new shareholder effort is being led by Bertis Downs, a public school advocate in Athens, Ga., who spent his career providing legal counsel and managing the rock group R.E.M., and who bought K12 stock a few years ago. Asked why he is taking this action, Downs said in an email:
My motivation in filing for this disclosure of K-12’s lobbying activities stems from my overall curiosity and interest as a parent and a shareholder in knowing more about what lobbying is done, whether through ALEC or directly, that leads to the so-called “education reform” laws being passed all over the country. How much does the company spend and how do they spend it and what results do they get for it? And is any of that good for meaningful teaching and learning in our schools? And is it good for the company and its shareholders?
At some point, parents should wake up and stop sending their children to these “schools.”
I wrote an article for the online version of the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how the big foundations paved the way for Betsy DeVos’ nihilistic campaign to privatize public education. I wanted it to be in a journal that foundations across the nation read. It is available only to subscribers.
https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Opinion-Blame-Big-Foundations/238662
Opinion: Blame Big Foundations for Assault on Public Education
By Diane Ravitch
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to reallocate $20 billion in federal funds to promote charter schools and private-school vouchers. He has selected Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos — who has long devoted her philanthropic efforts to advocating for charters and vouchers — as the next secretary of education. After the election, her American Federation for Children boasted of spending nearly $5 million on candidates that support school choice, not public schools.
Currently, 80 percent of charter schools in Michigan are run by for-profit corporations, due in no small part to Ms. DeVos and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos. These schools represent a $1 billion industry that produces results no better than do public schools, according to a yearlong Detroit Free Press investigation. The DeVoses recently made $1.45 million in campaign contributions to Michigan lawmakers who blocked measures to hold charters accountable for performance or financial stability.
With Ms. DeVos in charge of federal education policy, the very future of public education in the United States is at risk. How did we reach this sorry state? Why should a keystone democratic institution be in jeopardy?
I hold foundations responsible.
Extremist Attacks
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have promoted charter schools and school choice for the past decade. They laid the groundwork for extremist attacks on public schools. They legitimized taxpayer subsidies for privately managed charters and for “school choice,” which paved the way for vouchers. (Indeed, as foundations spawned thousands of charter schools in the past decade, nearly half of the states endorsed voucher programs.)
At least a dozen more foundations have joined the Big Three, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund.
For years these groups have argued that, one, public schools are “failing”; two, we must save poor children from these failing schools; three, they are failing because of bad teachers; four, anyone with a few weeks of training can teach as well, or better. It’s a simple, easily digestible narrative, and it’s wrong.
To begin with, our public schools are not failing. Where test scores are low, there is high poverty and concentrated racial segregation. Test scores in affluent and middle-income communities are high. The U.S. rank on international standardized tests has been consistent (and consistently average) since those tests began being offered in the 1960s, but the countries with higher scores never surpassed us economically.
The big foundations refused to recognize the limitations of standardized testing and its correlation with family income. Look at SAT scores: Students whose families have high incomes do best; those from impoverished families have the lowest scores. The foundations choose to ignore the root causes of low test scores and instead blame the teachers at schools in high-poverty areas.
Follow the Money
Major foundations put their philanthropic millions into three strategies:
They funded independently run charter schools, which are a form of privatization.
Some, notably the Gates Foundation, invested in evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.
They gave many millions to Teach for America, which undermines the profession by leading young college graduates to think they can be good teachers with only five weeks of training.
Many of the philanthropists behind the foundations have also used their own money to underwrite political candidates and state referenda aimed at advancing charters and school choice. Bill Gates and his allies spent millions to pass a referendum in Washington State authorizing charter schools; it failed three times before winning in 2012 by 1 percent of the vote. After the state Supreme Court denied taxpayer funding to charters, on the grounds that they are not public schools because they are not overseen by elected school boards, three justices who joined the majority ruling faced electoral challengers bankrolled by Mr. Gates and his friends. (The incumbents easily won re-election.)
The Walton Family Foundation claims to have launched one-quarter of the charter schools in the District of Columbia. It has pledged to spend $200 million annually for at least the next five years on opening new charters. Individual family members have spent millions on pro-school choice candidates and ballot questions. This year they joined other out-of-state billionaires like Michael Bloomberg in contributing $26 million to support a Massachusetts referendum that would authorize a dozen new charters a year, indefinitely. It lost, 62 percent to 38 percent. Only 16 of the state’s 351 school districts voted “yes”; the “no vote” was strongest in districts that already had charters, which parents knew were draining resources from their public schools.
Advocates for charter schools insist they are public schools — except when charters are brought into court or before the National Labor Relations Board, in which case they claim to be private corporations, not state actors. They do share in public funding for education, a pie that has not gotten bigger for a decade. So every new charter school takes money away from traditional public schools, requiring them to increase class sizes, lay off teachers, and cut programs.
Charters have a mixed performance record. Those with the highest test scores are known for cherry-picking their students, excluding those with severe disabilities and English-language learners, and pushing out students who are difficult to teach or who have low test scores.
Many other charters have abysmal academic records. The worst are the virtual charters, which have high attrition rates, low test scores, and low graduation rates. As The New York Times recently reported, citing federal data, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow in Ohio has “more students drop out … or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country.”
Why do state leaders allow such “schools” to exist?
Follow the campaign contributions to key legislators.
Failing the Test
The Gates Foundation’s crusade to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students has been a colossal failure, one from which the organization has yet to back off. (Unlike its $2 billion campaign to encourage smaller high schools, which the foundation admitted in 2008 had not succeeded.)
This has had devastating consequences. President Obama’s Education Department, which had close ties to the Gates Foundation, required states to adopt this untested way of evaluating teachers to be eligible for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding.
Since the standardized tests covered only mathematics and reading, some states, like Florida, began rating teachers based on the scores of students they didn’t teach in subjects they didn’t teach.
In New York State, a highly regarded fourth-grade teacher in an affluent suburb sued over her low rating and won a judgment that the state’s method, based on the Gates precept, was “arbitrary and capricious.” When newspapers in Los Angeles and New York City published invalid ratings of thousands of teachers, classroom morale plummeted and veteran educators resigned in protest. One in Los Angeles committed suicide.
The American Statistical Association issued a strong critique of the use of student scores to rate teachers, since scores vary depending on which students are assigned to teachers. The American Educational Research Association also spoke out against the Gates Foundation’s method, saying that those who teach English-language learners and students with disabilities would be unfairly penalized.
Still, big donors were so sure teachers were responsible for low test scores that they fell in love with Teach for America and showered hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
The nonprofit began as a good idea: Invite young college graduates to teach for two years where no teachers were readily available, sort of like the Peace Corps. But then the organization began making absurd claims that its young recruits could “transform” the lives of poor students and even close the achievement gap between children who are rich and poor, white and black. School districts, looking to save money, began replacing experienced teachers with Teach for America recruits, who became the hard-working, high-turnover staff at thousands of new charter schools.
Due in part to that supply of cheap labor, 93 percent of charters are nonunion, which the retail billionaires of the DeVos and Walton families no doubt see as a boon. Unfortunately, Teach for America undermines the teaching profession by asserting that five weeks of training is equivalent to a year or two of professional education. Would doctors or lawyers ever permit untrained recruits to become Heal for America or Litigate for America? It is only the low prestige of the teaching profession that enables it to be so easily infiltrated by amateurs, who mean well but are usually gone in two or three years.
Now that the Trump administration means to use the power and purse of the federal government to replace public schools with private alternatives, it is important to remember that universal public education under democratic control has long been one of the hallmarks of our democracy. No high-performing nation in the world has turned its public schools over to the free market.
Let us remember that public schools were established to prepare young people to become responsible citizens. In addition to teaching knowledge and skills, they are expected to teach character and ethical behavior. Gates, Broad, and other big foundations have forgotten that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good. Their grant-making strategies have endangered public education.
This is a time to hope that they will recognize their errors, take a stand against privatization of our public services, and commit themselves to rebuilding public education and civil society.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a research professor at New York University. She writes about education policy at Diane Ravitch’s Blog.
Donald Trump will continue as executive producer of ” The New Celebrity Apprentice,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, after his inauguration.
The role nets him hundreds of thousands annually, and he is not giving it up. He is not releasing his tax returns. Ivanka’s product line is now featured in Walmart.
Who knew that winning the presidency would open the door to so many lucrative deals?
Vladimir Putin must be enjoying the farce as we become the laughing stock of the world. Keep your eyes on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Jeff Bryant has written a stunning documentation of the damage done by the charter industry to public schools in North Carolina. It is worth your time to read it all. It is a preview of what lies ahead for public education in the Trump era, unless parents and educators and public-spirited citizens join to save their public schools. It is not a pretty picture.
The Tea Party Republicans in the legislature and Governor Pat McCrory in the state house set a course to undermine, underfund, and starve public schools while opening the state to charter schools, whether nonprofit or for-profit. Jeff Bryant shows how funding for the public schools is below 2008 levels, even though enrollment has grown by nearly 80,000. Public schools have had to make budget cuts, at the same time that charter schools and online charter schools take away students and funding. In North Carolina, as in many states, if a student leaves a charter school after October to return to the public school, the charter school gets to keep the full year of tuition and is not obliged to replace the student who left.
The board that oversees charter schools and decides which new charters to approve is filled with charter school advocates. As Donald Trump used to say, “It’s a rigged system, folks, it’s a rigged system.”
Bryant explains in detail how the for-profit charter management companies make money. He uses the example of National Heritage Academies, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the hometown of Donald Trump’s designated Secretary of Education. Half their teachers may be uncertified, which means they have lower salary costs. But the real money is in the real estate.
Bryant writes:
How do these schools make a profit? The best answer the reporter for the Charlotte Observer could find was in management fees for the EMOs [educational management organizations], which In North Carolina equal to 7 – 19 percent of total school operational costs.
But based on my inquiries, that figure represents a very small part of the profit these schools make.
Out Of Michigan And Florida
“North Carolina is one those states that is new to the charter game,” Ellen Lipton tells me in a phone call to her office in Michigan – home of National Heritage Academies. NHA is based in Grand Rapids, where Betsy DeVos also lives.
“The low per-student funding that tends to characterize Southern states generally kept charter school operators from moving into those states,” she contends. “But now states like Michigan are getting saturated” so the charter chains have decided to move south.
Lipton is a Michigan State Representative who has spoken out against the spread of charter schools through the state’s Education Achievement Authority, an appointed agency, similar to the Achievement School District North Carolina created last year, that takes over low-performing schools and turns them over to charter operators.
According to Lipton, NHA has “fine-tuned” the business of chartering to ensure they make a profit. She points me to a recent investigative report by the Detroit Free Press that finds, “It is difficult to know how charter management companies are spending money … Unlike traditional school districts, the management companies usually don’t disclose their vendors, contracts, and competitive bid documents.”
“NHA is a business model based on, not necessarily educating kids, but on being a facilities management company,” Casandra Ulbrich, another Michigan source, tells me.
Ulbrich is currently serving her second eight-year term on the Michigan State Board of Education and also works in education administration at a state community college.
She tells me how the NHA business model works: First, NHA forms a charter school board to “invite” NHA to manage a new school. The governing board is not independent of the management company, and members of the board can serve on multiple NHA charter boards across the state, thus creating a network of charter school boosters the work on promoting these schools.
After securing a contract to manage the new school, NHA purchases a building – it could be a storefront in a strip mall or an abandoned warehouse – and requests approval from an authorizer to open a school there. After the authorization, the charter board signs a lease agreement with Charter Development Company, LLC to take over ownership of the building. Charter Development Company, which has branches in all the states where NHA has schools, has its home office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the same address as the home office of NHA.
Now NHA and its related enterprises own the building and its contents, even if desks, computers, and equipment have been purchased with taxpayer money. It receives rent payments from the district. It owns the curriculum the school teaches. And if NHA is ever fired, the charter board – and by extension the district – is in the awkward position of having to buy back its own school.
As I have reported on many occasions (see here and here and here and here and here and here), a for-profit company called Bridge International Academies has been building a market for low-cost, for-profit schooling in Africa. It has been negotiating with the government of Liberia to take charge of all primary education and expanding in Uganda. Investors in BIA include Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Last summer, the Ministry of Education and Sports ordered the closure of 87 for-profit academies, including the 60 or so managed by BIA, on grounds that they did not meet minimum standards or appropriate facilities for students. Teachers’ unions objected to the academies’ use of un-credentialed teachers. This month, the Uganda High Court ordered the closure of all of BIA’s schools in Uganda.
BIA has 63 campuses and 12,000 students in Uganda. They will remain open until December 8, when students take their exams.
A legal tug-of-war between Ugandan authorities and a for-profit international chain of schools has led to the education provider being ordered to shut down in a matter of weeks, leaving the lives of thousands of pupils in limbo….
Bridge International Academies said it provides the best possible education to its students and that it will do whatever it can to make sure their schools continue to operate in Uganda.
Many students, parents and teachers protested after Uganda High Court ordered the closure of the low-cost private schools, which are backed by Microsoft and Facebook founders Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
Bridge International Academies has suggested that the opposition against their chain of schools was because the campuses competed against local state-run and private schools.
The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren’t qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved.
“The Ministry does not know what is being taught in these schools which is a point of concern to (the) government,” Mutazindwa said…
For its part, BIA — which runs more than 400 nursery and primary schools across Africa — has continuously denied the allegations that have been made by the government.
“There’s a lot of miscommunication and a lot of very serious, unfounded allegations. We would like to be given the opportunity to explain ourselves … The Ministry has been unwilling to give us an audience to set the record straight,” Uganda’s BIA director, Andrew White, told CNN.
In a statement, BIA addressed eight allegations that have been made about its operations. It said it teaches the Ugandan curriculum, all schools have good sanitation facilities and that the majority of their teachers are certified and registered. Those who aren’t certified and registered, it said, are attending in-service training.
When asked why the allegations were made if they weren’t true, White said: “We definitely feel like a lot of pressure has been applied to have a particular view of Bridge that is a negative one….”
One educational advocacy group agrees with the Ugandan authorities’ decision to close BIA.
President of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), Camilla Croso, told CNN that the quality of their schools is “totally inadequate and unacceptable.”
“They are profit making enormously,” she said. “It’s very indecent because they are looking at poor people as a profitable market.”
“It really is incompatible to have human rights and profit making because you are motivated and act in completely different ways.”
The Education Commission of the States posted a lineup of the partisan divide among the states. Republicans have a commanding lead over Democrats.
Of 50 states, 33 have Republican governors. Republicans control 66 partisan chambers, compared to 30 held by Democrats.
Republicans pick up three legislative chambers. The Kentucky House, Iowa Senate and Minnesota Senate switched from Democratic to Republican control. Republicans made history in Kentucky when they took 17 seats from the Democrats to gain control of the chamber for the first time since 1922, and only the third time in state history. Republicans now control all 30 legislative chambers in southern states.
Democrats pick up four legislative chambers. The New Mexico House, both Nevada Assembly and Senate and Washington Senate switched from Republican to Democratic control.
Tied chamber. Republicans also made gains in Connecticut, a reliably blue state, where the Senate is tied 18R-18D.
Three states with split/tied chambers. Colorado and Maine continue to have spit legislative chamber party control. This down from seven states pre-election (Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington). The Connecticut Senate is tied with 18 Republicans and 18 Democrats.
This means that a large number of states will look favorably on school choice, which Trump has described as his highest priority. Many states already have some form of voucher program; most–thanks to Race to the Top–permit charters. School choice–charters and vouchers–means less money for public schools. As public schools lose funding, class sizes will grow, programs will be cut, and alternatives will become more attractive.
If Betsy DeVos is confirmed as Secretary of Education, be prepared for an all-out federal assault on public schools. The same could be said of almost anyone Trump might select in her place (Falwell, Rhee, Moskowitz, etc.) The model is Race to the Top. The Department of Education might bundle $20 billion and dangle it before states as a competition, with eligibility dependent on laws permitting vouchers to religious schools and for-profit charters, even home schooling.
Friends and allies of public education, a cornerstone of our democracy for nearly 200 years, will have to organize and resist.
Join the Network for Public Education as we fight to defend public schools against privatization.
The DeVos family has had an outsize influence in Michigan, by its charitable contributions and its political contributions.
After the Detroit Free Press published a scathing series of articles about the corrupt, unaccountable practices in charter schools in the state, the legislature was shamed into drafting a law that would provide oversight of the charter sector.
The DeVos family gave out $1.5 million in campaign contributions to make sure that charter schools continued to be unregulated and unaccountable.
80% of the charter schools in Michigan operate for profit. No other state has so many for-profit operators.
Detroit is overrun with charters. It is at the very bottom of all urban districts tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, despite all its choice and competition. Or because of them.
Michigan doesn’t have vouchers, because the people of Michigan voted them down in 2000 when the DeVos family proposed an initiative to permit public funds to flow to nonpublic schools. The measure lost overwhelmingly, by 69-31%. No county in the state voted for it.
Milwaukee has had both charters and vouchers for more than 20 years, and it is among the lowest scoring urban districts in the nation, but ahead of Detroit.
Read what the New York Times wrote about charters in Detroit last June. DeVos now owns this mess.
Why should anyone open a charter school, get public money, and be free of oversight? Why should taxpayer dollars flow to religious schools when every state referendum on vouchers has gone down to inglorious defeat by large majorities?
Diane Ravitch's blog 