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Politico: Opposition to DeVos “Snowballs into an Avalanche”

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2017 //
25

Politico reports that the offices of Republican Senators are overwhelmed with letters, emails, and faxes opposing Betsy DeVos, according to Politico. She is the most controversial and unpopular cabinet choice of Trump, and Senators have been overwhelmed by negative comments. Most of them have gone into hiding. Their phone lines are jammed or off the hook.

The reasons for the avalanche of opposition:

1. She is unqualified, having no experience as a parent, student, teacher, or local board member in a public school, which 85% of American students attend 10% in private schools and 5% in privately owned charter schools).

2. She is a lobbyist for privatization of public schools.

3. As she demonstrated in her Senate hearings, she is ignorant of federal law and policy.

4. She is hostile to public schools.

5. If appointed, she will transfer federal funds from public schools to non-public schools.

6. She uses her vast fortune to buy votes of Republican senators.

Parents care about their children and their schools and communities. They object to a Secretary of Education who doesn’t care about their public schools and will hurt their children and their communities while prattling about “great schools.” Indeeed, they may even be aware of the damage DeVos has already done to the public schools of Michigan.

If no Republican breaks ranks, voters must remember in November: 2018, 2020, and 2022. Actions have consequences.

Why in the world does the GOP stand fast behind a nominee who is so clearly uninformed? Could it be the millions she and her family have given them? As DeVos once said, we do expect something in return for our money. Payback day arrived and she is getting what she paid for.

Trump has nominated many people who were unfitted to the mission of their Department, like Dr. Carson for HUD, Scott Pruitt for EPA. But DeVos! Our public schools are at risk.

It is not the grizzly bears that are alarmed by DeVos. It’s the Mama Bears. They protect their cubs.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Fraud, Michigan, Parents, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Lying about Detroit and Muskegon Heights and Michigan

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2017 //
17

In the debate about the appointment of Betsy DeVos, the failure of her brand of reform in Michigan has not gotten enough attention. Would you hire a plumber whose previous jobs were all failures? Would you trust your car to an auto mechanic who was known to be incompetent? Would you go to a doctor who lost his medical license for malpractice?

DeVos’s allies have been beating the drums about a Detroit miracle, but no one else can see it but them. Despite more than 20 years of charters, the Detroit school district is the lowest performing urban district on NAEP. As the Detroit Free Press has repeatedly written, many of the charters in Detroit are failing schools. DeVos fought off legislative efforts to impose accountability on charters.

Most recently, one of the boosters for privatization in Michigan published an article about the miracle of Muskegon Heights, a predominantly African American school district that was taken over by the state and given an emergency manager. The emergency manager turned the entire small district over to a charter operator. If you believe the DeVos PR, this was great for the children.

But Gary Rubinstein looked at the data and found that this charter flack was presenting “alternate facts.” Muskegon Heights is one of the lowest performing districts in the state of Michigan.

Before the takeover, Muskegon Heights had five schools. Now it has two.

Gary writes:

So one school is in the bottom 2% of all schools and the other is in the bottom 0%. Unless the second school once had a ranking with negative numbers, there is no way that being in the 0% can be an improvement over anything.

So this is yet another example of a lie to support the narrative that charter schools are superior to public schools. If this turnaround was supported by Betsy DeVos and it is any indication of her ability to devise real solutions to complex issues, I’m feeling pretty pessimistic about the direction education will take if and when she is confirmed as Secretary of Education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization

DeVos Pushing More Public School Closings, But Only African American Schools Are Targeted

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2017 //
45

The following article was sent to me by education researchers Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin. Baldwin is a former teacher in Saginaw. Recently, I was on an NPR program hosted by Warren Olney with three other people, one of whom spoke on behalf of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He insisted that not a single public school in Detroit had ever been closed. This article says that the number of public schools closed in Detroit over the past 20 years is nearly 200, with more school closings ahead, all in African American communities. Meanwhile the Detroit Free Press published an article showing that the closure of neighborhood schools–DeVos’s goal–means less choice for black residents, who no longer have a school they can walk to or transportation to schools of “choice.”

DeVos leads push for school closings, only African American schools targeted

By Russ Bellant and M. Denise Baldwin

When Michigan Governor Rick Snyder concluded that a new law that restructured Detroit Public Schools prohibited school closures until 2019, the DeVos network reacted immediately, demanding closures of Detroit schools. They enlisted elected officials who had received campaign contributions from the DeVos apparatus. Now the Governor has backed down, despite considerable legal muscle that agreed with his interpretation.

In a shocking move, the Governor has proposed the closing of 38 schools across the state, including 24 Detroit public schools (and one Detroit charter). But an examination of the list shows a disturbing pattern: all of them serve primarily African American populations.

The DeVos entity that speaks to education issues in the state, Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), quickly demanded that all 38 be shut down. They ignore the reality that in one part of Detroit, it would close all the area high schools and abandon K-8 education in a large area of the City. More fundamentally, they ignore the fact that they are accelerating separate and unequal education in Michigan.

GLEP, which was set up and has been primarily funded by Dick and Betsy DeVos, has been aggressive in advocating the shutting down of public schools and replacing them with charters. The charters, in turn, have been seen as a base to get electoral support for vouchers, according to plans formulated in the mid-1990s. An amendment to the Michigan Constitution to permit vouchers was put on the ballot by the DeVos family in 2000, but it was soundly defeated.

Undeterred, the DeVos machine continues their plan to charterize Michigan public schools with no caps or accountability mandated. The charters, some placed by DeVos allies, are set up primarily in communities of color. Eighty percent are for-profit corporations, according to a Western Michigan University study. They average a thousand dollars profit off each student, out of a state foundation of just over $7,000 per student.

White school districts have been more resistant to state intervention when school performance is an issue, and it gets more attention. But when Black schools are targeted, there is less statewide concern, so they are seen as a path of least resistance for charterizers.

DeVos has directly used her political muscle to take a highly rated Detroit aeronautics high school and have a state subsidy for that school transferred to a DeVos-created charter high school in west Michigan. They also took the Detroit curriculum as their own. The West Michigan Aviation Academy says that the school was an inspiration of Betsy DeVos.

It remains to be seen how much the Michigan public will tolerate the dismantling of their districts. One school that is in an otherwise majority white district plans a determined resistance to the state closing plan. The East Detroit Public Schools, in a county that voted for Trump, has on its website a statement from its Superintendent that “We have no intention of allowing the SRO (from the Governor’s office-RB) to dictate the future of our students.” A school board member added that “East Detroit Public Schools will not accept the closure of any of the District’s schools by the state and will not allow the SRO to intervene at this point in our plans. School closures hurt children.”

The state is also facing lawsuits over its destruction of public schools and educational quality. They have directly controlled the Detroit schools for the last eight years and 15 of the last 18 years. Their citation of academic shortcomings they created as justification of the closings is really an indictment of state control, a subject they avoid.

The state has also dismantled four school districts across the state. All were African-American communities. Currently three of the proposed schools for closure in Saginaw and in Bridgeport-Spaulding Public Schools serve students who were displaced when their home district, Buena Vista, was dissolved. The proposed closings would subject hundreds of students to two major school dislocations.

Detroit is the model of proving that mass closures only put districts in a downward spiral. In the last 13 years 172 district schools (61%) have been closed, mostly by the state, in response to state-created debt and academic performance. Another 15 were taken and turned into the Governor’s personal school district. Closings have lead to abusive charterization and neighborhood abandonment. If closures were the solution, Detroit would be the Harvard of K-12 education.

There is a likely legal challenge to the DeVos-led dismantling of public education based on impact disparities on African American communities. DeVos has shown no reluctance to exploit this vulnerability in our social fabric as she seeks a world of profit-driven charters and vouchers that undermine over a half-century of educational progress.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Detroit, Michigan

Bill Boyle: Betsy DeVos and the Problem of Institutional Racism

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2017 //
32

 

 

Bill Boyle notices a fact that has been obvious to everyone except corporate reformers for the past 15 years: almost every school that is labeled “failing” enrolls mostly children of color. In Michigan, the home state of Betsy DeVos, every community that is targeted for state takeover and for an emergency manager is majority people of color. Corporate reformers look at schools with low test scores, and they see dollar signs, not children with unmet needs. At present, 38 schools in Michigan have been declared “failing schools.” They are slated for closure. This was surprising to hear, because when I participated in a four-way debate last week with Matt Frendewey of DeVos’s American Federation for Children on NPR, he insisted that public schools are never closed in Detroit or Michigan, only charter schools. Twenty-four of the 38 schools slated for closure are in Detroit.

 

Bill Boyle writes:

 

“Let’s be clear and name this- Betsy DeVos is a huge proponent of institutional racism.

 

“How do you spot institutional racism? It’s pretty easy.

 

“First, here is what you don’t do. You don’t go looking for individual racists. I honestly don’t know DeVos’s personal ideas on race. I am certainly not naming her as a racist. Her intentions are beyond by my ability to determine. More so I don’t see her personal intentions as particularly relevant. (The same goes for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. Who cares if those who know him claim he’s a nice guy? See below.)

 

“What is relevant are the effects and outcomes of the policies that she supports. These are very, very easy to determine. And they clearly support institutionalized racism.

 

“It goes without question that DeVos has supported the narrative of “failing schools” and that she has funded it. In the state of Michigan this has led to a number of weird policies (the ability of the SRO to close schools being only one) that have become institutionalized through the financial backing and political influence of DeVos. (As an excellent example of how DeVos exerts pressure, see here.)

 

“So let’s dig a little deeper.

 

“What do these 38 schools on the SRO closing list have in common? They are in areas of high concentrations of poverty, and high populations of African American students. This is called a “disproportional outcome,” one that has a disproportionate effect on a particular group of people. In this case, we are talking about poor Black communities. Poor Black communities are having their schools taken from them. Poor Black communities are having their schools being named as failures, which allows us to avoid considering the racialized economic conditions that actually led to these communities having high concentrations of Black students who also tend to be struggling with poverty. Schools are being named as failures while hiding the fact that those in power have failed those communities.

 

“It is shameful.

 

“And it is, by definition, institutionalized racism.

 

“Maybe we should ask, does closing schools work?

 

“The answer is yes if your goal is to continue to steal resources from those most in need of them.

 

“The answer is no if you are hoping to support these communities.

 

“Hell no.

 

“Not even close.

 

“As an example, Muskegon Heights public school district was completely charterized as a result of the having been overtaken by emergency management in 2012. The whole district was given to a private company to run as a charter district. In 2014, that company left in the middle of the school year because the profit wasn’t what projections hoped for. It remains charterized.

 

“And it is now is on the closure list.

 

“Oh well.

 

“Muskegon Heights district is 95.6% Black with a poverty rate of 61.7%. Hmm…”

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Michigan, Racism

A Terrific Video about What Betsy DeVos Did to Detroit

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2017 //
9

Brave New Films made this video pro bono.

 
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/bravenewfilms/videos/10154039269412016/
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OC7wZbwzM&feature=youtu.be
Dropbox link (if you want to upload it natively to any of your sites): https://www.dropbox.com/s/1umev9emlvdffem/BNS_Trump_DeVos_V9C3_AT.mp4?dl=0

 

I was happy to participate.

 

It has already had 1.5 million views.

 

Share it with your friends.

 

Hard to think anything could top her hugely embarrassing testimony to the Senate HELP committee!

 

Resist!

Categories Betsy DeVos, Detroit, Michigan

A Debate about Education Reform on NPR “To the Point” with Warren Olney

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
19

 

 

I was part of a heated debate including Emma Brown of the Washington Post, Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and Matt Frendewey of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.

 

Emma played it straight. The sparks flew when Matt attacked Randi and me, and both of came at him from different directions.

 

The DeVos line is that she really cares about kids, and no one else does.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

What Are the “Results” that DeVos Can Point to?

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
13

During the hearings on Betsy DeVos, the Republican Senator Richard Burr (North Carolina) asked why people get all hung up on process, when they should be talking about “results.” DeVos agreed. I was hoping the committee might then discuss the results of DeVos reforms in Michigan and Detroit. Or anywhere else. How awesome is Detroit, which is overrun with charters? On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it is the lowest performing urban district in the nation. How awesome are Milwaukee and Cleveland, which have had vouchers and charters for more than 20 years? They barely top Detroit among the lowest performing urban districts in the nation.

 

Here is what the New York Times said about charters in Detroit:

 

Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

 

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.

 

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.

 

Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.

 

“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”

 

This morning I was on the NPR radio show from D.C. that used to be the Diane Rehm show but is now called 1A, with Rick Hess of the DeVos-funded American Enterprise Institute, and he said that Detroit charters were outperforming Detroit public schools. As Stephen Henderson, the editor of the Detroit Free Press wrote not long ago, the charters in Detroit vary in quality but many of them are failing and they are no better than the public schools.)

 

Henderson deconstructed the CREDO studies that Rick Hess cited, and concluded:

 

In a city like Detroit, for instance, where, on average, students perform well below statewide norms, kids in charter schools should more quickly close their gaps than kids in traditional public schools.

 

Hypothetically.

 

The problem is they really haven’t. Not for 20 years, dating to the beginning of Michigan’s charter experiment.

 

CREDO also found that, for instance, 63% of charters statewide perform no better than traditional public schools in math. And in Detroit, nearly half all charters do no better than traditional public schools in reading.

 

Overall, about 84% of charter students perform below state averages in math; the number is 80% for reading. That tracks closely with the outcomes for traditional public schools.

 

The gains for charter students are also clustered, in many instances, in high-performing outliers. But because Michigan does not require charter operators to have proven track records before they open schools or do much to hold them accountable after their schools open, the number of underperforming charter schools far outweighs the high achievers.

 

In addition, the CREDO results need to be considered in the context of other data about charter schools.

 

The Free Press investigation of charter schools, for instance, revealed that even taking poverty into account, charter schools essentially perform the same as traditional public schools, and in some cases, a little worse.

 

If Detroit, which is still the lowest-performing urban district in the nation, is the DeVos model of “success,” then our nation’s education system is doomed.

 

Similarly, Michigan’s standing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress has dropped, in some cases dramatically since 2003, about the time Betsy took control of education in the state. EdTrust wrote a report warning that the state was on its way to the bottom:

 

Among the 2015 NAEP results highlighted in the report:

 

• Michigan ranked 41st in fourth-grade reading, down from 28th in 2003.

 

• The state ranked 42nd in fourth-grade math, down from 27 in 2003.

 

• It ranked 31st in eighth-grade reading, down from 27th in 2003.

 

• It ranked 38th in eight-grade math, down from 34th.

 

Given these dismal results, why would anyone listen to Betsy DeVos on the subject of education? It must be the funding she has showered on Republicans, including 10 of the 12 Republicans on the committee that will judge her fitness to serve. It can’t be results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization

My Interview on NPR “The Takeaway” re Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
73

 

 

In case you want to listen for 10 minutes about why Betsy DeVos should not be confirmed, here is the link. 

 

Also, I will be on the Chris Hayes show tonight on MSNBC. Same topic.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Kenneth Zeichner: Why Betsy DeVos is Unfit to be Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
7

Kenneth Zeichner is Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. He writes here why Betsy DeVos should not be approved for Secretary of Education.

 

 

Betsy DeVos is thoroughly unqualified for the job of Secretary of Education. She has never attended a public school, sent her children to public schools, taught or worked in a public school district or a state education agency, overseen public education as a governor or governor’s aide, or studied the field of education. There has never been a more unqualified nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education in the history of the Department of Education.

 

The DeVos family’s has donated millions of dollars over the years to education causes through groups like the American Federation for Children and contributions to pro-“choice” political candidates to privatize public schools and turn their management over to corporations or religious groups. In Michigan, where DeVos has focused most of her efforts, about 80 % of charter schools are run by for-profit corporations as opposed to about 13% of charter schools nationally.

 

Ms. DeVos and her husband Dick who became billionaires mainly through earnings from their company, Amway, a Pyramid scheme[1] in which many people have lost a lot of money, have been very active in their home state of Michigan and elsewhere in promoting the spread of both unregulated charter schools and voucher schools.

 

Voucher schools involve the transfer of money from public schools to private and religious schools.

 

They began in the South during the civil rights era of the 1960s as a way for whites to maintain segregated schools after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools. The first modern day voucher program was started in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1989 and has transferred millions of dollars from the Milwaukee Public schools (MPS) to private groups and have made it more difficult for MPS to educate the children who remain in the public schools. Today there are voucher programs in about 30 states supporting some children living in poverty to attend private or religious schools.

 

The success of voucher schools in Milwaukee and elsewhere has been meager. Many voucher schools in Milwaukee have closed (about 40%) and they have not shown any consistent improvement over the performance of public schools even though 3% of their students have a disability in comparison with the public schools where 20 % of students have a disability.

 

In the 25th anniversary report evaluating the performance of Milwaukee’s voucher schools Patrick Wolf a Professor of School Choice at the University of Arkansas concluded “ This whole philosophy and theory of parental school choice kind of falls apart.” Instead of giving families more voice in the education of their children as is promised, voucher schools erode the power of families to influence their children’s education because they are unaccountable to the public even though they use public tax money.

 

There are both good and bad charter schools in the U.S. The unregulated form of charters that Betsy DeVos and her husband have promoted has been widely criticized by education experts and the public. For example, one of the leading advocates for charter schools in the U.S. and most respected education researchers, Professor Doug Harris of Tulane University, has argued in a recent N.Y. Times op-ed “As one of the architects of Detroit’s charter school system, she is party responsible for what even charter advocates acknowledge is one of the biggest school reform disasters in the country… She is widely seen as the main driver of the entire state’s school overhaul… It is hardly a surprise that the system, which has almost no oversight, has failed.”

 

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education rejected Michigan’s application for a grant to expand its mostly privately run charter schools citing the lack of adequate oversight. Professor Harris concludes his op-ed by stating: “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”

 

A strong public school system is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Public schools do not affect just the individuals who use them, but as a public good, they also influence the quality of life in the society as a whole.

 

There is not a single example of a successful education system in the world that has relied primarily on deregulation, privatization and market competition, the kind of reform that Betsy DeVos wants to promote in the U.S. Chile and Sweden are examples of countries where performance declined substantially after the growth of privatization in education…..

 

 

Ken Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation

Michigan: Academic Performance Has Been Declining as “Choice” Increases

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
8

 

Spurred by the financial clout and political power of the DeVos family, Michigan has embraced choice. A charter advocate wrote earlier to claim that the state has made unparalleled gains, thanks to choice. I knew this was wrong, but was on a car trip and couldn’t look up the NAEP data. In fact, Michigan’s academic performance relative to other states is in free fall.

 

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only reliable barometer of test performance, Michigan has gone into a decline over the past dozen years.

 

Michigan, already sliding toward the bottom nationally for fourth-grade reading performance on a rigorous national exam, is projected to fall to 48th place by 2030 if the state does nothing to improve education.

 

That finding is included in a report out today from Education Trust-Midwest, a nonpartisan education research and policy organization based in Royal Oak. The organization analyzed more than a decade’s worth of results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — or NAEP, a tough exam given to a representative sample of students in each state.

 

In 2003, Michigan ranked 28th in fourth-grade reading. In 2015, the state was ranked 41st.

 

“We’re certainly not on track to become a top 10 state any time soon,” said Amber Arellano, executive director of the organization. “It’s totally unacceptable for the economy, for business and especially for kids themselves.”
Among the 2015 NAEP results highlighted in the report:

 

• Michigan ranked 41st in fourth-grade reading, down from 28th in 2003.

 

• The state ranked 42nd in fourth-grade math, down from 27 in 2003.

 

• It ranked 31st in eighth-grade reading, down from 27th in 2003.

 

• It ranked 38th in eight-grade math, down from 34th.

 

The report is focused on the fourth-grade reading results because of how crucial it is for students to be able to read well by the end of third grade. But students have also struggled in math.

 

The achievement problem crosses demographic lines. Consider how various demographic groups in Michigan compared with similar demographic groups nationwide in fourth-grade reading in 2015: White students in Michigan ranked 49th, higher-income students in Michigan ranked 48th, and black students ranked 41st.

 

The problem? Many other states are outpacing Michigan, which has posted mostly stagnant — and in some cases declining — results on the NAEP.

 

“When you look at leading states … they’re like on a rocket ship and we’re on a snail,” Arellano said.

 

State officials are busily mapping plans and goals to become one of the top 10 states in the nation. But they are falling farther and farther down towards the bottom. If they keep up the DeVos formula, they will soon rank among the Southern states, where academic achievement has historically been low because of underfunding and high poverty.

 

Detroit has most of the charter schools in the state of Michigan. It is the lowest ranking urban district on the National Assessment of Education Progress. Many of the charter schools are far worse academically than the chronically underfunded public schools.

 

Don’t let anyone tell you that Michigan or Detroit have been improved by choice. The only reliable measure is the NAEP, and both Michigan and the city of Detroit are in terrible shape.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Failure, Michigan, NAEP, Privatization, School Choice
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