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Cory Booker’s Long and Profitable Friendship with Betsy DeVos, and Why It Ended

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
27

 

Cory Booker was recently interviewed by the Washington Post, and he was asked about his past support for vouchers and his friendship with Betsy DeVos. 

He insisted that he turned against vouchers in 2006, and he barely remembered any connection to DeVos. When someone asked if he had flown to Michigan in 2000 at the request of Dick and Betsy DeVos to support their voucher referendum, he at first denied it, then when shown a tape, he said he didn’t remember it.

He opposed DeVos’ nomination to be Secretary of Education in 2017.

DeVos’s allies are stunned by what they call his turnabout. They view Booker’s effort to distance himself from her and her agenda as a betrayal. 

Now that it is politically inconvenient, he has distanced himself from the issue and those who helped launch his political career,” said William E. Oberndorf, who was chairman of the American Education Reform Council when DeVos and Booker were on the board. “Cory once told me that his father used to say to him, ‘Never forget the girl who brought you to the dance.’ I can only conclude that Cory not only forgot one of the girls who brought him to the dance, he missed his . . . moment to stand up for an issue he always said he believed in.” 

Booker’s advocacy for vouchers won him the financial support of conservative Republicans who were delighted to see a black Democratic Mayor supporting their cause.

Booker’s political career took off as a parade of wealthy philanthropists, hedge fund managers and others who supported DeVos’s “school choice” viewpoint poured money into his campaigns and pet projects. 

In 2000, with their voucher referendum on the ballot, the DeVos family invited Booker to debate the legislative director of the ACLU. She kept a tape of the debate and shared it with the Post. The voucher proposal went down to a crushing defeat by 3-1.

In September 2000, Booker delivered a blistering pro-voucher speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group. 

Booker’s 2006 race for mayor of Newark won the support of many conservative Republicans. He proposed tuition tax credits (a form of voucher) and went all-in for charters.

When he ran for the Senate in 2014 in a special election, he was helped by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who held a fundraiser for him.

As recently as May 2016, Booker appeared again before the group that DeVos chaired, the American Federation for Children. After DeVos delivered a speech defending herself against attacks from Democrats, Oberndorf warmly introduced Booker, praising his commitment to school choice.

Booker spoke proudly about the growing number of students in Newark’s charter schools, saying, “This mission of this organization is the mission of our nation. . . . I have been involved with this organization for 10 years and I have seen the sacred honor of those here.” 

As Booker finished his speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To DeVos and her allies, it seemed that Booker was still firmly in the fold, according to Oberndorf. 

But a year later, he opposed DeVos’ nomination.

Booker’s vote shattered his career-long alliance with DeVos and stunned her supporters. 

“Cory gained a great deal of political support thanks to his association with Betsy and other supporters,” said Mitchell, the president of the American Education Reform Council when Booker and DeVos were board members. “His abandonment of school choice and of Betsy makes it clear that his professed commitment to the issue and his friendship with her were fueled by political ambition, not principle.” 

Betsy helped to fund his political career. But it was no longer convenient to be her friend.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Vouchers

Jersey Jazzman: Clapping for the Dead Merit Pay Fairy

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2019 //
5

Jersey Jazzman continues to write about the ignominious failure of the highly hyped merit pay fairy in Newark. He takes this development as a sign that all other districts should pay attention. In this post, he writes about those who were bewitched by the promise of merit pay:

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2019/08/clapping-harder-for-merit-pay-fairy.html

One of those who went gaga for merit pay was Kate Walsh of the reformy National Council for Teacher Quality. She said that the now-dead Newark Plan was “a model to which other districts should aspire.”

Jersey Jazzman says haha. Sure.


Merit pay…was little more than a broken promise to the teachers of Newark right from the start. A survey of Newark teachers in the first year found a large majority did not see the compensation system as “reasonable, fair, and appropriate.” (p. 24) It’s not a surprise, therefore, that this past month both the teachers union in Newark, the NTU, and the district’s administration decided that the program was not worth continuing.

But some reformy folks believe in merit pay the same way some children believe in fairies: they don’t want to acknowledge the evidence that shows, even in the most generous reading, that the benefits of merit pay are very small and likely are not indicative of true increases in student learning. Like Peter Pan, these true believers hope against hope that fairies can be brought back to life simply by clapping harder….

In the first year of the contract, Newark had about 3,200 teachers. How many qualified for the highest bonus, $12,500? Only eleven. Is Walsh really trying to make the case this small disbursal made a significant difference in teacher quality in Newark?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Merit pay, Newark

Jersey Jazzman: The Death of the Merit Pay Fairy in Newark

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2019 //
16

Jersey Jazzman has posted an obituary for the Merit Pay Fairy. He says it died in Newark, when teachers negotiated a new contract, deep-sixing a Merit Payplan that they endorsed in 2012.

JJ demonstrates with facts and evidence that merit pay failed.

He begins:

The Merit Pay Fairy lives in the dreams of right-wing think tanks and labor economists, who are absolutely convinced that our current teacher pay system — based on seniority and educational attainment — is keeping teachers from achieving their fullest potential. It matters little that even the most generous readings of the research find practically small effects* of switching to pay-for-performance systems, or that merit pay in other professions is quite rare (especially when it is based on the performance of others; teacher merit pay is, in many contexts, based on student, and not teacher, performance).

Merit pay advocates also rarely acknowledge that adult developmental theory suggests that rewards later in life, such as higher pay, fulfill a need for older workers, or that messing with pay distributions has the potential to screw up the pool of potential teacher candidates, or that shifting pay from the bottom of the teacher “quality” distribution to the top — and, really, that’s what merit pay does — still leaves policymakers with the problem of deciding which students get which teachers.

Issues like these, however, are at the core of any merit pay policy. Sure, pay-for-performance sounds great; it comports nicely with key concepts in economic theory. But when it comes time to implement it in an actual, real-world situation, you’ve got to confront a whole host of realities that theory doesn’t address.

Of course, it failed! As I explained in my 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, merit pay has been tried again and again for almost a century, and it has always failed.

I would like to believe that it has died, that—as Dorothy said about the Wicked Witch, it is “really, truly dead”—but I have my doubts.

Every time it has failed, someone rediscovers it and thinks that this time it will work, unlike every other time.

I remember AFT President Albert Shanker saying at a meeting in the early 1990s that merit pay was ridiculous. The way he put it was, “Let me get this straight: if you offer to pay teachers more, students will work harder? That makes no sense.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Merit pay, Newark

Newark Wipes Out Performance Pay for Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2019 //
18

When then Governor Christie and then Mayor Cory Booker persuaded billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to give $100 million to impose corporate reform on Newark, performance pay for teachers was the heart of their plan. Pay the “best” teachers for getting high scores, eliminate “bad” teachers, and Newark schools would be transformed.

In a major blow to the corporate reform movement, the latest teacher contract in Newark just eliminated performance pay.

It didn’t work in Newark, and it hasn’t worked anywhere else. It is a zombie idea. Teachers aren’t holding back, waiting for a bonus to goad them on. They are doing the best they know how. With help and support, they can improve, but not because of rewards and threats.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/newark/2019/08/15/merit-pay-was-the-heart-of-a-revolutionary-teachers-contract-in-newark-now-the-cory-booker-era-policy-is-disappearing/

In 2012, Newark teachers agreed to a controversial new contract that linked their pay to student achievement — a stark departure from the way most teachers across the country are paid.

The idea was to reward teachers for excellent performance, rather than how many years they spent in the district or degrees they attained. Under the new contract, teachers could earn bonuses and raises only if they received satisfactory or better ratings, and advanced degrees would no longer elevate teachers to a higher pay scale.

The changes were considered a major victory for the so-called “education reform” movement, which sought to inject corporate-style accountability and compensation practices into public education. And they were championed by an unlikely trio: New Jersey’s Republican governor, the Democratic-aligned leader of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who had allocated half of his $100 million gift to Newark’s schools to fund a new teachers contract.

“In my heart, this is what I was hoping for: that Newark would lead a transformational change in education in America,” then-Gov. Chris Christie said in Nov. 2012 after the contract was ratified.

Seven years later, those changes have been erased.

Last week, negotiators for the Newark Teachers Union and the district struck a deal for a new contract that scraps the bonuses for top-rated teachers, allows low-rated teachers to earn raises, and gives teachers with advanced degrees more pay. It also eliminates other provisions of the 2012 contract, which were continued in a follow-up agreement in 2017, including longer hours for low-performing schools.

“All vestiges of corporate reform have been removed,” declared a union document describing the deal.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Merit pay, New Jersey, Newark, Teachers, Unions

Why I Do Not Support Cory Booker

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
19

Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouchers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not been one of the leading cheerleaders for both charters and vouchers for the past two decades.

Valerie Strauss wrote here about his deep ties over the years to Betsy DeVos. 

Booker began his advocacy for vouchers twenty years ago.

“In 1999, Booker was a member of the Municipal Council of Newark and worked with conservatives to form an organization that sought to create a voucher program and bring charter schools to New Jersey.”

He helped Dick and Betsy DeVos try to sell vouchers in Michigan in 2000. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out in her article about Booker’s help for the DeVos voucher campaign, the DeVos family spent millions, but the people of Michigan rejected vouchers by a vote of 69-31%.

When Booker ran for mayor of Newark in 2001, the DeVos family contributed $1,000 to his campaign. Cheapskates.

Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a book called The Prize about Cory Booker’s alliance with Republican Governor Chris Christie and their determination to turn Newark into the “New Orleans of the North” by privatizing as many public schools as possible. Booker was a favorite of Wall Street and philanthrocapitalists, and he and Christie persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to spur privatization in Newark.

Regular readers of this blog have read the many posts by blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) about the statistical legerdemain that Newark charters play, the cream-skimming they do to get the students they want and exclude those that might pull down their test scores..

If you open the link at NPE Action, you will see that Booker’s campaigns have drawn the campaign funding of the usual billionaires and Wall Street hedge funders who have done their best to undermine public education.

Booker was feted by rightwing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and named a “champion of charters” by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools in 2017.

But his support for vouchers was not long, long ago.

In 2012, he endorsed Governor Chris Christie’s voucher proposal.

In 2016, he addressed Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children to express his support for their mission of replacing public schools with charters and vouchers.

Due to his contempt for one of our most important public, democratic institutions, I cannot support Cory Booker.

If he is the Democratic candidate, which seems unlikely, I will hold my nose and vote for him, because any Democrat is better than Trump. Even Cory Booker.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Cory Booker Promises to Abandon His Past Support for Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2019 //
34

 

Cory Booker has been a devoted promoter of charters and vouchers for many years.

He worked closely with Republican Governor Chris Christie and together they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to pony up $100 million to promote the charterization of Newark. He often boasts about what he accomplished by privatizing public schools.

But now that he wants to be president, he has suddenly decided that he will be a champion for public schools, not charters or vouchers. 

Could it be that he did the math and realized that 85-90% of students attend public schools. Only 6% attend charter schools. And he may have noticed that despite the efforts of his former dear friend Betsy DeVos, voters don’t like vouchers. They don’t want public dollars to underwrite religious schools.

Some of his allies are not at all happy about the new Cory.

It just goes to show where the wind is blowing: in  favor of public schools, not charters or vouchers.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Vouchers

Jersey Jazzman: How “Creaming” Works in the Charter Schools of Newark

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2019 //
10

 

Jersey Jazzman seems to be in an endless battle with New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, or at least with the writer of its editorials. He went to the trouble of getting a doctorate in statistics so he could persuade that editorialist to understand how the charters produce high test scores. It is called creaming, picking the best and excluding the rest. 

This article explains how in works.

Creaming has become a central issue in the whole debate about the effectiveness of charters. A school “creams” when it enrolls students who are more likely to get higher scores on tests due to their personal characteristics and/or their backgrounds. The fact that Newark’s charter schools enroll, as a group, fewer students with special education needs — particularly high-cost needs — and many fewer students who are English language learners is an indication that creaming may be in play.

If you understand how creaming works (as in skimming the cream from the milk bottle when it rises to the top—a phenomenon unknown to people below a certain age), then the charter claims of superiority are unimpressive.

If you don’t understand, and you refuse to try, then you will find the Newark Test Scores to be “incredible,” as the Star-Ledger did. Parse that word: Incredible. Not credible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman: What You Need to Know About Newark

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2019 //
2

Jersey Jazzman, aka Dr. Mark Weber, teacher, scholar, and blogger, brings the facts about the Newark schools up to date.

He does so in part because of Senator Cory Booker’s campaign, which has prompted news stories about the “Newark miracle.”

Bottom line: Don’t believe in miracles, at least secular miracles.

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

Jersey Jazzman Debunks the “Newark Miracle”

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
17

 

Whenever anyone mention an education “miracle,” scoff. We had the “Texas miracle,”  the “New York City Miracle” (that lasted only as long as MIchael Bloomberg was Mayor), and countless others.

Now that Cory Booker is running for President, we will hear about the “Newark miracle.” Don’t believe it.

To understand the statistical legerdemain, read Jersey Jazzman’s explanation here about Newark.

JJ is a teacher who became so frustrated with false claims that he went to Rutgers and earned a doctorate so he could master statistics and put paid to lies.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Media, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Newark: Privatizers Shelling Out Money to Buy Control of Newark Schools

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2019 //
6

Patrick Wall of Chalkbeat reports here that the forces of privatization are spending big in Newark to squelch local independent candidates.

Mayor Ras Baraka, who once railed against charter schools, has now joined forces with their funders, which gives him access to their money and power.

Wall writes:

The top spender in Newark’s school board race is a special-interest group with ties to New Jersey charter schools, according to campaign filings reported ahead of Tuesday’s election.

The group, Great Schools for All PAC, has already spent about $46,000 supporting a team of three candidates backed by Newark’s political establishment. By contrast, a rival team has reported spending less than $3,300 so far.

Last year, the group spent nearly $147,000 on the board race — more than three times the amount shelled out by the next-biggest spender.

Great Schools for All is an independent group that can raise and spend unlimited amounts in elections, but cannot coordinate with the candidates it supports. It has paid for online ads, direct mailings, phone banks, and canvassers to promote its chosen candidates, according to the filings.

The group’s chairman is Kyle Rosenkrans, the former CEO of the Northeast Charter Schools Network who was recently an official at KIPP New Jersey, one of the state’s largest charter school networks. The group’s donors include the political arm of a group that wants to expand charter schools across the country and another group co-founded by a KIPP board member.

Great Schools for All is just the latest charter-affiliated entity to spend heavily on Newark school board races. In 2016 and 2017, a pro-charter advocacy group called the Parent Coalition for Excellent Education, or PC2E, spent a combined $380,000 supporting candidates, according to campaign filings.

The spending is part of a trend across the country where national funders pushing a vision of education change that usually involves more charter schools are playing an ever-greater role in local school board elections.

In Newark, both PC2E and Great Schools for All have backed teams of candidates endorsed by Mayor Ras Baraka and North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos. The teams — originally called Unity, and now dubbed Moving Newark Schools Forward — have swept each election since the once-rival politicians and charter school advocates joined forces in 2016.

Defenders of the coalition say it has eliminated the divisive political battles and clashes between supporters of traditional and charter schools that once defined the city’s school board elections. But critics argue that the alliance and the outside money flowing into the election have made it nearly impossible for independent candidates to win seats on the board.

Denise Cole, a Newark parent and education activist who is running on a grassroots team called Children Over Politics, said the special-interest group has “smothered” the voices of Newark residents vying for seats on the board.

“School board elections are for the people and the people’s voice — not for outsiders to come in here and take over our schools,” said Cole, whose teammates include Saafir Jenkins and Leah Owens…

Rosenkrans’ new nonprofit is bankrolled by The City Fund, a national group planning to spend nearly $200 million to push cities to expand charter schools and give district-run schools more autonomy. An offshoot of The City Fund dedicated to politics and lobbying gave Great Schools for All $25,000 to spend on the Newark board race, according to campaign filings.

Great Schools for All received another $15,000 from Better Education for New Jersey Kids Inc., which grew out of a group established in 2011 to support education policies favored by then-Gov. Chris Christie and opposed by the state teachers union. The co-founders were New Jersey hedge fund managers David Tepper and Alan Fournier, a KIPP New Jersey board member whose foundation donated $1 million to KIPP schools in Newark.

To cut to the chase, a national organization–The City Fund–is bankrolling the slate of pro-charter candidates in Newark. The eight non-funded candidates have raised a total of $5,900. The point of this operation is indeed to “smother” the voices of local residents, unless they want to give their public schools to a corporate charter chain like KIPP.

 

 

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