Mercedes Schneider here does a close reading of one of Betsy DeVos’ greatest hits, the speech where she says that government sucks and the way to improve education is to let everyone get public money to go to school wherever they want without any oversight. Also, fire more teachers.
Betsy DeVos: “Government Sucks” and “We Don’t Fire Teachers Enough”
That pretty much sums up her deep philosophy.
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.
Today, the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will consider the nomination of Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. DeVos and her family have devoted many millions of dollars to destroying public schools and turning the clock back by more than a century. She wants the government to pay tuition at religious schools, voucher schools, for-profit schools, any alternative to public schools is her goal.
American public education is one of the essential institutions of our democratic society. The guarantee to everyone in this country that they could attend a free public school was a hard-fought victory. First, it required persuading the public to tax themselves to pay for schools for the children of the community. Second, it required separating the schools from religious institutions, which had long been the source of education. Third, it meant expanding access to all: to boys and girls, to children of all races and cultures, to children whose first language was not English, and to children with disabilities.
None of of these changes came easily.
And the struggle to provide good schools is ongoing, since so many states base school funding on property taxes, which privileges those who are already advantaged.
DeVos is ignorant of the history of public education in America and the role of public schools in our society. Her hostility to public schools should disqualify her from consideration for this position.
Nina Rees thinks Betsy DeVos is a great choice for US Secretary of Education. She would. She is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for “Public” Charter Schools and like DeVos, is devoted to privatization of community public schools.
I first met Nina when she worked for Vice President Dick Cheney as his education advisor. Before that, she worked for the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation. She subsequently worked for ex-felon Michael Milken, when he was entering the education industry.
What you will learn from her article:
The U.S. Department of Education has spent $3 billion on privately managed charter schools, through the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
What you will will NOT learn from this article:
That charter schools and vouchers have NOT improved education.
That education in Michigan has suffered because of DeVos’ zeal for the unregulated free market.
That the destruction of democratic public education is a crime against children, families, and our society.
That NO high-performing nation in the world has turned public funding for schools over to the free market.
The Texas legislature is starting a new session and once again Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (former rightwing talk show host) will lead a fight for vouchers.
Once again, legislators from rural and urban districts–Republicans and Democrats–will combine to defend their community’s public schools. This year, the state launched the failed policy of giving every school a single letter grade, and now educators realize that these measures are invalid and are setting them up for privatization.
Imagine if your child came home from school with a report card and it contained only a single letter grade. As a parent, you would be furious. No child is only one dimension; no child can be reduced to an or B or C or D or F. How much more absurd it is to attach a single letter grade to a complex institution like a school, staffed by many people, and subject to decisions made by the superintendent, the state education department, and the legislature.
Educators in North Texas see that the letter grades stigmatize their schools, damage their communities, and are intended to create demand for vouchers. There is zero validity, zero research, zero evidence for letter grades for schools.
“With the new legislative session starting Tuesday, educators from 60 North Texas districts united Monday to fight school vouchers and a new statewide grading system they say serves only to vilify public schools.
Frustration among school leaders has been mounting since provisional A-F grades were released Friday.
On Monday, area superintendents and trustees gathered in Garland to tell lawmakers that the grading system is flawed and that they are worried it is just a gimmick to get support for school vouchers or similar options.
“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said school choice, which could include voucher-like tax credits or similar options, is among his top priorities for this session so families have the ability to leave failing schools.
But the area’s school leaders said such efforts would only siphon money from public schools and hurt children most in need because they don’t have the transportation and other means to take advantage of such options. Only affluent families, many of whom aren’t in public schools now, would benefit, they said.
“This is subsidies for the rich. … A equals affluent. F equals free and reduced,” Terrell ISD Superintendent Micheal French said, referring to the likelihood of poor students remaining in struggling schools that would be labeled failures.
“The provisional grades released last week were a first look at the state’s new school accountability system that takes effect in 2018. Lawmakers required the Texas Education Agency to release a sneak peek of how schools would have scored, just before they returned to Austin for the legislative session.
“That timing only reinforced educators’ fears that the new A-F system is politically motivated.
“Monday’s group represented 60 of the 80 districts in the TEA’s Region X, which includes Collin, Dallas, Ellis, Kaufman and Rockwall among its 10 counties. Combined, the districts represent 15.5 percent of Texas’ public school students.”
Pastors for Texas Children–an extraordinary group of religious leaders from across the state–is in the thick of the fight on behalf of public schools, fighting vouchers.
Just when I thought I had read everything I needed to know about the DeVos family, along comes this brilliant investigative article by Zack Stanton of Politico. Stanton shows how powerful the DeVos family is, how it works as a tightly coordinated unit, and how it uses its vast wealth to smash the union movement, force school privatization, control the Republican Party in Michigan, and extend its reach to Louisiana, Indiana, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states.
The DeVos family, along with the Koch brothers, are the epitome of dark money, the spawn of Citizens United, which removed limits on political spending, enabling billionaires to buy state legislatures.
Dick DeVos ran for the governorship and lost in 2006. The family learned that it was better to work behind the scenes.
“Thanks to the DeVoses, Michigan’s charter schools enjoy a virtually unregulated existence. Thanks to them, too, the center of the American automotive industry and birthplace of the modern labor movement is now a right-to-work state. They’ve funded campaigns to elect state legislators, established advocacy organizations to lobby them, buttressed their allies and primaried those they disagree with, spending at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years. “The DeVos family has been far more successful not having the governor’s seat than if they had won it,” says Richard Czuba, the owner of the Glengariff Group, a bipartisan polling firm in Michigan. “They have, to some degree, created a shadow state party. And it’s been pretty darn effective.”
“Buoyed by the success in Michigan, the DeVoses have exported a scaled-down version of that template into other states, funding an archipelago of local political action committees and advocacy organizations to ease the proliferation of charter schools in Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana, among others. At the same time, DeVos-backed PACs have transformed the nature of American political campaigns. By showing the success of independent PACs that answered to a few deep-pocketed donors rather than a broad number of stakeholders associated with a union or chamber of commerce, for instance, the DeVoses precipitated the monsoon of independent expenditures that has rained down upon politicians for the past decade. In the process, they’ve reshaped political campaigns as well as the policies that result from them.
“Ten years after she watched her husband give a concession speech, Betsy DeVos was unveiled as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education. Across the country, public-school advocates and teachers’ unions expressed almost unanimous horror: One of the most effective advocates for breaking down the rules and protections for public schools and teachers would soon be the nation’s most powerful education policymaker.
“But people who’ve been watching the DeVoses closely knew they were seeing something else as well: One of the nation’s most ambitious, disruptive and downright unusual political families finally had a seat in Washington….
“The DeVos family is Dutch, thoroughly so. All four of Richard DeVos’ grandparents emigrated from the Netherlands, and today, the family continues to observe the tenets of the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination. Calvinism believes that God has decided our souls’ fates before we are born, assigning them to heaven or hell. It is a duty of practitioners to show their faith in God’s plan by displaying self-confidence, as though they know they have been chosen for blessings in the afterlife. One way to display this confidence is through entrepreneurship (one of the bedrock texts of sociology, Max Weber’s 1905 Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is expressly about the link between Calvinism and economic success)….
“Across those efforts, one constant is the DeVos family’s devout Christian beliefs, and the indivisibility they see between Christian and Calvinistic notions and their conservative politics. “The real strength of America is its religious tradition,” Richard DeVos wrote in Believe!. “Too many people today are willing to act as if God had nothing whatsoever to do with it. … This country was built on a religious heritage, and we’d better get back to it. We had better start telling people that faith in God is the real strength of America!” In the mid-1970s, DeVos made major donations to the Christian Freedom Foundation and Third Century Publishers, an outlet that printed books and pamphlets designed to strengthen the ties between Christianity and free-market conservatism; among those products was a guidebook instructing conservative Christians how to win elections and help America become “as it was when first founded—a ‘Christian Republic.
“Though they aren’t quite as large or wealthy as the DeVoses, the Prince family—even further west, in Holland, Michigan—shares one big trait in common with their in-laws: the idea that patriotism and politics are inseparable from Christianity. Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy’s mother, donated $75,000 to the successful 2004 ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan; four years later, she gave $450,000 to an identical initiative in California. Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the military contractor that gained notoriety in 2007, when its employees fired into a crowd of Iraqi civilians, killing 17. (In 2009, two former Blackwater employees alleged in federal court that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader.”)
“Throughout his adult life, Betsy’s father, Ed, donated handsomely to two religious colleges in Michigan, Hope and Calvin, the latter being his wife’s beloved alma mater in Grand Rapids. But his most important contribution—one that has shaped much of the past three decades of conservative politics—came in 1988, when Prince donated millions in seed funding to launch the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group that became one of the most potent political forces on the religious right. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder,” Family Research Council President Gary Bauer wrote to supporters after Prince’s sudden death in 1995. “He was a Kingdom builder.”
“In the 1960s and ’70s, Ed and Elsa Prince advanced God’s Kingdom from the end of a cul-de-sac just a few miles from Lake Michigan. There, they taught their four children—Elisabeth (Betsy), Eileen, Emilie and Erik—a deeply religious, conservative, free-market view of the world, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and sending them to private schools that would reinforce the values they celebrated at home, small-government conservatism chief among them….
“When Dick and Betsy DeVos are asked why they’ve chosen to mount a personal crusade for education reform, they often cite their family’s charitable giving, which puts them into contact with scholarship applicants. For years, the DeVoses read reams of personal essays filled with wrenching stories of dire finances and an abiding hope in the transformative impact of education. Those stories, the DeVoses have said, made it clear that something had to change.
“But there’s another reason why Dick and Betsy DeVos want to change America’s schools. They see it as the literal battleground for making a more Christian, God-centered society.
“In 2001, Betsy DeVos spoke at “The Gathering,” an annual meeting of some of America’s wealthiest Christians. There, she told her fellow believers about the animating force behind her education-reform campaigning, referencing the biblical battlefield where the Israelites fought the Philistines: “It goes back to what I mentioned, the concept of really being active in the Shephelah of our culture—to impact our culture in ways that are not the traditional funding-the-Christian-organization route, but that really may have greater Kingdom gain in the long run by changing the way we approach things—in this case, the system of education in the country.”
“Dick DeVos, on stage with his wife, echoed her sentiments with a lament of his own. “The church—which ought to be, in our view, far more central to the life of the community—has been displaced by the public school,” Dick DeVos said. “We just can think of no better way to rebuild our families and our communities than to have that circle of church and school and family much more tightly focused and built on a consistent worldview.”
Folks, if Betsy DeVos is confirmed, which is likely, we will have a major battle on our hands to protect public education and to maintain a separation of church and state. She is not a normal candidate for Secretary of Education. She is a religious zealot and a radical extremist. She will speak of her admiration for all successful schools, including public schools, but don’t believe it. She is a determined foe of public education.
Carol Burris has been traveling the country, meeting with educators. Parents, and local officials to learn how charter schools are working, how they affect the local public schools.
She wrote a four-part series about the charter mess in California. This article is about Pennsylvania, specifically about Bethlehem, which has a good school system. The schools have to cut services for the neediest kids because of funding lost to charters.
Burris goes on to detail the startlingly corrupt real estate dealings of certain Pennsylvania charter operators. Not only are the hurting community public schools, but they are ripping off taxpayers.
A former employee of a charter school in Lakeland, Florida, has been accused of stealing more than $100,000 from the school. Don’t expect this to dim the enthusiasm of Jeb Bush or Betsy DeVos for unregulated charters.
“45-year-old Ginger Collins was a former Assistant Director of Academics for the school until her resignation on September 16, 2016. She is accused of stealing more than $100,000 from the organization and creating fake companies and website to make her purchases appear legitimate.
“Collins was charged is facing seven felony charges including Grand Theft, Obtain Property by Fraud, Fraudulent Use of Credit Card, Money Launder Transaction, and three counts of Criminal Use of Personal Identification.
“She took trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cancun, Rhode Island, Atlanta, and mark these trips down as marketing expenses, and advertising,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
“According to investigators her spending didn’t end there. The stolen money was used to buy items such as a fat blaster, a portable urine funnel, and an $85 “Nit Wit” brand beanie. A fitting purchase, according to Sheriff Grady Judd. “Well the nit wit hat goes on a nit wit,” he said.
“Despite all of that, it was the purchase of a prom dress and fake eyelashes on a school credit card that finally tipped someone off. “She went on a shopping spree of almost a year,” Judd said.”
Which public school employee has the opportunity to steal $100,000? The motive may be there but there are too many checks to provide the opportunity.
Gary Rubinstein writes that Texas has started the process of awarding single letter grades to schools, based mainly on standardized test scores. This is an exceptionally asinine way of evaluating schools, invented by Jeb Bush.
Whenever “reformers” talk about expanding high-quality charters, they use KIPP as their example. It turns out that the failure rate for KIPP is higher than for public schools.
“I thought that maybe this was one of those things where a lot of schools got an F in this domain so I looked at the 280 Houston Independent School District schools and found that only 34, or about 12.5%, got an F in ‘Student Progress.’ So the percent of ‘failing’ KIPP schools is double the number of ‘failing’ schools in the biggest district in Texas.”
Since charters are are supposed to be the remedy for “failing public schools,” what is the remedy for failing charter schools?
Last spring, Salon published an article by Kali Holloway about Campbell Brown and her transition from news anchor to “education reformer” and “charter propagandist.” The article was posted before California’s highest court threw out the Vergara case, whose plaintiffs claimed that teacher tenure was racially discriminatory. It also was posted before a judge in Minnesota tossed out Campbell Brown’s copycat effort to kill teacher tenure in that state.
Nonetheless, the article accurately depicts Campbell Brown’s contempt for public schools, teachers unions, and teachers. Facebook announced that it plans to hire her as its face to the news media. It is important to know her low opinion of public education, a basic democratic institution, and the people who work to educate our children. As the article shows, Brown did not want to disclose the funders of her website, The 74, claiming that they might be harassed (as if!).
The article says The 74 is funded by: The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Jonathan Sackler (of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma) and the Walton Family Foundation.
