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Hundreds of Calvin College Students and Alumni Speak Out Against Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2017 //
13

Betsy DeVos is a graduate of Calvin College, a small Christian college in Michigan. Hundreds of students and alumni signed a letter opposing her nomination for Secretary of Education.

 

It is a thoughtful letter. I hope she reads it. I hope the U.S. Senate reads it. I visited Calvin College and lectured there about 10 years ago. I was very impressed by the kindness and goodness of those I met. Now I remember why.

 

The letter expressed these concerns, which I share:

 

 

1) While many of us were inspired by our time at Calvin College to make education a professional commitment, Mrs. DeVos was not. She has never worked in any educational institution as an administrator, nor as an educator. If the position of the Secretary of Education requires the individual to have an intimate knowledge of the tools used by educators, which we believe it does, Mrs. DeVos does not qualify.
2) Many of us entered Calvin College directly from Christian high schools and spent our entire elementary and secondary school years in these institutions, as did Mrs. DeVos. While we appreciate the opportunity to thrive and learn that is provided by these educational systems, we recognize that the vast majority of K–12 students are educated in the public school system. Because of this, we believe that any individual who is nominated to be Secretary of Education should have a strong commitment to public education, which Mrs. DeVos does not.
3) We believe that Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to education is limited to her advocacy of and financial contributions to religious and charter schools. Having the financial resources to promote one’s ideological point of view and endorse elected officials who share that ideology is not equivalent to the preparation that comes from being an educator or educational administrator.
4) Finally, in the first day of her confirmation hearing, Mrs. DeVos indicated a lack of support for federal policies regarding educational systems that receive public funding. This is especially concerning given that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Title IX, which ensure that all students’ educational experiences are free of discrimination that impedes learning, are not of value to Mrs. DeVos.

 

Our undergraduate education prepared us to be engaged and informed citizens who support public servants who seek to serve effectively and competently. This is precisely why we oppose the nomination of our fellow alumna, Betsy DeVos, for the position of United States Secretary of Education.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

Bald Piano Guy Explains the DeVos Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2017 //
9

The Trump administration is committed to bashing, trashing, and underfunding the nation’s public schools, while diverting federal funds to charters, religious schools, home schooling, and cybercharters.

 

There are three things we must do:

 

1) Fight back with every resource at hand

 

2) Laugh and keep up our spirits

 

3) Never lose hope

 

In the service of #2, I offer you the Bald Piano Guy, a teacher who will make you laugh out loud as he sings about the DeVos agenda for education.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Religion

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

Politico: The Powerful DeVos Family: God, America, and Free Enterprise

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2017 //
21

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization, Religion

Katherine Stewart: Betsy DeVos and God’s Plan for Schools (and America)

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2016 //
21

Katherine Stewart, author of a book about the religious right, wrote a powerful article today in the New York Times about Betsy DeVos’ ties to the fundamentalist strain of Christianity. Her book is titled The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. This is the time when everyone should read Stewart’s book to learn what DeVos has in store for our children.

 

Begin with the article today:

 

At the rightmost edge of the Christian conservative movement, there are those who dream of turning the United States into a Christian republic subject to “biblical laws.” In the unlikely figure of Donald J. Trump, they hope to have found their greatest champion yet. He wasn’t “our preferred candidate,” the Christian nationalist David Barton said in June, but he could be “God’s candidate.”

 

His first candidate for Education Secretary was Jerry Falwell, Jr., according to Falwell.

 

His second choice was billionaire Betsy DeVos.

 

Betsy DeVos stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right. In 1983, her father, Edgar Prince, who made his money in the auto parts business, contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as extremist because of its anti-L.G.B.T. language.

 

Her father-in-law, Richard DeVos Sr., the co-founder of Amway, a company built on “multilevel marketing” or what critics call pyramid selling, has been funding groups and causes on the economic and religious right since the 1970s.

 

Ms. DeVos is a chip off the old block. At a 2001 gathering of conservative Christian philanthropists, she singled out education reform as a way to “advance God’s kingdom.” In an interview, she and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., said that school choice would lead to “greater kingdom gain.”

 

And so the family tradition continues, funding the religious right through a network of family foundations — among others, the couple’s own, as well as the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, on whose board Ms. DeVos has served along with her brother, Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater. According to Conservative Transparency, a liberal watchdog that tracks donor funding through tax filings, these organizations have funded conservative groups including: the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal juggernaut of the religious right; the Colorado-based Christian ministry Focus on the Family; and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Like other advocates of school voucher programs, Ms. DeVos presents her plans as a way to improve public education and give families more choice. But the family foundations’ money supports a far more expansive effort.

 

The evangelical pastor and broadcaster D. James Kennedy, whose Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church is a beneficiary of DeVos largess, said in a 1986 sermon that children in public education were being “brainwashed in Godless secularism.” More recently, in 2005, he told followers to “exercise godly dominion” over “every aspect and institution of human society,” including the government.

 

Jerry Falwell Sr. outlined the goal in his 1979 book “America Can Be Saved!” He said he hoped to see the day when there wouldn’t be “any public schools — the churches will have taken them over and Christians will be running them….”

 

Mr. Trump’s senior strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, may not appear to be a religious warrior, but he shares the vision of a threatened Christendom.
“I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis,” he said at a conference in 2014. This was “a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.”

 

What is distinctive about the Christian right’s response to this perceived crisis is its apocalyptic conviction that extreme measures are needed. There is nothing conservative about this agenda; it is radical. Gutting public education will be just the beginning.

 

Will the Republican-controlled Senate confirm this religious warrior as Secretary of Education? Very likely, as the DeVos family has been a major donor of the Republican party, and Betsy DeVos was head of the Michigan Republican party. Does the Republican party want to advance the agenda of the Christian right? Does it want to privatize and Christianize public school funding? We will soon enough find out.

 

Meanwhile, here is what you can do to raise your voice: Send an email to your senators urging them to vote against her confirmation.

 

Even more important, call and visit their district offices and the offices of your Congressperson. Experienced Congressional staff advise that personal phone calls matter a lot. Personal visits matter even more. If you can’t show up at your representatives’ offices, call them.

 

Tell them to vote against DeVos. Don’t let Betsy DeVos privatize our schools and shower government funding on religious schools.

 

Defend  public education and the principle of separation of church and state.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Peter Greene Channels Betsy DeVos Giving a Speech

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2016 //
13

Peter Greene imagines Betsy DeVos’s first speech to the people of her hometown Grand Rapids, Michigan, explaining her belief in replacing public schools with privately managed charters and religious schools.

Here, in Greene’s words, is a portion of Betsy’s sales pitch for “school choice”; open the link to read it all:

You have to understand– when the founding fathers said that all men were created equal, they didn’t mean that all men are actually equal. The Puritans understood that some people are favored by God and therefor blessed with greater prosperity than others. These Chosen are more favored, more suited to take dominion over the rest of creation, more deserving of honor. They’re just better.

Are some people better than others just because they’re rich? No, that would be ridiculous. They’re rich because they’re better. People criticize me because every cent I have either was passed to me either by my parents or my husband, but those people are missing the point. God made me rich because I deserve it.

These signs of God’s favor and an individual’s superiority used to be pretty clearcut, and they used to be the foundation of America. But the founders made one crucial mistake– they let all sorts of people vote, and over time, those people got uppity. There was a time when America was still great, back when everybody knew his or her place, back when black people and poor people handicapped people and non-Christians didn’t try to take things they weren’t entitled to. Back when the homosexuals had the decency to pretend they didn’t exist. But those days are gone– ruined by a bunch of uppity people who won’t just shut up and listen to those of us who know better. Now homosexuals and blacks and women and Muslims can all strut around like they’re perfectly normal and it’s we decent Christians who have to hold our tongue and avoid saying simple things like “Jesus hates you and you’re going to hell.” It’s a topsy turvy world.

And it all starts in school.

We let the children of the better class of people mix with the children of Those People. Teachers don’t seem to know their place, and insist on teaching things they just shouldn’t teach, the kinds of things that students were never taught back when America was great– certainly not in the fine private schools my children and I attended. That is why I absolutely support the Common Core– someone has to tell Those People what they should teach. However, I understand that some of you are not fans of Common Core, and so I totally promise that the federal regulations requiring Common Core will be stricken from the law, along with the regulations requiring students to wear clown shoes and the regulations requiring lunch ladies to be certified Yeti’s. I guarantee you that in just a few months, all of those laws will be gone, and you will be free to have your state government enforce Common Core under some other name.

We will also do our best to crush both teacher unions and all those other unions, too. Unions are unnatural, a terrible attempt to interfere with the natural order of things. People who want to control working conditions and wages should not choose to be the kind of people who work at those jobs. It is their place to simply do their jobs and let those of us who Know Better make the important decisions.

Government has also interfered with the God-given natural order of things by forcing money to flow to people who don’t deserve it. If God wanted Those People to have money, He would have made them rich, and it is not government’s place to interfere with that just process. By getting government to takes its paws off schools, a choice and charter system can allow money to again flow to those who actually deserve it. A choice and charter system also allows children of the better people to get their education without having to deal with the children of Those People. Really, isn’t it better when people associate with their own kind?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Texas: Pastors Stand Together Against Vouchers: They Join the Honor Roll!

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2016 //
7

Rev. Charles Foster Johnson has organized strong resistance to the vouchers touted by the most powerful elected official in Texas, not the governor, but the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a former talk show host. Rev. Johnson is leader to Pastors for Texas Children, which has 2,000 members across the state. They are united in their opposition to vouchers and their support for public schools. Year after year, they have defeated vouchers in the legislature, and they are gearing up to fight them again. You can read more about his and his organization here, at “Reporting Texas.”

 

I am happy to place Rev. Johnson and Pastors for Texas Children on the blog’s honor roll for their stalwart defense of public schools, of the children of Texas, of religious liberty, and of the principle of separation of church and state.

 

 

Johnson, 59, is the Fort Worth-based executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, a network of about 2,000 church leaders around the state who work to support pubic schools.

 

Johnson and his group have emerged as chief adversaries of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Patrick champions a breed of education reform forged around vouchers — which steer money from public schools to parents to pay private school tuition.

 

“The lieutenant governor said, a couple of weeks ago, he’ll keep bringing it up until it passes,” Foster told the pastors, who were gathered for a meeting of Texas Baptists Committed in Waco. “It’s up to us to stop him.”

 

In his baritone southern drawl, Johnson told the pastors that vouchers siphon funds from schools in low-income neighborhoods and violate the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment. School vouchers contradict God’s law of religious liberty, he said, by providing government support for religion.

 

The organization’s mission is twofold: To advocate for public education with state lawmakers and to mobilize individual churches to support public schools by providing services such as student mentoring and teacher appreciation events.

 

Members have linked dozens of churches with public schools, met with more than 100 lawmakers since the organization’s inception in 2013, and published dozens of anti-school voucher editorials in newspapers across Texas.

Categories Honor Roll, Religion, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

EduShyster: A Brilliant Explanation of Betsy DeVos’ “Long Game” (Link Fixed!)

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
20

Jennifer Berkshire (aka EduShyster) is a funny, affable, charming person who often visits reformer gatherings, to learn more, get to understand the reformer ideas, and engage reformers face to face. Not in a hostile way, but as an interested observer who listens and learns.

 

In this remarkable post, she explains what Betsy DeVos wants. She first encountered Betsy DeVos at a Republican candidates’ parley in the summer of 2015. The candidates spoke, each outlining their bipartisan views on school choice, and DeVos spoke, and Berkshire wondered:

 

“Could the education reform coalition’s major selling point, its bipartisan-ness, really stretch to incorporate the extreme right-wing views of DeVos?”

 

Some reformers are less than thrilled with DeVos, says Berkshire, especially because of her personal role in torpedoing efforts to bring some order and accountability to the charters in Detroit. Other reformers did not appreciate the “outsized role she has played in shaping Detroit as an, um, education laboratory in which an out-of-control lab fire now burns.” Detroit is hardly an advertisement for educational reform via school choice.

 

For a brief moment in time, there was a genuinely broad-based coalition that wanted to save Detroit. It formed in 2014, and it seemed to be heading towards a hopeful conclusion. But the effort collapsed in the summer of 2016:

 

The feel-good story screeched to a halt last summer thanks to a wall of GOP opposition. Except that *wall* and *opposition* make it sound as though there were a whole bunch of people involved in the kneecapping that went down. There was a single family: Betsy and Dick DeVos. The bill that ultimately passed, with the DeVos’ blessing and with the aid of the lawmakers they bankroll, did virtually nothing to regulate Detroit’s *wild west* charter school sector, and will likely hasten the demise of the Detroit Public Schools. While Michigan’s burgeoning charter lobby was well represented in the final negotiations, elected representatives from Detroit were missing; in a clear violation of House rules, they weren’t even allowed to speak on the bill. And in a final twist of the shiv, the legislation that emerged lets uncertified teachers teach in Detroit, something not allowed anywhere else in Michigan. Oh, and don’t forget the new punishments for teachers who engage in *sick outs* to call attention to the appalling conditions in the city’s schools.

 

There is a queasy, racialized undertone to much of the education reform debate, with its constant implication that students of color fare best in schools over which their communities have little say. In Michigan, though, that argument has been taken by reform advocates, Betsy DeVos chief among them, to its extreme conclusion. The official message of DeVos’ organization, the Great Lakes Education Project, during last summer’s legislative battle was that dissolving the Detroit Public Schools would *protect kids and empower parents,* a cause that came with its own hashtag: #EndDPS. But what GLEP really meant was hard to miss. Detroit is a tax-hoovering abyss whose residents are too corrupt and incompetent to oversee their own schools.

 

After the GOP took control of Michigan in 2010, the charter cap was lifted, then eliminated. The state, once home to the nation’s industrial unions, became a right-to-work state. The legislature passed a law allowing “emergency managers” to take control of financially stressed districts, with unlimited powers. Voters passed a refendum eliminating the emergency managers, but the legislature revived it in a budget bill.

 

Guess whose districts and and schools were taken over by emergency managers and turned over to charter operators?

 

You’ve heard about Detroit, and Flint, with its poisoned water, but there are other less well known cases—like Benton Harbor, Muskegon, and Highland Park, which at last count was down to a single public school. Within a few years of Public Act IV’s enactment, half of Michigan’s Black population was living under some form of emergency management. *The municipalities and school districts that have been taken over are predominantly African American and poor,* David Arsen, an economist at Michigan State University, told me when I interviewed him last summer. *The optics are not good, especially in the context of the long civil rights struggle for voting rights.*

 

Berkshire realized that the real danger of the Trump era is that he is “moldable clay,” amenable to the plans of others.

 

The terrifying thing about the dawning of the Trumpian era isn’t just the specific awfulness of the President-elect’s policies. It’s that Trump is what the long gamers think of as *moldable clay,* receptive to whatever plots and plans they’ve spent years dreaming and scheming up. In Michigan, the long game has long been about making over the state’s schools: breaking up the government monopoly over education and getting rid of that pesky prohibition that keeps public monies from following kids to private schools, especially private schools of the religious variety. When Detroit-based writer Allie Gross set out this summer to document the long history of the efforts of the DeVos family and its allies to remake Detroit’s schools, she dug up an archival piece that a reporter at her paper, the Metro Times, wrote in 1995. Gross’ predecessor described a *relentless attack* on Michigan’s public education system, and a *Trojan horse* meant to blur the distinction between public and private schools en route to realizing the real goal: public funding for parochial schools.

 

Betsy DeVos is playing the long game, and she knows what she wants. What others want is irrelevant.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Politico: Betsy DeVos Described Her Crusade for Vouchers as Advancing “God’s Kingdom”

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2016 //
22

Politico describes a meeting of wealthy Christians where Betsy and Dick DeVos explained the religious motivation behind their dedication to school vouchers. 

 

 

The billionaire philanthropist whom Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.”

 

Trump’s pick, Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, has pursued that work in large part by spending millions to promote the use of taxpayer dollars on private and religious schools.
Her comments came during a 2001 meeting of “The Gathering,” an annual conference of some of the country’s wealthiest Christians. DeVos and her husband, Dick, were interviewed a year after voters rejected a Michigan ballot initiative to change the state’s constitution to allow public money to be spent on private and religious schools, which the DeVoses had backed.

 

In the interview, an audio recording, which was obtained by POLITICO, the couple is candid about how their Christian faith drives their efforts to reform American education.

 

School choice, they say, leads to “greater Kingdom gain.” The two also lament that public schools have “displaced” the Church as the center of communities, and they cite school choice as a way to reverse that troubling trend.

 

The audio from the private gathering, though 15 years old, offers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of DeVos’ personal views — views that may guide her decision-making as the nation’s top education official. DeVos has repeatedly said she wants policies that give families choices about their children’s education — the choice of public schools included — but her critics fear that her goal is to shift public funding from already beleaguered traditional public schools to private and religious schools.

 

Remember the idea of separation of church and state, which Thomas Jefferson championed? The DeVos family does not accept that principle.

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Edd Doerr: The Great School Voucher Fraud

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2016 //
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Edd Doerr is the president of Americans for Religious Liberty and a strong proponent of separation of church and state. In this paper, he gives a brief overview of the history of this infra, explains why vouchers are a very bad idea, and reviews the 27 state referenda on vouchers or variant on public funds for religious schools.

 

Since his paper was written in 2012, a proposal to amend the Florida state constitution to permit vouchers (called the Religious Freedom Amendment) was defeated in 2012 by 55-45%, despite a vigorous campaign by Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee on its behalf, and despite the deceptive tactic of asking voters whether they support “religious freedom.” This past election, voters in Oklahoma rejected a constitutional amendment that would “have stripped the provision in the state constitution that prevents public money or property from being used to support religion and religious institutions.”

 

Wherever vouchers exist, they have been authorized by state legislatures, never by voters. State legislatures are influenced by political contributions and are easier to manipulate than voters, as Dick and Betsy DeVos learned when their own state voucher proposal in Michigan went down to defeat in 2000.

 

In Doerr’s paper, he shows how voucher advocates ignore the Founding Fathers’ conviction about religious liberty. He cites Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia legislation called “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.”*

 

Doerr quotes a section of the bill:

 

This Act ended legal compulsion to attend church services and barred tax support for religious institutions. It provide that “no man . . . shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”

 

Doerr goes on to write:

 

While the Constitution drafted in 1787 did not grant the federal government power to deal with religion in any way, it proscribed religious tests for public office, and provided for an affirmation instead of an oath of office. The absence of a specific religious freedom guarantee bothered Jefferson and others. Six states ratified the Constitution but insisted on a religious freedom amendment. Rhode Island and North Carolina declined to ratify it until a bill of rights was adopted. Shortly after his election to the House of Representatives Madison introduced a compilation of proposals for a bill of rights to be added. Several versions of a religious liberty provision were considered before the following wording of what is now the First Amendment was adopted: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

 

President Jefferson, in a carefully thought-out 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, declared that these words built a “wall of separation between church and state.” Supporters of church-state separation hold that the “no establishment” clause was noted by the Supreme Court as early as 1878, but was best and most succinctly interpreted by the Supreme Court in the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education ruling. The Court stated:

 

“The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state’.”

 

So bear in mind as Trump and DeVos and others promote vouchers that would divert money from public schools to religious schools, they are at war not only with voters but with the Founding Fathers.

 

*Doerr cites the wrong date for passage of the bill in Virginia, which was 1779, not 1786.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump, Virginia, Vouchers
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