Archives for category: School Choice
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Jeb Bush Blasts Teachers’ Unions at School Choice Meeting in Indianapolis

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2017 //
28

Jeb Bush was honored by Betsy DeVos’ organization, the American Federation for Children, at their meeting in Indianapolis. Bush’s Foundation for Educational Ecellence is heavily funded by the technology and Bush loves to attack the schools that don’t adopt technology faster.

On this occasion, he blamed teachers’ unions for standing in the way of the electronic future. He says they care only for adult interests, which explains why they take a low-paying job with difficult working conditions.

Bush, who is funded by billionaire foundations and tech industries, finds it easy to use teachers and their unions as his punching bag and scapegoat.

He did not acknowledge that the nation’s highest scoring states on NAEP–Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut–have strong teachers’ unions, while the state’s that ban unions are the lowest performing.

Categories Bush, Jeb, School Choice, Technology, Unions

Esquire: “Is There a Point to All This Cruelty?”

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2017 //
11

Charles P. Pierce blogs regularly for Esquire, and he is one of the few mainstream writers who understands the creeping (now galloping) privatization of public education and knows that it is a very bad thing for our society.

You will enjoy reading this post, unless you are Betsy DeVos.

With the proposed budget cuts to the federal budget for education, he writes, DeVos isfinding ways to fulfill her life’s dream of destroying public education and monetizing all those bright shiny faces.

He writes:

Betsy DeVos does not know anything about public education except that she doesn’t believe in it as a concept. Free public education is one of the unquestioned triumphs of the American experiment, but it’s a disposable commodity to a know-nothing fanatic who married into a vast fortune and dedicated a lot of it to wrecking public education. One of the worst things about electing an unqualified dolt to be president is that the dolt’s administration is a paradise for free-range maniacs and their personal crusades. This is a case in point.

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Betsy DeVos Will Testify Today on Capitol Hill, Extolling Charters and Choice

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2017 //
27

Politico Morning Education has an advance copy of DeVos’ testimony.

She will defend the administration’s draconian budget cuts by asserting that choice is the only “reform” that matters.

EDUCATION SECRETARY BETSY DEVOS TO FACE LAWMAKERS: DeVos is back on Capitol Hill today to testify for the first time since her contentious confirmation hearing. She could take some hostile questions before a House appropriations subcommittee about the administration’s budget proposal, which seeks to cut 13 percent from Education Department programs while also giving $1 billion to school choice efforts that would encourage charter schools, private school vouchers and more freedom for traditional public school students to pick a school in their district they want to attend.

– During her testimony , DeVos is expected to explain that an administration goal is to promote local education funding systems that “expand educational choice in our public school systems,” according to prepared remarks obtained by Morning Education. Other goals include funding state and local efforts that support scholarship programs that allow students to attend private schools and take advantage of other educational options and boosting a federal charter schools program. “Each of these proposals reflects my strong belief that a greater focus on student-centered reforms is the next logical step following the enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which recognized and restored the primary role of states and school districts in operating a public education system that puts students and parents first,” she will say, according to the testimony.

– DeVos is also expected to say that while past presidents have “attempted to find the right set of levers here in Washington” to improve schools, that “unfortunately, I don’t think any of us are happy with the results of these seemingly endless, Washington-led reform efforts.” But she’ll point to the $4 billion the federal government has spent over the years to help start charter schools as an exception, referring to charter schools as “a bottom-up, locally driven education reform strategy based on empowering educators and providing choices to students and families.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, School Choice

Steven Singer: Charter Schools and Voucher Schools Are Virtually Identical

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2017 //
27

Steven Singer finds it annoying when corporate reformers insist that “charter schools are public schools.”

He insists in this post that the two are almost the same.

Neither is a public school, and neither should be subsidized by public funding.

He writes:

The stark orange monolith that was Donald Trump is starting to crumble.

And with it so are the dreams of corporate education reformers everywhere.

Where in previous administrations they could pass off their policies as Democratic or Republican depending on whichever way the wind blows, today their brand has been so damaged by Trump’s advocacy, they fear it may never recover.

Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they could champion both charter schools and school vouchers with impunity. But now the privatizers and profiteers hiding in progressive clothing are trying desperately to rebrand.

Not only is Trump’s voucher plan deeply unpopular, but the public has already begun to associate any kind of school privatization with a doomed President.

So like cockroaches, neoliberals have begun to skitter to one type of privatization over another. Fake Democrats hide beneath unfettered charter school expansion. Bought-and-sold Republicans cling to the idea that we should spend taxpayer dollars on private and parochial schools.

But is there a real substantial difference between each of these so-called “choice” schemes? Or are they both just scams when compared with traditional public schools?

THE DIFFERENCES

Charter Schools and Private Schools are basically the same thing.

The biggest difference between the two is funding.

Charter schools are completely funded by tax dollars. Private schools – even when school vouchers are used – often need to be subsidized by parents. For instance, many private schools charge tuition of $30,000 – $40,000 a year. Vouchers rarely provide more than $6,000. So at best they bring the cost down but still make it impossible for most students to attend private schools.

Sure they may start as an effort to allow only impoverished children to use tax dollars towards private and parochial school tuition. But they soon grow to include middle class and wealthy children, thus partially subsidizing attendance at the most exclusive schools in the country for those families who can already afford it.

Parochial schools, meanwhile, are exactly the same except for one meaningful difference. They teach religion.

Their entire curriculum comes from a distinctly religious point of view. They indoctrinate youth into a way of seeing the world that is distinctly non-secular….

The biggest commonality between these types of educational institutions is how they’re run. Unlike traditional public schools – which are governed by duly-elected school boards – charter, private and parochial schools are overseen by private interests. They are administered by independent management firms. They rarely have elected school boards. Their operators rarely make decisions in public, and their budgets and other documents are not open to review by taxpayers. This is true despite the fact that they are funded to varying degrees by public tax dollars.

So in all three cases, these schools are run privately, but taxpayers pick up the tab….

Neoliberal Democrats may try to save the movement by claiming charter schools are completely different. But they aren’t. They are fundamentally the same.

Open the posts to see the links and to finish reading the rest of it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Bill Phillis: Betsy DeVos is Clueless about the Common Good

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2017 //
34

Bill Phillis read Betsy DeVos’s prepared remarks at the Brookings Institution and it occurred to him that she literally doesn’t know what she is talking about. Bill is a retired deputy superintendent of schools for the state of Ohio and he works tirelessly to protect public schools against Governor Kasich and the Ohio legislature’s love of privatization.

Betsy DeVos, speaking at the Brookings Institution, said that we must think about funding individual children, not institutions or buildings in order to serve the greater public good. That logic would suggest that each citizen should be provided a tax voucher to purchase personal security while police departments and other safety forces are being dismantled. Why not abandon the Brookings Institution and provide some kind of voucher to allow Brookings employees to be paid to freelance their services?

DeVos’ answer to every question is “more choice” outside the real public system at taxpayer’s expense. Her view of public common good seems jaded by her anti-public school craze for choice. It appears she does not understand that each state has a constitutional provision requiring public education as an institution. It is through the institution of the public common school that the public common good is nurtured.

People organize states and nations for the common good. Tax funds are collected for public goods and services, e.g. roads, public safety, national security, education, etc. The public funds do not belong to individual citizens as an incentive to select private choices. Public institutions provide for current and future citizens. Individual choices relate to the here and now-not to future long-term benefits to society.

Government must not be the servant of special interests. The very idea of a commonwealth-the people collectively-is antithetical to the use of public funds for private purposes.

Even non-government groups, such as parent-teacher organizations, come together to promote common purposes. Local PTAs or PTOs raise funds for agreed upon projects. They don’t assign the funds to individual members for each to promote a project of their choice.

There are those who believe that a few unelected leaders should determine what constitutes the public good for all other citizens. Possibly, that philosophy is embraced by DeVos.

DeVos and those of her ilk are absolutely wrong that school choice promotes the public common good. It is time for all citizens to become engaged in ensuring public resources are used exclusively for the common good.

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org

Categories Betsy DeVos, Democracy, School Choice

Jennifer Berkshire: The Prophets of Privatization

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2017 //
16

Jennifer Berkshire (the writer formerly known as EduShyster) is one of the best education writers on the national scene.

In this article, she describes the evangelical roots of the present school-choice movement, as personified by Betsy DeVos.

You will meet some very peculiar people who loathe “government schooling” and prefer to home school their children. Some will be familiar to you, like the far-right billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who bankrolled Steve Bannon and Breitbart News. Daughter Rebekah homeschools her children to keep them free from the contamination of both public and private schools.

Berkshire notes that the Mercers funded an odd Oregon politician named Arthur Robinson.

She writes about Robinson:

In Oregon, Robinson is known as a kooky Tea Party-ish chemist who has been stockpiling urine as part of his mission to improve health, happiness, prosperity — and boost student test scores. He’s also a perennial GOP congressional candidate whose long-shot bids have been mostly underwritten by the Mercers.

In Christian homeschooling circles, Arthur Robinson is a household name. The Robinson Self-Teaching Curriculum, developed by Robinson and his six home-schooled children, teaches children to “teach themselves and to acquire superior knowledge as did many of America’s most outstanding citizens in the days before socialism in education.”

Robinson fleshed out his views on education during his 2016 run for Congress, releasing an education platform called “Art’s Education Plan!” He called for a nationwide voucher program, providing every student in the United States with the “freedom and resources to apply to any school in our nation, public or private.”

There was also a bold plan for Congress to shut down the schools of Washington, DC, for three months, long enough to fire the “unionized deadwood” and create a model in which students and parents are customers rather than “vassals of school administrators.”

She describes the ultra-conservative financiers and their faithful political vassals who have turned Florida into a mecca for publicly funded religious education, even though the Florida Constitution explicitly forbids it, and even though the state’s voters turned down a Jeb Bush effort to strip the state Constitution of its anti-voucher language in 2012.

Yes, there are some far-right extremists in the school choice movement. But, notes Berkshire, it was not DeVos that put school choice into the mainstream. It was Democrats who called themselves “reformers.”


DeVos and her allies are aided in the efforts to dismantle public education by Democratic education reformers who’ve spent the past two decades doing essentially the same thing. It is “progressive” reformers, after all, who’ve led the charge to convince parents and taxpayers that there is no meaningful difference between a public school and one that’s privately managed. That parents don’t care who runs their schools as long as they’re good is a standard reform talking point, along with the reminder that “charter schools are public schools….”

School choice has been legitimized, not by DeVos et al, but by the likes of Corey Booker, Rahm Emanuel and other reform-minded Democrats. If saving public education is to be a key plank of the #resistance, Democrats will have to join the fight or be swept aside.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Duncan, Arne, Florida, For-Profit, Home Schooling, Obama, School Choice

Trump’s First Education Budget: Deep Cuts for Public Schools, Good News for Charters, School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2017 //
22

Trump unveiled his first education budget, and it contains many cuts to popular programs in public schools. But it has a bonanza for private alternatives to public schools.

The Washington Post obtained a draft copy of the new budget, which has not yet been submitted to Congress.

Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The administration would channel part of the savings into its top priority: school choice. It seeks to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.

President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have repeatedly said they want to shrink the federal role in education and give parents more opportunity to choose their children’s schools.

Trump and DeVos are following the Obama formula for Race to the Top: Offer financial incentives for states to adopt the policies that the federal government wants. If they want the money they must volunteer, and that allegedly proves that participation was “voluntary.”

The budget proposal calls for a net $9.2 billion cut to the department, or 13.6 percent of the spending level Congress approved last month. It is likely to meet resistance on Capitol Hill because of strong constituencies seeking to protect current funding, ideological opposition to vouchers and fierce criticism of DeVos, a longtime Republican donor who became a household name during a bruising Senate confirmation battle…

Under the administration’s budget, two of the department’s largest expenditures in K-12 education, special education and Title I funds to help poor children, would remain unchanged compared to federal funding levels in the first half of fiscal 2017. However, high-poverty schools are likely to receive fewer dollars than in the past because of a new law that allows states to use up to 7 percent of Title I money for school improvement before distributing it to districts.

The cuts would come from eliminating at least 22 programs, some of which Trump outlined in March. Gone, for example, would be $1.2 billion for after-school programs that serve 1.6 million children, most of whom are poor, and $2.1 billion for teacher training and class-size reduction.

[Trump budget casualty: After-school programs for 1.6 million kids. Most are poor.]

The documents obtained by The Post — dated May 23, the day the president’s budget is expected to be released — outline the rest of the cuts, including a $15 million program that provides child care for low-income parents in college; a $27 million arts education program; two programs targeting Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students, totaling $65 million; two international education and foreign language programs, $72 million; a $12 million program for gifted students; and $12 million for Special Olympics education programs.

Other programs would not be eliminated entirely, but would be cut significantly. Those include grants to states for career and technical education, which would lose $168 million, down 15 percent compared to current funding; adult basic literacy instruction, which would lose $96 million (down 16 percent); and Promise Neighborhoods, an Obama-era initiative meant to build networks of support for children in needy communities, which would lose $13 million (down 18 percent).

The Trump administration would dedicate no money to a fund for student support and academic enrichment that is meant to help schools pay for, among other things, mental-health services, anti-bullying initiatives, physical education, Advanced Placement courses and science and engineering instruction. Congress created the fund, which totals $400 million this fiscal year, by rolling together several smaller programs. Lawmakers authorized as much as $1.65 billion, but the administration’s budget for it in the next fiscal year is zero.

The cuts would make space for investments in choice, including $500 million for charter schools, up 50 percent over current funding. The administration also wants to spend $250 million on “Education Innovation and Research Grants,” which would pay for expanding and studying the impacts of vouchers for private and religious schools. It’s not clear how much would be spent on research versus on the vouchers themselves.

The new budget would also have a large impact of student aid programs for higher education.

It is clear that parents and educators must organize to fight for the funding of programs that benefit students in public schools.

Ninety percent of American children attend public schools, yet they are being neglected in the budgetary planning because Trump and DeVos favor charters, vouchers, and other kinds of school choice.

Don’t agonize. Organize.

Join the Network for Public Education. Be active in the fight against these cuts. Be active in the resistance to privatization and the Trump administration’s indifference/hostility to public schools.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Funding, Network for Public Education, School Choice, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Supporting public schools, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Inside the Bradley Foundation: Documents Reveal Plan to Spread Right-Wing Ideology, State by State

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2017 //
15

Hackers broke into the computers of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and released a treasure trove documenting the aggressive efforts to spread right-wing ideology.

I posted about these documents earlier, citing an article called “Weaponized Philanthropy” by Mary Bottari.

There is so much material that there will be many articles and books about the political uses of an allegedly charitable foundation.

Here is another article about the Bradley Foundation by Alex Kotch, which appeared in Raw Story and AlterNet.

He writes:

New investigations by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy analyze hacked internal documents, which reveal that much like the Koch network, the Bradley Foundation has launched a national strategy to help conservatives control the branches of state governments and alter state policy to lower taxes, shrink government and attack labor unions.

The Bradley Foundation, which has historically supported taxpayer-funded “school choice” initiatives and work requirements for welfare recipients, is named after Lynde and Harry Bradley, two brothers who founded the profitable factory automation manufacturer Allen Bradley Co. After Lynde’s death in 1942, the Allen-Bradley Foundation was established. When Allen Bradley was sold to Rockwell International in 1985 for $1.7 billion, the foundation’s assets ballooned and it became the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation as it added a focus on promoting the brothers’ conservative ideology on a national scale.

Thirty gigabytes of Bradley Foundation internal documents hacked by a group named Anonymous Poland reveal that after a $200 million influx of cash in late 2012 from the trust of Caroline Bradley, Lynde’s wife, the Bradley Foundation geared up to fund networks of conservative think tanks, legal centers, candidate recruitment organizations, media outlets and advocacy groups in 13 states, based on the foundation’s successful efforts in Wisconsin. The foundation had already laid the groundwork for a welfare-to-work program and a private school voucher system and defended GOP Gov. Scott Walker in a campaign finance probe, helping him survive a recall election prompted by his dismantling of public-sector unions.

Now the foundation is focusing on five states it views as having a strong conservative infrastructure, thus making them ripe for rightward change. The foundation is working to expand conservative power in Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin by funding established networks of right-wing organizations that promote conservatism and help far-right candidates win elections. It’s a long-term strategy that “can take decades,” according to the longtime CEO of the foundation, Rick Graber, who recently stepped down from his post.

Be prepared, if you live in Colorado, Noth Carolina, Oregon, Washington, or Wisconsin. The Bradley Foundation is coming for your public schools.

Categories Billionaires, School Choice, Unions, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Peter Greene Takes a Deep Dive into the Mind of Betsy DeVos and Finds…Nothing

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
13

Peter Greene reviews the speech that Betsy DeVos gave to the annual meeting of the Global Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs at Arizona State University.

She interminably bashes and belittles the public schools as obsolete, failing, etc.

She has, as he puts it charitably, a one-track mind.

She visited wonderful public schools in Van Wert, Ohio, and saw children and teachers who were engaged in learning. She learned nothing. Whatever she saw passed through her mind immediately without leaving an impression.

She keeps searching for an analogy to plug school choice. She tried Uber and that didn’t go over so well. Now she has a new metaphor:

Think of it like your cell phone. AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile may all have great networks, but if you can’t get cell phone service in your living room, then your particular provider is failing you, and you should have the option to find a network that does work.

Because is just a commodity or a service. Of course, lots of folks live in a place where they have none of those networks as a choice because businesses only serve the customers that are profitable enough to get their attention. This may just be an area of ignorance typical to the really rich– I’m betting that DeVos has never been in a situation where a business told her it wasn’t worth their bother to serve her, nor has she found herself in a situation where that service was simply priced out of her reach.

She truly has no idea of what a public service is and why it is different from something you buy or rent.

She has already given up on the claim that school choice produces better results or better education.

She pushes choice for the sake of choice, even if the quality of choices are diminished.

Categories Betsy DeVos, School Choice

Jan Resseger: A Tribute to Benjamin Barber, Philosopher of Democracy and the Common Good

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
17

Benjamin Barber was a political philosopher whose passion was the strengthening of civil society and democratic institutions. He died April 24.

Jan Resseger wrote a beautiful tribute to him, on the importance of public education and the danger of privatization. Her citations from his works are eloquent and powerful. Jan doesn’t mention that Barber criticized me in his 1992 book, which she quotes; I can tell you frankly, looking back, that he was on the right side of the culture wars of that era twenty-five years ago.

She writes, quoting his works:

“It is the peculiar toxicity of privatization ideology that it rationalizes corrosive private choosing as a surrogate for the public good. It enthuses about consumers as the new citizens who can do more with their dollars and euros and yen than they ever did with their votes. It associates the privileged market sector with liberty as private choice while it condemns democratic government as coercive.” (Consumed, p. 143)

“We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.” (Consumed, p. 139)

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning. I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones. What do we get? The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector. As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it)….” (Consumed, p. 132)

“This book admits no dichotomy between democracy and excellence, for the true democratic premise encompasses excellence: the acquired virtues and skills necessary to living freely, living democratically, and living well. It assumes that every human being, given half a chance, is capable of the self-government that is his or her natural right, and thus capable of acquiring the judgment, foresight, and knowledge that self-government demands. Not everyone can master string physics or string quartets, but everyone can master the conduct of his or her own life. Everyone can become a free and self-governing adult… Education need not begin with equally adept students, because education is itself the equalizer. Equality is achieved not by handicapping the swiftest, but by assuring the less advantaged a comparable opportunity. ‘Comparable’ here does not mean identical… Schooling is what allows math washouts to appreciate the contributions of math whizzes—and may one day help persuade them to allocate tax revenues for basic scientific research… The fundamental assumption of democratic life is not that we are all automatically capable of living both freely and responsibly, but that we are all potentially susceptible to education for freedom and responsibility. Democracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy.” (An Aristocracy of Everyone, pp. 13-14)

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice
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