Archives for category: School Choice
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Reader Reports on State Grades for Ohio District Visited by Betsy and Randi

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2017 //
10

A reader sent this comment about the Van Wert, Ohio, public schools, and how the state grades them. It shows how wacky Ohio’s school grading is.

“Van Wert is a rural community where half the district’s 2,000 students come from low-income families yet 96% graduate from high school—on time. With top-line results like that, you’d expect the district would be getting top grades in Ohio’s standardized school assessment system, but you’d be only half-right: A’s for graduation rate and progress in math and reading, but F’s for achievement gaps and K-3 literacy.

“So where did DeVos focus her post-visit remarks? On school choice, of course. Faced with the dearth of charter schools and private schools and vouchers in rural Ohio, she seized on the fact that the parents of nearly 20% of the students in Van Wert city schools choose to send their children to public schools in other districts.

“She also promised to lift the burden of government-mandated paperwork that takes time away from teaching. When asked for examples of that burdensome paperwork, however, she couldn’t cite any. Suggesting that she’s been getting alternative-fact lessons in Washington.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Ohio, School Choice

Russ Walsh: School Choice and the Faustian Bargain

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
25

In the wake of Betsy and Randi’s visit together to a public school in Ohio, Russ Walsh reflects on how school choice affects democracy. Every dollar that goes to a charter or voucher is taken away from public schools like those they visited. “Choice” means budget cuts to the public school, and it means that public dollars go to privately controlled schools.


“While the school that DeVos and Weingarten visited is in a heavily Republican district in Ohio, the voters there are no fans of school choice. As one voter put it, vouchers are “like theft.” “It’s saying we passed a levy to go to our school district, and it’s going somewhere else.” Exactly. School choice is theft of our tax dollars and theft of our democracy.

Choice sounds so democratic, so quintessentially American that voucher and charter school champions keep using the term to hoodwink people into thinking that choice in schooling is a good thing. I suggest that those of us who oppose vouchers and charter schools call school choice what it is in the eyes of that Ohio voter, tax theft. The government collects our taxes in order to provide essential services to all of us. There is no choice involved, we all must pay taxes (unless, apparently, we are hugely wealthy). Those essential services include providing for a military, promoting research on health and welfare, providing for police and fire protection, and funding public schools. When money is diverted from the support of the public schools, it amounts to, as the Ohio voter said, theft. Or maybe another way to say it is “taxation without representation”, since voters have no voice and no oversight of how tax money is spent in schools that receive money through vouchers or charters.

It should be readily apparent that corporate education reformers are anti-democracy. In city after city around the country democratically elected school boards have been replaced by boards appointed by the mayor or governor. In Philadelphia, an appointed board has been in place for nearly two decades and the deterioration of the schools has continued unabated. In Detroit, in Betsy DeVos’ home state, the state took over the schools and has systematically led them into chaos. And let us remember that DeVos has spent millions to get legislation passed in Michigan that limits any kind of oversight for voucher and charter schools. So quite literally these schools are stealing public funds with no accountability as to how they spend it…

When parents send their children to charter schools or voucher schools, they are looking for a better opportunity for their children. We can all understand the appeal of that. What parents may not realize is that they have entered into a Faustian bargain. In order to get this shiny new toy of a voucher, they must give up their voice in their child’s education. No elected school board, no independent audit, no budget vote, no say in school policies.

In this drama, Betsy DeVos plays a willing Mephistopheles, offering choice, but getting you to sign away your voice. Without a voice, there is no democracy.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Busted Pencils on the New Documentary: “Backpack Full of Cash”

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2017 //
16

Tim Slekar regularly posts podcasts of high value to the resistance, to those fighting privatization and high stakes testing.

This episode features an interview with Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow, the veteran filmmakers whose new documentary tells the story of the organized assault on public education. Please take the time to listen.

In 2001, Sarah Mondale and Sarah Patton made a four-part documentary called “School,” which ran on PBS and was turned into a book.

The new film is titled “Backpack Full of Cash,” the term corporate reformers use to describe their goal: every child with a backpack full of cash, taking it anywhere he or she chooses.

It is narrated by Matt Damon.

We should all call PBS, which recently ran a series opposing public schools and touting the glories of the free market, and urge them to give airtime to this documentary. PBS is probably trying to curry favor with the Trump administration to stop the defunding of public television. It is sad, don’t you think, that public television gives airtime to a show attacking public education?

Send emails to: http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback/

Categories Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, School Choice

The Big Lie Told about Students with Disabilities and School Choice

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2017 //
44

A follower of this blog contacted me recently to share a video on YouTube that outraged her. She explained that she is blind and so are her two children.

She is also a lawyer, who has overcome many obstacles to achieve an education and a profession.

She was outraged because this video featured a young man who said he was blind and that he was unable to get the support he needed in public schools. He was educated, he said, in a private school. He is a remarkable young man who is a champion golfer despite the loss of his vision; he now attends USC.

She wrote that both her children had been educated in public schools, and what she heard from the video was not true.

A blind guy, college student and champion golfer, waxed poetic about his opportunity to go to college because he was fortunate to have parents who could afford to send him to private school, which in California, (he maintained), is the only way he could get such opportunities. He said that he received services that the public school could and would not provide; they had “tried” that route. I wish I knew who to contact to get an opposing ad done with me and my kids, all of whom excelled in public school; the general public needs to know about the IDEA. Clearly, Betsy DeVos cannot tell them, as she knows nothing about it and wouldn’t care if she did.

The truth is that private schools, charter schools, and voucher schools are not required to meet the requirements of the federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Students who leave public schools abandon their federal rights, a point made recently in an investigative article in the New York Times.

So, here is the lowdown. This video appeared on a YouTube channel called PragerU. PragerU espouses the views of Dennis Prager, a rightwing talk show host. There is no “university” with that name. If you scan the videos on the PragerU site, you will find they are all shout-outs for anti-government propaganda. Since he is now 68 years old, I assume he will decline Social Security and any other government benefits.

Categories School Choice, Special Education

Jeff Bryant: Betsy DeVos Doesn’t Care About Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2017 //
11

The U.S. Department of Education has been a major force in protecting the civil rights of students and promoting desegregation.

But, writes Jeff Bryant, these issues do not seem to be part of Betsy DeVos’s agenda. Nor are they a high priority for Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department.

He writes:

“So far, Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has sent numerous signs she is assembling a staff and laying down a policy mindset that seems indifferent – if not outright averse – to the needs of nonwhite students.

“DeVos has taken the helm of federal education policy at a time when black and brown school children and youth critically need leaders in the federal government to address their needs.

“The number of Latino, African-American, and Asian students in public K-12 schools passed the number of non-Hispanic whites over two years ago. Nevertheless, schools have become more racially segregated than they were 40 years ago.

“The weight of research evidence shows when schools are racially and socioeconomically integrated, all students – even the white kids – benefit academically and in their social and emotional capabilities. Yet, without strong federal leadership, states and local districts generally shirk their responsibilities to enforce school integration.

“Racial segregation is not the only problem nonwhite students confront in schools. Students of color in our nation’s schools are disproportionally more apt to receive out-of-school suspensions than their white peers, which significantly raises their tendency to eventually get entangled in the criminal justice system. A recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy found that in New York City alone these punitive school discipline programs cost the city more than $746 million annually.

“How may we expect a DeVos administration to step up to address these challenges?

“As I reported shortly after her nomination, DeVos has a problematic track record on civil rights, based on her actions in Michigan to promote school choice programs that significantly worsened the state’s racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools.

“In one of her earliest moves as Secretary, DeVos announced her department’s decision to end a federal grant program created during the Obama administration to encourage more diversity in schools. Experts on poverty and race had called her handling of that program “a real test of her commitment to school integration.” She flunked it.

“More alarming is recent news of how many new hires for the education department have a history of making racially offensive comments and expressing controversial opinions on efforts to level the social and economic playing field for African-Americans and other racial minorities.”

Choice promotes segregation by race, religion, and income. The more she sticks to the only script she knows, the more segregated our society will become.

To hear her and Trump speak about education as “the civil rights issue of our time” is to drown in hypocrisy.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Race, School Choice, Segregation

Betsy and Randi Visit a Rural School District in Ohio

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2017 //
47

Betsy DeVos and Randi Weingarten visited the public schools of rural Van Wert, Ohio. Randi wanted Betsy to see how important federal dollars are to a good public school. Betsy went along and got a promise from Randi to tour a school of choice with her.

Education Week says the “rifts” between them remain. Yeah, a rift the size of the Grand Canyon is not likely to close no matter how many schools they visit together or how often they meet.

Betsy’s spokesperson says she is not anti-public school. She just pours millions into campaigns of state and local candidates who support charters and vouchers, not public schools.

This effort to find common ground between polar opposites strikes me as pointless. It would be like bringing a devout Orthodox Jew to a Roman Catholic Church in hopes of changing his mind, or bringing a devout Roman Catholic to a synagogue and expecting to find common ground. Or hoping that a Bosox fan would be converted by a visit to the Yankees’ dugout. C’mon!

The New York Times’ account has this perceptive comment:

“Van Wert educators said they believed their biggest threat was school choice. An expanded voucher program would be “potentially catastrophic” for the district’s finances, said Mike Ruen, the district’s treasurer.
About 400 students now take advantage of a state open-enrollment policy, which Ms. DeVos endorsed during her visit. It allows students to attend an out-of-district school and take $6,000 in state per-pupil funding with them.
Most of them attend schools in a neighboring suburb. About 20 students are enrolled in an online charter school that has a 39 percent graduation rate. And a local vocational school takes 80 percent of the funding for each student who transfers there.

“Only one private school competes directly with Van Wert public schools: a small Catholic elementary school in town that the public school system provides special education services to, mostly at no charge. A Catholic high school 15 miles away is less of a draw, but could become one if parents receive vouchers. “I don’t think people are against choice,” Mr. Amstutz said. “But when you talk about expansion, taking money away from public schools, it gives people heartburn.”

Betsy DeVos will not change her mind about the importance of giving taxpayer dollars to every family to choose a charter school, a religious school, home schooling, a cyber charter, or whatever other option they want. They can even choose a public school. To the extent she is able, she will divert federal funds away from public schools to the other choices. She won’t resist Trump’s deep budget cuts. This visit will not transform her. It will not make her more attentive to the needs of the children in public schools. No doubt, she feels sorry for them because they are in public schools.

Randi will not stop being a union leader because of visiting a non-union charter or voucher school. She won’t stop believing in the importance or value of public schools. She won’t become a supporter of DeVos’s privatization agenda or Trump’s budget cuts.

Sorry, friends, but I don’t see the point of seeking “common ground.” There is none.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Have You Heard? Truth in Edvertising

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2017 //
13

Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider discuss a new phenomenon: schools that advertise for students. They identify one charter that spends $1,000 per student to recruit new ones. This is the new world of school choice and the free market, where schools compete for customers and your tax dollars are spent for advertising and marketing, not for teacher pay or supplies.

http://haveyouheardblog.com/truth-in-edvertising/

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, School Choice

Colorado Senator Michael Bennett Struggles to Distance Himself from Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2017 //
30

Colorado Senator Michael Bennett was previously superintendent of schools in Denver. There he set off the school choice frenzy and led the parade to open charters. Now he finds himself trying to explain that he is different from Betsy DeVos. He is a Democrat, one of DFER’s champions. She is a Republican, Trump’s pick as Secretary of Education. He sold out public education. She wants to privatize it. She loves vouchers. He doesn’t. She is a choice ideologue. So is he.

See the difference? Look closer. No, closer still. I know it’s hard but keep trying.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Colorado, DFER, Education Reform, School Choice, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider Explains Why Betsy DeVos Never Mentions the School Where Her Mother Briefly Taught

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2017 //
5

Mercedes Schneider has been reading the archives of the local newspaper in Holland, Michigan, where the DeVos family reigns.

She learned about the brief teaching career of her mother in the local public school.

She learned the name of the school.

She has a picture of the school.

She knows the fate of the school. It was closed, after a century as the heart of the community.

Read her post to learn why it was closed.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Michigan, School Choice

Who is the Walton Family Foundation Funding?

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2017 //
42

It is very instructive to scan the long list of organizations that are funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Some will surprise you. Some will not. Here is what we know about this foundation. The Walton Family (beneficiaries of Walmart) is the richest family in America. There are many billionaires in the family. Like Betsy DeVos, they don’t like public education. They don’t like regulation. They love the free market. They don’t like unions. Individual family members have spent millions on political campaigns to support charters and vouchers. The Foundation also supports charters and school choice.

In 2015, the Walton Family Foundation spent $179 million on K-12 education grants. They are in the midst of a pledge to spend $1 billion to open more charters, and they have targeted certain cities for their beneficence (Atlanta, Boston, Camden, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, San Antonio and Washington, D.C.) Their goal is to undermine public education by creating a competitive marketplace of choices. They and DeVos are on the same page.

I suggest you scan the list to see which organizations have their hand out for funding from one of the nation’s most anti-public school, anti-union, rightwing foundations.

Here are a few of their grantees:

Black Alliance for Education Options (BAEO), run by Howard Fuller to spread the gospel of school choice: $2.78 million

Brookings Institution (no doubt, to buy the annual report that grades cities on school choice): $242,000

California Charter Schools Association: $5 million

Center for American Progress (theoretically a “centrist Democratic” think tank): $500,000

Charter Fund, Inc. (never heard of this one): $14 million

Chiefs for Change (Jeb Bush’s group): $500,000

College Board (to push Common Core?): $225,000

Colorado League of Charter Schools: $1,050,000

Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week): $70,000

Education Reform Now: $4.2 million

Education Trust, Inc. (supposed a “left-leaning advocacy group”): $359,000

Education Writers Association: $175,000

Educators for Excellence (anti-union teachers, usually from TFA): $925,000

Families for Excellent Schools (hedge fund managers who lobby for charter schools in New York City and Massachusetts): $6.4 million

Foundation for Excellence in Education (Jeb Bush’s organization): $3 million

High Tech High Graduate School of Education (this one stumped me; how can a high school run a graduate school of education?): $780,000

KIPP Foundation: $6.9 million

Leadership for Education Equity Foundation (this is TFA’s political organization that trains TFA to run for office): $5 million

Massachusetts Charter Public School Association (this funding preceded the referendum where the citizens of Massachusetts voted “no mas” to new charters): $850,000

National Public Radio: $1.1 million

National Urban League: $300,000

Pahara Institute: $832,000

Parent Revolution: $500,000

Relay Graduate School of Education (that pseudo-grad school with no professors, just charter teachers): $1 million

Schools That Can Milwaukee (Tough luck, the Working Families Party just swept the school board): $1.6 million

StudentsFirst Institute: $2.8 million

Teach for America (to supply scabs): $8 million

The New York Times: $350,000

Thomas B. Fordham Institute: $700,000

Urban Institute (supposedly an independent think tank in D.C.): $350,000

To be fair, in another part of the grants report, called Special Projects, the Walton Family Foundation donated $112,404 to the Bentonville Public Schools and $25,000 to the Bentonville Public Schools Foundation, in the town where the Waltons are located. Compare that to the $179 million for charters and choice, and you get the picture of what matters most.

Categories Billionaires, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Massachusetts, Media, Privatization, School Choice, StudentsFirst, Teach for America, Walton Foundation
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