2017 Medley #18: DeVos Doubles Down

Accountability, Discrimination, Budget Cuts, Church-State Entanglement

We all knew that Betsy DeVos was going to be a problem for public education. She didn't hide her disdain for the common folk who sent their children to America's public schools. She didn't hide the fact that she wanted to privatize all the education in the U.S.

So it was no surprise that last week she presented the Trump Administration's plans to support privatization and destroy public education.

[emphasis in any of the quoted material below is mine]

ACCOUNTABILITY: FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS ONLY

DeVos Still Anti-Accountability

The bludgeon used by "reformers" against public schools has been accountability based on test scores. As we have learned in Indiana, that accountability is only meant for public schools. Schools accepting vouchers or charters can get their grades changed, can get loan forgiveness when they collapse, can continue to receive state funding even after having "failed," and can even choose their own students.

Accountability is the weapon used to hurt public education, and then claim that public schools are failing. As far as DeVos is concerned, no such accountability is needed for schools run privately.

...What we know is what we've known since the days that DeVos beat back attempts at accountability measures in Michigan-- she opposes anything that might in any way tie the hands of the Right Kind of People, the people who deserve to set policy and create schools and profit from all of it.

I can understand how liberals are bothered by this policy. What I don't quite understand is where the conservatives are. Where are all the people who built up the education reform wave in the first place with rallying calls for teacher accountability and school accountability and don't just trustingly throw money at schools and where the hell are our tax dollars going, anyway? Oh wait-- they are off in the corner, counting up all the money they aren't going to pay in taxes under the GOP plan.

As my college ed prof told us in the seventies, the accountability needle keeps swinging back and forth-- but this time it has gone so far in the accountability direction that it has come out the other side in a place so unaccountable that the federal Secretary of Education cannot imagine a situation in which she would deny federal dollars to any voucher school, ever, for any reason. This isn't just throwing money at schools-- it's lighting the money on fire and throwing it off a cliff. This is wrapping all the money around a big club that will be used to beat anybody who's not white and wealthy and healthy.

Betsy DeVos Continues Her Push For Private School Vouchers

One of the problems with "school choice" programs (aside from the fact that the "choice" is with the school, not the parents) is the lack of public oversight. Millions of taxpayer dollars are funneled into private, religious, and charter schools, which are given fewer restrictions for how money is being used. Nearly every day there's another scandal in which someone misappropriates or misuses funds meant for educating children.

...We have a responsibility to provide great public schools to every kid in America. Instead of strongly investing in public schools where 90 percent of kids go, Trump’s budget cuts billions of dollars from key programs and would divert already scarce funding to private schools.

Members of Congress pressed DeVos on the fact that these private schools, even though they get taxpayer funds through vouchers, discriminate against students and are unaccountable to the public. Although she tried to evade their questions, it was clear that she has no interest in ensuring meaningful oversight of schools or barring discrimination in a federal voucher program.

PRIVATIZATION: DISCRIMINATION ALLOWED

Betsy DeVos Wants to Take Money From Poor Kids and Give it to Schools That Could Discriminate Against Them

Private schools get a big boost with the Trump/DeVos education plan. At the same time the message for public schools is, "Let them eat cake."

...the real priority of this administration isn’t pragmatic; it’s ideological – and it’s a particularly ugly ideology our federal government has historically been focused on dismantling.

More specifically, Trump’s education budget cuts $9.2 billion (13.5 percent) of federal outlays to public schools, and eliminates or phases-out twenty-two programs.

Both Republicans and Democrats expressed concerns with cuts in federal support for afterschool programs, Special Olympics, arts education, gifted and talented students, teacher training, class size reduction, career and technical education, and programs targeted at helping disadvantaged students and veterans successfully complete high school and enter higher education.

TARGETING THE NEEDIEST

10 Serious Issues Facing Public School Students: Where’s Betsy?

DeVos couldn't seem to care any less about serious problems facing America's school children. Problems like poverty and segregation simply don't matter. In fact, the cuts in the proposed budget seem designed to target the most needy children in our schools...the poor, special education, and students who don't speak English.

Betsy DeVos wastes precious time on her choice initiative, ignoring the most serious problems facing our young people in public schools. At a hearing the other day, she pushed many of these problems onto the states.

But I would argue that these difficulties still require thoughtful attention and research from an education secretary who should be engaged.

Instead of working to find solutions to such problems, she’s too busy planning how to destroy public education with her unproven choice ideology.

Children in crisis need help now! They can’t wait.

Is There a Point to All This Cruelty?

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.

THE PROBLEM WITH CHURCH-STATE ENTANGLEMENT

Annie Waldman: Betsy DeVos on Creationism and Intelligent Design

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been a watchdog for the constitutional separation of church and State since 1947. As such, they understand that "school choice" was a tool originally utilized to support racial segregation. That hasn't changed. "School choice" programs in America are contributing to the increase in segregation. One might even think that was (one of) the goals from the beginning.

Americans United has also been on watch to prevent the entanglement of churches with the state. They have worked tirelessly to keep religious practices and content out of public schools. Betsy DeVos has a history of supporting the entanglement of church and state...as well as her obvious preference for parochial education.

[Full disclosure: I have been a member of Americans United for more than three decades.]

“DeVos and her family have poured millions of dollars into groups that champion intelligent design, the doctrine that the complexity of biological life can best be explained by the existence of a creator rather than by Darwinian evolution. Within this movement, “critical thinking” has become a code phrase to justify teaching of intelligent design.

“Candi Cushman, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, described DeVos’ nomination as a positive development for communities that want to include intelligent design in their school curricula. Both the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation and Betsy DeVos’ mother’s foundation have donated to Focus on the Family, which has promoted intelligent design.

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DeVos is Still Ignorant

Last week, when she unveiled her education plan and budget, Betsy DeVos said some things which only served to prove her ignorance of America's public education system and reinforce the belief that she is completely unqualified for the job which she blatantly purchased from Senate Republicans.

OUR CURRENT SYSTEM

Betsy DeVos Compares School Choice Critics To ‘Flat-Earthers’

DeVos said,

The defenders of our current system have been regularly resistant to any meaningful change. In resisting, these flat Earthers have chilled creativity and stopped American kids from competing at the highest levels.

For someone who has the job of overseeing the nation's public schools DeVos has no understanding of what our current system is.

In fact, DeVos's critics are very much against the "current system." The current system is actually one based on an overuse and misuse of testing which is manipulated in order to damage public schools and divert tax dollars to private and parochial schools.

For decades we've been holding our public schools hostage to standardized tests which measure a student's family income more accurately than their achievement. We've used the tests in invalid ways to judge school systems, schools, and teachers as well as children. The results have been used to close schools, force out experienced teachers, and demean public education as "failing." On the contrary, our public schools are generally excellent and successful despite the roadblocks being thrown up by policy makers, billionaires, and legislators.

She claims that critics are the one who have "stopped American kids from competing at the highest levels." Instead, it's a system that allows children from wealthy families to do just that – compete at the highest level. Our students who come from schools with poverty rates of less than ten percent achieve at levels higher than any other students in the world. The problem is that those who denounce public schools as failures have worked to segregate our children based on educational classification, economic status, and race. DeVos and the proposed federal budget only make the "current system" more inequitable

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL TESTING

Education Department Faces Deep Cuts; DeVos Faces Tough Questions

"The bottom line is we believe that parents are the best equipped to make choices for their children's schooling and education decisions," DeVos said. "Too many children today are trapped in schools that don't work for them. We have to do something different than continuing a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach."

The one-size-fits-all approach she claims her critics favor is actually what her critics oppose. The fight against so-called "education reform" has been a fight against the system that judges all children based on a single standardized test. It's been a fight against a those who use tests to denounce public schools, and as an excuse to divert needed funds to privatization schemes like charter schools and vouchers.

If Secretary DeVos knew anything about public schools she would know that teachers work every day to differentiate programs for individual students. Most public school teachers understand that every child is different...that children need to learn based on where they are and how much they can accomplish, which is different for every child. But Betsy DeVos doesn't know this about public schools. She never attended public schools. She never worked in public schools. She never sent her children to public schools. She is completely ignorant of the excellent work that public schools and their teachers do every day.

Those children who are "trapped in schools that don't work for them" are mostly poor children of color, forced into underfunded schools in neighborhoods which have been economically abandoned by oligarchs like DeVos who work to cut taxes for the rich, and divert much needed resources from public schools to private and religious schools.

In addition, parents aren't the ones who have choices once they leave the public school system. That option belongs to the charter school or voucher accepting school which, more often than not, rejects the hardest and most expensive to educate children. The people best equipped to make choices for children's education are trained educational professionals with input from parents, working in well staffed and well resourced public schools.

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2017 Medley #17: Privatization

Privatization: Choice, Bipartisanship, Testing

PRIVATIZATION: CHOICE

Why Care About Other People’s Children

Since charter and voucher schools' test scores are no better than those of public schools, the privatizers had to change their argument for diverting public money into private and parochial pockets. The reason, they say, is for "parents to have choices." Most refuse to allow "choice" when it comes to opting out of a state's standardized test, but that's another story.

The idea behind "school choice" is that it should be up to a parent where his or her child goes to school and there are reasons other than achievement for choosing one school over another. This is a legitimate reason, except it's not up to the government to use public funds to pay for private educational choices.

No other public service provides "vouchers" to divert money to privatization. We can't choose to get a voucher for money paid to public libraries in order to shop at a commercial book store.

We can't choose to get a voucher for money paid to municipal park departments in order to fund membership in a country club.

We don't get vouchers to help pay for our cars instead of supporting local public transportation.

We don't receive vouchers in any other area, and we shouldn't receive them for education either. Public tax money is collected for the public good...for the community...for all of us.

Is the drive for "choice" in public education just another symptom of America's growing selfishness? It's framed in a selfish way focusing on "what's best for me no matter what it does to the community." I understand the desire to want the best for our own children, and I can't blame parents for trying to find a good "fit" for their child, but every citizen has a stake in the children of their community.

In a 1992 speech nominating Bill Clinton for President, Mario Cuomo said,,

They are not my children, perhaps. Perhaps they are not your children, either...They are our children.

And we should love them. We should, we should love them. That's compassion.

But there's common sense at work here as well, because even if we were hard enough to choose not to love them, we would still need them to be sound and productive, because they are the nation's future.

The selfishness of Americans will come back to haunt us when neglected, undereducated, undercared for children grow into adults. Pennsylvania teacher-blogger, Steven Singer, echoes Cuomo...

That’s why some folks champion privatized education – they only care about their own children. In effect, when a parent sends their children to a charter or voucher school, they are telling the community that they don’t care what happens to any one else’s kids so long as their kids are properly cared for and educated.

...So why should we care about other people’s children?

Because it’s better for ours. Because doing so makes us better people. Because all children are ends in themselves. Because they’re beautiful, unique sparks of light in a dark universe.

THE BIPARTISAN DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Don’t Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats.

Thank you, Diane Ravitch.

In this post Ravitch says what I (and many others) have been saying for a long time. Democrats, at least nationally, are not friends of public education. They might be slightly better than Republicans because they haven't been pushing as hard for vouchers, but support for education "reform" in the U.S. is definitely bipartisan.

The trend towards blaming teachers, closing schools, encouraging charters, and misusing and overusing tests, was part of the education plan of President Bill Clinton...took shape with the passage of NCLB supported by Edward Kennedy and George Miller...and doubled down with Barack Obama's Race to the Top...all Democrats. There's a myth that Democrats love public schools, partly because they nearly always get endorsements from teachers unions, but, while they love teachers unions, they don't actually love the teachers or the public schools they teach in.

Obama, for example: In 2007, candidate Barack Obama told the National Education Association Representative Assembly,

...Don't label a school as failing one day, and then throw your hands up and walk away from it the next. Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test. We know that's not true...

President Obama's Race to the Top, unfortunately, did just the opposite of what the candidate said – it literally labeled schools as "failing" and then, by encouraging states to replace the bottom 5% of schools with charters, walked away from them. Yet, the NEA endorsed him. In the same speech, he endorsed merit pay for teachers. Candidate Obama said that he was against using an "arbitrary" test to link teacher pay to performance, and then President Obama, in Race to the Top, did exactly that.

Ravitch tells the Democrats to give up their "privatizing" ways and return to support for public schools, public school teachers, and the children of America.

Listening to their cries of outrage, one might imagine that Democrats were America’s undisputed champions of public education. But the resistance to DeVos obscured an inconvenient truth: Democrats have been promoting a conservative “school reform” agenda for the past three decades. Some did it because they fell for the myths of “accountability” and “choice” as magic bullets for better schools. Some did it because “choice” has centrist appeal. Others sold out public schools for campaign contributions from the charter industry and its Wall Street patrons. Whatever the motivations, the upshot is clear: The Democratic Party has lost its way on public education. In a very real sense, Democrats paved the way for DeVos and her plans to privatize the school system.

Two Privatizers: Democratic Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, with
Republican Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

PRIVATIZATION: TESTING

National and Urban NAEP Results: Neighborhood Public Schools 23, Charters 4

For years privatizers have decried the low test scores of American students as proof that our public schools are "failing." The fact that it's not true hasn't seemed to matter.

Here's a study showing that charter schools don't do as well as real neighborhood public schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP test. What will the "reformers" say to that? Perhaps they will claim that standardized tests don't tell the whole story when it comes to student learning...I have my irony meter ready for that one.

But, here in Indiana the change in tone has been obvious. We are no longer privatizing public schools just to save poor children from "failing" public schools. Now it's about "choice" for "choice's" sake...just because.

In conclusion, the school-level national and large city NAEP results drawn from the Data Explorer are informative for the public discourse as charter schools are presently being presented as a superior alternative to the public school system. These descriptive school-level results from the NAEP Data Explorer suggest that the relationship between charter schools and improved student performance is not being realized nationally and in large cities. As a result, the present conversations promoting outstanding overall success of charter schools clearly need to be reconsidered and reframed.

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Pence, Preschool, and Privatization

A tweet from NEA...

Kids who attend public preschool programs better prepared for kindergarten than kids who don’t. https://t.co/FrVIwgQquI via @MindShiftKQED

— NEA (@NEAToday) May 6, 2017

REJECTING FEDERAL DOLLARS

Mike Pence, as Indiana's governor, rejected an $80 million preschool grant from the federal government. He said it was because he didn't want "federal strings attached," but my guess is that there were two different reasons.

First, the grant was supported by Glenda Ritz, the Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction who insulted Pence by getting more votes than he did in 2012. Pence, with help from the State Board of Education and the Republican wing of the General Assembly, spent four years doing everything he could to prevent her from doing her job.

Second, the federal preschool dollars didn't help Pence with his plan to privatize and religionize public education. Instead it just benefited children.

THE PENCE PLAN CONTINUES

This past year, while the V.P. was moving into his West Wing office, the Indiana General Assembly approved a preschool plan which links preschool money to vouchers, thereby expanding what is already the nation's most expansive voucher plan. Pence would be proud.

But vouchers weren't all the ALEC supported privatizers in the Indiana General Assembly were after. They also included $1 million for a "virtual preschool" plan.

Because sitting in front of a computer screen for 15 minutes a day is the same as participating in a quality preschool program.

WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYS

So Indiana has increased privatized preschool as part of the latest voucher expansion, and has made tech companies happy by paying for a "virtual preschool." But the research discussed in an article from KQED News referred to public preschools, which children actually attended.

The article, “What the Science Says About How Preschool Benefits Children,” stated that students with public preschool experience, are more successful in Kindergarten. They don't need vouchers. They don't need 15 minutes a day of screen time. They just need high quality preschool programs like those Mike Pence stalled by rejecting 80 million free dollars.

They listed four key findings...

• That while all kids benefit from preschool, poor and disadvantaged kids often make the most gains...

• Children who are dual-language learners “show relatively large benefits from pre-K education” — both in their English-language proficiency and in other academic skills...

• And yet, the researchers said, that doesn’t mean preschool should necessarily be targeted toward poor or disadvantaged kids. “Part of what may render a pre-K classroom advantageous” for a poor student or a child learning English, “is the value of being immersed among a diverse array of classmates.”

• Not all preschool programs are alike. Features that may lead to success include: “a well implemented, evidence-based curriculum,” and an emphasis on the quality and continuous training of pre-K teachers. There’s still a lot of research that needs to be done, the study concludes, “to generate more complete and reliable evidence on effectiveness factors.”

There was no mention of a 15 minute "virtual" preschool.

MR. PENCE GOES TO WASHINGTON

Don't think for a minute that the Trump/DeVos plan for privatization of America's public schools has nothing to do with Mike Pence. DeVos helped fund Indiana's privatization movement. There's little doubt that the Trump/DeVos goal of privatizing America's public education system will be modeled on the success Pence, and his predecessor Mitch Daniels, had in Indiana.

Effectiveness doesn't matter...the only thing they care about is funneling public tax dollars into corporate and religious pockets under the guise of "choice." They don't support public education. They don't care to provide educational equity for the shameful number of children in America who live in poverty. They don't care about them. They just care about diverting tax dollars. They just care about increasing private school attendance.

The same for preschool. They're not interested in supporting the research which suggests that poor children benefit the most from preschool. They're more interested in the money they can get by redirecting students from public schools into parochial and private schools.

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