Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/betsy-devos-and-the-plan-to-break-public-schools?mbid=nl_TNYby Rebecca Mead
excerpt:
How might DeVos seek to transform the educational landscape of the United States in her position at the head of a department that has a role in overseeing the schooling of more than fifty million American children? As it happens, she does have a long track record in the field. Since the early nineteen-nineties, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been very active in supporting the charter-school movement. They worked to pass Michigans first charter-school bill, in 1993, which opened the door in their state for public money to be funnelled to quasi-independent educational institutions, sometimes targeted toward specific demographic groups, which operate outside of the strictures that govern more traditional public schools. (Dick DeVos, a keen pilot, founded one of his own: the West Michigan Aviation Academy, located at Gerald Ford International Airport, which serves an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male population of students.)
As a board member of Children First America and the American Education Reform Council, and later as the chair of the American Federation for Children, DeVos lobbied for school-choice voucher programs and tax-credit initiatives, intended to widen the range of institutionsincluding private and religiousthat could receive funding that might otherwise go to both charter and traditional public schools. In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos expressed her ultimate goals in education reform, which she said she saw encompassing not just charter schools and voucher programs but also homeschooling and virtual education: That all parents, regardless of their zip code, have had the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children. And that all students have had the best opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential.
One can fully credit DeVoss commitment to her causeone might even term it her crusadewhile also seeking to evaluate its effectiveness. How have such DeVos-sponsored initiatives played out thus far in her home state? Earlier this year, the Detroit Free Press published the results of a yearlong investigation into the states two-decade-long charter-school initiativeone of the least regulated in the country. Almost two-thirds of the states charter schools are run by for-profit management companies, which are not required to make the financial disclosures that would be expected of not-for-profit or public entities. This lack of transparency has not translated into stellar academic results: student standardized-test scores at charter schools, the paper found, were no more than comparable with those at traditional public schools. And, despite the rhetoric of choice, lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools, while the parents of more privileged students were better equipped to navigate the system. Even Tom Watkins, the states former education superintendent, who favors charter schools, told the newspaper, In a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids arent getting educated.
After DeVoss nomination, the editorial-page editor of the Free Press, Stephen Hendersonwhose own children attend a high-performing charter schoolwrote a searing indictment of Detroits experiment. This deeply dysfunctional education landscapewhere failure is rewarded with opportunities for expansion and choice means the opposite for tens of thousands of childrenis no accident, he wrote. It was created by an ideological lobby that has zealously championed free-market education reform for decades, with little regard for the outcome. DeVos was at the center of that lobby; her lodestar, Henderson wrote, has been her conviction that any nontraditional public school is better than a traditional one, simply because it is not operated by government.
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The_Casual_Observer
(27,742 posts)The aim is to reduce everything to "free market" so somebody can make a profit.
lastlib
(22,981 posts)Thomas Jefferson said, "An insightful and informed and educated citizenry is the arch-enemy of tyranny." Conversely, if kids are uneducated and uninformed and uninsightful, tyranny has one less arch-enemy. Dumbed-down serfs are compliant serfs. So with the education system crippled or destroyed, the corporate masters get meeker, more compliant serfs to upset the established order, thus greater profits. Score: Tyranny, 1--Democracy, zero. Game over!!
SharonAnn
(13,766 posts)Republican conservatives really want to get all money that is spend for the citizenry to flow to/through them so that they can rake off as much of the money as they can.
Taxpayer $$$ for schools is a large stream of $$$ every single year, going on into perpetuity. It's an ideal place to try get tapped into. Same with Medicare and Social Security.
yurbud
(39,405 posts)already obscenely wealthy.
That's why Obamacare was allowed to happen.