Bernie Sanders’ Staff Called Me to Talk About Education Policy
I got an e-mail recently from Senator Bernie Sanders’s education advisor. She said she reads the blog and wondered if we could talk. I said sure but I was not ready to endorse anyone in the Democratic primaries.
I asked for and got her permission to share that this conversation occurred. As everyone knows who ever gave me confidential information, I never write or speak about what I was told in confidence.
We set a date to speak on the phone since I am in New York and she is in D.C.
She called and conferenced in the campaign’s chief of staff.
Here is what happened.
I told them that I was upset that Democrats talk about pre-K and college costs—important but safe topics—and skip K-12, as though it doesn’t exist. Every poll I get from Democrats asks me which issues matter most but doesn’t mention K-12.
I expressed my hope that Bernie would recognize that charter schools are privately managed (in 2016, he said in a town hall that he supports “public charter schools but not private charter schools). No matter what they call themselves, they are not “public” schools. They are all privately managed. I recounted for them the sources of financial support for charters: Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires, the DeVos family, the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, ALEC, and of course, the federal government, which gave $440 million to charters this year, one-third of which will never open or close soon after opening. (See “Asleep At the Wheel: How Athens Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,” Network for Public Education).
I proposed a way to encourage states to increase funding for teachers’ salaries. I won’t reveal it now. I think it is an amazingly innovative concept that offers money to states without mandates but assures that the end result would be significant investment by states in teacher compensation, across the board, untethered to test scores.
I recommended a repeal of the annual testing in grades 3-8, a leftover of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind. I pointed out to them that all the Democrats on the Education Committee in the Senate had voted for the Murphy Amendment (sponsored by Senator Chris Murphy of Ct), which would have preserved all the original punishments of NCLB but which was fortunately voted down by Republicans. I suggested that grade span CONTINUE READING: Bernie Sanders’ Staff Called Me to Talk About Education Policy | Diane Ravitch's blog
