Trump Moves To Destroy Public Education | The Huffington Post

Trump Moves To Destroy Public Education | The Huffington Post:

Trump Moves To Destroy Public Education

In the last two weeks Donald Trump has backtracked, charmed, fudged, modified, and hedged on positions he took during his campaign for president. Some critics, like the New York Times, even start to hope a Trump presidency might not be as bad as they initially feared. Trump will probably never “build the wall” and Hillary seems to be safe from criminal prosecution. But for children and schools in the United States the situation looks worse than expected as Trump quickly moved with plans to tear apart public education in this country. It is going to be a long and difficult fight to try to stop him.

During the campaign, Candidate Trump endorsed a vastly expanded “charter school” system and pledged to divert $20 billion in federal funds away from public schools. It would end up financing Southern segregation academies, religious schools, and private and for-profit ventures. To do this Trump was going to tie federal dollars to individual children, so wherever they went, the dollars would follow.

Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education could hardly be worse. Right-wing billionaire Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos has spent decades and millions of dollars in campaigns to privatize, defund, and destroy public education in her home state of Michigan and in the United States. Lily Eskelsen García, President of the National Education Association declared “By nominating Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration has demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators, and communities.”

DeVos is a product of Christian education and she and her family members are involved across-the-board in right-wing activities including anti-gay marriage efforts and covert for-profit military operations. DeVos never worked in public education in any capacity and her children all attended Christian academies.

Much of DeVos’ money comes via her husband who inherited the Amway health and beauty products company. DeVos personally was chairwoman of the board of Alliance for School Choice and is head of the the All Children Matter political action Trump Moves To Destroy Public Education | The Huffington Post:

Special Education: Vouchers and Betsy DeVos

Special Education: Vouchers and Betsy DeVos:

Special Education: Vouchers and Betsy DeVos

What will future Education Secretary Betsy DeVos do with special education? Most voucher programs currently go to students with disabilities. My guess is that there will be increased support with the new Trump administration and DeVos.

The following states have voucher programs for student with disabilities: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and Wisconsin and Arkansas.

Many other states have been on the verge of passing voucher legislation and usually they start with special education.

Yet, there is no evidence vouchers do better than programs in traditional public schools. In most cases students do worse, and they lose their rights to due process under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

The McKay Scholarship Program

The McKay Scholarship Program in Florida is one of the better known Special Education: Vouchers and Betsy DeVos:

Fake news site wrestles with a potential Trump conflict of interest - The Washington Post

Another news site wrestles with a potential Trump conflict of interest - The Washington Post:

Another news site wrestles with a potential Trump conflict of interest

Former network TV anchor Campbell Brown has always said she wanted her education-news site, The74, to be perceived as a nonpartisan source for improving the nation’s primary and secondary school education.

But Donald Trump may have just dumped a major conflict of interest right into Brown’s, and The74’s, lap.

By naming billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos as his pick for secretary of education on last week, Trump put Brown in the awkward position of covering one of her closest allies.

A foundation headed by DeVos was among the wealthy school-reform advocates that funded Brown’s website when it launched last year. DeVos and Brown — formerly an NBC News anchor and the host of a prime-time show on CNN — are also on the board of the American Federation for Children (AFC), an organization that promotes charter school and government-funded vouchers to subsidize private education. The AFC and The74 co-sponsored a forum involving Republican presidential candidates last year.

All of which means The74 would be covering the policy pronouncements and initiatives of one of the people to which it owes its existence.

News organizations sometimes wrestle with subjects and people that are close to their own interests. The Washington Post, for example, is owned by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose company and activities are occasionally the subject of Post stories and editorials. In such cases, the connection between the paper and its owner is disclosed within the story.

But in DeVos’s case, The74’s interests are more direct, overlapping and constant. As a site seeking to lead “an honest, fact-based conversation” free of “misinformation and political spin” about America’s 74 million children under 18, its coverage of DeVos and her advocacy of school vouchers and charter schools will be inherent in almost everything it publishes.

DeVos’s appointment appears to place the site, which is named for the 74 million school-age children in America, in much the same position as Breitbart News, the conservative-news digital operation. Breitbart’s executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, has been named Trump’s chief White House strategist, raising questions about Breitbart’s role in a Trump administration.

Brown referred questions about her operation to a spokesman, Dan Bank, who said the site discloses its funding relationships in a note published with stories in which the relationships are relevant.

In stories about DeVos, the note reads: “The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation provides funding to The 74 and the site’s editor in chief, Campbell Brown, sits on the American Federation for Children’s board of directors, which is chaired by Betsy DeVos. The American Federation for Children also sponsored The 74’s 2015 New Hampshire education summit.”

That’s not enough, say those who oppose DeVos and the “reform” agenda.

“Given the fact that Betsy DeVos is a funder of The 74, it is hard to see how the publication can cover her appointment fairly,” says education historian Diane Ravitch, who has clashed with Brown and DeVos on policy matters before. In view of the close “personal and financial ties” between DeVos and Brown, Ravitch said, the site “should not cover the U.S. Department of Education for the next four years.”

Brown has previously recused herself from making editorial decisions for her site about the AFC and Success Academy, a charter-school network, because she sits on the board of both Another news site wrestles with a potential Trump conflict of interest - The Washington Post:

Success Academy CEO Mocks Protesters Rallying Against Trump - East Harlem - DNAinfo New York

Success Academy CEO Mocks Protesters Rallying Against Trump - East Harlem - DNAinfo New York:

Success Academy CEO Mocks Protesters Rallying Against Trump

HARLEM — The head of Success Academy charter schools openly mocked protesters as they rallied against her apparent support for Donald Trump Wednesday.

As a crowd gathered outside her East Harlem home, Moskowitz came out with her family, wished the crowd a "Happy Thanksgiving," then posed smiling with a sign that read: "Success Academy Threatened to Call 911 on 1st Graders. #GotToGo."

The stunt drew hisses from protesters who were angry that she gave Ivanka Trump a tour of one of her Harlem schools.

“And you wonder why we’re angry,” said Zakiyah Ansari, the advocacy director for the Alliance for Quality education who organized the rally with other nonprofit organizations.

Ivanka Trump visited Success Academy Harlem 1 charter school last Friday, apparently surprising even staffers there.

The tour was given a day after Moskowitz quashed rumors that President-elect Trump would tap her to be head of the Department of Education in his cabinet.

Ansari said she was appalled by the visit by the President-elect’s daughter because of the “the rhetoric and hate [President-elect Trump] has spewed for 18 months” against minority communities, particularly Muslims and Latinos.

“She had the audacity to bring this person into that school, which is 90 to 95 percent black and Latino,” she said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, with whom Moskowitz has often sparred, said earlier this month Trump’s White House is linked to white supremacists following the hiring of Steve Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart Media, as a senior adviser.

Moskowitz's stunt Wednesday was also personal for Fatima Geidi, who pulled her son out of Upper West Success Academy two years ago.

“This is funny to her, but it is not funny,” Geidi said.

“What am I supposed to tell my black son?”

Geidi was a part of a PBS documentary on Success Academy and spoke out against the school.

Earlier this year, she filed a federal complaint against the school alleging discrimination and mistreatment against her son, who has special needs.

Others said Moskowitz should be doing more to quell anxiety brewing from the election.

“What are the conversations like in the school?” said one woman at the rally.

A representative from Success Academy did not respond to request for comment.Success Academy CEO Mocks Protesters Rallying Against Trump - East Harlem - DNAinfo New York:

Truth From Fiction – The real story about CT School Funding (by Wendy Lecker) - Wait What?

Truth From Fiction – The real story about CT School Funding (by Wendy Lecker) - Wait What?:

Truth From Fiction – The real story about CT School Funding (by Wendy Lecker)

A primer about Connecticut School Funding by Wendy Lecker

In September, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher issued a controversial decision in Connecticut’s long-running school funding case, CCJEF v. Rell.  Judge Moukawsher set forth a very narrow vision of what is needed in public schools in order to provide an adequate education; a vision that contradicted precedent across the United States and precedent from the Connecticut Supreme Court itself.  He essentially ruled that the State need only provide the “bare minimum” of facilities, teachers and instrumentalities of learning, and labeled anything beyond these three narrow categories as “extras;” even though it is accepted that students, especially our neediest students, need much more than that in order to have the opportunity for an adequate education.

Judge Moukawsher did highlight the inequities in wealthy versus poor districts in Connecticut. However, he refused to recognize that the extra resources that districts with needy require are part of a constitutionally adequate education. Thus, if allowed to stand, his decision would render it impossible to create an equitable school funding system in Connecticut- one that provided adequate resources to our neediest districts. His decision has been appealed by both the State and CCJEF, and will reach the Connecticut Supreme Court in the spring of 2017.

In the meantime, there have been calls for Connecticut to fix its school funding formula before the CCJEF appeal is heard. The loudest calls have been coming from the charter lobby, which wants to seize this opportunity not to create a more just school funding system, but rather to create a system that facilitates the diversion of public dollars intended for public schools to privately managed charter schools.

The charter lobby has usurped the language of equity to advance its cause. It claims that Truth From Fiction – The real story about CT School Funding (by Wendy Lecker) - Wait What?:

When Finland's Teachers Work in America’s Schools - The Atlantic

When Finland's Teachers Work in America’s Schools - The Atlantic:

When Finnish Teachers Work in America’s Public Schools

They find that they have less autonomy and an overly rigid school day.

“I have been very tired—more tired and confused than I have ever been in my life,” Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”

Chartouni, who is a Canadian citizen through marriage, moved from Finland to Florida with her family in 2014, due in part to her husband’s employment situation. After struggling to maintain an income and ultimately dropping out of an ESL teacher-training program, a school in Tennessee contacted her this past spring about a job opening. Shortly thereafter, Chartouni had the equivalent of a full-time teaching load as a foreign-language teacher at two public high schools in the Volunteer State, and her Finnish-Canadian family moved again. (Chartouni holds a master’s degree in foreign-language teaching from Finland’s University of Jyväskylä.)

In Tennessee, Chartouni has encountered a different teaching environment from the one she was used to in her Nordic homeland—one in which she feels like she’s “under a microscope.” She’s adjusting to relatively frequent observations and evaluations of her teaching, something she never experienced in her home country. (A principal or an administrator in Finland, Chartouni noted, may briefly observe a teacher’s lesson, but not on a regular basis.)

Already this autumn, she’s had a couple of visitors in her American classroom: a representative of a nearby university, where she’s completing studies to receive a local teaching license, and her “professional learning community” coach. A district administrator will come to visit her classroom, too. According to Chartouni, these three evaluators will make a few unexpected visits throughout this school year.

Chartouni misses that feeling of being trusted as a professional in Finland. There, after receiving her teaching timetable at the start of each school year, she would be given the freedom to prepare curriculum-aligned lessons, which matched her preferences and teaching style. “I wanted to do my best all the time,” she said, “because they trusted my skills and abilities.” I encountered something similar when I moved to Finland from the U.S., where I started my teaching career.

According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report, teacher autonomy is positively associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and retention. When Finland's Teachers Work in America’s Schools - The Atlantic:

Obama administration to release new rules for judging schools - The Washington Post

Obama administration to release new rules for judging schools - The Washington Post:

Obama administration to release new rules for judging schools

The U.S. Education Department on Monday plans to release final regulations governing how states should judge which schools are doing well and which are struggling and require help, a contentious set of rules that has pitted the Obama administration and its civil rights allies against an unusual alliance of teachers unions and GOP leaders.

But for all the debate, it is unclear — given Republican Donald Trump’s surprise election — whether the new rules will much matter. Trump has pledged a smaller federal footprint in public education, giving rise to speculation that his administration is likely to either rewrite the new regulations entirely, giving states more leeway to handle school accountability as they wish, or render the rules meaningless by declining to enforce them.

[Trump picks billionaire Betsy DeVos, school voucher advocate, as education secretary]

The new regulations explain in detail what states must do to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal education law that replaced No Child Left Behind when it passed with bipartisan support last year.

States must continue to administer standardized tests in math and reading to students in grades 3 through 8, and once in high school. But rather than judging schools solely by test scores, states now have a new opportunity to include other measures — such as chronic absenteeism or access to Advanced Placement courses — in their school ratings.

The department released draft rules in May and made some changes in response to comments and criticism.

The draft rules, for example, required states to identify schools in need of extra help by the 2017-2018 school year, a timeline widely panned as unrealistic; the final rules extend the timeline by a year.

The draft rules also drew criticism for requiring states to roll all of the data pertaining to a school into one simple rating, such as a letter grade, to give parents easy-to-understand information. The revised rules say that states are only required to put schools into one of three categories, as specified in the law itself: those in need of “comprehensive” intervention, including the lowest-performing five percent of schools and high schools with graduation rates below 67 percent; those in need of “targeted” support, including those with low-performing subgroups of students; and schools with no special identification.

It’s not clear whether these changes, and others, will mollify those who have accused the Obama administration of overreaching its authority in interpreting the new education law.Obama administration to release new rules for judging schools - The Washington Post:

The push for positive school climate bumps up against Trump rhetoric | EdSource

The push for positive school climate bumps up against Trump rhetoric | EdSource:

The push for positive school climate bumps up against Trump rhetoric

 President-elect Donald Trump were a high school student in California, he might find himself in a restorative justice circle making amends for his hurtful words and behavior.

“He would be in a lot of trouble,” said Jaana Juvonen, a UCLA researcher who studies student bullying.

Supported by civil rights laws, brain science and research on learning, schools in California and across the nation have increasingly made it a priority to try to create classrooms that are welcoming to all. The goal is civil discourse, improved academic performance and fewer discipline incidents. Positive school climate is part of the idea behind elementary school students shaking hands with their teachers in the morning, middle school students creating “No Bullying!” posters and high school students talking it out in stress management support groups. In California, improving “school climate” is part of the new education accountability system, although no one is quite sure what to measure.

Now the positive school climate movement has been thrown off course by the rhetoric of Trump, Juvonen said. “It’s so disheartening to see,” she said. “Schools were so gung-ho about addressing bullying, and now we have the ugliest face of bullying re-emerging.”

On the campaign trail, Trump disparaged Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, suggested he was open to a database of the names of people who practice the Muslim faith, boasted about his ability to sexually assault women and mocked a disabled reporter.

Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported more than 700 incidents of hateful graffiti, assaults and bullying, with 40 percent of the incidents occurring at K-12 schools and universities across the nation. In California, six incidents of racist graffiti have occurred since October in the San Ramon Valley Unified School District in the east Bay Area. In one case, a urinal in a boys’ bathroom at Monte Vista High School in Danville was marked “whites” and another was marked “colored.” In Shasta County, a Shasta High School student handed out “deportation notices” to some students. In Los Angeles, a substitute physical education teacher at Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School was recordedtelling students that he had their phone numbers and addresses and their parents would be deported.

In response, nine leading national school administration groups, including AASA: The School Superintendents Association, are pushing back. Last week, the groups issued a statement calling for educators, parents and students to step up and “make our schools’ values known.” The groups asked for schools to publicly affirm that all The push for positive school climate bumps up against Trump rhetoric | EdSource:

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Testing Students Into Oblivion

CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Testing Students Into Oblivion:

FL: Testing Students Into Oblivion

Friday the Tampa Bay Times reported on a great new program being pursued by Pinellas County schools to raise school ratings. The program could best be described as "Just stop having school and devote your time to test prep instead."

The article focuses on differences that are emerging between biweekly test results for 3-6 grade students and K-2 students. In doing so the article completely breezes past the fact that these schools are giving biweekly tests to K-2 students.

There is so much educational malpractice jammed into this whole stupid package.

The biweekly testing is being done in Pinellas "transformation zone" schools, aka "schools with lousy ratings" aka "poor schools." Pinellas County (that's St. Petersburg etc) schools have seen a transformation common in Florida, with shrinking enrollment and huge piles of money being funneled into mismanaged charter scams. But the story in Pinellas County is even worse than that, because the Pinellas County school board purposefully manufactured these failing schools. Let's pause for a history lesson.

You can read the full story here, or my shorter versionhere. But let me lay out the short ugly version. But if you remember the story of "failure factories" in Florida from a year or so ago-- well, that's where we are.

The county has a history. St. Petersburg zoned itself for segregation in the 1930's and put the interstate smack through the black part of town in 1970. Black parents went to court to force integration, and the federal government stepped in to monitor the district. That monitoring stopped in 2007, and Pinellas County immediately started working on resegregating their schools.

By reversing successful desegregation and education programs, by concentrating the poor black and brown kids in just five schools, and then deliberating failing to provide those five schools with the resources and support they needed, Pinellas County managed to turn five previously-successful elementary schools into infamous "failure factories."

So the district created transformation zones in which they promised to focus on these poor schools and get them what they should have had (and used to have) all along. Last spring Pinellas County was looking for "transformational leaders" to run their elementary and middle schools. So what do CURMUDGUCATION: FL: Testing Students Into Oblivion:

Louisiana Educator: Our Louisiana School Principal Evaluation System is Seriously Flawed

Louisiana Educator: Our Louisiana School Principal Evaluation System is Seriously Flawed:

Our Louisiana School Principal Evaluation System is Seriously Flawed

Note to readers: Recently I became concerned about Superintendent White’s proposal that the new calculation of a school’s performance score would have a 25% component based on the annual improvement of student test performance. I especially question such a system applied to all schools, particularly since A rated schools often have little room to improve. This concern only added to my fears that our new Louisiana school principal evaluation system may also be overly reliant on perpetual student test score increases.

With the above concerns in mind I asked Herb Bassett, a Louisiana educator whom I regard as one of the best analysts of statistical based rating systems, to study the new principal evaluation system now in operation in Louisiana and provide my readers with his insights as to the appropriateness of this model for principal evaluation. 

Mr. Bassett’s conclusions described below are very worrisome, and lead me to believe that principals and district superintendents have been saddled with a poorly designed and extremely unfair system for principal evaluations. Please review Mr. Bassett’s analysis and also my commentary following the analysis.

Bassett’s Analysis of Guidelines for Principal Evaluations

The following is an analysis of SPS growth targets recommended by the Louisiana Department of Education as part of the latest principal evaluation system. The analysis explains how LDOE:

1.     imposed what amounts to a stack ranking system designed to fail both 25% of A school principals and 25% of D school principals on at least one component of their evaluations
  Note from editor: Stack ranking is a type of employee evaluation system that ranks employees on the results of the employee evaluation. It is common in stack ranking to designate a certain percentage of employees each year as unsatisfactory and a certain percentage as satisfactory as well as a certain percentage as high performers. This procedure amounts to a quota system for each level in the evaluation system. Even though the ranking affects only part of the principal’s evaluation, it can make a huge difference in the final evaluation.,

2.     overrode its own Achievement Level Descriptions for the majority of its target recommendations, that the overrides had a downward influence on principal ratings, and that LDOE did not clearly explain its overrides in its Goal -Setting Toolkits, 

3.     used an incorrect method to establish its target recommendations. This resulted in unrealistically high targets for A school principals while allowing relatively lax targets for D and F school principals.

This year, the LDOE convinced the Accountability Commission and BESE to tie principals' evaluations directly to SPS growth. Bulletin 130 now states:

§305. Measures of Growth in Student Learning Targets

D. Principals and Administrators. A minimum of two student learning targets shall be identified for each administrator.

1. For principals, the LDE shall provide recommended targets to use in assessing the quality and attainment of both student learning targets, which will be based upon a review of “similar” schools. The LDE will annually publish the methodology for defining “similar” schools.

2. For principals, at least one learning target shall be based on overall school performance improvement in the current school year, as measured by the school performance score.

LDOE was left to decide how it would set the targets. Its 2016 overall SPS Improvement target recommendations would lead to the following (based on the recently released 2016 SPSs):

·      Over two-thirds of principals of A-rated high schools would get the lowest rating while only one principal of an F-rated high school would do so. 

·      No A-rated combination school principal would make the highest rating while exactly half of the principals of F-rated high schools would.

·      More than one-third of all principals would make the lowest rating.

These outcomes defy common sense. LDOE's recommended targets were unrealistic for A rated schools and comparatively lax for D and Fschools. Why would we require an A school to improve its SPS more than twice as much as a Dschool to rate full attainment? These inverted expectations came from a questionable ranking system and from using incorrect methods to calculate those rankings.

Principals were encouraged to base a second goal on an individual component of the SPS. LDOE recommended similarly flawed targets for those as well.

I certainly hope that many principals and their supervisors chose to override the LDOE Louisiana Educator: Our Louisiana School Principal Evaluation System is Seriously Flawed:

President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Push Increasingly Discredited School Policy | janresseger

President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Push Increasingly Discredited School Policy | janresseger:

President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Push Increasingly Discredited School Policy

While public schools across the United States are the quintessential institution of the Ninety-Nine Percent, for years now public policy has been driven by the ideas of the One Percent. Nobody exemplifies this ironic contradiction better than the woman nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as our next Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. She is the founder and chair of the board of the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, and she leads the All Children Matter PAC. Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick lead the Great Lakes Education Project, the organization behind the massive growth of unregulated—and mostly for-profit—charter schools that are now known to have contributed to the financial crisis in the Detroit Public Schools. DeVos is also a board member of Jeb Bush’s pro-privatization Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll describes the political influence of the Michigan DeVos family: “The DeVoses sit alongside the Kochs, the Bradleys, and the Coorses as founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax ballot measures.”

Here is Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: “(I)t would be hard to find a better representative of the “donor class” than the DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for years. Betsy, her husband Richard, Jr. (Dick), and her father-in-law, Richard, Sr., whose fortune was estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.1 billion, have turned up repeatedly on lists of attendees at the Kochs’ donor summits, and as contributors to the brothers’ political ventures. In 2010, Charles Koch described Richard DeVos, Sr., as one of thirty-two “great partners” who had contributed a million dollars or more to the tens of millions of dollars that the Kochs planned to spend in that year’s campaign cycle.”

Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are One Percenters, and both are proponents of the privatization of education —vouchers by which children carry tax dollars to pay tuition at parochial or private schools, and charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Push Increasingly Discredited School Policy | janresseger:

NPE begins campaign to oppose DeVos - Network For Public Education

NPE begins campaign to oppose DeVos - Network For Public Education:

Diane Ravitch’s Network for Public Education’s campaign to oppose Betsy DeVos begins

Over 70,000 supporters send letters to their senators opposing the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education this weekend.
Network for Public Education ranks swell, with over 56,000 joining in less than 48 hours.

Kew Gardens, New York — Today, the Network for Public Education, a national nonprofit education advocacy organization, announced its campaign to stop the approval of Betsy DeVos, as U.S. Secretary of Education.

NPE President and NYU education historian, Diane Ravitch, said the following in opposition to DeVos: “Betsy DeVos’s hostility to public schools makes her unfit to be Secretary of Education. She has a long record of supporting private and religious schools, not public schools. Those of us who believe that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good, must resist her nomination. Police departments, firefighters, public libraries, public parks, public beaches, public schools: these belong to all of us. DeVos should continue her privatization campaign in the private sector, not as the Secretary of Education.”

NPE Board member, Mark Miller (who is also the President Elect of Pennsylvania School Boards Association) noted that his state has some of the worst charter laws in the nation. Miller said, “My largest concern about Betsy DeVos in the office of Education Secretary is her ability to advance her personal war to privatize public schools while having the force of the Federal Government behind her. This could push school districts like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem and Erie over the brink, while endangering others for financial ruin. Our students deserve better.”

According to NPE Executive Director, Carol Burris, “The enormous initial response to our campaign reinforced what we at NPE have always believed—Americans love their community public schools. They respect their school boards, nearly all of whom are unpaid public servants elected by their community. De Vos’s Michigan system is a disaster caused by profiteers swooping into an unregulated school “market.” Americans want their community schools, not K-12 versions of Trump University, on the corner.”

NPE will expand efforts throughout December and January, and form alliances and joint actions with other national and local pro-public education organizations.NPE begins campaign to oppose DeVos - Network For Public Education:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 28, 2016
More information contact:
Carol Burris (718) 575-3276; cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org
The Network for Public Education (NPE)

Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. says Trump asked him to be education secretary - The Washington Post

Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. says Trump asked him to be education secretary - The Washington Post:

Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. says Trump asked him to be education secretary

President-elect Donald Trump announced last week that he was tapping Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary — but, apparently, she wasn’t his first choice.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Virginia’s Liberty University, the largest evangelical university in the United States, told the Associated Press that he had met with Trump in New York earlier and was offered the job of U.S. education secretary. He turned it down, he said, for personal reasons.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a query about Falwell’s comments. It has not been publicly said that anyone other than DeVos was offered the job.

Falwell, a lawyer, has led Liberty since the 2007 death of his father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded the university. Falwell, one of the country’s best-known evangelical leaders, endorsed Trump to be president in January, just before the primary/caucus season began, and welcomed him to the university campus to address students. In mid-November, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Falwell had said he had talked to Trump about his interest in helping to reform higher education. The paper said on Nov. 15:

Falwell, an early and engaged supporter of the billionaire businessman, knows him personally and was in New York for his election last Tuesday. Since then, Falwell has spoken with the next president and with Vice President-elect Mike Pence about his interest in serving the new administration.

“I let them know one of my passions is reforming higher education and education in general,” Falwell said in an interview Tuesday.

“I told them I’d be willing — I have a lot of responsibilities here — but I’d be willing to serve in some capacity that sort of brings education back to some form of sanity.”

The Associated Press has now reported that Falwell said Trump offered him the job of education secretary but insisted that he stay in the position for at least four years. Falwell said he did not want to leave Liberty University for more than two years and so he declined the position.

DeVos, who did not support Trump during the presidential campaign, is active in Christian communities. As my Post colleague Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote in this story:

DeVos is politically known in Michigan for her push for private school voucher programs, a position that has been controversial within public education circles. But in religious circles, the DeVos name is synonymous with key philanthropic 

Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. says Trump asked him to be education secretary - The Washington Post:

The Essential Selfishness of School Choice | gadflyonthewallblog

The Essential Selfishness of School Choice | gadflyonthewallblog:

The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

Say your friend Sheila invites you over to her house.

Sheila has just made a fresh pumpkin pie.

She offers you a slice.

You politely refuse, but she insists. She hands you the knife so you can take as big a piece as you like.

You start to cut and then ask, “Does it matter where I cut from?”

Sheila says, “No. Take whatever you want.”

You don’t like crust, so you cut a perfect triangle piece from the middle of the pie.

Sheila’s face reddens.

This wasn’t exactly what she meant, but what is she going to do? You took your slice, and now the rest of the pie is ruined. No one else can take a whole piece. Your choice has limited everyone else’s.

That’s what school choice does to public education.

It privileges the choice of some and limits the choices of others.

Advocates say parents should be able to choose the school their children attend.

And parents today do have many choices. About 90% send their kids to traditional public schools. Others home school, pay for private schools or opt for charter or voucher schools.

The problem comes with these last two options. In both cases, tax money meant to The Essential Selfishness of School Choice | gadflyonthewallblog: