School Choice is a Bamboozle a Hornswoggle a Flimflam | tultican

School Choice is a Bamboozle a Hornswoggle a Flimflam | tultican

School Choice is a Bamboozle a Hornswoggle a Flimflam

ACSA endorsed a candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction who actively works to privatize public schools. As a participant in the Destroy Public Education (DPE) movement, he supports initiatives undermining the teaching profession and good pedagogy.

Established in 1971 to advance the cause of public education, the ACSA has joined ranks with groups working to end taxpayer supported universal public education. The endorsement of Marshall Tuck over Tony Thurmond for Superintendent makes this clear.

Tuck and Thurmond are both Democrats. Thurmond is a progressive and Tuck is a neoliberal. The California Teachers Association (CTA) endorses Thurmond as do a long list of elected officials and organizations including Senator Kamala Harris.

Jenifer Berkshire’s article “How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party,” describes neoliberals:

“‘The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,’ wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed [of Democrats], whom he called simply ‘The Neoliberals.’ His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore …. …, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party…. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over.”

Pictures snipped from campaign cyber sites and reformatted by Ultican.

Tony Thurmond spoke at the CTA delegates meeting in October 2017. He won their endorsement. The CTA news release said:

“We won’t stand for vouchers and we will not allow the privatization of public schools in the great state of California,” Thurmond told cheering delegates. He declared that resolving the teacher shortage is key to closing student achievement gaps. “I don’t know how we close the achievement Continue reading: School Choice is a Bamboozle a Hornswoggle a Flimflam | tultican

Tony Thurmond for State Superintendent of Public Instruction - https://www.tonythurmond.com/

LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise | The Nation

LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise | The Nation

LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise

A school funded by LeBron James in Akron, Ohio, is a beautiful example of what all our public education should look like.

“We don’t deserve LeBron James.” This has been the drumbeat, steadily repeated on social media, ever since the greatest basketball player on earth opened a new public school in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, called I Promise. The school, which serves 240 at-risk third- and fourth-graders, is a sight to behold. It stands as a breathtaking piece of architecture, sending an immediate message to the children about their worth from the moment they step through the doors. In addition to meals, job training for parents, and even a bicycle and helmet for every student, the school offers guaranteed college tuition for everyone who goes on to graduate high school.

All credit to LeBron James, who just adds to his résumé as someone—much to the chagrin of Laura Ingraham and her Fox News acolytes—who will never just “shut up and dribble.” As James said to ESPN about his school, “We want to create an environment of family and not like a workplace. Sometimes you can get tired if you look at it like work—you kind of get tired of it. We want to create an environment of family where you want to always be around your family. No matter the good and the bad, you always want to be around that support system.”

The praise he is receiving is more than deserved. That the school is public and not a charter is also special and demands particular attention. I spoke to Jesse Hagopian, activist Seattle public-school teacher and co-author of the book Teaching for Black Lives. He said, “Corporate education reformers have claimed that charter schools—taking public funds for privately run schools—are the only way to bring innovation to education. With his ‘I Promise’ public school, LeBron has shook that idea like so many opponents on his way to the rack. By partnering with the Akron Public Schools—not trying to subvert them or profit off of them with an unaccountable charter—LeBron has demonstrated to the world the power of truly investing in public education.”

While going on a media tour to promote the school, James has taken the opportunity to challenge Trump’s racism, telling CNN, “He’s kinda used sport to kinda divide us. And that’s something that I can’t relate to because I know that sport was the first time I was ever around someone white.”

He also said that Trump has emboldened racists. “The president in charge now has given people… they don’t care now―they throw it in your face now.” When asked what he would say to Trump if he was sitting across the table from him, James just said, “I would never sit across from him.”

It’s true, we maybe don’t deserve LeBron James in our cultural life. At the same time, it is vital that we don’t fall in love with the idea that the wealthy philanthropist, no matter how exemplary, is going to fix the crisis of public education in this country. James, one of the the most powerful and wealthy athletes on earth, just put his heart and soul into building this school, and its reach is still 240 children in Akron. In Baltimore, thousands of young people freeze in their schools’ dilapidated buildings during the winter and face unbearable heat over the summer. As Aaron Maybin, former NFL player and current Baltimore art teacher, said last winter, “How would your kids concentrate if you sent them to school in a refrigerator for eight hours? With failing lighting. Two classes in one room? We tried our best as Continue reading: LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise | The Nation

Destroying Public Education With Vouchers and Charters in Wisconsin + The Privatization of Puerto Rico’s Public Schools Has Begun – Betsy DeVos Is On the Job | Video Worth Watching

Destroying Public Education With Vouchers and Charters in Wisconsin

Destroying Public Education With Vouchers and Charters in Wisconsin

This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but Protestants, evangelicals, and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.

The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools ….”

Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.

A mounting social division like those faced after the civil war is developing. Katherine Stewart shared that history in her stunning book, The Good News Club:

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Lutherans as well as Catholics had developed extensive systems of parochial education. For many Protestants, however, the loss of students from those denominations was not a welcome development. It was feared that the combined force of the Lutheran and Catholic electorate would endanger the existence of public education altogether. The tensions between those who wanted universal public education and those who wanted their schools to look like their churches continued to grow. In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant declared that if a new civil war were to erupt, it would be fought not across the Mason-Dixon Line but at the door of the common schoolhouse. In an 1876 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, he articulated the conclusion many people had already drawn concerning the continuing struggles over religion in the public schools: “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions,” he said. “Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards I believe the battles which created the Army of Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.” (pages 73-74) (emphasis added)

Privatizing Public Schools Not Achieving Predictions

John E. Chubb was a co-founder of the for-profit Edison Schools and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Terry M. Moe was a professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Chubb and Moe co-authored Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools which was published by Continue reading: Destroying Public Education With Vouchers and Charters in Wisconsin

The Privatization of Puerto Rico’s Public Schools Has Begun – Betsy DeVos Is On the Job | Video Worth Watching

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DeVos Family Money Is All Over The News Right Now | 89.3 KPCC

DeVos Family Money Is All Over The News Right Now | 89.3 KPCC

DeVos Family Money Is All Over The News Right Now

From the policy of separating immigrant families, to limiting the power of labor unions, to naming the next justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, this summer the DeVos family name has been all over the news.

Over the years, the parents, in-laws and husband of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have given hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes. And many of those causes are front and center of policy initiatives and goals of the Trump administration right now.

Those foundations include: the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation (founded by the education secretary and her husband); the DeVos Urban Leadership Initiative (formerly the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation), founded by Betsy DeVos' in-laws; and the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, founded by her parents.

Betsy and Dick DeVos support free-market conservative organizations "because of their mainstream, common commitment to freedom, the most universal civil liberty," said Greg McNeilly of the Windquest investment group, one of the family's for-profit financial holdings, in response to inquiries about Betsy DeVos' giving. "This commitment to protecting and promoting freedom is an animating core of their worldview."

And, he added, the family supports humanitarian organizations, because "helping the poor and disadvantaged is a driving principle of their worldview and it's reflected in the history of their foundation."

Betsy DeVos oversaw some of this giving personally, as a member of the board of directors of the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation since 1989. In a disclosure form prior to her confirmation as education secretary, DeVos reported resigning her position at the foundation as of December 2016.

During her confirmation hearing, DeVos denied making decisions for the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, which is on record giving to many anti-LGBT groups, despite being listed as a board member for 17 years; she said this was a clerical error.

Lonnie Scott, who tracks the family's philanthropic giving as head of the progressive Continue reading: DeVos Family Money Is All Over The News Right Now | 89.3 KPCC