The Public Agrees!: Charters are Overrated – Cloaking Inequity

The Public Agrees!: Charters are Overrated – Cloaking Inequity:

The Public Agrees!: Charters are Overrated

Are charters overrated? The public says yes! More on that in a moment.

The recent Intelligence Squared debate has resulted in a variety of new and important conversations. Via phone calls, social media DMs, and emails I have received quite a bit of feedback from folks that are for and against privately-controlled school choice. I also accepted a challenge from Chris (Citizen) Stewart to debate him Cambridge-style this evening. You can watch here free tonight at 6 pm PST on the Sacramento State Doctorate in Educational Leadership Facebook page via Facebook LIVE.

 

More recently, I received an invite to debate Mike Petrilli and Shayne Evans in Chicago with Macke Raymond (CREDO) moderating. I am still searching for a suitable debate partner before I accept that invitation.

Btw, I am still interested in debating the DFER’s Shavar Jefferies. He agreed, then changed his mind.

8 Aug

JulianVasquezHeilig @ProfessorJVH

.@shavarjeffries Name a time and place and we can debate ed policy. But you better bring your A game. I gave @DrStevePerry same heads up.

 Follow

Shavar Jeffries @shavarjeffries

@ProfessorJVH @DrStevePerry u don't know what you're doing right now. I'm in for next time I get to West Coast.Hit me offline for details

11:46 AM - 8 Aug 2016

 
•  Retweets
 
•  likes

In the post Charter Schools Are Overrated @IQ2US I gave you a heads up about the “Charters are overrated” debate that was held in New York City and sponsored by Intelligence Squared.The Public Agrees!: Charters are Overrated – Cloaking Inequity:

Teachers Will Be a Formidable Force Against Trump | The Nation

Teachers Will Be a Formidable Force Against Trump | The Nation:

Teachers Will Be a Formidable Force Against Trump

Teachers are working to protect undocumented immigrant students, trans students, and any student whose chance at an equitable education is at risk.

New Yorkers protest against Donald Trump’s harsh new immigration policies and accompanying ICE raids, February 11, 2017. (Reuters / Stephanie Keith)

New York schools have historically been seedbeds of political dissent, but under the Trump administration, the classroom atmosphere has been more charged than ever. Kids wonder if Homeland Security will snatch up their parents at home while they’re in school. And teachers might take a little more care to make sure their trans student can use the right bathroom without getting bullied.

Educators and students took these anxieties to a Brooklyn rally last weekled by grassroots student activists and the MORE United Federation of Teachers rank-and-file caucus, to urge New York City schools Chancellor Carmen Farina to strengthen schools’ existing “sanctuary” protectionsagainst interference by immigration authorities.

“For students who come from mixed-status families, there’s a lot of fear around deportation,” says Jennifer Queenan, a high-school teacher in Brooklyn. A recent Know Your Rights training organized at the school, she recalled, drew about 60 community members, mostly adults. Some perhaps had seen their child’s school as one of the few local institutions where they felt safe.

Although New York is a “sanctuary city”—meaning, authorities refrain from collecting information on immigration status or disclosing people’s status to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other federal agenciesTeachers Will Be a Formidable Force Against Trump | The Nation:

My Upcoming Books | Deborah Meier on Education

My Upcoming Books | Deborah Meier on Education:

My Upcoming Books

Dear friends,

I have not written since December 2016. On this page I mean. Actually I have been writing a lot on demand so this frivolous web page (or whatever it is called) has been ignored.

I am faithfully writing a weekly Bridging Differences exchange with Harry Boyte on our EdWeek blog, while involved in various degrees on three books that I claim to be co-authoring. One, the work primarily of a former Mission Hill colleague Matthew Knoester, is now pretty much finished and Teachers College Press will be printing it soonish. It is on alternative forms of assessment to standardized testing that are more accurate, more useful and in keeping with the democratic spirit and intent of schooling. No number can sum us up, and the presumption of experts in data ad technology to think that is possible has an old and dishonorable history.

The second book is the product of examining my own work which led to a collaboratively reframed idea with another Mission Hill colleague, Emily Gasoi. It will (we hope) appear next fall under the title This School Belongs to You and Me. Publisher, Beacon Press. We are both worn out and excited about it. It is a dialogue about the issues that have bedeviled me for fifty or more years. We explore together how schools can be a force for nourishing democracy or for squelching it. If it is not visible in our schools, where else can the young see it played ?

The third is still in the formative stage. Two colleagues (Shane Mage and Matt Alexander, the founders of June Jordan high school in San Francisco) are putting together the stories and thoughts of colleagues who have intentionally tried to create democratically governed schools—stories with sometimes not so happy endings. We hope to figure out, as we read them, what wisdom they may offer us as we, each in our own domain, carry on the fight to build a more perfect democracy. ASCD is interested and we have collective some great stores and are still playing around with how to present them and others we hope will contribute. (While also being as active as we can in the critical fight to prevent what we have from disappearing altogether under Trump.)

More on that activism in my next blog. In the meantime, be on the lookout for my aforementioned upcoming books!My Upcoming Books | Deborah Meier on Education:

Betsy DeVos: Trump Budget Will Protect 'Vulnerable' Students Despite $9B Cut | Education News | US News

Betsy DeVos: Trump Budget Will Protect 'Vulnerable' Students Despite $9B Cut | Education News | US News:

DeVos Praises Trump Budget Proposal
The education secretary says the president's spending blueprint will protect the 'vulnerable' despite its cutting of billions of dollars from her department.

 President Donald Trump's budget proposal, which would ax Department of Education funding by $9 billion, protects the "nation's most vulnerable populations," Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told members of state boards of education Monday morning.

"The president promised to invest in our underserved communities and our increased investment in choice programs will do just that," said DeVos, discussing the president's fiscal 2018 budget proposal publicly for the first time since its release last week.

---

RELATED CONTENT

Trump Should Go Small on School Choice

---

"This budget maintains our department's focus on supporting states and school districts with the goal of providing an equal opportunity of a quality education for all students," she said, speaking at the National Association of State Boards of Education's legislative conference in Washington. "This budget also continues support for our nation's most vulnerable populations, including students with disabilities."

Trump's spending blueprint would pour $1.4 billion into school choice policies while shrinking overall discretionary spending for the department by 13 percent, from $68 billion to $59 billion.

The billion-dollar increase aimed at expanding school choice would come in the form of a proposed $168 million boost for charter schools, $250 million for a new school choice program centered around private schools and a $1 billion increase for Title I, the largest federal K-12 program that provides school districts with funding for poor students.

The budget proposal provides no details about the new private school program, but says the boost to Title I would be used to encourage adoption of an education funding system that allows students to use funding to go to a public school of their choice – a category that ostensibly includes charter schools.

Organizations including teachers unions, civil rights groups and groups that represent school boards, superintendents and principals slammed the president's spending plan Betsy DeVos: Trump Budget Will Protect 'Vulnerable' Students Despite $9B Cut | Education News | US News:

CURMUDGUCATION: The Map of the World

CURMUDGUCATION: The Map of the World:

The Map of the World

Boston Public Schools just caused a stir by adopting a new map of the world.

"Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion"reads the headline in the The Guardian, and "amend" is a good choice of words, because BPS decided to replace one set of distortions with another.

Boston had been using the Mercator Projection (1569), a version that we're all pretty familiar with.

Mercator distorts by spreading out the world as it approaches the poles, so that by the time we get to Greenland or Alaska, the land masses are looking much larger than they actually are. Mercator was mostly trying to help with navigation, and this map was fine for that. And since his audience/customers were mostly starting from Europe, his map reinforces the idea that Europe is the center of the world. And it makes Africa and South America look relatively smaller.

This is many people's mental map of the world, complete with its built-in distortions.

BPS decided to switch to the Gall-Peters projection (1855/1967) a map that sets out to render each land mass equally, so that the relative sizes of the land masses are accurate.

But because the projection is still onto a rectangle, Gall-Peters combats one distortion with another distortion. The Marcator inflates land area by stretching it out at the bottom and the top; Gall-Peters fixes that by squishing the map in at the top and the bottom until the land areas are comparable and "correct."

This version is not necessarily very useful for navigation, but in the late 20th century it stirred up a bit of a mess. Arno Peters was actually duplicating the 100-year-old work of James Gall, and he promoted it as a more just and socially aware map than the Mercator, annoying the crap out of the cartographic community, which had been CURMUDGUCATION: The Map of the World:

Schools Matter: "Don't take any pictures and don't tweet this out. . ."

Schools Matter: "Don't take any pictures and don't tweet this out. . .":

"Don't take any pictures and don't tweet this out. . ."

NEA VP, Becky Pringle, helped wrap things up and put a sweet bow on them at the 2015 International Association of K-12 Online Learning conference that outlined Silicon Valley's dystopian future for school kids. 

In an era when young adults are tethered to their IPhones and exhibit all the symptoms of what might be called a debilitating technological autism, Gates and his young protege, Zuckerberg, see a profitable vista opening up before them, as children become more and more dependent on technological tools that replace teaching and learning among humans.

We now know that NEA and AFT are signed on this nightmare plan, too, that views knowledge as a commodity that requires only Google to unlock.  What about teachers?  They will be necessary insofar as children must be goaded to be enthused by their own subjugation to an education future ruled by algorithms.

Schools Matter: "Don't take any pictures and don't tweet this out. . .":

In the America-first budget, schools come last - The Hechinger Report

In the America-first budget, schools come last - The Hechinger Report:

In the America-first budget, schools come last
Trump’s education budget defunds public schools and universities, herds students toward private and charter schools

When it comes to education, President Donald Trump’s “America First” budget flips the famous line from the baseball movie “Field of Dreams” that people have adapted to use in business ever since: “If you build it, they will come.”

Trump’s philosophy seems to be, “If you break it, they will come to private and charter schools” — “it” in this scenario being the traditional public school system. The new president has made it clear that he will use drastic cuts — $9.2 billion worth of them to the Department to Education — to lessen the public sector’s hold on students, without offering viable alternatives.

With the release of his first budget, Trump seeks to cut federal education spending by 13 percent (that $9.2 billion figure), according to an initial analysis performed by The Washington Post. The reductions would pay for a $1.4 billion voucher expansion to help subsidize public school students who want to attend private schools. Included in these cuts are things like teacher training and afterschool programs, the savings from which would make room for a $168 million increase (a 50 percent hike) in charter school spending, which funds the start-up and expansion of charters.

Join the conversation later on Andre Perry’s radio show, “Free College,” hosted Tuesdays on WBOK1230 in New Orleans at 3pm Central/4pm Eastern 504.260.9265.

Encouraging private and charter school attendance by reducing federal funding to traditional public schools and thus making them less desirable to attend doesn’t create opportunities for students. If “draining the swamp” includes traditional public schools, Trump has In the America-first budget, schools come last - The Hechinger Report: 

Finger painting as fun, learning and an act of resistance. | Fred Klonsky

Finger painting as fun, learning and an act of resistance. | Fred Klonsky:

Finger painting as fun, learning and an act of resistance.

An old photo appeared on my Facebook page this morning. It was a picture I took of my students finger painting in 2012.

I reposted the picture and wrote:

“Looking through some old pics of student art work I am reminded that one of the things that drove teacher-hating trolls the most nuts was that I, an elementary Art teacher, was paid a full teacher’s salary for “finger painting with kids.” So I always made sure that during the school year that is exactly what I did. And post it. Kids love to finger paint and it is messy! And I was paid in full.”

It is true that we finger painted as an act of resistance to teacher-bashing.

Well, at least I did.

I’m pretty sure that my kindergarten and first grade students did not follow the latest debates about standards and outcome-based instruction, PARCC testing or guided learning.

They cared less about where I was on the salary schedule.

My art room had large formica tables that sat four kids, two on each side. I would walk around with a bottle of laundry starch and pour a puddle in front of each student directly in front of them and then repeated the walk with colors of poster paint.

A piece of paper could be pressed against a final picture making a print. But I liked the fact that the image was temporary and changeable with the wipe of a hand.

An observation about art in elementary school Art curriculum:  We don’t have our students draw enough.

Sure. They draw what they are directed to draw: Flowers, landscapes, houses, people. That kind of thing.

What I found was that my students in kindergarten and first grade didn’t really draw from observation and less from direction. And no matter how often I would point out that eyes were not circles with dots in the middle of another, bigger circle, that was how they drew them except to satisfy me.  They drew from stuff that they saw in their Finger painting as fun, learning and an act of resistance. | Fred Klonsky:

What is Worth $1 Million? – Have You Heard

What is Worth $1 Million? – Have You Heard:

What is Worth $1 Million?

A middle school serving some of Boston’s most vulnerable students faces a $1 million budget cut. Teacher Adina Schecter reflects on what that says about the city and its priorities…

By Adina Schecter
It is 6:45am and I’ve just pulled into the parking lot of the McCormack Middle School in Dorchester, MA.  I can already hear our sixth, seventh and eighth graders entering the building, their chattering voices somewhere between childhood and adulthood. This morning, like every morning, the staff at the McCormack—teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, and City Year corps members—are lined up outside to greet each student individually. Once inside, students make their way to the cafeteria for a hot breakfast. Many of them depend on our school for two meals a day. The staff at the McCormack understands that the best way to get our students ready to learn is to make sure they have food in their bellies and personal attention from an adult who cares.  

But the McCormack, a traditional Boston Public School that serves a diverse group of middle school students, faces a budget reduction of more than a million dollars next year.  We have serious concerns about our school’s fate.  Already lacking the resources to meet the complex needs of our students, my colleagues and I now fear for the survival of our school community, and for our students who are losing high-quality teachers and programs.

Perhaps there are many schools that look like ours in the early morning, but our school is increasingly unique in this day and age: we will take any child who comes to us. There is no lottery for admission; no application to complete.  Our students are low-income students.  Over 90% receive free or reduced lunch. And in a highly-segregated district, we are one of most diverse middle schools, with a student body that is 55% Latino, 32% African-American, 7% Asian and 5% white. Twenty-five percent of our students receive special education services, ranging from push-in support in regular education classrooms to intensive reading intervention to highly specialized support for students with emotional impairments. Forty-percent are English Language Learners, many of them newcomers who arrived in the country within the last year. New arrivals whose formal education has been interrupted find a home in our SIFE program. We take (Panther) pride in our students, whether they need help learning What is Worth $1 Million? – Have You Heard:

 

Poverty and Its Effects on School Achievement Are Forgotten in the President’s Budget | janresseger

Poverty and Its Effects on School Achievement Are Forgotten in the President’s Budget | janresseger:

Poverty and Its Effects on School Achievement Are Forgotten in the President’s Budget

On Friday the Trump administration released a very “skinny” budget that outlined a few priorities for each federal department without many details. Many members of Congress, as you have undoubtedly heard, are not happy with what they see, and the ideas in this budget will likely be changed and amended before a budget is passed by Congress. (See more details about the budget process and the President’s proposed education budget here.) There is enough in Friday’s proposed budget for the Department of Education, however, to demonstrate Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s priorities.

In the list of programs for the Department of Education, there are three different expansions of school school choice and privatization—Title I Portability, some kind of pilot of federal vouchers, and expansion by 50 percent of the Charter Schools Program that underwrites grants to states for the launch of new charter schools.  The K-12 education budget cuts after-school programs, two programs that help students prepare for and apply to college, and teacher preparation. There is nothing in Trump’s new education budget to expand the opportunity to learn for America’s poorest children in urban and rural public schools.

For fifteen years the United States has had a test-based accountability system in place supposedly to close achievement gaps, raise school achievement, and drive school staff to work harder. There is widespread agreement that No Child Left Behind (now to be replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act) has failed to close achievement gaps and significantly raise overall achievement for the students who are farthest behind.

Among academic experts on education there is also widespread agreement about what needs to change to help students who struggle.  Expansion of school privatization and libertarian “freedom of choice” for a few students is definitely not the prescribed treatment for what is a much deeper set of problems.

Helen Ladd, a well-known professor of public policy and economics at Duke University, just published an extensive analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.  No Child Left Behind relied almost exclusively, Ladd writes, “on tough test-based incentives. This approach would only have made sense if the problem of low-performing schools could be attributed primarily to teacher shirking as some people believed, or to the problem of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ as suggested by President George W. Bush. But in fact low achievement in such schools is far more likely to reflect the limited Poverty and Its Effects on School Achievement Are Forgotten in the President’s Budget | janresseger:

President Trump: It’s Time to Hold Bill Gates Accountable for His #EducationReform Failure. – Missouri Education Watchdog

President Trump: It’s Time to Hold Bill Gates Accountable for His #EducationReform Failure. – Missouri Education Watchdog:

President Trump: It’s Time to Hold Bill Gates Accountable for His #EducationReform Failure.

President Trump is set to meet with Bill Gates on Monday, March 20, according  to The Hill:

White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced the meeting on Thursday at his daily press briefing but did not provide any other details.

The two previously met in December at Trump Tower.

After the meeting, Gates told reporters that the two had a “good conversation” and had discussed “innovation, how it can help in health, education, the impact of foreign aid and energy, and a wide-ranging conversation about power of innovation.”

During his campaign, Trump had mentioned Gates as one of the business leaders he would consult if elected.

“We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way,” Trump had said about turning to the tech industry to help prevent terrorist groups from recruiting through social media.

There was no indication the meeting had to do with Gates’ insistence on directing public policy for education reform, but as he has invested heavily in educational experiments coupled with his support for common core state standards and longitudinal data systems, this might be a topic of discussion.  President Trump, look at this meme.  If ‘accountability’ is the goal of education from the Democrats and Republicans, the amount of Gates money spent on his educational theories for no educational improvement demonstrates he is a failure in the educational realm.  As early as 2008, it was apparent that Gates’ educational reform programs were not delivering what they had promised and the amount Gates has spent on educational reform from that time period can be found in this Forbes article. 

Financial information showing that Gates poured more than $2.3 Billion in Common Core initiatives is contained in Stunning revelation Bill Gates has spent $2.3 Billion on Common Core – #PARCC.   Additional information on the Gates takeover of education can be found in this 2014 Washington Post article, How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution.

If the Democrats and Republicans are insistent on using data and accountability measures to determine if a President Trump: It’s Time to Hold Bill Gates Accountable for His #EducationReform Failure. – Missouri Education Watchdog:

How Technology Integration Has Altered Doctor/Patient Care in Hospitals (David Rosenthal, M.D. and Abraham Verghese, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Technology Integration Has Altered Doctor/Patient Care in Hospitals (David Rosenthal, M.D. and Abraham Verghese, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

How Technology Integration Has Altered Doctor/Patient Care in Hospitals (David Rosenthal, M.D. and Abraham Verghese, M.D.)

Over the past few years, I have compared physicians and teachers because even with so many differences in preparation and the nature of their work, they share two core principles. Both professionals belong to helping professions where their success, in part, is dependent upon the patient and the student. And success, however defined, depend upon each professional developing close relationships with their patients and students. The degree to which labor-saving devices have increased the efficiency of both physicans and teachers in carrying out their daily work, there are, nonetheless, tradeoffs that have become apparent as professionals practice in hospitals and schools.

The following article, “Meaning and Nature of Physicians’ Work,” appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, November 16, 2016. To see citation, click on footnote number in NEJM article.

….Typically in our field, internal medicine, residents arrive at the hospital at 7 a.m., get sign-outs from nighttime residents, and conduct “pre-rounds” to see patients they have inherited but don’t know well, before heading to morning report or attending rounds. Attending rounds often consist of “card-flipping” sessions held in a workroom, frequently interrupted by discharge planning and pages, calls, and texts from nurses and specialists. Finalizing discharges before noon can feel more important than getting to know new patients. Increasingly, the attending physician doesn’t see patients with the team, given the time constraints.

No longer are there paper charts at the bedside. The advent of the electronic era, while reducing the time required for tracking down laboratory or radiology results, has not substantially changed the time spent with patients: recent estimates indicate that medical students and residents often spend more than 40 to 50% of their day in front of a computer screen filling out documentation, reviewing charts, and placing orders. They spend much of the rest of their time on the phone coordinating care with specialists, pharmacists, nutritionists, primary care offices, family members, social workers, nurses, and care How Technology Integration Has Altered Doctor/Patient Care in Hospitals (David Rosenthal, M.D. and Abraham Verghese, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

The Graduation Crisis In One Page

The Graduation Crisis In One Page:

The Graduation Crisis In One Page

Jeanne Melvin, President of Public Education Partners (PEP), has compressed information about the graduation crisis into one page.  The bottom line of her 12 point synthesis is that the legislature must act to reduce the number of high stakes testing.

Because of new graduation requirements created by the Ohio General Assembly, “one third of Ohio’s Class of 2018 is now at risk of not receiving a high school diploma” and “the percentage of non-graduates could reach 60-70 percent in urban areas.”

State officials must consult with public school personnel-not ALEC, not DC, not Gates, Walton, Eli Broad and other foundations, not David Brennen and Bill Lager, not Betsy DeVos and corporate privatizers-when developing public education policy.

—–

William L. Phillis, Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding

ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net

The Graduation Crisis In One Page:

Corporate Reform: Turning a Profit at Public Expense - Living in Dialogue

Corporate Reform: Turning a Profit at Public Expense - Living in Dialogue:

Corporate Reform: Turning a Profit at Public Expense

By John Thompson.

I wish I didn’t have to write a positive review of Alex Molnar’s “Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold.” But, as Molnar explains, the toxic effect of neoliberal, market-driven school reform provides an exceptionally clear example of privatization’s threat to America’s public wellbeing. So, as we wrestle with the new threats to our democracy that are posed by Trumpism, we have to come to grips with his persuasive account of how America’s democratic mission of public education was subordinated to corporate power and profits.

Molnar was born in 1946, at the beginning of the Baby Boom and the post-WWII economic boom. Although he’s much, much older than I am (I was born in 1953) he gets to the heart of the era’s educational matter when recalling:

Not being economists allowed us to naively imagine that since humankind had, for the first time in history, the productive capacity to eliminate material deprivation and the means to do so with ever fewer hours of labor, it would be necessary to develop education programs and curricula to help large numbers of people figure out how to best make use of their new-found leisure time.

Molnar cites a Swedish mother’s response to the invention of the washing machine:

We have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.’ Because this is the magic: You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books.

My Oklahoma City principal made the same point when he took each of our elementary school classes to a special event in the nearby junior high school. We saw a documentary on technology and the predicted decline of the work week to as little as 15 hours. Our principal presented the case for what I later learned Corporate Reform: Turning a Profit at Public Expense - Living in Dialogue:

Schools Matter: NEA and AFT among Leaders of Blended/Personalized Learning

Schools Matter: NEA and AFT among Leaders of Blended/Personalized Learning:

NEA and AFT among Leaders of Blended/Personalized Learning



If you have been wondering why NPE, FairTest, BATs, Diane Ravitch's Basecamp, etc. have had almost nothing negative to say about the brave new world of competency-based, personalized blended learning, then you might want to sit down for a moment and follow the links below.  

It seems the corporate unions that all the anti-reformy groups serve became signatories in 2015 to a wide-ranging blueprint for the future of schools.  It is a future based on heavy doses of computer technology for instruction, curriculum, and assessment, with less teaching by real teachers in fewer school buildings, with great wads of money going to Silicon Valley billionaires.  

In a 2016 blog post from Gisele Huff, Executive Director of the Jacquelin Hume Foundation, we find this paragraph:

Personalized learning is an idea whose time has come. The Foundation was an early supporter of Education Reimagined and I participated as one of 28 strange bedfellows in the production of its vision document (http://ow.ly/ZmPpn). That document has Schools Matter: NEA and AFT among Leaders of Blended/Personalized Learning:

Director of Christian Organization Calls on Christians to Support Public Schools | deutsch29

Director of Christian Organization Calls on Christians to Support Public Schools | deutsch29:

Director of Christian Organization Calls on Christians to Support Public Schools

On February 07, 2017, Andrea Reyes Ramirez, executive director of the Faith and Education Coalition – NHCLC, published an article in Christianity Today in which she calls upon Christians to support America’s public schools.

Her article is entitled, “Under DeVos, the Real School Choice Christians Face.”

I am a Christian. I believe that I need a Messiah, and I believe that Christ is that Messiah. I am also an unequivocal supporter of traditional public education.

School choice funnels money away from the traditional public school, and US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has an established history in actively undoing the community school even as she uses her billionaire buying power to advance free-market ed reforms.

I do not view DeVos’ buying legislators in order to impose her will upon Michigan public education as Christlike behavior. Her actions hurt people, and she has demonstrated her willingness to ignore such evidence and proceed with her agenda.

I wondered what other Christians thought, if indeed any had written in Christian publications in support of public education.

Thus, I was pleased to find Ramirez’s article.

There is some language (e.g., about “high standards” and “low-achieving schools”) that could have taken me down some rabbit trails, but I chose not to go there. The overall tone of Ramirez’s piece is one of support for public education.

An excerpt:

A new administration’s nominee for Secretary of Education doesn’t usually steal the show. Betsy DeVos made headlines during her prolonged and contentious nomination process which ended in approval today. While some evangelical supporters of homeschooling, private school, and charter school options are celebrating a school choice advocate’s appointment to this all-

Director of Christian Organization Calls on Christians to Support Public Schools | deutsch29: