Everybody Hates Betsy

DeVos is the worst hire. By far. The Huffington Post https://t.co/h8uK4kzQsg

— Charles P. Pierce (@ESQPolitics) November 25, 2016

From the New York Times:

Betsy DeVos and the Wrong Way to Fix Schools

...Detroit and New Orleans represent radically different versions of school choice — and the one that seems to work is the one that uses the state oversight that Ms. DeVos opposes.

New Orleans is also important because it is the only city in the country where we can compare the results for charter schools with the approach Ms. DeVos prefers even more — school vouchers. In a study my center released this year, researchers found that the statewide Louisiana voucher program had exactly the opposite result as the New Orleans charter reforms. Students who participated in the voucher program had declines in achievement tests scores of eight to 16 percentile points. Since many of these students received vouchers through a lottery, these results are especially telling.

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From the Detroit Free Press:

Betsy DeVos: Fighter for kids or destroyer of public schools?

Yes, everyone hates Betsy...except for ideologues who believe public education should be eliminated...looters who stand to profit from the dismantling of public education...and this myopic little twit who has a job-for-life with The New York Times for some reason (from The News Hour):

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess it’s — yes, of some comfort, I guess.

Sometimes, the campaign seemed to be, as Mark said, vindictive, but sort of a depraved three-ring circus. The transition period has not been that. He’s nominated people like DeVos or Haley who are competent people, who are more or less professional, experienced people.

They may not be, on substantive ground, all of our cup of tea. They are very consistent with the way he campaigned, a nationalist campaign on education policy, a campaign that is enthusiastic about school choice...

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. First of all, charter schools are public schools. They’re paid for publicly and they’re part of the public system. They just have a more independent structure.

And so I guess I would say, we need a reform movement. We have seen, I think, in the charter school movement started out, whatever it was, 10 or 15 years ago — it’s increasingly gotten better. Charter schools are figuring out how to do this. The charter schools that are most effective are scaling the most quickly, and so there’s got to be a continued move for reform.

At the same time, the teachers unions are pushing at that reform, has had some political successes. And so I think charter schools, choice, and frankly school standards need a champion. And DeVos has been a good pretty champion.

Now, I don’t — she’s not without fault. You have got to have two things in education reform. You have got to have some flexibility, so people can figure out what to do. But you also have to have accountable, basically what the Common Core standards were, some sort of set of national standards, so we can measure.

It’s hard for parents just to measure schools. DeVos has been really good at the flexibility. She’s not been enthusiastic about the accountability. So, she’s a complete — an incomplete operator.

But I do think — I have met her a few times. She’s a normal person, a sophisticated person, in some ways a self-effacing person. And she has been at least a champion of reform, if maybe too much emphasizing choice, not enough, in my view, emphasizing charters.

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DAVID BROOKS: Just, as I have traveled around from school to school, whether it’s project-based learning or an outward bound curriculum, it’s very hard to tell the difference between charters and public anymore. There’s no fine line.

They’re often adopting very similar programs, maybe with a different administrative structure. But what I’m saying is, you’re seeing reform throughout the movement, in the so-called charters, in the so-called publics, if we’re going to call them that. And that reform dynamism has to be kept going.