Revising Reform for Trumplandia

If reformsters are good at anything, it's revising the narrative to match current conditions. They are masters of the retcon (a comics term referring to retroactively altering character continuity, like when Frank Miller introduced Elektra into Daredevil continuity and we suddenly learned that a character we had never heard about before had actually been-- oh, shut up. You're a nerd!).

Anyway, reformsters periodically go back and retroactively rewrite the story. What's that you say? No way-- Common Core was always intended to be flexible and adaptable for each school system. What's that you say? No, we never said that every school district must adopt the Common Core Standards! Teachers? We totally love them and never ever blamed all of education's ills on them. No, we never promised that charters would do more with fewer dollars. And of course we have always contended that charter schools are public private public private public private public private look, we'll get back to you on this one. Sometimes reformsters have been rewriting harder than a Soviet Russia historian and actual history has disappeared faster than Chuck Cunningham.

No Happy Days forthis guy-- gone and completely forgotten

The Rise of Trump has brought the erasers out in force.

Reformsters have a problem, exemplified by this set of tweets regarding Jeanne Allen, head and mouth of the very reformy Center for Education Reform:

Back in May, @JeanneAllen said of Trump: "I don't want my issues coming out of his mouth." Warned he would get 2nd and 3rd stringers on edu. https://t.co/DzoQpe6YmN

— Politics K-12 (@PoliticsK12) November 16, 2016

Guilty in May. Much changed after, 4 all involved, including selecting @mike_pence & @KellyannePolls https://t.co/nwLl4YdYcs

— Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) November 16, 2016

Trump is ready to give reformsters most of what they want, yet to get it, they have to figure out how to embrace-not-embrace Trump himself.

Today brought a new attempt at this dance that both reveals the tack that reformsters are going to try as well as showing why they want to try it.

At Real Clear Education, Shavar Jeffries (Democrats [sic] for Education Reform) and Peter Cunningham (Education Post), both super charter school fans,  attempt to solidify the left-tilted reformster argument, based partly on a real distinction and partly on fake history of what has happened so far.

The distinction they'd like to make is between charter fans who want accountability and those who don't. Many charter supporters, they point out, have called repeatedly for strong accountability. This is a True Thing-- it wasn't that long ago that several charter organizations were themselves calling out the bogus money-sucking scam that is cyber-charter schooling. I have talked to several charter promoters who believe that charters must be held accountable because 1) nobody benefits from fly-by-night charter scams and 2) they risk making the rest of the charter industry look scary and bad and in need of tight government control.

Unfortunately, Secretary of Ed-in-Waiting Betsy DeVos doesn't believe in any of that accountability, and has spent decades spending great gouts of money to block any such accountability. The results are on display in states like Michigan and Florida, where all manner of charter shysters are allowed to run rampant with no regard for damage, waste and fraud. DeVos believes the market will sort these folks out, despite the glaring evidence that the market will do no such thing.

So Jeffries and Cunningham contend there is some dissension in the charter-loving ranks, and on this issue, I believe they are correct. However, they also have a story to tell about how we got here, and that part reads like a fantasy tale from an alternate universe.

School choice has a proud progressive history. 

Um, no. It really doesn't. Jeffries and Cunningham rattle off some names like Rahm Emmanuel and Andrew Cuomo, who barely qualify as Democrats at all, and Presidents like Clinton and Obama, who developed and perfected the technique of consolidating Democratic power by abandoning Democratic principles. The writers also try to invoke Albert Shanker, the Great-Godfather of charters, but they skip over the part where a few years into the experiment, Shanker turned his back on charters after seeing them become money-making businesses instead of engines of educational innovation.

Public school choice has an even more robust conservative history, based on conservative principles of free markets and competition.

That sounds a little more like it. But the writers bring this up in order to invoke the "bipartisan alliance" that has been behind the choice movement. Maybe. I would describe the alliance as one between people who say they want charters because they believe in the free market and people who say they want charters because it will bring social justice. What I've never been entirely certain is just how many people in the latter group are just running a con. It's fitting that the head of DFER is co-writing this piece, since DFER's origin was about finding a way to move the Democratic Party into line with reform.

Some of us have been pointing out the very non-progressive elements of the school choice movement for years, but today Shavars and Cunningham discovered some of them, too. The charter overwhelming preference for non-union teachers and the general assault on unions. The members of the choice community who are mostly interested in defunding education entirely. The duo retcon their way to this assertion:

The grand bargain at the heart of the school choice movement is accountability for autonomy. In exchange for performance goals linking a charter school’s survival to academic results and other student outcomes, they are freed up from bureaucracy and red tape that limits innovation and flexibility.

Nope. That has been the sales pitch, but in many areas, it has most definitely not been the grand bargain, the mediocre bargain, or even the blue light special. Where free market fans have led the charge (e.g. Ohio, Jeb Bush's Florida, DeVos's Michigan), charters have pressed for autonomy only. Charters have gone to court to fight hard to avoid being accountable to anyone.

Nor can these guys pretend to be surprised by any of this. For instance, when it comes to slamming the unions, nobody has done it more relentlessly than DFER. Shavars and Cunningham warn that "when the choice movement devolves into an anti-union movement, it loses support on the left," but DFER has been right on the front lines of that devolution.

So why are they suddenly so fretful about all this, anyway? The clue is in this article's warning that these behaviors will "lose support on the left," or as Cunningham tweeted it

Accountability is key to keeping progressives in the reform tent. @shavarjeffries @CharlesBarone https://t.co/qt3ruSeqv8

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) November 30, 2016

It's not the concern about principle, or allying with an odious and destructive administration, or even being revealed as hypocrites. A whole parade of reformsters have lined up, like Jeanne Allen, to announce that while they used to be horrified by Trump, maybe his administration will actually be swell. Hey, if Mitt Romney can be turned with a cheap meal, why wouldn't choice advocates be willing to change sides at the prospect of getting everything they ever wanted?

No, that's not the issue.

The issue is that the reformster movement managed to convince a whole bunch of progressives and Democrats to join in, play along, come get in the tent, and generally support the movement. They could sell it by talking about civil rights and making life better for poor brown and black children and most of all by pointing at a popular Democratic President who was the most elevated face of the reform movement. And now those actual progressives are experiencing a moment just like that one in the tower where Dorothy sees Aunty Em in the crystal ball, but then suddenly it's the Wicked Witch, and reformy folks are worried that Trump's scary face with chase away a bunch of erstwhile progressive reform supporters.

Look, for a couple of decades now, the choice charter movement has not been supported by a bipartisan alliance of Democrats and Republicans. It has been a neo-liberal privatization program, pushed by an "alliance" of neo-liberals who called themselves Republicans and neo-liberals who called themselves Democrats. It has been easy for neo-lib-GOP folks to sell the wonders of free market competitive privatizing to at least the business wing of the GOP. It has taken a bit more saleswork for the neo-lib-dems to sell privatization to their crowd, and now they have lost the allure and leverage and power of leading the ruling party. The neo-lib point people have never had trouble shifting gears and changing tunes, but the people who fell in line because they sincerely bought what neo-lib-dems were selling-- those people will be harder to keep in the big tent.

Neo-lib-dem leaders are going to have to come up with a new sales pitch, a way that progressives can oppose Herr Trumps DC dumpster fire and Billionaire Betsy's call to let public education burn while still pushing hard for charters and choice. It's going to take something more clever than an issue of "accountability," but be patient. This is just the first draft; I'm sure they'll come up with the next revision, a new argument, at which point, it will become the argument that they swear they've always been making.

Slowing Down

For the past several years, I have sometimes felt like Indiana Jones just a few feet in front of the damn giant boulder.

This is not entirely the result of various education reforms. We've been through some changes locally, including but limited to some schedule changing that has resulted in slightly shorter periods, and some changes in staffing that have led to slightly larger classes.

But of course like many other schools, we are being trickled down upon by the dripping ooze of school reform. We have lots of additional paper-- well, computer work that is meant to show how we're aligning our instruction to the standards (spoiler alert-- mostly by completing computerized paperwork). We spend time worrying about the numbers and part of my week is now set aside for sitting and fretting over various slabs of data. And when you add up all the days I lose to testing, or pre-testing, or practice testing, it all adds up to days and weeks of school during which I don't get to actually teach.

Meanwhile, the mountain of material that I feel I should be getting through looks more and more like, well, like two mountains, piled on top of each other and sitting on top of a third mountain that has been smushed into the ground so far that I'll have to dig it all out before I can deal with it. And so there is a voice yammering away in my ear, strained and urgent, reminding me that I only have X days left and if I don't hammer through this stuff today, and quickly, I'll never get to the other material which I really need to get to because these students are less than two years away from going out into a world that will demand every possible skill set from them and oh my good lord in heaven how am I ever going to get anything done if they want to talk about stuff and holy crap the boulder is right on my heels-----

It has become almost routine for me. Maybe it happens when I'm home unwinding with family and vacation, or maybe it happens when I suddenly see what I'm doing and realize I am losing the thread. But either way, I catch myself, I stop, I slow down. I breathe.

Today I used an exercise that I absolutely do not recommend for anyone. I started my forty minute classes with twenty minutes of material.

My solution is not the obvious one; I'm not allowed (by me) to fill up a class period with "study hall." The taxpayers pay me perfectly good money to work with students. So I have to find those other twenty minutes in the moment, in my students' concerns, in whatever jumps up and demands attention. I do stack the deck in my favor-- I don't try this on a day where, for instance, the lesson is about participial phrases. Today I wanted to talk to my students about what skills they think they'll need for adulting that they think the school hasn't, or may never, provide. And because I don't have enough "teaching" to fill the period, I have to shut up and let discussion flow. Maybe I listen. Maybe I prime the pump. Maybe I'll tell a personal story (my pedagogical justification being that modeling vulnerability in a safe place is important, as is their seeing that I'm a human). I can't plan this, not for every single second. I have to slow down and listen and watch and be there.

I confess that I used to work like this more often, and I'm not proud of doing it less. If I'm not careful, instead of a safe place where everyone can be heard and relationships are built, my classroom can become a racquetball court with one of those tennis ball cannons sitting in a corner firing off a ball every ten seconds. But we change in our practice-- when I began teaching, I had to put all my effort into creating energy, pushing it out, pumping it out, being, as my co-op said, punchy-quick. I was a quieter, more guarded person then. Now, in a classroom, I have to be sure to breathe, to lay back, to listen.

It's important to remember that while we are there to do the work, our conception of the work has to include the students as actors, as co-conspirators, as participants with agency. One of the most corrosive aspects of the modern reform movement is the conception of education as something that is done to students, who are supposed to sit there passively while we perform our magic tricks and pull numbers out of them like so many standardized rabbits out of identical hats. We can not, must not reach the point where we are so focused on getting away from that giant boulder that we trample right over the students in front of us.

The students are more important than the numbers. They are more important than the test results, more important than the lesson plans, more important even than the personal goals we set to "cover" exactly This Much material by the end of our days with them. The students are not there to serve us; we are there to serve them. Sometimes you just have to take a moment to get the thread back. Slow down.The boulder is just a fake, a movie prop, and you are tougher than it is.

Christmas Curmudgushopping

If you want a little something for the fan of education blogging in your life (because don't we all know dozens of such people), I'm going to make a quick pitch here for Curmudgucation gear. It almost physically pains me to say "Hey, buy my stuff," but 1) helpful people keep telling me to build my brand and 2) I've got twins on the way.



Here's a book! Featuring almost 100 hand-picked blog posts from the first year or so of the blog, covering most of the usual topics. Great for someone who wants to read bloggy stuff in short burst while holding an actual book in their hands.

I am also a fan of Cafe Press. I like being able to give friends and family custom decorated stuff, and I've always found the quality to be pretty good.

Here's a nifty large mug

I actually use this duffle for the gym and short trips. Sturdy

It's a tote bag. For toting.

Snappy t-shirt. Okay, some day I'll get fancier with the design.

I can guarantee that any of these products will put you in an elite group of people who are mostly related to me.

Online Teaching Credentials

Want to be a teacher, but just don't have the time or money to do all that, you know, college degree getting stuff? Well, you're in luck. Meet Teach-Now!

It's the Teach-Now Educatore difference (no, I didn't mistype "educator")! "Become certified to teach in virtually every subject, at virtually every level, in virtually every state" though it's more than that, because the company is international in its reach-- they have created "several strategic global partnerships that expanded our presence to Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America." It is the "most direct and cost effective pathway to teaching in the digital age."

Nice to know this product is still available today

You can keep doing what you're doing, squeezing this streamlines approach into your spare hours. You'll use the same "project-based learning technologies and project-based curriculum you will us" when you have your own classroom. You will get feedback through online streaming and working in a virtual classroom. Just nine months and about $6,000 and you can end up with a shiny new Masters Degree in education. The program does focus on people who are already grown up and out in the world; one entry requirement is to have a bachelor's degree.

This nifty business idea comes from education entrepreneur and former nun Emily Feistritzer, who in this laid-back PBS interview talks about her first job-- selling statues of the Virgin Mary that glowed in the dark. I swear that I am not making any of this up. Feistritzer became a nun at nineteen, left the convent at age thirty-one, landed a PhD in education, and began several decades worth of education-flavored business.

She became founder/CEO of the National Center for Education Information in 1979. Next she became founder/CEO of the National Center for Alternative Certification in 2003. Finally, she launched Teach-Now in 2011. According to the PBS interview, she launched that when she "plopped down a half-million dollars of her own money," and it now has fifteen full-time employees, revenues of around $4 million and a profit margin of around 20%. So the business of quicky internet teacher certification is apparently pretty healthy.

Back in 1985 she was behind a piece of federally-funded research that asked teachers about their sexual habits and their attitudes toward abortion. NCEI occasionally publishes surveys of teacher info, which, not surprisingly, look particularly at training pathways. And Feistritzer also took the nuns to court in 2002, accusing them of sexual abuse (that did not make it into the PBS piece). One gets the impression, reading through her history and watching her speak, that she is a tough and determined person.

Based in DC, Dr. Feistritzer apparently talks to lawmakers now and then and gets to put her two cents in with policy makers. She's a 2016 Brava Award winner for SmartCEO. Oh, and she's an actual member of the Education Writers Association, which is more than certain bloggers can claim.

The PBS-- well, it's hard not to think of it as an infomercial-- focuses on one African-American male student of the program, and highlights how neo-teachers rocketing through this program must do student teaching, which is monitored by video and on-line supervision. It talks about many of the things that are good about getting this young man into the classroom; it does not consider the question of why this program is the best way to get him there.

Teach-Now is, essentially, the teacher prep version of Competency-Based Education, the sort of remote decentralized we-don't-need-no-steenking-school-building version of education that some folks really want to have come down the pike. As with many similar oh-just-make-a-video-and-we'll-watch-that programs, I cannot for the life of me understand how a single camera POV can possibly give a supervisor enough information about what's going on in that classroom.

But hey. Modern, times, you know. I have a couple of friends who went on the internet and had themselves certified as ministers, so they can perform weddings and lead grace and all that cool stuff. Why not internet teachers, too-- both certified on the net and prepared to teach via the net. The program has reportedly produced about 1,200 of these internet teachers.

What nobody, including the happy-time PBS folks, says is whether the program is any good, whether it produces good teachers, or teachers that get jobs and stay in the profession for any amount of time. The only special qualities that are discussed ever are how it's quick, cheap, and convenient, and at that point my back is already up, because if quick, cheap and convenient are your metrics for an attractive experience, you probably aren't going to be happy in teaching in the first place, a profession that consumes time, costs you both the money you never earn and the money that you spend on the work, and which is an endless cavalcade of inconvenience (has any student ever asked for help when it was convenient). And I remain unconvinced that someone watching you being live-streamed through a smart phone is in any position to give you useful feedback on your classroom.

So while it's swell that one more person is getting rich from marketing another education-flavored product, I am doubtful that it's doing the profession any good.

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 version here. 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 transformational schools get?

They get Antonio Burt, a roving ronin of school transformation with experience within Tennessee's "innovation zone." What else do they get?

They get testing every other week for their littles. Every other week. What possible justification is there for biweekly testing? Well, according to the Tampa Bay Times:

The tests, which are new this year and are only being given in those schools, are being used to help teachers identify how well they have taught the state standards and to catch students' weak areas earlier in the year. 

Oh, bullshit. This is training. This is the rankest kind of test prep. This is making the students well-rehearsed little test-taking machines. It is throwing up your hands and admitting that the Big Standardized Tests are not legitimate measures of anything except test-taking prowess, and while I applaud the recognition of reality, this is terrible education malpractice.

First, a generation of students is being taught that you go to school to take a test, and that's all education is. This is the worst kind of lie, a selfish inexcusable lie told to our most vulnerable children.

Second, just what has been cut out of the curriculum to make room for all this testing? If each administration of the test only ate only one day, that would still be eighteen days of school given over to testing, which is a almost four weeks, a month. A month of actual instruction lost to these students.

Third, these are the students who are going to be least helped by an education that is all about doing well on a Big Standardized Test. The deck is already stacked against them, and being well-versed in the taking of standardized tests is not going to help them.

This kind of baloney is most damaging to the small children, but it's bad news for all the students in Pinellas County.

Other misguided "transformational" ideas are hinted at in the article.

Antonio Burt, who is leading the Pinellas transformation effort, said teachers are not waiting to expose students to advanced concepts. For example, a standard usually scheduled to be taught in February — one that could count as much as 40 percent on the Florida Standards Assessment — now is introduced to students in August, giving them more time to practice.

SMH. First of all, this is the very definition of test-centered curriculum, which is an absolutely indefensible practice. Second of all, how does this even work-- students, I know we haven't laid the groundwork for any of this, and it involves concepts you haven't been taught yet, but we're just going to skip to chapter twenty-three on the text-book. I mean, I guess this is genius-- we can just "introduce" the quadratic formula to Kindergartners because if we introduce it sooner, they'll do better on the test, right?

Transformational schools are all about the test. Here's one super-swell motivational piece--

At Sandy Lane Elementary, principal Tzeporaw Sahadeo adds some encouragement for the children. She created the 80 Percent Club to recognize students who scored at least an 80 percent on their biweekly tests. 

Those students get to cut the lunch line for the week and are given 80 "shark shillings" — enough for a bag of coveted Takis spicy chips from the school store. Incentives also are given for children who barely miss the mark and earn 70 percent.

Yes, the school ties when you get to eat to your test score. That's not just a bizarre example of an extrinsic motivator, which we've long known is not a healthy sort of motivation to saddle a kid with. It also means that every day at lunch, students are lined up publicly in the cafeteria according to test results. If you thought a data wall was bad, how do you feel about a data lunch line?

The hook for this article is the mystery of decreasing test scores. The littles do well on the tests, but older kids do not, particularly on the literacy test. What could explain it? The article considers two explanations. One is that the standards get harder and more complex. And Burt suggests that there are "pockets of teachers" who "need reinforcement on what the standards are." I would suggest some other theories. One is that the standards are bunk. Another is that standardized literacy tests don't really test literacy. Yet another would be that the older students get, the less inclined they are to jump compliantly through hoops that they see as useless and pointless and part of an educational system that is not offering to give anything to them, but instead only wants to get them to produce scores for the school's benefit.

Test-centered education is ultimately always backwards. The school is not there to serve the students by providing them with an education. Instead, the students are there to serve the school by generating the numbers the school wants to get.

It is possible to have some understanding for Pinellas school leaders, who are staring down the barrel of Florida's immensely stupid, damaging, and unhelpful test-based school grade system. Throughout Florida, many schools face that one basic choice-- do they actually work at providing students with a real education, or do they make their school test centered in an effort to avoid punishment for low scores? In a state that is determined to break down its public schools, the better to drive parents and students into the arms of the charter industry, that's not a small or easy dilemma for public schools to face.

But Pinellas County has chosen poorly (and the Tampa bay Times has, on this occasion, reported lazily by not asking for evidence that any of these practices actually work). Test-centered education isn't good for anybody except the businesses selling test materials. Pinellas County has lost its way, but it's the students who are getting abandoned in the wilderness.

ICYMI: Post Turkey Edition (11/27)

I briefly toyed with the idea of collecting all the articles that explain how awful Betsy DeVos will be as Secretary of Education, but it just made my computer sad, so I just picked a couple and selected some other pieces to help us all remember that there are other things to pay attention to.

Higher Education in Pennsylvania 101

William Boggs in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette explains what some legislators don't seem to understand about higher educationm

A Story That No One Will Print

Maybe this is moot now, but still worth a read. John Merrow reprints the story about She Who Will Not Be Named that nobody wanted to run. A reminder of just how awful she was.

The Data Delusion

Okay, this actually takes us back to 2013. But it's a good read about the ways in which education "data" leads us to believe things that just aren't so.

Polls Convinced Me That Hillary Clinton Wouldn't Lose: As An Education Researcher The Result Was a Wake-Up Call

The mishandling of election data leads this education data guru to reconsider the meaning of educational data

End School Privatization

Jamaal Bowman with a short, clear call for the end of school privatization

Michigan House's Detroit School Bills Are Pure Garbage

Stephen Henderson has some passionate and reality-based reactions to the Michigan legislature's latest move to screw over the schools of Detroit. Remember-- if you want to see the future of education under DeVos, just look at Michigan.

What We Can Learn About Betsy DeVos from Her Husband's Charter School

MarkWeber (Jersey Jazzman) takes a look at Mr. DevOs's little side project.

Bad News Betsy

Emily Talmadge with another angle of the bad news about DeVos's selection

Heavens to Betsy 

Finally, Russ Walsh includes a variety of links and recommendations so that if you do want to read even more, you can. But you could also do something about this terrible idea.

How Bad Is DeVos? So Bad...

The nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education is such a bad choice that we don't even have to talk about actual policy ideas to understand how unsuited she is for the position. Consider--

John King was a terrible choice for Secretary of Education. But John King has worked in a classroom with students and run a school, even if the classroom and school were charters. John King has held a statewide post in government as head of education in New York State. He doesn't appear to have been very good at any of these jobs-- but he has at least been exposed to what happens on all three levels so that he has at least a vague working knowledge of what goes on in those areas. He even attended public school as a child.

Betsy DeVos has none of those qualifications. She has never been a public school students and never worked as a teacher, administrator or state level education bureaucrat. Betsy DeVos is less qualified than John King.

Arne Duncan was a terrible choice for Secretary of Education. But Arne Duncan had been responsible for a major urban school system, so he had at least some vague notion of what happens in a public school system. He had political connections not because he had money to throw around, but because he was a good and loyal friend to people with bigger political profiles. Hell, he was a good basketball player, meaning he was at least exposed to the concept of teamwork and the idea of working hard to achieve a goal.

Betsy DeVos has never run an organization as sprawling and varied as an urban school district, and has no experience with any such educational system. Betsy DeVos is less qualified than Arne Duncan.

Eva Moskowitz was a terrible choice for Secretary of Education. But Eva Moskowitz built a school-flavored business from the ground up, so she has at least some vague notion of the many moving parts involved in making a school work. And while Moskowitz is by no means wealth-impaired, she has showed political savvy and an ability to make friends in high places to get her own way.

Betsy DeVos has no experience in the inner workings of a school or a business, and certainly not an organization that wants to be both. And she only knows one way to build political connections-- writing checks. Betsy DeVos is less qualified than Eva Moskowitz.

She Who Will Not Be Named (ex-DC chancellor) was an unspeakably awful choice for Secretary of Education. But like Duncan, she has been in charge of a major urban school district. She has stood in a classroom and tried to teach. And She is experienced at getting other people to invest in her vision and displayed a real gift for generating positive PR, even when she doesn't deserve any of it.

Betsy DeVos has never run a school district. She has never taught. And she has never had to convince anyone to back her idea, because she can bankroll it all herself. Nor has she ever displayed any talent for being the public PR-friendly face of anything.

All four of the above terrible, terrible choices for Secretary of Education worked their way up from a poor or middle class background, learning how to sell themselves, start an enterprise, make friends, gather influence, and just generally make their way in the world. Professionally, they have had to learn how to work other people to get what they want.

Betsy DeVos was born rich, married rich, and has never had to build influence or make a case for her own views by any method other than exercising her bank account (a bank account that she never did a lick of work to fill up in the first place). A Secretary of Education has to build influence, make a case, sell an idea, and do the political work to push across policies. DeVos has never had to do any of these things; and a Secretary of Education cannot build political clout or support by flexing her personal wealth. DeVos has ideas about education, but she has never done any of the legwork or built understanding about how to implement her ideas beyond writing a check or hiring some people to astroturf support for ideas. She has simply bought allies and bankrolled compliance; there is no reason to believe that she knows how to win agreement and cooperation from people who are not financially beholden to her. If DeVos had not been born rich, if she had not married rich, we would not be having this conversation, and she would not be a person of influence in education. DeVos is one of those masks that money puts on when it wants to walk around and do stuff; without the money, she's an empty sack with no more importance or influence than a regular citizen, or a teacher.

The four candidates listed above are all terrible, terrible choices for the post, and yet all of them have qualifications that DeVos lacks. In fact, before we even start to discuss just how terrible and destructive her ideas about public education are, we should be talking about her complete lack of qualifications to run a federal department. She is not familiar with how schools work. She is not familiar with how large metropolitan or state systems for education work. She is not familiar with how to work with people who are not on her personal payroll.

Bottom line-- even if you think that Betsy DeVos is bang-on correct in her education ideas* there is no reason at all to believe that she has any of the tools necessary to succeed as head of the US Department of Education.

Betsy DeVos is supremely unqualified, the most terrible of the terrible choices for Secretary of Education.



*in which case you are seriously deluded, but let's skip past that for the moment