More Baloney in Support of DeVos

This week, it's often looking as if the postponement of Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing was so that she could round up a few more supporters.

So here comes former Michigan Governor John Engler, the guy who helped start the process of busting up public education in Michigan.

Engler opens with a nifty observation:

America doesn't need any more fights around education.

Yeah, I'm looking better every day, amiright?

By which I can only assume that he means, "Y'all need to shut up, sit down, and do as your told. Fall in line and stop stirring up trouble." What other reason can the need for less fighting lead one to conclude that a good choice for Educhief is someone who has dealt with disagreement by threatening and stomping on those who disagree with her? But then, Engler's current job as president of the Business Roundtable gives him a particular perspective on these issues:

 
Business leaders are intently focused on promoting creative approaches that will raise the performance of our K-12 students — making them and the entire U.S. economy more competitive for decades to come. 

Baloney. Business leaders have often been spectacularly dim about the purpose of public education (spoiler alert: it is not to manufacture a deep pool of meat widgets to serve corporate needs or desires).

Thankfully, as a businesswoman and entrepreneur, Ms. DeVos has been singularly focused on accountability and results — exactly what our education system needs.

When has Betsy DeVos ever been a businesswoman? Her father was a businessman. Her brother was an entrepreneur. Her father-in-law was a businessman, of sorts. But what business has Betsy ever run? Entrepreneur? What new business has she ever started? What new business idea  did she launch? DeVos is a billionaire heiress who married a billionaire heir, and together they have leveraged their fortune into political clout by setting up lobbying groups and buying (and threatening) legislators. (For a detailed and disturbing account of all of this, read this hot-off-the-internet piece from Jennifer Berkshire, and see what a family of rich folk can do to turn an entire state into a one-party fiefdom.)

Engler has other slabs of baloney to share. The false assertion that Detroit's charters have been successful. The odd notion that DeVos, who spent millions defeating accountability measures, is somehow an accountability hawk. And Engler is going to repeat that DeVos is out to serve all students without providing any actual evidence.

Jeb! Bush wants to speak up for her as well. Unsurprising, because they are also old reformy buddies, fans both of privatizing schools for fun and profit as well as trying to crush teachers unions the better to cripple the Democratic party in their state.

Bush wants us to know that DeVos is a "champion of families, not instistutions." He feels that DeVos is a victim of two "false narratives" about school choice.

Bush says that one falsehood is that charters are hostile to pubic schools, but that's not so. Which is... fanciful indeed. Rather "the choice movement seeks flexibility for putting children m the right learning environment, embracing all high-quality providers." So our new marketing slogan is that charters provide flexibility, not a "rescue" from the "failing public schools"? Bush may want to clue some of his chartery brethren in to this so they can stop reading from the old marketing script.

The other alleged falsehood is that charters weaken public school, but hey-- in Florida, public schools have gotten way more awesome since charters started opening up-- an absolutely insupportable assertion since any number of factors could explain the 'improvement" in Florida schools. And really-- why talk about Florida when we can talk about Michigan, the state where DeVos mostly got her way and disaster ensued?

But if you don't believe Jeb, well, here's his mom. Yes, Barbara Bush has also come out in support of DeVos.

Bush is a big fan of literacy, and she wants to toss out that old correlation about third grade reading and later success, only like most everyone who trots that out, she doesn't get the difference between correlation and causation, so she's going to praise DeVos for Michigan's stupid third grade reading retention law which says that students can't advance to fourth grade until they pass the Big Standardized reading test.

Betsy DeVos has helped pass reforms to drive gains in literacy.  

Sure. Call it that. I call it bullying eight year olds. Also note that we're applauding a private citizen for getting legislation through a state government, as if that's a good thing. And Grandma Bush tosses out this old chestnut:

I also believe Mrs. DeVos has the right priorities on important issues such as school choice, early childhood development and accountability in education. I have worked with Mrs. DeVos’ advocacy organizations for years and I know that her commitment to children runs deep. She believes passionately that children should have access to high performing schools regardless of their race, income or zip code. That is why she has fought valiantly to give parents of at-risk children the right to send their kids to charter and private schools when the public school system is letting them down.

All children should NOT have "access" to high performing schools. Every passenger on the Titanic had "access" to a lifeboat, but only a few got to ride in one (or on a door). All children should have a good school. All children should be in a good school. Why the hell is the formulation always, "We think this school si failing, and that's unfair to the students in it, so we're going to rescue 5% of those children and do nothing to help the rest, including doing nothing to improve the school we're leaving them in." How is that a solution??!!

There are no, says Ma Bush, quick easy one-size-fits all solutions to school issues (except, I guess, charters and choice, which fix everything magically). But DeVos will send stacks of money out to the states where magical advances will be made, somehow. And then dear, sweet, steely-eyed, grey-haired Ma Bush let's go with this line--

I believe Mrs. DeVos is an educator at heart. 

No. No, she is not. Not at all. Do you know how I know? Because people who are educators at heart go out and become actual educators! They get the training and then they become actual teachers, in actual schools. That's what people who are educators at heart do. But hey-- if I tell you that I'm really a doctor at heart, will you let me operate on you or become surgeon general?

Bush wraps up with some vague nonsense about the "powerful forces resistant to change" and go back and read Berkshire's piece again if you want to see what powerful forces resistant to change  look like,  because mostly they look like unelected billionaires who buy up all the machineryu of government and stomp on anyone who tries to change the path that those plutocrats laid out for the entire state.

I suppose over the next few days we'll get more of this. It's odd because, truthfully, I don't think there's much chance that DeVos won't be confirmed. Mind you, she is spectacularly unqualified in every conceivable way, from her lack of organizational and administrative experience to her complete ignorance of public education to her spirited embrace of an armful of failed and foolish policies. Really, nobody deserves to be Secretary of Education less than Betsy DeVos. But this is Trumpistan, and the Senate hardly ever chases away cabinet nominees, and Being Unqualified is the new black, so I expect she'll be accepted. I just don't want it to be cheap or easy.

So by all means, DeVos supporters-- keep popping up to say foolish things, because a DeVos USED will cost US education tremendously for the foreseeable future, and you might as well be on the record when the bill comes due.

Petrilli: Reconsider Vouchers

It's kind of curious. So many people are suddenly talking about vouchers again, and the only real reason that we are is because we're looking at the possibility of a Secretary of Education who just loves them and we're all trying to figure out what could come of that (Spoiler alert: nothing good). Wise researchers like Jersey Jazzman are reminding us where the voucher money ends up (Spoiler alert: in religious schools) and even some charter fans are expressing reservations.

Into this conversation leaps (strolls? glides? saunters? scampers?) Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) to say, "Hey, maybe you need to take another look at cool, modern voucher systems!" Okay, what he actually says is "Vouchers have changed. Maybe your position should change, too" at the Flypaper, Fordham's blog.

Petrilli starts by roping in a reference to his earlier piece in which he argued that reformsters are still one big happy family, and can they please not get all split apart all over the place just because Herr Trump has nominated the DeVonator to USED? Because if you haven't noticed, reformsters are kind of worried about holding their coalition together in the Age of Trump.

We all support giving parents the power to choose schools other than those assigned to children by their local district; the question is how wide their range of choices should be.

Which is one of those reformy statements that triggers me to ask why nobody ever talks about the choices available in a public school. Anyway, he plays the Not Really Splitting Apart card so that he can point out that, hey, everybody wants to give parents choices-- there's just a little disagreement about what the mechanism should be, and before you go throwing out the vouchers with the bathwater, Petrilli wants you to know that nowadays we aren't talking about the kind of vouchers systems that were all the rage one or two years ago.

Vouchers, he admits, have a reputation for coming with no actual oversight or accountability, and, well, yeah, he admits that was pretty much true in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee. But nowadays, in places like Louisiana and Indiana now just ooze accountability out of their very pores, to the point that they are held almost as accountable as charter schools-- which is of course the point Petrilli has to make here for those charter fans who fear that voucher schools will undercut them by not having to follow any rules at all. Because the free market jungle is awesome unless you are the prey and not the predator. Petrilli's point is not, "Yes, voucher schools will be made awesome" so much as it is "Don't worry charter fans-- voucher schools will have to play by the same rules you do without any special advantages."

By "accountability," Petrilli mostly just means that these schools must administer the same Big Standardized Test as regular old public schools, which may be soothing to accountability hawks, but ought to scare hard-core voucher fans because, as some conservative critics have noted, where government money goes, government strings and rules and regulations follow. (It's an issue we have some history with in my area.)

By "accountability," Petrilli apparently doesn't mean "must conduct all business in public and keep financial records transparent to the public, too." Nor is it apparently related to how the schools treat teachers or students. "Accountability" just means "must give students the BS Tests and be rated by the state."


But maybe, Petrilli continues, you object to vouchers because the private schools can maintain their usual exclusive standards. Well, um, that's right. They don't. In fact, Fordham's own research tells that plenty of private schools won't open themselves up to voucher programs unless they can control their admissions. Many, of course, can also keep the riff-raff out unofficially by virtue of having tuition costs far in excess of the voucher amounts.

Well, so what, says Petrilli. We have some selective admissions schools already and colleges, heck, they selectively admit all the time already. And while he doesn't quite go there, we know that Petrilli believes that charter systems can be a good way to select out the Strivers and rescue them from having to be in school with Those Other Kids. Selectivity in private and charter schools? That's a feature, not a bug.

Petrilli knows some people are squeamish about the whole mixing church and state thing, but he says we might as well be consistent and we let churches house Head Start and use Pell Grants to send students to religious colleges, so what's the big deal? I would note that Head Start does not include a religious training component, even if they're in a church basement. College is a slightly different kettle of fish because it's not mandatory, like K-12 education, but he may have a point about consistency-- I vote we stop using Pell Grants to pay for religious college education. I could lay out all the religious separation arguments, again, for my conservative friends, but it might be simpler to point out that under such a system, your conservative tax dollars could be going to support a school based on Sharia law, or that teaches classes only in Spanish. I believe that if conservatives imagine such a system, they will quickly figure out the problems of mixing church and state all by themselves.

But Petrilli wants you to know that, for instance, Catholic schools are awesome and their students do really well and even stay out of typical teen trouble more than public school kids. Petrilli speculates that Catholic schools put the fear of God into kids; I'm going to speculate that everyone should learn more about the difference between correlation and causation, because the kinds of families that round up extra money to put their kids in a Catholic school might well be the kinds of families that raise kids who are more likely to stay out of trouble. Or maybe it's that Catholic schools can, as Petrilli notes, get rid of any and all students who don't behave.

And that's pretty much Petrilli's argument.

He does miss a few points. For instance, in his discussion of voucher-based systems, he somehow neglects to mention the voucher system of Wisconsin (a voucher mess), nor does he get into the everything but actual vouchering system of Michigan -- the one that can tell us the most about DeVos's ideas and goals with vouchers, choice, unions, and also the one that shows so clearly that DeVos's ideas and goals yield an ugly and dysfunctional mess that not only fails to produce choice schools with any quality, but also drags down the public school at the same time.

Petrilli suggests we spend some time before the rescheduled hearing looking over vouchery stuff. I recomend we spend some time looking at the fruits by which DeVos can be known. Try this article, or this one. Or this. Or this one. And another. And still another. And you can follow it up by reading about how hard DeVos has fought against accountability in Michigan.

Petrilli has mounted a pretty weak argument here-- vouchers are really okay because voucher students in some places have to take tests, the separation of church and state is just silly, and creaming the best students is cool and appropriate. But then, that has been the problems with vouchers all along-- the arguments for them are weak, so weak that the only successful path for installing a voucher system is to buy or rent enough legislators to write it into law. Where voters get a say, they say no. Nor have they changed all that much, ever. So we can look at them again, and again, and again, but, spoiler alert-- they will still look like a bad idea.

Tofu Schools

The repeated claim is that charters and choice are necessary in order for students to have options and to be able to select from many different educational programs, which makes me wonder-- are public schools made out of tofu or some other featureless, uniform substance. When you slice a public school, do you uncover the same bland surface, the same unvaried material, no matter which way you slice? Is it true that the only way to find variety, choice, or selections is to set up charter schools?

I teach in a relatively rural high school, so we're not loaded with resources or money, and yet a student at my school can choose to emphasize music or the arts or attend our vocational technical school to learn welding or home health care. You can take a yearbook class to learn photography and design, or theater, or public speaking, or business technology. If you're interested in 3D printing or working in a basic-but-fun mass media lab, we can hook you up. In my department alone, we have a variety of pedagogical and personal styles; a student who passes through our building is bound to find one teacher in our department that she really clicks with.

We are most definitely built our of tofu.

In fact, I would think that our school, like most public schools, actually provides better access to variety and choice than a so-called choice system, because to switch gears ("I think I'd like to stop playing trumpet and start learning auto body repair!") doesn't require a student to withdraw, then enroll in a whole new school and start over again. Want to switch your emphasis? Go see your guidance counselor. You can keep your friends and your locker and your lunch table-- you just get some different classes.

Sometimes the choices have to do with the community, and sometimes with a singular vision of one individual in the system (just up the road is a school that for years had an awesome steel drum band because they had a teacher who was knowledgeable and interested in steel drum bands). The particular constellation of choices under one roof will vary from roof to roof-- that's what gives a school its distinctive flavor (and one more reason it's a lousy idea to try to make all schools taste like Common Core Test Prep). But you don't have to move out from under that roof to find different choices. 

I would suspect that in the larger urban districts schools become more "specialized" in a number of ways, like specializing in the arts or specializing in technology or specializing in making do with far fewer resources than they ought to have. But I will still bet you that nowhere in this country will you find a public school made of tofu.

Bad Management

I have a theory that one of the major problems in America today is just plain bad management. I have watched it trash companies on the smaller, more local scale here, and periodically we get to watch large American corporations go down in flames.

For instance, consider retail giant Sears. Business Insider has published a blistering look inside the ongoing death spiral of the venerable retail giant. Hayley Peterson's reporting is thorough, brutal, and depressing, and it provides a striking look at how bad management can sink a business because in the case of Sears, the problems are neither complicated nor complex-- one terrible CEO is managing to torch the entire place.

CEO Eddie Lambert is the very model of a modern major management disaster. He has no background in retail, and yet, somehow, he is running a giant retail corporation. What's his actual background? Running hedge funds. Making money from investments. This is one of the precepts of modern management-- anybody can manage any business as long as they have previously managed some other business. And if they have previous experience shuffling investment money, then so much the better.

Lambert has tried a variety of stupid bad management ideas. In 2013, Business Insider took a look at his bright idea to split the company into divisions and pit them against each other, because (as you may have heard) competition fosters excellence. It didn't. It fostered a huge lack of cooperation that in turn led to decisions that were bad for the enterprise as a whole. (You can read more about this special kind of management stupid in action here at Bruce Baker's blog post at the time).

Lambert tries to manage at a great distance, by screen. This is also a bit of modern management brilliance-- keep yourself in an insulated bubble far away from the people you manage, because if you get close and get involved and have to look them in the eye, your human considerations might get in the way of your business calculations.

Lambert is a mean, screaming, punishing SOB. As painted by Peterson, he is a manager who demands that his subordinates tell him what he wants to hear and do not disturb him with information that contradicts his "vision" for the enterprise. Like many of these guys, he believes that he is a visionary and that nothing must be allowed to distract from his vision.

Lambert is wrong. Virtually every one of his genius ideas has failed to improve Sears' situation. That includes selling off valuable parts of the company to get a few bucks now to keep things afloat. But every one of his ideas has wrought more destruction than growth. And because he doesn't know a damn thing about retail, his ideas fail to address the most basic central mission (get customers to come into stores, and then sell them stuff they want), his ideas are useless, even destructive as they sap energy and attention from the main thing.

Lambert has covered his own ass. Peterson explains how Lambert has created a web of funds and loans and investments that insure, no matter what happens to Sears (and all the people who work there), Eddie :Lambert will be fully insulated and not hurting financially. Not hurting at all. "He's moving money from one pocket to the other pocket, and he's protected himself on both sides," said one of the many, many former executives from Sears.

I follow stories like this almost as often as I follow education stories, and the same question always comes to mind-- is THIS what reformsters mean when they insist that schools be run like a business? Because if we are going to talk about running schools like a business, perhaps we should get a bit more specific, because an astonishing, frightening number of American businesses are actually run pretty badly.

I've said for decades that education is where bad management ideas go to die, but the really unfortunate thing is that some of the worst ideas shambling about the management landscape like clumsy, destructive beasts-- some of these cause huge amounts of damage before they can finally collapse. I don't even want to think about happens when they take root in the White House. We must at least continue to do our best to keep them from making a mess out of our schools.

Charter Fans Challenge DeVos

The Massachusetts Charter Public [sic] School Association has joined the discussion of Betsy DeVos-- and they've joined it by asking Senator Elizabeth Warren to grill DeVos a little more thoroughly.

Don't worry. Confirmation hearings have to end some time.

MCPSA has had a rough few months. In November, Massachusetts voters resounding rejected a proposal to lift the charter cap and let charters roam free, feasting on public tax dollars. But on January 9th, they sent a letter to Warren that opened with this paragraph:

As the Association representing the 70 Massachusetts commonwealth charter public schools, we are writing to express our concerns over the nomination of Elisabeth DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education. We do not express these reservations lightly, but we believe it is important to raise certain issues that should be addressed by the nominee.

So what's the problem? MCPSA assures the senator that they are "hopeful" that Trump-DeVos will continue "the bipartisan efforts of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations" to keep promoting charter schools. But they have concerns.

They are concerned about reports about DeVos voucher support and charter proliferation in Michigan "that has been widely criticized for lax oversight and poor academic performance, and appears to be dominated by for-profit interests." They even cite a Detroit Free Press piece on the subject.

MCPSA wants to remind their senator that they are super-duper, and the Massachusetts charters are just the best ever (a hugely arguable point, but let's not get sidetracked today). And they believe that oversight and accountability are a big part of their success. And they are concerned that DeVos has a history of opposing oversight and accountability, and somebody had better ask her about that and just, you know, make sure that she is going to support rules and accountability and oversight and demands for quality.

Meanwhile, the New York Times editorial board, which has never met a charter school scheme it didn't like, also came out to express "big worries" about DeVos. The nominee

also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.

Goodness, New York Times! Are you ready to join the rest of us defenders of public education? That would be... unexpected. So what's going on? Why would stalwart charter fans be concerned about a DeVos USED? I can think of four reasons.

1) Protecting the brand.

If you let any kind of riff-raff set up a charter school, and they do a lousy job of it, you hurt the brand. "Charter school" becomes synonymous with "crappy school" instead of "cool private school you can send your kids to for free." Worst case scenario, your lousy practitioners of the charter arts screw up so badly that the public starts calling for really tight regulation and oversight. Nightmare scenario-- some lunkhead messes up so badly that charters end up with more scrutiny and regulation that regular old public schools. And then the fun times are over for everyone. You let one bad apple in, and before you know it, none of us can have nice things.

2) Protecting the coalition.

As suggested by MCPSA's bipartisan President supporter list, reformsters in general and charter fans in particular have built a bipartisan coalition. Conservatives get a free market, highly profitable system of education-flavored school-like businesses, and lefties get a system that supposedly uplifts the poor and restores social equity. The rise of Trump has been a real threat to this coalition, and while some of the pretend progressive groups like Democrats [sic] for Education Reform have mapped out a sort of two step (don't work IN her department, but totally work WITH her department) the fact remains that it is going to be hard to rally progressives and justice warriors behind a Trump administration. But the newly formed Democratic Education Caucus may be just what they fear. Some figure far, far more conciliatory than Betsy DeVos will be needed to bridge that gap.

3) It's that voucher thing.

Not all charter fans love the idea of vouchers. Vouchers, among other things, take a whole bunch of money off the table because the same day that vouchers go into effect, a whole bunch of Catholic and other pre-existing private schools get a windfall. Vouchers mean that charter schools have to compete not just with public schools, but with all the parochial and private schools already out there. Vouchers do not necessarily work out well for charter operators.

4) The threat of the Way-Too-Free Market.

Imagine that you are in the jewelry business and you are creating 14 carat gold. What a pain would it be for someone to enter your market selling rings that are labeled 14 carat gold but which are actually made out of brass, and discover that there are no regulations that forbid them from lying about their product and nobody with the authority to make them stop.

In states like Massachusetts, where there is at least a light smattering of regulation, charter school operators compete on a level-ish playing field because they have to provide an entity that bears at least a passing resemblance to an actual school. But when we get into states like Ohio and Florida and, yes, Michigan, we find people entering the charter school game by providing something that barely resembles a school, pumped up with advertising full of lie-soaked baloney (here's a Florida example). How is a charter school that actually wants to be a school-- how is that supposed to compete with some charter scam artist?

Or look at it this way. Free market competition, particularly between businesses that can't really increase their revenue streams, is not about pursuing quality, but about cutting costs. Regulations essentially establish a financial floor beneath which the business may not sink, established by costs that may not be cut (e.g. auto makers cannot cut costs by removing seat belts). Ideally, that floor is also set by the business person's ethics, but the invisible hand can exert a pretty powerful force, and there will always be people who are far more interested in making a buck than doing the right thing. So charter school accountability and oversight help establish a level beneath which operators may not stoop, and some operators will always want to make sure that their less ethical brethren are restrained from-- well, I would call it cheating, but then, it's not cheating if there's no rule against it. If the rules say you can establish a charter where attendance is not mandatory and you only have to have one teacher for every 200 students, it's not cheating to do so-- but it sure gives you an advantage over competitors.

Put one last way-- charter operators are happy to have ways to undercut public schools, but they would rather not have other charter operators undercut them.

It will be interesting to see if opposition to DeVos continues to appear on her reformy flank. Our first few months in Trumpistan will undoubtedly give rise to much political shifting and re-alignment; only time will tell how that will shake out in the education biz.

Should Devos Make This Argument for Choice?

Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) is using the occasion of the DeVos nomination to make some points about choice as a reform strategy. This is fair-- all of us in the education debates are both agitated about the nomination and aware that, for at least these fifteen minutes, American political discourse is actually paying attention to education. So we're all busy articulating our thoughts about the subject; there's no reason reformsters shouldn't do the same.

So Hess is at National Review with "What Betsy DeVos Should Tell the Senate," a four-part argument for choice that is his dream speech for DeVos, a Hess-crafted argument for choice programs. As is often the case, while I disagree with almost everything he has to say, I appreciate his ability to articulate it clearly so that I can more clearly understand where he goes wrong. So let's look at the four acts of this failed play:

First, teaching and learning are natural, intuitive acts. They aren’t the exotic product of some mysterious alchemy.

There are, of course, other possibilities that are neither gut-based or alchemic. For instance, teaching is a craft that requires training and experience and a serious background of knowledge. Hess's point that "humans are natural learners" with brains "hard-wired" to understand and learn and know is absolutely legit. His observation that "adults are predisposed to share knowledge, interests and skills" might a bit more open to debate. His implication that, therefor, teaching is no big deal and probably anyone can do it (as it doesn't require arcane training or special setting) is arguably false.

His bigger point is that "systems, structures, and bureaucratic rules are getting in the way--" and oh my God, I just realized that Rick Hess of the conservative AEI is actually a closet hippy! Fight the power! Stick it to the man! Let's just sit in a field somewhere and , you know, just be, and just let the learning flow naturally! Now I cannot shake the mental image of Hess in a dashiki with flowers in his hair.

But I digress. He's afraid that systems and bureaucratic baloney are getting in the way of the human dimension of education. That is undoubtedly true in some places. But his conclusion-- "Parental choice is a powerful way to keep the natural, human dimension of school improvement front and center"-- flows from nowhere. In fact, we need look no further than marquee charters like Success Academy or the many No Excuses schools to see choice schools where the natural, human dimension is deliberately and purposefully squelched.

There is no reason to expect that charters would be one iota more humanistic or open than public schools.

Second, Washington doesn’t run schools.

If only. Hess quotes his standard line here: "Washington can force states and districts to do things, but it cannot make them do those things well." On this, we are mostly in agreement. I might add that DC can also be effective in telling states and districts what they may not do ("No, you may not stick all of your students of color in that unfunded tinderbox next to the toxic waste plant.")

Hess's line is also problematic as an argument in favor of no regulation at all, but some regulation is necessary. Put another way, if you do "running a school" badly enough, you are no longer actually running a school. Put another way, to force states and districts to do a thing, you have to define the thing, which inexorably takes you toward defining how to do it well.

As words for DeVos to speak, this is also problematic for reasons laid out by Hess's colleague Andy Smarick. DeVos has spent her whole adult life trying to influence the exercise of power by government; given the steering wheel, will she really say, "We must let states do whatever they want, even if that means they ban vouchers and stifle choice."

Hess is also correct to say that we have seen "that inept teacher evaluation systems" have done harm, but ESSA requires some sort of system, and there is no sign that anyone in power knows what an ept system would look like, least of all a billionaire heiress who has never seen a public school teacher in action in her entire life.

Educators are trapped in the same dysfunctional school bureaucracies as students. They are beleaguered by inconstant school-board governance and frustrated by paperwork. They experience first-hand the problems of ill-conceived accountability systems and federal efforts to micromanage school discipline. Teachers have every right to be concerned about out-of-touch politicos and capricious bureaucrats.

He might have included federal efforts to force Common Core standards on his list, but his point is valid. In the schools, we are acutely aware of all the stupid things forced down upon us by state and federal bureaucrats.

However, as with the first point, there's no reason-- none at all-- to believe that charters and choice offer any sort of improvement. Most of the charter sector is built on the idea of giving teachers the least possible leverage. Hire young, inexperienced teachers and make sure that they have no job protections at all so that you can fire them at any time for any reason. This is not remotely a recipe for "empowering professionals," but it is the recipe that charter operators prefer. Being able to push aside "heavy-handed bureaucratic impediments" is no bonus if you simply replace them with heavy-handed corporate requirements to comply or be fired.

Finally, decades of federal education statutes have spawned a paralyzing tangle of rules, regulations, and mandates. Federal guidelines prevent districts from cutting spending that’s no longer productive, prohibit funds from being distributed in sensible ways, and impose crushing paperwork burdens on harried educators. This stifles schools and districts, along with online programs and personalized learning initiatives.

This is one of the oldest of the charter-choice arguments, and it continues to strike me as hugely unconvincing. 

You hire a housekeeper. You make the housekeeper wear handcuffs whenever they come to work. Then you fire them. "You do a lousy job with those handcuffs one, so we're going to hire someone else."

You have a car. Every day you eat at McFlabby's drive through and throw the garbage in the back seat. One day you say, "This car is a mess. I need to buy a new car."

Why not address the handcuffs and the mess? They're your handcuffs. It's your mess. Fix it rather than discarding the scene of your poor stewardship. If you believe that the Big Problem in education is bureaucratic red tape and over-regulation, then attack bureaucratic red tape and regulation. Push for proper use of the resources you have, rather than agitating for more resources. Because here's the other thing-- if you handcuffed the last housekeeper and dumped a mess in the last car, you'll probably do it all over again. This is why some conservatives oppose vouchers-- because they believe you cannot get government money that is not attached to government strings.

Will DeVos attempt to use any of Hess's arguments? I suppose anything's possible, but one of her problems as a nominee is that historically, DeVos's typical method of "persuasion" has been to threaten policy makers with her money-- if you don't give her what she wants, you will suffer consequences. This may be a great technique for a wealthy lobbyist or a billionaire who wants to change the world, but it's no way to run DC. Previous Secretaries have had trouble accomplishing anything because they wanted to boss Congress around or simply ignore the laws Congress passed and write their own-- there is no evidence that DeVos knows any methods of persuasion beyond brute monetary force.

I'm not looking for DeVos to adopt Hess's talking points, and I hope she doesn't for all the reasons listed above. But I'm not sure she can with a straight face. Hess argues that decades of federal rulemaking have "forced state and local officials into a 'compliance mindset,' distorting the impact of even reasonable-sounding rules." And once again, I don't really disagree with that assessment. I'm just not sure how someone who has demanded compliance in her career as an activist, acting in support of a charter-choice industry that regularly demands compliance of its students-- I'm not sure these are the right messengers for this idea.

Hess calls choice "a way of shifting power from far-off bureaucrats back to families and educators," and while I agree that shift would be welcome, that's not how school choice has worked so far.

Instead of shifting power to families, choice has shifted power to charter operators, who get to control what information is used in their marketing, get to decide which students they want to work with, and get to operate without transparency or accessibility to the parents and taxpayers. Parent "choice" is only of those schools made available to them by groups in boardrooms outside the community.

Instead of shifting power to educators, charters do their best to reduce educator power so that teachers must either take what is offered to them or walk away, must be compliant or lose their jobs, and must be willing to compromise principles because they have no means of speaking up nor protection when they do.

The transfer of power may, as Hess says, be sorely needed. But there are no signs that a choice system will involve such a transfer, and even fewer signs that Betsy DeVos is interested in such a transfer.

Warren Spanks DeVos

Elizabeth Warren has noticed that there will be only one, brief opportunity to grill Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos, and so today she has sent DeVos a letter outlining what sorts of answers she's looking for. The whole thing is sixteen pages long, and while Warren has not always been on the right side of education debates (in particular, she believes in the Big Standardized Test), she pulls no punches here, asking many of the questions that many of us want to see asked. You can read the whole 16-page missive here, but I'll hit the highights for you.

On the very first page, after outlining the reason for the letter, Warren outlines the situation with appropriate bluntness:

There is no precedent for an Education Department Secretary nominee with your lack of experience in public education. While past nominees for Secretary of Education have served as teachers, school system leaders, and governors, and came to the Department of Education with deep executive experience in public education, you have held no such position.

Warren notes that a review of DeVos's record shows that she has "largely advanced your policy agenda through others" mainly through money. Warren quotes DeVos's now-infamous line about expecting a return on her investment.


You are, of course, free to spend your fortune however you choose, but making large political contributions to 'buy influence' does not qualify you to help set policy for the education of America's school children.

Warren wraps up the executive summary by noting DeVos's "non-existent" record on higher ed, and then gets down to the specifics.

K-12 Education

While there is an extensive record of your millions of dollars in political spending to support privatizing elementary and secondary schools and sending public education funds to private and religious schools through voucher schemes, there is little evidence that there efforts have improved public education or have helped students learn and achieve.

Warren lays out (this whole letter includes footnotes) the DeVos record on pumping vouchers, then notes that the evidence on vouchers is "mixed at best." Warren also notes the role of vouchers in the history of segregation. Warren says she is "extremely concerned" about DeVos's "staunch support" for a system that will "siphon away much-needed public education funds" in a manner that allows voucher schools to sidestep standards and discrimnate.

Warren's K-12 questions include asking if DeVos will support only policies with rigorous basis in peer-reviewed evidence, would DeVos use her position to promote voucher systems-- including honoring the ESSA provision that prohibits the USED from meddling in such things. Will DeVos oppose any voucher program that results in a cut for public school funding? And how will she make sure that such programs don't further segregate schools?

Opposition to Accountability in K-12 Education

Warren lays out the long, sad history of DeVos's battle against charter accountability in Michigan, and the mess it has helped feed. She underlines both educational accountability in the broad sense and also as it applies to making sure that schools are "not shortchanging students of color, low-income students, English learners, students with disabilities, and other historically marginalized groups of students."

So Warren's line of questioning is simple-- will DeVos follow the law, and support the parts of ESSA that call for accountability. Will she ensure that schools, including for-profit charters, do not discriminate> Will she vigorously enforce the financial accountability pieces of ESSA? Will she demand that states make extra resources available to poorer schools, and will she punish states that don't?

Higher Education

Warren is "particularly concerned" about the DeVos "paper thin" record on higher ed. USED has a big stick to swing about higher ed, particularly in the management of a gigantic mountain of loan and grant money. Warren doesn't waste time indicting previous administrations-- she just notes there's a huge mess with the whole loan business, and she notes that she and Trump actually agree that "the federal government should not be making a profit off the backs of students trying to get an education."

The department has a trillion-dollar loan portfolio to manage, and Wall Street is salivating at the thought of buying up that debt so that they can soak those students debtors, a large portion of whom are in a real mess. Again, Warren gets into some details about the situation, throwing in stats and names. This is an issue she knows well, and about which DeVos has virtually never said a word.

So Warren asks if DeVos agrees with Warren and Trump on that backs of students thing. Does DeVos know of any "statutory authority" to re-privatize all that student loan? Will DeVos support metrics and measures to fins the bad actors in the student loan biz, and make them act a little less bad? Basically, Warren wants to know if DeVos will have student loan borrowers' collective backs, or will she side with the various sharks (including the federal government) that want to treat students as so much delicious chum.

Oversight of Public, Non-Profit, and For-Profit Colleges and Universities

Warren notes that in exchange for the gazillions of dollars of money that the feds pump, via students, into the higher ed system, the feds have a responsibility to make sure "that students receive the education they were promised and that taxpayer dollars are not wasted on loans to students who attend bogus schools (like, say, Trump University). She notes the abysmal mess that was Corinthian Colleges, generously gives the feds credit for trying to do better at protecting students and taxpayers.

Warren notes that DeVos has never said boo about higher ed policy, but "the very policies you have spend decades advocating for in elementary and secondary education-- more free taxpayer money for private and for-profit education operators with virtually no strings attached-- are the exact policies that have caused so many problems and harmed so many students in higher education." I have some problems with the outgoing administration's policies for higher ed accountability, but Warren is dead-on with this point-- what DeVos wants for K-12 has had disastrous results in higher education.

Warren has a long list of questions here, and they boil down to "In the ongoing struggle between debt-ridden students and predatory and even fraudulent colleges and universities, whose side will you be on? Whose interests are you going to preserve?" Warren's un-boiled-down questions are pointed, sharp and specific, with no room for wiggling.

Finale

America's students and their families need a Secretary of Education who will support public education, hold states and schools accountable for providig quality programs, protect the civil rights of all students, and meaningfully address the student debt and college affordability crisis. The next Secretary of Education must support adequate and equitable federal funding for public education, hold accountable all schools that receive taxpayer dollars-- from charter schools to for-profit colleges-- and ensure that they are delivering a world-class education for our students. These are the qualities I will be looking for in the next Secretary of Education, and I look forward to hearing from you and receiving your answers to my questions during your confirmation hearing.

There are things that I wish Warren understood, including the massive problems created in the hapless quest for federal accountability measures of local schools. But her proposed grilling of DeVos (and her low-nonsense assessment of DeVos's history and proclivities) looks good to me. It will be interesting to see how this goes-- Warren's questions are direct, clear, and specific, with little or no room for vague wobbly generalities. I don't expect a lot of good news to come out of these hearings, but a plain-language face-off between Warren and DeVos could at least provide some entertainment, and require DeVos to give some clear answers.