Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education

At least she won't have a job for very long since he just said recently he'd eliminate the Department of Education?

Her philosophy seems to dovetail with the Trump U model (and she was a huge donor), so I'm not completely surprised. I can't help wondering, though, is Trump picking wholly unqualified people to reassure himself (in his magic mirror) he's the smartest man in the room? All through the campaign his spokespeople and surrogates assured voters he would surround himself with people tops in their fields, and I always wondered how he could possibly stomach that. Nikki Haley has not an ounce of foreign policy experience, and DeVos has badly lost her bids to upend Michigan's education system. It's just so...absurd.

My husband's theory is that he's surrounding himself with people who will be able to take the fall for him when things go wrong.

My legit theory is that he's picking the only people he's ever heard of, which includes major donors to himself and anyone crazy enough to spend a ton of time on Fox news.

My conspiracy theory is that he's intentionally picking the craziest people he can think of because he's trying to convince the electoral college to turn against him because he really doesn't want to be president.

Hang on--I'm missing about the vouchers. From what my Google-fu tells me, vouchers are a way for parents to use public school funding to send their kids to private school, instead of footing the bill entirely for tuition? Is that correct? I'm struggling to see this as a bad thing. What's the catch here? I mean, I assume there has to be, but I'm not seeing it.

When enough parents take money out of the public system, there isn't enough to maintain the public system. Staff would be reduced, schools would close, kids would be bussed, and the financial stakeholders of private schools would be enriched at taxpayer expense. What tends to happen is that poor parents either are not fully informed of, or aren't willing to take, vouchers (because where is the private school? the other side of town?) and thus the poorest neighborhoods would be left with underfunded, decrepit schools.

I am not opposed to public charter schools, working within the public school framework, overseen by the Superintendent of Public Education, for programs that target underserved constituencies within the public system or for more focused schools (ie: STEM academies). I am not in favor of taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to the Catholic archdiocese or (other church-funded schools), or further enriching endowment-holding private academies.

People wanted political outsiders.

Apparently this means "completely unqualified" rather than, say, "not corrupt/immoral."

kaitie said:

My husband's theory is that he's surrounding himself with people who will be able to take the fall for him when things go wrong.

My legit theory is that he's picking the only people he's ever heard of, which includes major donors to himself and anyone crazy enough to spend a ton of time on Fox news.

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These are my theories too, as well as the converse of the first: every power hungry ladder climber, including established but marginalized Republicans of lesser fame, are seeing their chance to get their way and let Trump take the blame when it fails. I wonder if they think he's too unplugged and out of touch to see what they're doing.

Silva said:

People wanted political outsiders.

Apparently this means "completely unqualified" rather than, say, "not corrupt/immoral."

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The worst part is, the bureaucrats who actually know what they're doing will be swept out too. (Also, the bottom of a swamp is a quagmire.)

Chris P said:

I wonder if they think he's too unplugged and out of touch to see what they're doing.

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If they do, they'd be right.

If I were to guess, I'd say Bannon has a significant influence on choices like this one. He may have even solicited the donation and is now returning the favor.

Yet one more lie from Trump, "I'm financing my own campaign and won't be beholden to any donor."

Perhaps if we push the message on social media or call in to the news media pointing this possible appointment out as a payback for the donation, Trump will dump the idea. Long shot, I know because he probably believes the lie that charter schools are a solution*, but he's sensitive to criticism despite the bluster.

*Research has shown that charter schools have the same range of success and failure as public schools, they are not better and not a solution overall.

System Failure: Charter Schools in Louisiana

New Orleans was to show the success of the privatization of public schools after the takeover of the system following Hurricane Katrina. See the introduction to the Shock Doctrine titled Blank is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World to find out the root of the corporate takeover of the New Orleans public school system.

The so-called success of charter schools in New Orleans never happened and in fact, it has been a disaster. See The Cruel Hoax of “Choice” With Charter Schools, So much for school choice in New Orleans and elsewhere, and Rethinking Schools interview with Karran Harper Royal titled Colonialism, Not Reform: New Orleans Schools Since Katrina.

To follow is a report issued in May of 2015 by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Coalition for Community Schools that describes some of the details of the failure.

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They also do more harm than good, especially when it comes to the huge income gap.
Failing the Test: Charter Schools’ Winners and Losers

Research Shows That Charter Schools:
Place huge financial burdens on traditional public schools
Increase racial and economic segregation
In LA, enroll a smaller percentage of children with severe disabilities than do LA’s public schools

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Rhoda Nightingale said:

Hang on--I'm missing about the vouchers. From what my Google-fu tells me, vouchers are a way for parents to use public school funding to send their kids to private school, instead of footing the bill entirely for tuition? Is that correct? I'm struggling to see this as a bad thing. What's the catch here?

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Not only does it take away money from public schools, but there's also a push to use government vouchers for privately funded religious school. Government funds should not be used for religious teachings.

Have you guys heard the Bannon interview where he essentially said that what needed to happen was everything needed to be destroyed so the system could be rebuild the "right" way? It's disturbing as heck to think that someone who wants to burn everything down could be having any influence in decisions like this.

Honest question because I don't know the answer, but do home schoolers get any funding? If students got vouchers to go anywhere, could the parents pocket the money by home schooling?

Also, I agree that government funds shouldn't be used for religious teachings. My daughter's preschool is in a church and would actually lose federal funding if they had a religious curriculum.

kaitie said:

Have you guys heard the Bannon interview where he essentially said that what needed to happen was everything needed to be destroyed so the system could be rebuild the "right" way? It's disturbing as heck to think that someone who wants to burn everything down could be having any influence in decisions like this.

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This was what I was going to say. I'm willing to bet he's behind a lot of these choices as a way to hasten his goal.

kaitie said:

Honest question because I don't know the answer, but do home schoolers get any funding? If students got vouchers to go anywhere, could the parents pocket the money by home schooling?

Also, I agree that government funds shouldn't be used for religious teachings. My daughter's preschool is in a church and would actually lose federal funding if they had a religious curriculum.

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We've homeschooled in 2 states, and never received any government money for our expenses.

In Ohio, we lived in the 6d largest district in the state. Ohio law allowed homeschoolers to participate in extra-curriculars of their district. Our district required "part-time" attendance and determined that PT meant 5 classes per day. Yeah, no. This was a mostly suburban district in central OH.

Now in OK, we're using a combination of Epic online charter schools and homeschooling for our younger kids. Epic funds cannot be used for any religious curriculum purchases. The two older kids go to the local technical school, and we supplement a few things at home.

kaitie said:

At least she won't have a job for very long since he just said recently he'd eliminate the Department of Education?

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Then she'll be FIRED!

Sigh. Remember when Trump said it didn't matter that he was inexperienced, because he'd appoint a crack team (the BEST team) of experts for his cabinet, one that could run things while he concentrated on making America great again?

I had extremely low expectations then, and so far, he's tunneling under them like a dung beetle through, well, dung.

What's the solution to failing schools? According to the nation's Report Card only 40% of high school seniors are ready for college or a career.

"But what do NAEP scores mean? On the 12th-grade test in particular, Ho says, research shows that NAEP maps well with estimates of college and career readiness from Common Core-aligned tests, the SAT and the ACT.
According to research by Ho and others, just under 40 percent of students score at college and career ready levels on NAEP.
"College and career ready" means these scores strongly predict that students will be able to succeed doing college-level academics, or with on-the-job training in a position requiring only a high school diploma."

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016...lege-or-career-ready-says-nations-report-card

Gregg said:

What's the solution to failing schools? According to the nation's Report Card only 40% of high school seniors are ready for college or a career.

"But what do NAEP scores mean? On the 12th-grade test in particular, Ho says, research shows that NAEP maps well with estimates of college and career readiness from Common Core-aligned tests, the SAT and the ACT.
According to research by Ho and others, just under 40 percent of students score at college and career ready levels on NAEP.
"College and career ready" means these scores strongly predict that students will be able to succeed doing college-level academics, or with on-the-job training in a position requiring only a high school diploma."

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016...lege-or-career-ready-says-nations-report-card

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Yep, news flash: our underfunded and besieged public education system isn't doing a great job of preparing most of our kids--especially the ones from poor communities, from uneducated families, or who are English learners, or have other special needs--for college and an adult life as informed citizens who are ready to engage on a lifetime of learning and intellectual curiosity.

So instead of asking teachers what they need to do their jobs better, spending more money on education, and appointing people who are actually experts on education to head the Department of Education, let's solve this problem by tossing public education out entirely and promoting religious schools!

We're all going to need to do more praying if we want to get through the next four years, after all.

Are charter schools doing a better job than public schools overall?

http://www.data-first.org/questions...egular-public-schools-in-student-performance/

And Gregg, I vote for you to return to the bear avatar. I really thought he was cute.

Gregg said:

What's the solution to failing schools? According to the nation's Report Card only 40% of high school seniors are ready for college or a career. ...

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Accounting for some of the problem are the restrictions on teaching such subjects as science where evolution theory is too controversial to teach in some schools. Global warming? Don't offend the parents.

Then there is our ludicrous history curriculum in high schools. Ask any history professor at the college level what he/she thinks of how prepared new students are for college level history.

Text books all over the country are influenced by Texas values because of how the textbook publishing industry works.

Roxxsmom said:

Yep, news flash: our underfunded and besieged public education system isn't doing a great job of preparing most of our kids--especially the ones from poor communities, from uneducated families, or who are English learners, or have other special needs--for college and an adult life as informed citizens who are ready to engage on a lifetime of learning and intellectual curiosity.

So instead of asking teachers what they need to do their jobs better, spending more money on education, and appointing people who are actually experts on education to head the Department of Education, let's solve this problem by tossing public education out entirely and promoting religious schools!

We're all going to need to do more praying if we want to get through the next four years, after all.

And Gregg, I vote for you to return to the bear avatar. I really thought he was cute.

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It's so frustrating because the people making the decisions are rarely educators. It's not just at a federal level. I used to teach in a program that was sorely underfunded, poorly managed, with several unqualified teachers. There were so many things that could have been done to improve that situation. But here's an example of what happens. Our program had a lot of problems, and that was recognized. The school asked what they could do to make things better. Among several other suggestions were things like smart boards and white boards in the classrooms, particularly the latter. We had crappy chalkboards that were hard to read, only white chalk. We wanted white boards because it was easier to read and easier to use multiple colors when explaining things like diagramming a sentence.

Well, they came back and told us we weren't getting white boards or smart boards. Instead, the administration had decided that what we teachers really needed was iPads attached to projectors that we could use in class instead, with screens to project on. Sure, they weren't going to include any training in this technology. Sure, no one could explain why the iPads were better than smart boards other than it was cooler and made the school look more high tech. And sure, we would no longer be able to have students write easily on the board.

Instead of listening to what we needed to actually make our classes function better (included were things like paying us more (you would not BELIEVE how little we were paid) and paying for things like conferences so we could stay on top of new research, everything was ignored so that the higher ups could decide what we needed instead.

It's systemic. What we need is to make sure teachers are well-trained and give them what they need, and to eliminate the things we know for a fact don't work (constant testing, for instance) and to use research-based techniques and technologies. And we need to listen to the teachers. We honestly don't even need to throw more money at the problem. America spends far more per student on education than many other countries that have far better scores. We need to be smarter about how money is allocated and make sure that the people making policy decisions are educators or people who are talking to researchers and educators to make the best decisions.

Which of course is once again not happening here.

MaeZe said:

Accounting for some of the problem are the restrictions on teaching such subjects as science where evolution theory is too controversial to teach in some schools. Global warming? Don't offend the parents.

Then there is our ludicrous history curriculum in high schools. Ask any history professor at the college level what he/she thinks of how prepared new students are for college level history.

Text books all over the country are influenced by Texas values because of how the textbook publishing industry works.

Click to expand...

If they can't read it doesn't matter what kind of history they learn. If they can't do math they probably won't understand much science.

Roxxsmom said:

Yep, news flash: our underfunded and besieged public education system isn't doing a great job of preparing most of our kids--especially the ones from poor communities, from uneducated families, or who are English learners, or have other special needs--for college and an adult life as informed citizens who are ready to engage on a lifetime of learning and intellectual curiosity.

So instead of asking teachers what they need to do their jobs better, spending more money on education, and appointing people who are actually experts on education to head the Department of Education, let's solve this problem by tossing public education out entirely and promoting religious schools!

We're all going to need to do more praying if we want to get through the next four years, after all.

Are charter schools doing a better job than public schools overall?

http://www.data-first.org/questions...egular-public-schools-in-student-performance/

And Gregg, I vote for you to return to the bear avatar. I really thought he was cute.

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The bear was cute - but at an appropriate distance. I thought he/she might try to climb through our window. I came across another one outside about 20 feet away from me - we were both startled.
Charter schools don't necessarily do better than public schooling, but if they fail they go away. Charter or private schools don't have to be religious. My kids went to a non-religious private school because our local, suburban public school was terrible. Interesting that the private school had a much more diverse student body than the public school.
I don't have answers - but I know the problems are complicated and go beyond the quality and dedication of the teachers, especially in poorer neighborhoods.
But in many poorer communities the church is a very important part of people's lives - and churches do much of the charity work in the neighborhood. What do we do if a poor parent feels that a religious school is best for their child's education but they cannot afford the expense?