Devos, betsy

see main and tag

capt 2/15 818

bak

omg

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/betsy-devos-planning-allow-schools-use-federal-funds-buy-guns

Betsy DeVosis working on a plan that would, for the first time in history, allow schools to use federal funds to buy guns, according to a report in The New York Times late Wednesday. The Education Secretary was tasked by the President with putting together a commission to protect schools from gun violence after the massacre at Florida's Parkland High School.

DeVos is examining an Obama-era program of grants that is designed to "provide all students with access to a well-rounded education," "improve school conditions for student learning," and "improve the use of technology in order to improve the academic achievement and digital literacy for all students," according to the Dept. of Education's website.

But because Congress did not specifically block the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants from being used to purchase firearms, DeVos believes she can use her discretion to order those funds be allowed to be used to buy guns, and to fund firearms training.

In essence, DeVos would be using federal funds to subsidize firearms manufacturers and the gun lobby.

DeVos' school safety task force has produced no tangible results. The Education Secretary revealed months after forming her commission that it would not be examining the role of guns in school gun violence.

wa ex op ed (also parscale)

pix wearing glasses so betsy must be smart/serious

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/dont-lower-standards-for-federally-subsidized-for-profit-colleges

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omg flint:

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https://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13064/flint-casualty-right-wing-government-experiment

arn p

Flint Is a Casualty in the Right Wing's War on Local Democracy

Submitted by Arn Pearson on March 31,

This month's hearing in Congress about the crisis in Flint, Michigan shed more heat than light on the decisions that poisoned the water more than 100,000 residents rely on to drink and bathe, including nearly 30,000 children and teens. Democrats focused their ire on Governor Rick Snyder, while Republicans predictably tried to deflect blame onto the Environmental Protection Agency as part of their long-standing campaign to eliminate the agency responsible for regulating polluters.

But two Members of Congress honed in on the real culprit in the debacle: Governor Snyder's "emergency manager" law that stripped Flint of any local democratic control and put its fate in the hands of unaccountable executives hand-picked by Snyder.

"Did that emergency management system fail under your leadership in this matter?" asked Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), demanding a yes or no response from Snyder.

"That would be a fair conclusion," Snyder eventually conceded.

"This is a failure of a philosophy of governance you advocated," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA). "A city in America... is on its knees because of your emergency manager's decision to save $4 million. And now it's going to cost a lot more to clean up."

Is this really happening in the world's leading republic?

Funding the War on Local Democracy

Governor Snyder's controversial emergency manager law is a cornerstone of the Right Wing's war on labor and local democracy in Michigan, which has been orchestrated by a network of "think tanks" and committees backed by the billionaire DeVos family, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the Kochs, and other politicos.

Thanks to record spending by outside groups in 2010 and $6 million of Snyder's own fortune, the Republican Party in Michigan joined 11 other states in capturing the governor's mansion from the Democrats and flipped the Michigan House, giving the party a lock on political power for the first time since 2002.

The Republican Governors Association Michigan 2010 PAC dominated the playing field to become the "largest political action committee in the history of Michigan politics," according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

Through an elaborate shell game, 98 percent of the $8.4 million raised and spent by the RGA MI 2010 PAC came from outside Michigan, while Michigan donors gave the national Republican Governors Association (RGA) $8.6 million, including $5.4 million from the state Chamber of Commerce.

The RGA MI 2010 PAC then contributed $5.3 million to the state Republican Party, and sent off $3 million to back Rick Perry's bid for a third term as governor of Texas, while the national RGA spent $3.6 million on sham issue ads attacking Snyder's Democratic opponent. Still with me?

All in all, the RGA raised and redistributed $114 million to PACs in at least 15 states, helping to elect a slate of right-wing governors, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who moved quickly to attack public sector unions.

Right-wing billionaires and their corporations played a big role in raising all that money. Records on Open Secrets show that the DeVos family, Amway, and its parent company, Alticor, pumped $1.9 million into the RGA's 2010 political operation.

David Koch personally gave $1 million, while his brother William chipped in $100,000 and Koch Industries another $50,000. The Kochs have since become RGA's #1 source of cash, bankrolling the RGA to the tune of $5.3 million during the 2014 election cycle.

Paul Singer also ponied up $1.4 million. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave a million that year, and News America, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. that owns the pro-Republican outlet Fox News, sprung another $1.3 million.

DeVos Dynasty Targets Michigan

Although Snyder—a business executive and venture capitalist—campaigned as a moderate Republican who promised to run the state like a business and create jobs, the deep pockets driving the Republican surge had more ambitious ideas.

Their goals: break the unions, scrap public sector labor contracts, and privatize government services.

Dick DeVos, son of billionaire businessman and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, took a first crack at this agenda when he spent $35 million of the family fortune to run for governor in 2006. He lost badly, but he didn't let up.

In 2009, DeVos helped his close ally, Ron Weiser, get elected as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, where he was able to coordinate the party's 2010 landslide victory. By 2014, political observers were calling the DeVos family Michigan's "most potent interest group," and their spending on in-state candidates and political committees had increased to $4.9 million.

After Snyder's election, DeVos-backed groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy were poised to help move his legislative agenda forward.

Launched in 1987, the Mackinac Center is one of the nation's largest state-based, right-wing pressure groups promoting "free market," pro-business policies. It is an active member of the State Policy Network (SPN) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), two important cogs in the Koch machine.

Mackinac has long been one of the key groups leading the Michigan charge for the big ticket items on DeVos' right-wing wish list, including breaking the back of organized labor.

Ronald Reagan may have once said, "[w]here free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost," but that's just crazy-liberal talk as far as the Mackinac Center is concerned.

As a Mackinac staffer told a state legislator in 2011: "Our goal is [to] outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan."

Mackinac's activities have been fueled by DeVos as well as money from the Koch network of billionaires. Between 2010 and 2012, the Mackinac Center received $1.5 million from the DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, preferred investment vehicles of the Koch donor network, and four DeVos foundations kicked in another $560,000 between 1998 and 2011.

However, those totals public do not reveal how much billionaire cash Mackinac has received through checks from personal trust accounts or from corporations, which are not publicly reported.

Mackinac at the Root of Sweeping Emergency Manager Powers

Once sworn in, Snyder wasted no time in making one of the most audacious power grabs in the country.

On March 16, 2011, while thousands protested outside, he signed Public Act 4 into law, giving him the ability to take near-total control over financially struggling municipalities through appointed "emergency managers."

Few could have been more pleased than the DeVos family and their confederates at the Mackinac Center.

The provision for emergency financial managers dates back to a 1988 Michigan law, but those managers wielded limited power.

Mackinac's Louis Schimmel called for loosening limits and expanding managers' powers as early as 2005, and the group reprinted his article in January 2011. They argued that: "The state's policy prescription for fiscally floundering cities should be to appoint[] far more powerful emergency financial managers than they have in the past."

Mackinac pressed for sweeping authority for emergency managers to assume the powers of elected city councils and mayors, break union contracts, and revise municipal charters, while getting legal immunity from any liability for the results of their actions.

Snyder's emergency manager law included all four of those changes, and the Mackinac bunch patted themselves on the back while singing the law's praises.

Concerned citizens and critics, however, denounced it as "financial martial law."

Other cities around the country have had emergency managers, including New York City in the 1970s, but their powers were limited to financial matters.

The Snyder-Mackinac approach to the law was dramatically, exponentially different. It gave unelected and unaccountable managers chosen by the governor near total control over all city decisions—including things like where a city gets its water.

Snyder's First Emergency "Tyrant"? A Mackinac Guy

Snyder chose the architect of the expanded emergency powers—Mackinac's Louis Schimmel—to be the first person he appointed as an emergency manager, installing him as the potentate for Pontiac, Schimmel's home town.

Within months, Schimmel had fired key city officials and privatized the entire public works department. The Pontiac City Council still held their weekly meetings, packed with angry citizens, but they had no authority to make any decisions.

When asked by a local radio station if the emergency manager law made him a dictator, Schimmel replied: "I guess I'm the tyrant in Pontiac then, if that's the way it is."

Schimmel didn't get any argument from state court judge Rae Lee Chabot, who reversed the manager's action to cut Pontiac's pension board in half, a decision that ignored the legal requirements of Michigan's Open Meetings Act.

"[I]t looks like a dictatorship," Chabot said.

State-Controlled Pontiac Outsources Water to Indicted Corporation

Shortly before Schimmel took control of Pontiac using the law he helped create, his predecessor as emergency manager of Pontiac, Michael Stampfler, flexed his muscles under Snyder's new law and outsourced the city's water treatment to United Water Services.

Watchdog Chris Savage broke the story on Eclectablog.

"This is big news," he wrote, because the giant for-profit water company had just been indicted by a federal grand jury in 2010 on 26 felony counts of conspiracy and Clean Water Act violations for its mishandling of water services in Gary, Indiana. (The company's workers have since been acquitted of criminal charges in the Gary case, but United Water paid $645,000 in civil fines under a consent agreement in 2014.)

Schimmel completed the outsourcing process in November 2011 by firing key public works employees and turning full control over to United Water.

Before long, consumer complaints over water quality, outages, and sewer backups started piling up. It took nearly three years before Oakland County, where Pontiac is situated, announced that it was taking over operations.

All the warning signs were there for Flint.

Savage summed up the problem well:

Emergency Financial Managers are generally good at what they do. They are typically trained as accountants and business optimizers. They know how to trim and cut and lean out organizations to squeeze every last drop of profits out of them. Unfortunately for the residents of Michigan, things like parks, public safety and the protection of natural resources don't produce profits and generally are presented as 'costs'…When we begin to put a price tag on the very things that make our cities, society and state good, safe, livable and lovable, while putting CPA-like EFMs in charge, you can expect that these things will suffer in order to save money, even if it puts our citizens at risk."

Democracy? What Democracy?

Citizens and public employees in Michigan were not having it.

Following extensive protests, opponents sprang into action and quickly gathered more than 200,000 signatures to qualify a voter initiative, Proposal 1, for the November 2012 ballot to repeal Snyder's expanded emergency manager law.

Stand Up for Democracy, the ballot committee backing Proposal 1, received 91 percent of its funding from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Michigan Council 25, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

Opposition to Proposal 1 was led by Bob LaBrant, Senior Counsel at the Sterling Corporation, a leading Republican PR firm, and the former director of political and legal campaigns at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for 34 years. LaBrant's ballot committee, called Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, focused its strategy on a court fight to bump Proposal 1 off the ballot. That effort ultimately failed, and the group spent little on campaigning against the measure.

On November 6, 2012, 53 percent of Michigan's voters cast ballots to repeal Snyder's emergency manager law. But that didn't stop Governor Snyder and his backers.

Barely one month later, Snyder pushed a slightly revised bill through the lame duck legislature and restored the sweeping powers of his emergency managers.

Only this time, he added an appropriation which, under Michigan law, prevents it from being subject to referendum. Check and mate.

Kevyn Orr, who later became emergency manager for Detroit, sent an email to the Detroit Free Press saying, "Michigan's EM law is a clear end-around the prior initiative that was rejected by the voters in November. ...[A]though the new law provides the thin veneer of a revision it is essentially a redo of the prior rejected law."

The new law did contain what critics call a "choose your poison" provision, allowing municipalities to choose between an emergency manager, bankruptcy, arbitration, or a consent agreement.

Not on the table for cash-strapped cities reeling from the collapse of the auto industry and the impact of free trade agreements: any state largesse like the 86 percent corporate income tax cut that Snyder handed Michigan businesses in 2011, worth an estimated $1.7 billion per year.

The resurrection of Snyder's emergency manager law wasn't even the most dramatic thing to happen in the 2012 lame duck session.

According to Mother Jones, DeVos and his close allies—who led a $23.2 million campaign to defeat another voter initiative, Proposal 2, aimed at enshrining collective bargaining in the state constitution—had devised a plan to ram through "right-to-work" legislation before anyone knew what hit them.

They pitched the plan to legislative leadersand a Snyder aide on November 20, and by early December unleashed an ad campaign using a new group, the Michigan Freedom Fund, closely tied to Dick DeVos.

Snyder surprised the public by calling the measure to a vote on December 6, and five days later the birthplace of modern industrial unions became a "right-to-work" state.

The following May, at the State Policy Network's annual meeting in Oklahoma City, Dick DeVos and the Mackinac Center were recognized for their leadership in the legislative fight to win passage of the "right-to-work" law in Michigan. As reported by PR Watch, Dick's wife Betsy DeVos personally presented SPN's highest award to Mackinac's president, Joseph Lehman.

Mackinac's blog noted that it had been pushing for "right-to-work" since 1990 and had posted more than 500 "articles, blog posts, special essays and news [clips] generated by Mackinac Center analysts" backing the legislation.

The victory didn't come cheap.

The big players of Michigan's right wing had spent millions to defeat Proposal 2, an attempt to protect union rights in the state.

That funding included $9.2 million from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, $5.5 million from the Michigan Alliance for Business Growth, $2 million from the DeVos family, and $2 million from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

The Michigan Freedom Fund spent another $1 million on the post-election ad campaign leading up to legislature's adoption of the "right-to-work" law.

The Mackinac Center had an annual budget of $4.4 million as of 2012. Aside from checks to groups that do not disclose their major donors, the DeVos family spent more than $44 million in publicly reported funding on the Republican Party, party committees, and candidates in Michigan between 1997 and 2013.

Expanded Emergency Management Comes to Flint

Plagued by the loss of 90 percent of its industrial workforce, disinvestment, and depopulation, Flint was facing a severe financial crisis by the time Governor Snyder took office.

Since then, Snyder has appointed four emergency managers to seize control of the city's assets and run Flint's local affairs.

Flint voters elected a new mayor on November 8, 2011, but a state review panel declared a "local government financial emergency" the same day, and Snyder had installed his first emergency manager, Michael Brown, by December 1.

The next day, Brown dismissed more than half a dozen key city administrators and Flint's elected officials had their pay and benefits removed.

In January 2012, angry Flint residents joined a protest near Governor Snyder's home. AFSCME filed suit and managed to get a restraining order on Brown, but Brown was back by April in time to unveil his budget, which included cuts in nearly every department and a tax hike.

Jack McHugh at Mackinac claimed in a March 2012 column that municipal budget problems were a "cancerous fiscal malpractice," and he argued that Snyder's emergency manager expansion provided the "rigorous 'chemotherapy'" needed "to sustain the necessary functions of tapped-out school districts and local governments."

In Flint's case, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Frustrated with expensive water service from Detroit and frequent rate increases, Flint and surrounding Genesee County had joined nearby cities in 2010 to form the new Karegnondi Water Authority.The plan was to obtain water directly from Lake Huron once a new pipeline was complete. (That is now projected to be June 2016.)

The Flint City Council voted for the new water source in March 2013, albeit symbolically as it had no power, and the emergency manager and state treasurer approved a plan to switch water supplies a few weeks later.

That's when the trouble started.

"Flint Residents Can Taste History"

mick m shuts down enforcement

Trump administration announced Thursday that it had picked a former official at for-profit DeVry University to head an Education Department unit that polices colleges for student aid fraud.

Last year, DeVry paid $100 million to settle federal claims it misled students.

Julian Schmoke Jr., who was an associate dean at DeVry from 2008 to 2012, will lead federal student aid enforcement activities, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said.

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https://www.alternet.org/watch-betsy-devos-abruptly-cuts-interview-when-asked-about-not-visiting-poor-schools

...DeVos was in Detroit, Michigan to attend the national championships for high school robotics, while promoting students seeking jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, ClickonDetroit reported.

She reportedly spoke on the importance of access to education, but when asked if she planned to visit any Detroit public schools, she said no visits were scheduled. Some of those at-risk schools were even within walking distance of the robotics contest. When reporters asked follow up questions about struggling Michigan schools, DeVos' staff quickly ended the conversations and ushered her away.

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gop leadership conf

MACKINAC ISLAND — In a word, satisfied.

That’s the mood here on Mackinac Island, where the state GOP gathered this weekend for its biannual conference.

It’s the 32nd time the party has held such a conclave, but this time it’s different: The GOP exercises control of state government. Of the U.S. Congress. Of — as GOP Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel says — the U.S. Supreme Court.And for the first time since 1988, this state, once part of the vaunted Democratic “blue wall,” went red in a presidential election.

"We in Michigan have a lot to be proud of, but nothing more than that," said U.S. Secretary of Education andGOP mega-donor Betsy DeVos,addressing the assembly Friday night.

More: Politicians drop big money on Mackinac Island, records show

More: School choice, Secretary DeVos? Let's try good choices

The work wasn’t easy. It took years.

And lots and lots of money. That's the part DeVos didn't talk about. But in this venue, it's impossible to ignore. The DeVos family has made at least $82 million in political contributions nationally, as much as $58 million of those dollars spent in Michigan — with $14 million in the last two years alone.

There’s something really through-the-looking-glass about DeVos addressing a room full of legislators whose campaigns she has funded, lobbyists whose work she has paid for, and activists whose movements she launched. This is, in a very real way, a room DeVos built, in a state her family has shaped, in a country whose educational policy she now plays a key role in administering. The DeVoses are by no means the only big-money donors, on either side of the political aisle. But in Michigan, it's difficult to find a significant state-level policy change the DeVos family hasn't backed: right-to-work, pension reform, unfettered school choice.

And here's what's troubling: When DeVos says that this country's education system is failing, she's right. Compared to other developed nations, America is behind. That's true everywhere, from those just-fine suburban districts whose schools still draw new residents, to large urban districts, where disinvestment and poverty have exacerbated the challenge of educating children.

Kaffer: School slide worries suburban parents, and should worry Lansing, too

Kaffer: Charter choice more complicated than it seems

DeVos is now in a powerful position to spread her philosophy of unconstrained school choice to the rest of the country. But Michigan is left to deal with the mess that the charter movement has wrought.

DeVos' school-choice movement is predicated on the idea that given options, parents will choose what's best for their child. She's not entirely wrong. But this philosophy doesn't account for parents for whom there are no good options. For many Detroit families, too many neighborhoods offer underperforming public schools and underperforming charters. Not much of a choice for parents desperate to do right by their kids.

And while DeVos says she's not against traditional public schools, she takes no accountability for the damage done to traditional districts when kids decamp for charters, taking the state's per-pupil funding with them or the painful reality that while there are strong charter schools that deliver great outcomes, many charters perform worse, or deliver only marginally better results than traditional public schools.

Michigan, far from being DeVos' proof-of-concept, should be the experiment that gives the lie to the viability of school choice as a panacea to the nation's educational woes: In Michigan, after two decades, despite some modest gains in science, fewer than half of students test proficient in math and reading.

Parents should have options — strong educational options — and choice alone doesn't provide them. What would? Investment in what we know works: Highly qualified teachers paid competitive salaries. Wraparound services for children whose parents struggle to provide the advantages some kids are born to. Functional transportation, so that quality choice for parents is something more than a concept. A willingness to look behind an uncompromising ideological agenda at the people whom that agenda should serve.

A little less satisfaction, and a little more self-awareness.

https://www.alternet.org/devos-vision-beyond-privatizing-education

If  Betsy DeVos enjoys the occasional quaff of champagne on her private jet, the recent news that the Supreme Court is poised to deliver a knock-out blow to public sector unions presented a reason to celebrate. The announcement was made just hours before DeVos alit in Harvard Square last week, where she was the star attraction at a school choice conference. At Harvard’s Kennedy School,DeVos was met by one of the largest protests she has encountered to date: an all-ages demonstration vs just about everything Trump’s Secretary of Education has said and done during the past seven months. Inside, the event was tense, even hostile—another rocky outing in a tenure replete with them. Or at least that is the conventional wisdom. 

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Turning red

The latest Supreme Court case to take aim at the unions, Janus vs AFSCME Council 31, began two years ago with a suit filed by yet another right-wing billionaire: Illinois’ Bruce Rauner. While it is framed by conservatives as a case about individual rights and freedom, the aptly named “Janus” is about politics and power. Public sector unions, virtually the only ones left, provide the bank and the foot soldiers that get Democrats elected. At their best, they’ve spearheaded progressive causes that go far beyond the interests of their members. In Massachusetts, the teachers unions have been the driving force behind successful campaigns for a minimum wage hike, paid sick time for all workers, and are now pushing a tax on millionaires. The unions are also virtually the last organized defense of what’s left of our safety net—Social Security and Medicare; the right wants those next.

Just days before DeVos appeared at Harvard, she was back in Michigan, taking what was essentially a victory lap. She exhorted the crowd at a conservative gathering on Mackinac Island to pat themselves on the back for the Mitten State’s having gone Republican in the 2016 Presidential election—the first time since 1988. “We in Michigan have a lot to be proud of, but nothing more than that,” DeVos said. The story of just how the DeVos’ pulled off the feat of turning Michigan red is long and ugly, involving mountains of cash, the steady erosion of representative democracy, and a decades-long effort to dismember the state’s once powerful teachers union: the Michigan Education Association.

Michigan went right-to-work in 2012, ushered into the former cradle of industrial unionism via the DeVos’ trademark combo of political arm twisting and largesse. Another DeVos-inspired law made it illegal for employers, including school districts, to process union dues, while simultaneously making it easier for corporations to deduct PAC money from employee paychecks. This summer the DeVos’ succeeded in driving a final nail into the MEA’s coffin: the GOP-controlled legislature essentially eliminating pensions, among the last tangible benefits that teachers in Michigan receive from their unions. The union leaders I spoke to when I traveled through the state reporting on DeVos’ legacy were candid about the increasingly precarious state of their organizations. But far worse lies ahead. The demise of retirement benefits means that new teachers have little incentive to join the unions; the shrinking terrain of collective bargaining gives veteran teachers little reason to remain in them.

Dark money days

The specter of Harvard students, standing in silent protest during DeVos’ talk was a powerful one; the banner declaring “Our Students Are Not 4 Sale” a blunt rejoinder to a vision in which schools are akin to food trucks. But the sign reading simply “Dark Money” may best have captured DeVos’ ethos, her family’s M.O., indeed her very path to the Trump cabinet.

The sign was actually a reference to a current dark money controversy simmering in Massachusetts, where the chair of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Paul Sagan secretly chipped in $500K from his own deep pockets to last year’s ill-fated campaign to expand the number of charter schools in the state. (Sagan’s defense was that he didn’t want to be perceived as politicizing the issue). The organization that bundled the contributions of Sagan and an array of out-of-state billionaires was later spanked with the largest campaign finance fine in Massachusetts history, a ruling that is now being touted as a potential gamechanger for states that are awash in untraceable cash.

Protesters carried signs demanding that both DeVos and Sagan be "dumped," but only the latter was tarred with the dark money brush. Even among DeVos' detractors, her role in ushering in our new era of dark money has gone largely unheralded. Campaign workers gathering signatures among the demonstrators for a ballot measure that would reduce the influence of money in politics, had no idea, for example, that DeVos herself was a driving force behind Citizens United. But as Jane Mayer describes in Dark Money, removing any restrictions on political spending has been central to the family’s mission, dating back decades.Long before Betsy DeVos was railing against the “red tape” that stifles public schools, she and her clan were seeking to free the campaign finance system from the burdensome regulations limiting the size of the checks they could write and their influence.

The family funded one long-shot legal challenge after another targeting various campaign finance laws. In 1997, DeVos became a founding board member at the James Madison Center for Free Speech, an organization that had as its goal ending all legal restrictions on money in politics. “Soft money,” DeVos wrote in a column for the Capitol Hill magazine Roll Call, was just “hard earned American dollars that Big Brother has yet to find a way to control.”

That the balance of power has shifted from parties to a handful of outrageously wealthy zealots, “a tiny, atypical minority of the population,” as Mayer described, is now undeniable. See for example, a recent New York Times storyabout the coming battle of the billionaires, in this case Mercer vs. Koch, over whose grim libertarian vision of the future will be imposed upon the rest of us. Unions are among the last brake on this transfer of power—now they’re under existential threat.

DeVos lite

A recent poll found that DeVos remains the most disliked official in Trump’s cabinet—not an easy feat to pull off in a gallery of rogues. The depths of her unpopularity are due, not to to the fact that liberals and progressives hate her harder but because her divisiveness crosses partisan lines. When I traveled to Van Wert, OH this spring to take in the spectacle of a joint school visit by DeVos and the American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten, I encountered one Trump supporter after another who still liked their guy, even his other cabinet members, but not DeVos. Her single issue, using taxpayer dollars to send kids to private religious schools, has never been popular with voters, and her Margaret Thatcher “there is no school system” line makes little sense in places like Van Wert, where local schools play an outsized role in binding communities together.

After seven months on the job, DeVos may finally be shrugging off the “nitwit” rep she earned during her disastrous confirmation hearings. DeVos’ Title IX speech at George Mason was sophisticated and skillful, winning plaudits, even from critics. At the Harvard protest, I spotted but a single reference to grizzly bears, on a sign that lay abandoned on the sidewalk. As for the Secretary herself, she gives every indication of being quite pleased with the progress she’s making, and why shouldn’t she be? “Hasten slowly,” is how DeVos described her family’s motto in a recent interview. DeVos’ own family and the one she married into, have sought to impose their vision of a country free of unions and dependence on government, including “government schools,” for two generations. Now, after decades of slow hastening, they’re almost there.In other words, this should be fertile territory for Democrats. But the coming decimation of public sector unions also means that the Democrats will be more dependent than ever on corporate money, especially from the financial sector. Accept the growing influence of the party’s biggest donors, comprised of Wall Streeters, hedge funders and Silicon Valley elites, and you also get their cramped and narrow vision of what is possible. And the moneyed influencers within the Democratic Party share a vision of education—personalized, privatized, union free—that’s increasingly difficult to distinguish from the one DeVos espouses.

Jennifer Berkshire is the education editor at AlterNet and the co-host of a biweekly podcast on education in the time of Trump.

bondi lawyer muniz

9/17 her only action (on higher ed?) or just intent rape?

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from wood NAS:

Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”

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civil rights, student debt

http://www.alternet.org/education/betsy-devos-undermines-civil-rights

...RANDI WEINGARTEN: Look, the great thing is that 18—you know, we went to—we went to the attorney generals. It is fantastic that the attorney generals, 18 or 21 of them, are now, you know, suing to enforce the borrower defense law—or, regulation. I mean, what this essentially means—let me just—because those are code words. What this essentially means is that Corinthian College went bankrupt. All these kids were left holding the bag, with the student debts. What the borrower defense law means—or, rule means, is that just like Corinthian gets its debts discharged in bankruptcy, these kids should not be holding the bag. That’s what it means. So, the AGs are suing on that. And look, we—thankfully, we were able, in a bipartisan way, to get the new federal law covering K-12 passed last year in the Congress. And even Lamar Alexander just said to Betsy DeVos, "You’re misreading the law."

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about—well, NPR is reporting Wayne Johnson will be the new head of Office of Federal Student Aid, after James Runcie abruptly resigned last month.

RANDI WEINGARTEN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is according to the Department of Education. FSA is an agency responsible for administering $1.4 trillion in outstanding student loans from 42 million borrowers, plus aid programs for millions of college students. As not mentioned in the department’s press release and first reported by BuzzFeed, Johnson is currently the CEO of Reunion Financial Services Corporation, a private student loan company.

RANDI WEINGARTEN: Right. I mean, this is—I don’t think saying the fox guarding the hen house is enough to describe what is going on. You basically have people from an industry that bilked kids, that have had predatory practices, now running the student aid programs. And it’s just—again, it is this preference, this out-and-out preference for the lenders, for the for-profit colleges, that we have fought for the last several years. Like, you can’t give worthless degrees and leave kids holding the bag with unsustainable debt. And basically, we are winding back the clock on this, as well as on rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Randi Weingarten, we want to thank you very much for being with us, president of the American Federation of Teachers, as we move on to other education news.

==

http://www.alternet.org/education/betsy-devos-queen-obfuscation-talking-nonsense

After 156 days on the job, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos finally sat down with the media on Thursday. Capping off the start to a controversial listening tour on campus sexual assault issues, DeVos took a handful of questions from reporters and mostly delivered talking points in return.

DeVos passed on answering a question about whether she plans to rescind Obama’s 2011 Title IX guidance. To a query about whether she’d erred in agreeing to meet with so-called men’s rights groups, she said it was important to “hear from both sides.” And in response to the star question of the day, delivered by USA Today’s Greg Toppo, about whether having a president who has admitted to sexual assault makes the issue harder for her to deal with, she deflected.

Thursday's brief press event marked the second major media event of the week for the notoriously reporter-averse education secretary. This weekend she appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show for what was billed as her first-ever network interview. It was over in five minutes and made her remarks on campus sexual assault seem weighty by comparison.

Her substance-free performances are all the more remarkable given the fierce urgency with which DeVos has pursued her agenda since arriving in Washington. Sidelining federal civil rights enforcement, rolling back protections for students who have been defrauded by shady for-profit colleges, meeting with a steady stream of “edupreneurs” and flogging school choice at every turn—these have been busy days for the Secretary.

The NBC interview was actually a trio of softballs thrown by reporter Craig Melvin as part of a segment on Philadelphia’s charter school wars. Melvin met up with DeVos at Boys Latin of Philadelphia Charter school. You can read their entire exchange yourself:

Melvin: You go to a lot of schools like this, I would imagine.

DeVos: I do.

Melvin: Critics have said the success of schools like Boys Latin has come at the expense of neighborhood schools. Are you OK with that?

DeVos: Actually, I think schools like this are a really great example of schools that are meeting the needs of kids that haven’t fit in elsewhere.

Melvin: But if there’s only one pot of money, aren’t traditional public schools always end up getting shortchanged to some extent?

DeVos: Great public schools are going to continue to do a great job for the students that they’re serving. I think instead of talking about schools and school buildings we should be talking about funding students and investing in individual students.

And that was it.

In her six months as the top education official in the land, DeVos has gained a reputation as press-averse. The words “closed press” pepper her weekly calendar, and she shuns open media events. But even when a reporter is lucky enough to get a microphone in front of her, forget about forceful follow-ups. That line about funding individual students instead of schools is a DeVos favorite; she makes that statement virtually everywhere she goes. I’ve yet to hear anyone really push her on what it means, or where it leads. New York City requires a massive infusion of cash in order to repair its train woes, but by DeVosian logic we should be talking about funding and investing in individual commuters instead.

As for DeVos’ point about Latin being a place for “kids who haven’t fit in elsewhere,” it came on the heels of a fairly brutal exchange between Melvin and Latin founder and CEO David Hardy about the kids who don’t attend the school. As Melvin pointed out, Latin has fewer students with disabilities than the Philly public schools and not a single student who is still learning English. His refusal to let Latin founder and CEO David Hardy off the hook on this point was squirm-inducing, but DeVos should have been at the other end of Melvin’s insistent questioning. She has consistently held up as models schools that don’t accept hard-to-teach kids. This spring she toured a voucher school in Indianapolis that had no special educationstudents, then touted a Florida private school that says it isn’t equipped to accept kids with special needs. Now here she was again, calling for more schools like Latin.

“This is where Betsy DeVos cherry-picks the kind of kids that she wants to fund and invest in,” says Philly city councilwoman Helen Gym, who was also featured in the segment. I called her to find out if she’d had a chance to chat with DeVos (no) and what she’d thought of the Secretary of Education’s performance. “She wants to invest in certain students and exclude others. And I think she wants to profit off of it too.”

Full disclosure: I’m a Gym fan, and wrote a story about her run for office in 2015 that entailed my following her around the city talking to prospective voters in neighborhoods where shuttered schools stood as hulking symbols of disinvestment. On the campaign trail, she went after public officials whom she accused of walking away from public systems, and called out a trio of billionaires who’ve bankrolled the “disruption” of Philadelphia’s schools. Note to Dems: Gym won handily, buoyed by voters who believed her when she said you can’t lift up a city and the people who live there without lifting up its public schools.

Contrast that with the hyper-individualism of DeVos’ vision, in which families, untethered from neighborhood, public institutions or context, choose what she would call a “learning option.” It’s a radical vision that fares best in the abstract. (In Michigan, a collective uproar ensued after the DeVos family’s GOP allies passed a law making it harder for communities to raise money for schools; a judge later threw it out.) “She makes these very banal statements about kids before adults and students before systems,” says Gym. “But at the same time she’s deliberately undermining public schools.”

Higher education reporter Adam Harris argues that by mostly refusing to talk to the press, DeVos robs the public of knowledge of what she’s up to, especially as the department makes major policy shifts. But it’s worse than that. The combination of silence and banality effectively mask just how radical her vision is. Instead, we’re left to speculate based on the company she keeps. This week, in addition to her listening session with men's rights groups, she met with a libertarian group in California that maintains parents should be able to flee public schools that are indoctrinating their children into socialism. (Closed press.) Earlier this spring she paid a call onLarry Arne, the president of Hillsdale College, who has called for rescuing kids from failing schools in order to “reverse support for socialism.” And when somehow the radical anti-gayFamily Research Center ended up on the Department of Education guest list for a Father’s Day event, its support for conversion therapy attracted headlines, but not its view that homeschooling is the only schooling.

After months of evading the media, DeVos finally surfaced this week—and still had nothing to say. Meanwhile, her actions and her allies tell us everything we need to know.

[vid mg kelly?]

==

mma april

In the lead-up to billionaire Republican megadonor and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ confirmation, numerous media outlets published deep-dive investigations into DeVos’ background, significant political contributions, potential conflicts of interest, far-right ideology, and negative influence on Michigan policies.

But since she formally took over at the Department of Education, the investigative work seems to have mostly dropped off; coverage of DeVos has focused more on her public gaffes than the inner workings of the agency she now runs. It certainly doesn't help that DeVos and her department have struggled with media transparency. As education media writer Alexander Russo wrote, "DeVos takes press questions at events only occasionally, has yet to grant a formal interview with a major national education reporter, and heads a department that only intermittently provides answers in a timely manner – through a spokesperson whose name reporters are forbidden to use. The agency has even struggled to put out her weekly schedule in advance of public events."

It's time for investigative journalists to dig deeper and shine light on DeVos' priorities, such as early staffing decisions at the Education Department. There's certainly plenty to explore -- many of the temporary staffers in the Education Department are veterans of the right-wing think tank echo chamber on "education reform," and some have anti-LGBTQ and anti-black track records. Like DeVos, almost none have spent significant time as educators.

As ProPublica reported, the Trump administration has installed hundreds of officials across federal agencies including the Education Department (known as “beachhead” teams). Though the positions are designed to be temporary, many are expected to transition into permanent roles, and may have “taken on considerable influence in the absence of high-level political appointees” who need to first be vetted and confirmed by the Senate:

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

[...]

Much about the role of the beachhead teams at various federal agencies is unclear. But close observers of the early weeks of the Trump administration believe they have taken on considerable influence in the absence of high-level political appointees.

The beachhead team members are temporary employees serving for stints of four to eight months, but many are expected to move into permanent jobs.

Several Education Department Officials With Offensive Online Histories May Remain On Staff

A December Politico report highlighted three newly named Education Department staffers who had previously posted offensive comments about women and people of color online. Two of the staffers still appear to work for DeVos’ agency months after the report. Kevin Eck, a special assistant to Secretary DeVos, had to apologize after he tweeted disparagingly in late 2015 about the “all black cast” of NBC’s The Wiz adaptation. Politico also documented several disparaging tweets by Eck about the LGBTQ community, including at least one post that pushed the dangerous “bathroom predator” myth people use to justify barring transgender individuals (students, in particular) from using the appropriate public facilities. According to his LinkedIn profile, Eck still serves in this role at the department.

The Politico article identified another staffer, Derrick Bolen, who “has tweeted numerous statements that could be considered insensitive to African-Americans and women.” Bolen’s posts include at least one in which he used a racial slur. He began serving as a confidential assistant to DeVos in the early days of the administration; ProPublica notes that Bolen “appear[s] to have switched departments” and may now be working at the Department of Labor. His LinkedIn profile does not list any past experience in teaching or education policy; instead, Bolen served most recently as a regional field director for the Republican National Committee.

One "Beachhead" Staffer Was Investigated For Corruption By The Federal Government

Former Alaska state Sen. Jerry Ward served as a special assistant to Secretary DeVos until his reported resignation last week. Years before Ward worked as the Alaska state director for the Trump campaign or served on Trump’s inaugural committee, he was investigated by the Department of Justice for alleged corruption stemming from “his relationship with private prison advocate William Weimar.” According to local media coverage, federal prosecutors also concluded that Ward had interfered with a witness in a corruption trial in order to protect himself from prosecution. Little is known about Ward's resignation from the "beachhead" team; he has not discussed the matter publicly. 

Prominent Education Officials Have Serious Ties To The For-Profit Education Industry

Journalists have already begun identifying new members of the Education Department staff -- beachhead or otherwise -- whose backgrounds raise strong conflict-of-interest questions. In March, The New York Timesreported that Robert Eitel, a vice president for regulatory legal services at for-profit college operator Bridgepoint Education Inc., is on leave from the position to work as a special assistant to Secretary DeVos. Ethics experts told the Times that Eitel’s connections to Bridgepoint, in particular his legal work while the company faced several government investigations, could “bump up against federal rules involving conflicts of interest and impartiality.” Eitel was recently granted written permission from ethics officials to work on regulations specifically affecting student loan repayment; under his legal leadership, Bridgepoint paid out “a settlement of more than $30 million over deceptive student lending.”

Another early member of DeVos’ staff, Taylor Hansen, also has significant financial ties to the for-profit higher education world; he’s both a for-profit college lobbyist and the son of the former CEO of a student loan guarantee agency. As Bloomberg News reports, Hansenresigned from his role at the Education Department in mid-March, just one day after the department announced a reversal on an Obama-era directive related to fees that loan guarantee agencies can charge some students who default on their loans. The change, Bloomberg explained, “is almost certain to hand … a victory” -- and possibly $15 million in additional revenue -- to the company that, until very recently, was operated by Hansen’s father.

Jerry Falwell Jr. Brings A Handful Of Conflicts And Concerns To The Department

Jerry Falwell Jr. is the son of televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. and the president of Liberty University, a Christian college in Virginia founded by Falwell Sr. in 1971. He has also been tapped to head a "task forceon higher education” in the Trump administration, reportedly at the insistence of senior White House official and former Breitbart.com executive Stephen Bannon. Falwell Jr. has encouraged students to carry concealed weapons on campus in order to “end those Muslims,” and defended President Donald Trump’s 2005 comments boasting about sexually assaulting women. Liberty University also offers insight into Falwell Jr.’s leadership and priorities -- the school is closely tied to the Liberty Counsel, an anti-LGBTQ hate group, hosts extremist groups and individuals for campus events, and prohibits “sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman.”

Little information has come to light about Falwell’s plans for the higher education task force, but reports indicate that he is “particularly interested in curbing rules that require schools to investigate campus sexual assault under Title IX, a federal law that bans discrimination in education.” Falwell has also said that he wants the task force to “re-evaluate ‘overreaching regulation’ by the federal government,” reportedly in areas such as college accreditation and federal loan cancellation for defrauded students, leading to calls for more information from Senate Democrats who see potential for conflicts of interest. “Mr. Falwell’s personal and financial interests on issues affecting student loan debt, recruitment, and distance education are extensive,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that Liberty University was the third-largest recipient of federal student loans in 2016.

Numerous “Beachhead” Officials Have Ties To Privatization Groups DeVos Has Supported -- And Almost None Have Ever Worked In Classrooms

The vast majority of “beachhead” officials within the Education Department have close connections to the right-wing “education reform” media echo chamber bankrolled by billionaires and private corporations -- but little to no experience in the classroom.

This list includes at least four staffers who have previously worked for education privatization groups led by DeVos in some capacity: Michael Frendewey, a communications staffer at American Federation for Children, which was founded by DeVos and led by until her nomination; and Andrew Kossack, Josh Venable, and Neil Ruddock, all former staffers of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which counted DeVos as a board member until her nomination.

The longer list of staffers who come from the dark-money “education reform” echo chamberincludes Jason Botel, of the DeVos-affiliated Maryland Campaign for Achievement Now; Michael Brickman, a former staffer with the Fordham Institute and Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI); Gillum Ferguson, a former staffer for conservative outlets Opportunity Lives and The Washington Free Beacon; Alexandra Hudson, who has written education policy pieces at conservative outlets and think tanks like TheHeartland Institute, The Federalist, and *The Weekly Standard* and recently worked as an education policy analyst for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (part of the State Policy Network of right-wing think tanks); Lauren Rigas of the American Conservative Union and the American Enterprise Institute; and Patrick Shaheen, a former staffer at the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.

And DeVos’ Brother, Erik Prince, Held A Secret Overseas Meeting To Create A “Trump-Putin Back Channel”

Let’s not forget the bombshell Washington Post report from April 3: Erik Prince, DeVos’ brother and the founder of the infamous Blackwater security firm, met with “a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and [then] President-elect Donald Trump” days before Trump’s inauguration. According to officials, Prince “presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump” during the secret Seychelles meeting although he has no formal role with the administration. The meeting took place less than two months after Trump announced he would pick Prince’s sister to head the Education Department.

IHE

trans team? apr 13

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced the hiring of nine senior staff members Wednesday, including an acting under secretary with significant experience working on student aid and postsecondary issues.

The hiring of most of the individuals in the announcement had previously been discussed publicly, but it was the first official announcement from DeVos about who would fill key staff positions. Like other federal agencies in the Trump administration, the Department of Education has gone nearly three months without naming appointees to a number of political positions.

James Manning, who was named senior adviser to the under secretary and acting under secretary of education, was picked last November to lead the Trump "beachhead" team at the department -- the group appointed by the incoming administration to assist with the transition at each federal agency. Manning has experience as a department official going back to the Carter administration, last serving as acting chief operating officer of federal student aid. As acting under secretary, Manning would be the most senior official in the department after DeVos.

Rohit Chopra, the former student loans ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said Manning is experienced and fair-minded.

"He knows the Office of Federal Student Aid inside and out, which has been a trillion-dollar headache for many an education secretary," said Chopra, who also served as a special adviser to former Education Secretary John B. King Jr. "I hope his role signals that cleaning up loan servicing and debt collection will be a top priority."

The hires announced included others with deep experience in education policy, as well as more controversial picks.

The addition of Rob Eitel, who was named senior counselor to the secretary Wednesday, was the subject of media scrutiny last month after it was reported that he had taken a leave of absence from for-profit college chain Bridgepoint Education Inc. to serve as a special assistant to DeVos. Eitel had been the chief compliance officer at Bridgepoint, which would be affected by the department's approach to regulations such as borrower defense and gainful employment.

Other hires announced Wednesday included:

• Josh Venable, chief of staff
• Dougie Simmons, deputy chief of staff for operations
• Ebony Lee, deputy chief of staff for policy
• Jana Toner, White House liaison
• Jose Viana, assistant deputy secretary and director for the Office of English Language Acquisition
• Jason Botel, deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education and acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.

Senate approval would be required only for the assistant secretary position.

The appointment of Candice Jackson as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights has stirred concerns among advocates for victims of sexual assault. Jackson staked out a public image as a supporter of women who accused former President Bill Clinton of assault.Last year, however, she called the women who accused President Trump of harassment and assault "fake victims." Jackson was also named acting assistant secretary. The "acting" designation for Jackson, Botel and Manning would allow them to initially fill those roles without Senate approval.

Brenda Tracy, an activist on sexual assault issues and a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Commission to Combat Campus Sexual Violence, said the appointment of Jackson felt like "the rug being pulled out from under us" for advocates of Title IX protections.

"It just feels like a slap in the face," she said. "It's disheartening to know you don’t have the support of your government behind you."

7/16

public citizen is suing Betsy DeVos.

:{Before she was installed as Secretary of Education, the extreme right-wing magnate had a financial interest in hedge funds invested in for-profit colleges and a corporation that went after student loans in default.

Now DeVos is blocking implementation of the “Borrower Defense Rule” — a rule to protect students defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges.}:

Along with a Harvard Law School program, we represent two victims of predatory student loans, Meaghan Bauer and Stephano Del Rose.

The two former students of the New England Institute of Art allege that the for-profit institute deceived them and left them with a useless education, few job prospects and tens of thousands in debt.

They would like to sue the school. But the school is trying to keep them out of court, and force them into a corporate-friendly arbitration system where their rights will be restricted.

The Borrower Defense Rule exists to ensure defrauded students like Bauer and Del Rose can have their day in court, and as a class action — with others alleging they were similarly scammed — if they choose.

But the students can’t invoke the protections of the rule while DeVos delays it.

So, we’re suing DeVos to force the rule to take effect.

The rule also authorizes the Department to cancel student loans for schools that lure students through trickery and deception.

Trickery and deception are the stock-in-trade for the for-profit school industry.

But the students can’t effectively assert their right to have the loans cancelled while DeVos delays the rule.

Our case charges that DeVos’ delay has no basis in law and that she failed to follow the proper procedures to change a rule.

==

==

at same time devos meeting w/ men's gp https://thinkprogress.org/devos-sexual-assault-bf7801b8264c

After months of receiving requests for meetings from advocates for sexual assault survivors, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally decided to sit down with them. But she’s also meeting with groups that are critical of Title IX guidance on campus rape, some of which have histories of intimidating rape survivors and dismissing domestic abuse against women.

The department reached out to the National Coalition for Men, SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, and Families Advocating for Campus Equality, according to Politico.

DeVos has not taken a position on 2011 education department guidance on campus sexual assault, which expanded protections for sexual assault survivors by requiring all schools to have procedures in place to handle and quickly investigate complaints. But her decision to meet with these groups isn’t a good sign.

The National Coalition for Men, which was founded in the 1970s, has a long history of what is now known as “men’s rights activism.” One of the groups’ chapters published the photos and names of women, while calling them “false accusers.”

In 2012, the group supported the Republican House version of the Violence Against Women Act, which removed protections for LGBTQ people in crisis centers. The group has been very litigious when it notices events specifically designated as for women. Its members sued a strip club for letting women in for free during its “ladies night” and sued a company called Chic CEO for not letting men into a women’s networking event.

Harry Crouch, president of National Coalition for Men, has also vocally blamed survivors for the abuse they faced. In a 2014 interview with Pacific Standard, Crouch defended Ray Rice, a former football player, who was indicted in 2014 on third-degree aggravated assault for an incident involving his then fiancee. “I’m not saying he’s a good guy,” Crouch said. “But if she hadn’t aggravated him, she wouldn’t have been hit. They would say that’s blaming the victim. But I don’t buy it.”

SAVE: Stop Abusive and Violent Environments is included in a list of misogynist websites put together by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2013, SAVE published an article alleging that many civil rights, like the “right to privacy in family affairs,” have been “undermined by domestic violence laws.”

Assuming that the article, which is still on the site, represents its views, SAVE also thinks attorneys should be able to ask “detailed, often intrusive questions about the accuser’s prior sexual history.” The group takes issue with a federal rule that, with a few exceptions, protects survivors by not allowing evidence of a victim’s sexual behavior to be admissible in court.Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) is a non-profit founded a few years ago by mothers of sons who were accused of sexual misconduct while they attended college. The website describes the “ruined futures” of the accused and “havoc of unjustly dismantled lives.” Under the text, “Title IX’s future victims,” the site published the story of a man who said he was falsely accused of rape and equates his experience to that of a rape survivor.

“Falsely accused students suffer emotional trauma similar to that of rape victims, and yet receive no emotional support from their colleges,” the site

reads.

Researchers estimate that somewhere between 2 to 10 percent of rape allegations are false, but even among those who are falsely accused, it’s rare for men to end up in prison as a result. For students who are found responsible for sexual assault, only 30 percent were actually expelled, according to a 2014 Huffington Post analysis of data from over 100 schools.

But that hasn’t stopped FACE. One of its founders, Sherry Warner-Seefeld, told the National Review that on the whole, she found it “dangerous to our country” to require universities to conduct annual surveys on sexual assault and publish the results online.

Hosting these groups further hints that Devos may be open to rescinding the 2011 expanded guidance on Title IX protecting sexual assault survivors. During her confirmation hearing in January, Devos said there were “conflicting ideas and opinions around that guidance” and said it “would be premature” to commit to upholding the guidance.

DeVos has also donated to a group that opposed the guidance. The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation made donations totaling $25,000 to Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has shared articles dismissive of sexual assault survivors. One read, “Unfortunately, much of the feminist ‘war on rape’ has conflated sexual assault with muddled, often alcohol-fueled, sexual encounters that involve miscommunication.”

In April, the department welcomed Candice Jackson as the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees investigations into how universities handle campus rape.Jackson has previously called the women who accused Trump of sexual assault during the campaign “fake victims.”

Whatever the department decides on the 2011 guidance, it is already making moves that would adversely affect sexual assault survivors. An internal Office for Civil Rights memo sent by Jackson narrows the approach of investigations into civil rights complaints, which includes campus rape. This means that the department will stop requiring staff to look at three years of complaint information in order to understand systemic discrimination within a school district or university. The memo also loosened oversight of regional offices.

This article has been clarified to show that FIRE shared but did not publish an article about campus rape sexual assault.

http://time.com/4857776/candice-jackson-sexual-assault-apology/

at same time devos meeting w/ men's gp https://thinkprogress.org/devos-sexual-assault-bf7801b8264c

(WASHINGTON) — The Education Department's top civil rights official's "flippant" remarks are raising questions about the government's commitment to fighting campus sexual violence, even as she issued her second apology in as many days for attributing 90 percent of sexual assault claims to both parties being drunk.

Candice Jackson, assistant secretary for civil rights, told victims of sexual assault meeting with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday that she was sorry for her remarks.

==

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/05/27/529867484/education-department-faces-deep-cuts-devos-faces-tough-questions

==

swamp things

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/devos-paris-agreement-heartland-2437936505.html

Senators Question DeVos on Connection to Heartland Institute's Mailing to Educators Denying Climate Science

:{:{

Four Democratic senators sent a letter to Education Sec. Betsy DeVos this week calling out her support of President Trump's decision to pull out of Paris.

The letter points out that DeVos has not commented "on any administration decisions or policies outside of the purview of the Department of Education" except for Paris, which she praised in a statement last week.

https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017-06-07%20Heartland%20Letter%20-%20DeVos.pdf

The senators raised concerns over a Heartland Institute-funded campaign to distribute climate denier literature to every public school science teacher in the country, and questioned if DeVos or her staff had contact with the Heartland Institute on climate science issues.

The senator's—Sheldon Whitehouse, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey—wrote in the letter:

"It is our sincere hope that neither White House staff nor Department of Education officials have turned to the Heartland Institute on the issues of climate change and climate science, or had any roll in this mailing to educators."

The senator's asked Education Sec. DeVos to answer the following four questions:

1. Have any staff members at the Department of Education had contact with individuals associated with the Heartland Institute on climate, science, or science education issues? If so, on what dates did these consultations occur and who did they involve?

2. If the answer to the previous question is yes, please provide copies of all relevant correspondence between you and any Department of Education staff and representatives of the Heartland Institute.

3. Are you or any members of your staff aware of discussions between White House staff members and individuals associated with the Heartland Institute? If so, what were the dates and topics of these conversations and who did they involve?

4. Are any informational resources currently provided through Department of Education )e.g. What Works Clearing House, Teaching Resources page, etc.) created in collaboration with, or reviewed by, anyone associated with the Heartland Institute?

For a deeper dive:

Washington Post $, PBS, The Hill

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/devos-is-questioned-about-campaign-to-influence-climate-change-education/

four Democratic senators are sharply criticizing a conservative think tank’s efforts to bring climate change skepticism into the nation’s public schools as “industry funded” and “possibly fraudulent” and demanding to know whether federal education officials have been in contact with the group.

}:

The Heartland Institute has been sending books, DVDs and pamphlets to science teachers across the country promoting its stance that climate change is caused by natural phenomena rather than human activities — a view :{rejected:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: by nearly all climate scientists. Heartland’s campaign to influence how climate science is taught in public schools was first reported by FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project :{in March:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

The Illinois-based non-profit vows to continue its efforts, saying it has already sent more than 300,000 packages to K-12 and college-level science teachers since the launch of the campaign earlier this year. Mailings have wrapped up for the summer break, according to Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely. He added, however, “This is not the end of Heartland’s efforts to bring balance to the climate debate in our schools, but just the beginning.”

In a letter sent to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — all of whom have been outspoken on climate change issues — described the campaign as an effort “to disseminate fossil-fuel industry talking points as curriculum for science teachers.”

The senators asked DeVos whether any Education Department officials have had contact with individuals associated with the Heartland Institute “on climate, science, or science education issues,” and whether any informational resources put out by the department have been created in collaboration with Heartland.

The senators also asked DeVos whether she was aware of any discussions between the White House staff and Heartland. In March, the group’s president and CEO, Joseph Bast, told FRONTLINE and GroundTruth, “We’re getting a lot of requests for expert opinion from the White House … That’s very new.”

Heartland was founded in 1984 and has a history of promoting causes that align with the interests of industry. In the 1990s, for instance, the organization lobbied against smoking bans, for which it was rewardedwith donations from tobacco company Philip Morris. Today, the group promotes a bevy of libertarian and conservative causes, including oneDeVos has spent years advocating for: The school choice movement, which would allow students to spend public dollars to attend private and religious schools.

But Heartland is perhaps best known for its position as a leader in the movement to reject the scientific consensus on global warming. Among the group’s arguments is that curbing greenhouse gases would damage the economy — the primary reason given by President Donald Trumplast week for pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

DeVos has, until recently, been relatively quiet on her personal view about climate change. During her nomination process in January, she was asked by Whitehouse whether she believed that humans cause climate change. DeVos answered that because the Education Department has no jurisdiction over climate change, “I would respectfully defer to my colleagues in other agencies” on the issue, and noted that the department “is prohibited from dictating curricula in our nation’s schools.” States and school districts, rather than the Education Department, direct curricula and science standards.

However, last week DeVos issued a statement praising President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. “The announcement made today by the President is one more example of his commitment to rolling back the unrealistic and overreaching regulatory actions by the previous Administration,” the statement read.

It was that statement that prompted Whitehouse and his colleagues to write the letter, he said. “It raises at least a suggestion that there may be more mischief going on between the fossil fuel industry and its denial front groups and the administration through Secretary DeVos,” the senator said in an interview.

DeVos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Heartland declined to comment on whether anyone at the organization has corresponded or met with staff at the Education Department, but in a written statement Bast said that his organization stands by the materials it has sent to teachers, and will continue to send out copies as it sees fit. Bast said the senators’ letter consisted of “purely partisan rhetoric apparently aimed at undermining the presidency of Donald Trump,” and said that Whitehouse is guilty of the very thing Heartland has frequently been accused of: bringing “politics into high school classrooms.”

The senators’ letter isn’t the first Democratic condemnation of the mailing campaign: In April, three ranking Democrats in the House publicly urged Heartland to stop the mailing campaign

Whitehouse also sent letters to a dozen scientific and educational organizations to “alert” them to “factually inaccurate and scientifically unsound materials on climate change.” He said he worries that the Heartland materials will successfully sway some teachers’ opinions of climate change.

“It takes a bit of sincere effort to do the research and find how fraudulent many of their assertions are, and that’s an effort that busy teachers may not undertake,” he said. “So it leaves at least a passing impression in an innocent teacher’s mind that there may actually be something to this.”

:{

http://www.alternet.org/education/evidence-mounts-school-choice-isnt-delivering-promised-results-not-k-12-privateers-are

Another week, another round of evidence that providing parents with more “school choice,” especially the kind that lets them opt out of public schools, is not a very effective vehicle for ensuring students improve academically or that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.

The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DCthat allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense. The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.

This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.

Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice for choice’s sake.

Results Don’t Matter?

That seems to be what US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos argues in her reaction to the news about the apparent failure of the DC voucher program. As the Washington Post reports, the report prompted her to say, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

That reaction struck education historian Diane Ravitch as an implication that “results don’t matter.” She writes on her personal blog, “If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.”

Ravitch points to an op-ed in a local DC paper that argues the “whole point” of choice is for parents to pick schools they believe to be “best” for their children, regardless of the nature of the school or the results of its program.

The writer compares education to breakfast cereal, arguing that some parents may prefer Cheerios while some prefer other brands. What’s the big deal?

This line of reasoning aligns with DeVos’s recent comments comparing schools to all sorts of consumer goods. As the Associated Press reports, in a recent address she made at an education technology conference, DeVos compared school choice to switching phone carriers. “If you can’t get cell phone service in your living room,” she says, “you should have the option to find a network that does work.”

In another of her pronouncements about school choice, she compared education options to ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft.

For anyone who’s been paying attention, DeVos’s remarks aren’t surprising.

Seven years ago, when a study of the school voucher program in Milwaukee came to a disappointing conclusion similar to the more recent studies mentioned above, it prompted Charles Murray –co-author of the eugenics-inspired treatise The Bell Curve – to respond, basically, “So what!”

Writing in the New York Times, he argued that results from the study of the Milwaukee program didn’t much matter. “Our children’s education is extremely important to us,” he wrote, “and the greater good doesn’t much enter into it.” (Point of irony: Murray argues against using test scores as meaningful measures of school performance, yet the title of his infamous book is a direct reference to how test scores are distributed on a graph.)

More recently, editors of The Economist ruminated over the DC voucher study and  concluded the negative results meant, “A parent with a voucher may increasingly think twice about using it. That is a good choice to have.”

The Ultimate Choice

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— CONSUMER AND LABOR GROUPS BLAST DEVOS’ DECISION TO SCRAP OBAMA-ERA OVERHAUL OF STUDENT LOAN SERVICING.On Tuesday, DeVos halted Obama-era plans to overhaul how millions of student borrowers pay back their federal loans including new consumer protections for borrowers and contract provisions aimed at boosting the quality of federal loan servicing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), called the change a “gut punch” to the nation’s student loan borrowers because the policies would have made it harder for companies to cheat borrowers. Persis Yu, director of National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, said DeVos is walking away from “common-sense protections.”

— Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers called the move “just another clear example of Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration putting the interests of predatory profiteers over the needs of the little guy — in this instance, the millions of people trying to go to college or acquire career skills without being crippled by debt.”

— In a memo, DeVos wrote that it was necessary to scrap the plans because of “a myriad of moving deadlines, changing requirements and a lack of consistent objectives” and a need to move forward “with precision, timeliness and transparency.” The Obama administration’s plan had called for a streamlined loan servicing platform in which borrowers make payments through a single web portal, rather than going through individual loan companies. The first phase of that project was initially slated to be finished by the end of 2016 but was delayed until this past February.

— “This increases the stakes for the CFPB to write clear rules to solve the problems in the loan servicing market,” said Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s former student loan ombudsman, who criticized the decision. “If the Education Department won’t use its buyer power to clean up bad practices, law enforcement has to step in.”

— The Education Department did not consult with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helped craft the policy guidance, before withdrawing it, according to a CFPB spokesman.“Borrowers deserve to be treated fairly and should be able to repay their debt without having to deal with illegal loan servicing practices,” the spokesman told Morning Education. “The CFPB will continue to find ways, working with all of our partners, to support and protect the 44 million Americans with student debt.” Michael Stratford hasmore.

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http://go.propublica.org/e/125411/l-utm-campaign-dailynewsletter/3z4f74/114891505

he new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights once complained that she experienced discrimination because she is white.

As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.

“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”

Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activistand an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.

Her appointment “doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who led Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Department of Justice.

“I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil rights issues.”

On Wednesday, DeVos formally announced Jackson’s position as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, a role that does not require Senate confirmation. The 39-year-old attorney will act as assistant secretary in charge of the office until that position is filled. DeVos has not yet selected a nominee, who would have to receive Senate confirmation. As acting head, Jackson is in charge of about 550 full-time department staffers, who are responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints each year.

Jackson referred ProPublica’s interview request to the U.S. Department of Education, which did not respond to our request. Neither Jackson nor the department responded to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

Jackson takes over an office that has been responsible for protecting students from racial, gender, disability and age discrimination for decades. Under the Obama administration, the office increased its caseload. It emphasized to colleges that they could give preferences to minorities and women to achieve diversity, and advised them to be more aggressive in investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment on campus. Some of the guidance from the office provoked controversy, particularly among Republicans who have long called for the office to be scaled back.

Jackson grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where her parents operate two medical practices, specializing in family and aesthetic medicine. Her father, Dr. Rick Jackson, also ran unsuccessfully for Congress and is a country music singer under the name Ricky Lee Jackson. Jackson’s brothers have acting and music careers as well. Jackson and her mother have helped provide “business and legal” management for her father and brothers, according to a biography on her website from 2016.

In 2009, Jackson co-wrote a Christian country song with her father and brother, called “Freedom, Family and Faith.” The lyrics had an anti-government tinge: “Some politician wants our liberty/ They say just trust me, we’re all family/ I’ve got a family and hey, it’s not you/ Don’t need Big Brother to see us through.”

While in college, Jackson joined the Stanford Review as a junior, after transferring to the university in 1996 from a community college in Los Angeles. When she arrived, according to a Review article she wrote during her senior year, she was “eager to carry the message of freedom to Stanford through the only conservative publication on campus.”

Eric Jackson, no relation, who is Candice’s friend, former classmate and book publisher, said the conservative perspective of the Stanford Review often went against the status quo on campus. It took “courage,” he said, to write for the publication, which was co-founded in 1987 by PayPal billionaire and Donald Trump adviser Peter Thiel. “A number of us got death threats,” he recalled.

One topic of heated debate on campus was affirmative action, which California banned in public institutions, such as universities, in 1996. The prohibition did not affect private universities, like Stanford, which could continue to employ preferential policies both in admissions and in special programs designed to assist minority students in college-level math and science courses.

During her senior year, Candice Jackson penned her objections in an op-ed, contending the university “promotes racial discrimination” with its practices.

“As with most liberal solutions to a problem, giving special assistance to minority students is a band-aid solution to a deep problem,” she wrote. “No one, least of all the minority student, is well served by receiving special treatment based on race or ethnicity.”

Jackson was far from the only critic of such minority-only programs. In 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened up similar programs to all races.

In another article Jackson penned for the Review during her senior year, entitled “How I Survived Stanford Without Entering the Women’s Center,” she condemned feminism on campus.

“In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”

In the article, she encouraged women to choose conservatism over feminism. “I think many women are instinctively conservative, but are guided into the folds of feminism before discovering the conservative community,” she wrote.

She concluded, “[t]he real women’s issues are conservative ones.”

Her former Stanford Review colleague, Eric Jackson, told ProPublica that her college writings are nearly 20 years old and that it’s important to understand the context of her commentary. “The feminist culture she was critiquing was different than what happens today,” he said. Jackson, he added, is “very pro-woman.”

After Stanford, Jackson “exchanged conservatism for libertarianism,” she later wrote. She did a summer fellowship at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a free-market think tank in Auburn, Alabama, according to an institute publication. The institute was reportedly founded with money raised by former congressman and 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul, and is a leading hub of contemporary libertarian scholars.

While at the Institute, Jackson provided editorial assistance on a book of collected essays by the institute’s co-founder, economic historian Murray N. Rothbard. A charismatic figure who devoted his life to ideas, Rothbard died a few years before Jackson’s fellowship. Mark Thornton, an economist and a senior fellow at the Mises Institute who vaguely recalled Jackson but did not specifically remember her role at the center, said that her editorial assistance may have involved proofreading.

Rothbard’s 1999 book, “Education: Free and Compulsory,” advocated for a voluntary education system, denouncing government-mandated schooling. Currently, all U.S. states require students to attend school until they are at least 16 years old.

“To force these children to be exposed to schooling, as the State does almost everywhere, is a criminal offense to their natures,” wrote Rothbard. “In any case, the instruction has almost no effect on these children, many of whose hours of life are simply wasted because of the State’s decree.”This was not Jackson’s only connection to Rothbard’s work. She also wrote two papers analyzing his theories. One essay compared his philosophy to that of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. In the other, she wrote that his 1982 book, “The Ethics of Liberty,” “shines as a monumental achievement, meeting Rothbard’s goal of setting forth ‘a positive ethical system … to establish the case for individual liberty.’”

In other essays, published on a former colleague’s website, Rothbard called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “monstrous,” and lambasted one provision of it, which prohibited employment discrimination, as “a horrendous invasion of the property rights of the employer.”

Rothbard was “about as fringe as you could be and still be a tenured professor,” said Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, who met him twice.

If someone was a follower of Rothbard, Caplan told ProPublica, “instead of thinking of discrimination as a rampant problem, they would say the free market would take care of it.”

Jackson has often collaborated on articles with William Anderson, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute and a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland. Their work has appeared in the publication Reason and on the website of Llewellyn Rockwell, a co-founder and chairman of the Mises Institute.

Anderson, who told ProPublica that he has known Jackson for years, said that she would likely approach her position at the Education Department from “the standpoint of individual rights and due process.”

After graduating from Pepperdine University’s School of Law in 2002, Jackson also worked for Judicial Watch, a conservative legal advocacy group, for nearly two years as a litigation counsel, according to her LinkedIn page.

In the past few years, she has operated her own law firm. According to a recent biography on her website, her practice specialized in “business, entertainment, and litigation matters,” for a range of clients, “from restaurants to medical clinics, and from authors and musicians to filmmakers and record labels.”

In 2005, Jackson wrote a book on the allegations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, titled “Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine.” She gained national attention last October after she arranged for several of Bill Clinton’s accusers to attend a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Jackson sat with the women in the front of the audience. A few days before the debate, Jackson established Their Lives Foundation. In registration documents, she described two of its purposes as “giving public voice to victims of women who abuse positions of power” and “advocating for and against candidates for political office.”

Less than a week after the debate, Jackson posted on Facebook that her foundation “supports all victims of power abusers,” but labeled Trump’s accusers “fake victims.” Since the initial announcement of her Education Department role, her Facebook page has been taken offline.

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seemed to back bathroom bill/

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/department-education-spending-millions-protect-betsy-devos-and-thats-not-even

Betsy DeVos has been met with angry mobs since her narrow confimation in mid-February. As a result, the department is spending a staggering $1 million per month to keep her safe, according to the Washington Post. "The [U.S.] Marshals Service is hiring nearly two-dozen people to guard her," the report finds.

Under an agreement signed in late Month, DeVos will be under its protection through September, but she may use law enforcement agency's services for the duration of her term.

The Post report also noted that while "the new outlay is a tiny fraction of the department’s budget, [it] comes as the Trump administration has proposed slashing the spending plan by $9 billion, or 13.5 percent."

The education secretary is the sole cabinet member who requires protection from the United States Marshal Service.According to the agency's spokeswoman Lynzey Donahue, no cabinet member has required such protection in nearly a decade.

As News One Now host Roland Martin pointed out Monday, "DeVos' stance on charter schools and special education has caused protesters to show up at every school she visits."

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-venable-6715406 hillsdale, jeb?

http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-education/2017/01/new-staffers-arrive-at-education-department-218400

THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT’S NEWEST FACES:Eighteen new faces are joining the Trump administration’s Education Department this week, Caitlin Emma reports. Jason Botel, executive director of the Maryland education advocacy group MarylandCAN, is coming on as a senior White House adviser for education. He’ll work closely with Acting Education Secretary Phil Rosenfelt to lead the new team. That team includes Josh Venable, who helped prepare Betsy DeVos for her confirmation hearing and is considered a top candidate for chief of staff. It also includes Jim Manning, who worked at the Education Department during the Bush and Obama administrations and led the landing team at the department during the transition to the Trump administration. Andrew Kossack, the former commissioner of the Indiana Department of Revenue and an alum of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is joining the team as well. And Stanley Buchesky, formerly a managing partner at the venture capital firm The EdTech Fund, will work on budget and finance issues. See the full list of team members here.

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http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-eli-broad-opposes-devos-20170201-story.html

no link

i Broad, the prominent local philanthropist behind a massive effort to increase the number of charter schools in Los Angeles, is protesting the appointment of Betsy DeVos as secretary of Education.

Broad sent a letter to U.S. senators Wednesday, asking them to vote against President Trump’s nominee.

“I believe she is unprepared and unqualified for the position,” Broad wrote. “Indeed, with Betsy DeVos at the helm of the U.S. Department of Education, much of the good work that has been accomplished to improve public education for all of America’s children could be undone.”

Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican fundraiser based in Grand Rapids, Mich. Before Trump announced her nomination, she spent her dollars and connections promoting school choice, in the form of both vouchers and charter schools.

Confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of Education in peril as two GOP senators defect

School vouchers use public money to fund private — often religious — schools, and charter schools are publicly funded, but can be privately run.

Broad has contributed heavily through a political action committee to local school board candidates who support charter schools, and his philanthropic group is backing an effort to increase their growth in Los Angeles, which already has more such schools than any other city in the U.S.

But despite their agreement on charter schools, Broad thinks DeVos’ views are too extreme. “We must have a Secretary of Education who believes in public education and the need to keep public schools public,” he wrote.

During a contentious confirmation hearing last month, DeVos drew ire for her apparent lack of basic understanding of some key education laws. Before the hearing, Broad wrote, he questioned her support for “unregulated charter schools and school vouchers.” Her performance reinforced his doubts.

On Tuesday, the Senate education committee voted along party lines to advance her candidacy.

But her confirmation might be in trouble. On Wednesday, two Republican senators on the education committee who voted for DeVos to get through committee said they would vote no on the Senate floor. One more Republican defection would mean DeVos doesn’t get the job.

DeVos’ nomination has put Democratic charter school supporters in a hard spot because she also supports school vouchers. Vouchers are a third rail in Democratic politics  — they arouse fears not just about the draining of dollars from public schools but about erosion of the separation of church and state as well.

At a rally in January, local union leaders passed out signs connecting Broad and DeVos.

You can read the full letter here.

==

Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, wants America to believe she's all about giving parents the right to choose what's best for their children. But her radical policies and politics have left a legacy of crumbling schools and poisoned water in her home state of Michigan that parents neither asked for nor wanted.

Billionaire DeVos—who has no relevant education experience and never attended public school—won the nomination by virtue of her family being one of the largest soft money contributors to the Republican National Committee and the dominant political force in Michigan, where Trump's razor-thin margin helped him clinch his Electoral College victory.

At her confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders asked DeVos, "Do you think that if you were not a multi-billionaire, if your family had not made hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to the Republican Party, that you would be sitting here today?"

DeVos once infamously admitted that her family "expects a return on our investment" in political campaigns.

It looks like she just got it.

DeVos and her husband Dick have been leading advocates for privatizing public education, expanding charter schools, and providing taxpayer-funded vouchers for private and religious schools, and have bankrolled politicians and special interest groups to promote that agenda.

The DeVos family has been promoting and funding efforts to "Christianize" public education for more than twenty years. In the DeVos' personal worldview, public schools inappropriately vie with religion for the hearts and minds of students.

"Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's Kingdom," said Betsy in a 2001 interview. "As we look at many communities in our country, the church has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity," added Dick.

Their radical solution entails redefining "public education" by weakening and defunding public schools while diverting tax dollars to subsidize private and religious institutions, in ways that confront current constitutional notions about the separation of church and state.

Parents in Michigan chose to reject that vision by wide margins.A voter initiative for school vouchers pushed by the DeVos family in 2000 was spurned by 69% of the voters, and Dick DeVos lost by a huge margin when he ran for governor in 2006, despite spending $35 million of the family fortune.

Instead of walking away from their unpopular positions, Betsy and Dick DeVos shifted gears and adopted a "long-game" strategy of advancing for-profit charter schools, privatizing government, busting public sector unions, and deregulating private schools.

The DeVos family pumped millions into state elections, ballot initiatives, and right-wing groups, like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP). They used their fortune to grease the skids for Governor Rick Snyder's election in 2010, and then backed aggressive campaigns to win passage of Michigan's controversial emergency manager law and "right-to-work" legislation.

All in all, the DeVos family pumped more than $44 million into Michigan Republican campaign committees and candidates between 1997 and 2012, and followed that up with another $8.3 million in Michigan's 2014 and 2016 elections. And that's just what was disclosed. They spent millions more on special interest groups that do not report their spending to influence elections and legislation.

Following his election, Governor Snyder won passage of the emergency manager law used to strip Flint of any local control and take over Detroit's public school system, which was championed by the DeVos-funded Mackinac Center. Voters repealed the law at the ballot in 2012, but Snyder quickly rammed through a new version. The results have been disastrous.

Under Snyder's control, Flint was forced to abandon its clean water source and accept polluted water from the Flint River—water that corroded the city's outdated lead pipes and resulted in the lead contamination of drinking water for thousands of children and families. The poisoning of Flint became a national scandal and sparked congressional hearings and a criminal investigation, which so far has resulted in the indictment of two former Flint emergency managers appointed by Snyder.

In Detroit, Snyder used state control to defund public schools and allow a "Wild West" of charter schools to spring up. The condition of public schools deteriorated to dangerous levels,prompting hundreds of Detroit teachers to launch "sick outs"in January 2016 out of protest. Detroit parents lost their democratic rights, while unelected managers closed two-thirds of their schools.

Educational standards didn't fare any better. After six years under emergency managers, Detroit's testing scores had declined to the lowest in the nation, the school system was drowning in red ink, and nearly a third of charter schools had folded due to academic or financial reasons. The New York Times called it, "a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States."

The deplorable situation in Detroit's schools prompted the legislature to act in 2016, but heavy lobbying by the DeVos family and GLEP resulted in killing charter accountability standards adopted by the Senate while imposing new limitations on public schools and penalizing "sick outs" as illegal strikes. Critics point out that GLEP had greater access to negotiations on the bill than did Detroit's legislative delegation.

Legislators voting for the DeVos-backed bill had received thousands in campaign contributions from the family, not unlike the hundreds of thousands received by U.S. Senators now handling Betsy DeVos' nomination.

And rewards for those who toed the DeVos line came quickly. According to the Detroit Free Press:

The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.

The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.

Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos has been pushing the same education privatization and deregulation scheme nationally through groups like the American Federation for Children, the Alliance for School Choice, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

And it appears she has the same future in mind for the nation as she had for Detroit. When asked by Senator Tim Kaine to commit that all schools that receive federal funding—including charter and private schools—should be held to the same accountability standards, DeVos hedged and then said "no."

Whether Trump embraces Betsy DeVos' radical agenda, or is now doling out federal agencies to billionaire campaign funders the way past presidents have doled out ambassadorships, it's clear that the nation's public schools will be DeVos' next casualty if the Senate confirms her as Education Secretary.

==

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2017/01/13207/betsy-devos-ethics-report-reveals-ties-student-debt-collection-firm

Public education advocates are demanding another hearing on Trump nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, after her dismal performance in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee (HELP) January 17th and after the late release of her ethics report on January 20th.

The report, available here, details some 102 companies that might pose a conflict of interest for DeVos and sheds new light on the nominee's investments and ethics.

While most Secretaries of Education have an extensive resume as school administrators or as educators, DeVos has neither. DeVos, an heiress, is married to the billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, Dick DeVos. Together they have spent millions advancing a radical school privatization agenda, including taxpayer vouchers for private and religious schools, and electing politicians across the nation willing to advance that agenda. DeVos was asked about her experience for the job by Democratic senators who were only allowed 5 minutes each.

While most senators asked about K-12 education, the exchange with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on the topic of higher education was a standout. (See the video below.)

Professor Warren Grills DeVos on Her Higher Education Experience

vid]

In the world of higher education, "the Department of Education is in charge of making sure that $150 billion we invest in students each year gets into the right hands and that students have the support they need to pay back their student loans," said Warren, who was a professor at Harvard Law School before becoming the Senator from Massachusetts.

"The Secretary of Education is essentially responsible for managing $1 trillion dollar student loan bank and distributing $30 billion in Pell grants to students each year. The financial futures of an entire generation of young people depend on your department getting that right."

"Now Mrs. DeVos do you have any direct experience in running a bank?" asked Warren.

"Senator, I do not," replied DeVos.

"Have you ever managed or overseen a $1 trillion loan program?" asked Warren.

"No, I do not," replied DeVos.

"How about a billion dollar loan program?" asked Warren.

"I do not."

"How about participating in one?" Warren asked if DeVos or her children had ever taken out a student loan from the federal government, the answer, of course, was no.

And DeVos refused to commit to enforcing federal rules that prevent waste, fraud, and abuse against predatory for-profit institutions like the ITT Technical Institutes shut down by the Obama administration and Trump University, which settled a $25 million dollar lawsuit alleging fraud shortly before Trump took office.

But DeVos appears to be selling herself short. She does have experience with higher education, with financial ties to a debt collections agency.

DeVos Experience Includes Ties to Student Debt Collection Company

Student loan debt in America recently topped $1.3 trillion and continues to grow. The average Class of 2016 graduate has $37,172 in student loan debt, up six percent from last year.

This staggering debt is a big problem for students, parents and society as a whole. Student loan payments are surpassing groceries as the biggest monthly expense for many households. The crisis prompted Sen. Bernie Sanders to propose a bold solution, free education at public institutions, while on the campaign trail.

While many economists and policymakers see a looming disaster, Betsy DeVos apparently sees an opportunity to cash in.

In a Office of Government Ethics report that was completed January 20, DeVos agreed to divest from a long list of companies that pose a conflict of interest.

On the list, are a number of firms that have found ways to profit off of public education.

Among them is LMF WF Portfolio, a company which helped finance a $147 million loan to a debt collection agency that does business with the Department of Education, called Performant Financial Co.

Performant recently lost out on a U.S. Department of Education contract and is appealing the decision with the Government Accountability Office. Performant desperately needs that contract because it represents 24 percent of its business, according to the company's SEC report, and its stock is tanking to $2 a share. If confirmed as Secretary, DeVos would be in a position to influence the awarding of these contracts and would have oversight responsibility for private debt collectors working for the government, explains the *Washington Post*.

And Performant clearly needs oversight.

Performant racked up 346 complaints with the Better Business Bureau. The company is accused of applying wage garnishments for debt already paid, calling debtors at work, calling family members of debtors at work, and other inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior. One consumer complaint posted online says Performant repeatedly pestered a 90 year old World War II vet for a nonexistent student loan with Wells Fargo.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the financial watchdog agency that Senator Warren helped to create during the financial crisis of 2009, also has numerous complaints against the company registered in its public database.

• A student in Massachusetts filed a complaint with the CFPB against Performant for its continued attempts to collect debt that was already paid.
• A student in Georgia filed a complaint against Performant for using "obscene/profane/abusive language".
• A student in South Carolina filed a complaint with the CFPB because Performant attempted to collect the wrong amount.
• A Connecticut student filed a complaint against Performant for "continued attempts to collect debt" that was not theirs.
• A student in Illinois filed a complaint against Performant because they did not receive a right to dispute notice.

After receiving a flood of complaints about abusive collection practices (the most common complaint is that consumers are dogged for debt they do not owe), CFPB is considering further regulating the debt collection industry and proposed new rules in 2016.

DeVos has agreed to divest herself from these companies and a list of others profiting from providing education-related services, such asKinderCare Education associated with junk-bond king Michael Milken,but her financial ties to these firms illustrate how motivated she is to monetize a public education system that most Americans consider a public trust. Other education-related firms on the list include, T2 Systems, Varsity News Network, N2Y LLC, Caldwell and Gregory, Inc., Flip Learning and more.

"It is already unquestionable that Betsy DeVos is the most unqualified Education Secretary nominee in our nation's history, but it is clear that if she is confirmed, she will make the student debt crisis exponentially worse," said Scot Ross of One Wisconsin Now, who has pushed for meaningful solutions in the state of Wisconsin. "Allowing borrowers to refinance their federal student loans, just like you can a mortgage, is something that would immediately allow 25 million borrowers get lower interest rates at no net cost to taxpayers."

"But if Betsy DeVos is personally profiting from the existing system, she will likely do nothing to help the hardworking student loan borrowers across Wisconsin and across the nation," said Ross.

Democracy

Education

==

http://trump.kimalbrecht.com/#3

BETSY DEVOS

Board memberChairwomanCo-founderFormer board memberFormer chairwomanFormer chairwoman, elder boardFormer directorFormer memberFormer member / managerFormer member of the board of directorsFormer member, board of directors and executive committeeFormer trusteeGubernatorial appointeeIndirect investorMemberMember of board of directorsMember, advisory boardMember, board of directorsNominee for Secretary of EducationTrustee

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS TRUST FUND

FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION

THE PHILANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE

ADVOCATES FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

AMERICAN FEDERATION FOR CHILDREN

ALL CHILDREN MATTER PAC

DICK & BETSY DEVOS FAMILY FOUNDATION

KENNEDY CENTER

KIDS HOPE USA

THE WINDQUEST GROUP

ALL CHILDREN MATTER, INC.

ALLIANCE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

AMERICAN EDUCATION REFORM COUNCIL

GREAT LAKES EDUCATION PROJECT PAC

MARS HILL BIBLE CHURCH

RCB MAIN FLOOR, LLC (D/B/A "RESERVE GR, LLC")

RDV CORPORATION

RDV SPORTS, INC

THE STOW COMPANY — HOLLAND, INC.

THE STOW COMPANY

DETROIT ATHLETIC CLUB

NEUROCORE, LLC

COMPASS ARTS

ECONOMIC CLUB OF GRAND RAPIDS

EDUCATION FREEDOM FUND

MICHIGAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

JAMES MADISON CENTER FOR FREE SPEECH

MICHIGAN COUNCIL OF ARTS & CULTURAL AFFAIRS

SOCIAL FINANCE INC.

MACATAWA BAY YACHT CLUB

WINDSOR CLUB

WISKOWHAN PLAYERS CLUB

YACHT CLUB OF COSTA SMERALDA

AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY ALLIANCE

BAY HARBOR YACHT CLUB

BIRCHWOOD FARMS GOLF & COUNTRY CLUB

CASCADE HILLS COUNTRY CLUB

THE POTTERS HOUSE SCHOOL

DEVOS INSTITUTE FOR ARTS MANAGEMENT

ARTPRIZE GRAND RAPIDS

EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION IN ACTION

GLEP EDUCATION FUND

GREAT LAKES EDUCATION FOUNDATION

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORM...

==

pub cit

Betsy DeVos

Trump's Pick for: Education SecretaryCorporate Connections: Amway, Windquest

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Betsy DeVos is the daughter of a wealthy western Michigan industrialist and is married to Amway heir Richard Devos. They have an estimated net worth of more than $5 billion. Members of the DeVos family have been among the foremost funders of right-wing politicians and ideological causes since the 1970s. Aside from extensive contributions to candidates and Republican Party committees, they have concentrated their giving to groups promoting free-market economics. Other contributions have gone to groups opposing campaign finance laws or working on social values issues, such as opposing gay marriage. DeVos’ greatest personal focus has been on education, such as seeking to expand charter schools, permit parents to use public funds as vouchers toward private school tuition and advocating related proposals to steer funding away from traditional public schools.

• Betsy DeVos is chair of the Windquest Group, an investment firm in manufacturing, technology, clean energy and in other investment firms. Windquest has indirectly invested in Social Finance Inc. (SoFI), which profits by helping individuals negotiate the terms of their student loans. SoFi’s prospects could be hindered if proposals to lower the rates on federally issued student loans were approved.
• The DeVos family has given an estimated $200 million to conservative causes, Mother Jones estimates. These include gifts to the Heritage Foundation, groups operated by right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch, and various groups hostile to campaign finance laws.
• The DeVos-funded Mackinac Public Policy Center teamed with Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council in support of “right to work” legislation that was approved in Michigan in 2012.
• All Children Matter, an advocacy group that DeVos founded, still owes the state of Ohio $5.3 million stemming from a fine for election law violations it was found to have committed in 2008.
• The DeVoses spent $2 million in 2000 on a Michigan referendum that would have permitted students to use public funds a vouchers toward private school tuition. The proposal failed.
• A group financed by DeVos successfully opposed legislation “that would have prevented failing schools from expanding or replicating.” The proposed legislation responded to a federal finding that Michigan suffered from “an unreasonably high” percentage of poorly performing charter schools.
• Financial disclosures released during Richard DeVos’s failed run for governor of Michigan in 2006 revealed that the couple were investors in K12 Inc., a controversial for-profit company that operates online charter schools. The disclosure did not indicate the size of the DeVoses’ investment.
• With respect to the family’s extensive giving to conservative candidates and causes, Betsy DeVos wrote in 1997: "[M]y family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party ...I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point.We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment; we expect a good and honest government. Furthermore, we expect the Republican party to use the money to promote these policies, and yes, to win elections."

==

http://www.alternet.org/education/inside-donald-trumps-extremist-education-agenda-hillsdale

Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency left education policy experts at a complete loss to explain what this would mean for the nation’s schools. During his campaign, Trump gave few clues about what would inform his education leadership, only that he had some antipathy for the Department of Education, he was no fan of Common Core and he would advocate for more “school choice.”

After his election, experienced education journalists at Education Week predicted Trump would embrace conservative Beltway think tanks and state education policy leaders who had bristled under the rule of Obama’s education department, and would reject the influence of teachers unions, civil rights groups, and politically centrist education “reform” groups.

Many who pointed out “personnel is policy,” speculated Trump would pick an education secretary from the ranks of his transition advisers who came mostly from the above-mentioned DC-based circles and state government centers. Other knowledgeable sources predicted Trump might draw education policy knowhow from “outsider” sources, such as the military, big business or the charter school industry.

Not a single source I can find anticipated Trump would look for education expertise in the deep, dark well he repeatedly seems to draw from: the extremist, right-wing evangelical community.

The DeVos Nomination

The first clue that Trump would embed the extremist views of radical Christian orthodoxy in the White House’s education policy apparatus was his nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the nation’s next Secretary of Education.

As Politico reports, DeVos is a “billionaire philanthropist” who “once compared her work in education reform to a biblical battleground where she wants to ‘advance God’s Kingdom.'”

Politico reporters point to numerous recordings and interviews in which DeVos and her husband Dick, a billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, promote education policies asavenues to “greater Kingdom gain … lament that public schools have ‘displaced’ the Church as the center of communities," and refer to their efforts to advance private, religious schools as a "Shephelah," an area where battles, including between David and Goliath, were fought in the Old Testament.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Katherine Stewart, an expert observer of the Christian right, writes, “Betsy DeVos stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right.”

Stewart points to numerous examples of DeVos-related family foundations that have generously donated to “conservative groups” pushing religious right doctrine including, the Alliance Defending Freedom,” the legal juggernaut of the religious right,” and “Colorado-based Christian ministry Focus on the Family.”

But Trump’s selection of DeVos for education secretary is not the only clue that the nation’s education policy may be in for a sharp veer to the religious right. As Stewart reports, “The president-elect’s first move on public education [was] Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the nation … Liberty University teaches creationism alongside evolution.”

Falwell Jr. Came First

The Associated Press was first to break the story about Falwell Jr. being offered the job, reporting also that he declined it saying, “He couldn’t afford to work at a Cabinet-level job for longer than [two years] and didn’t want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.”

“Here is Trump, ready to hand the job [of Secretary of Education] to a religious zealot whose sole goal,” writes Michelangelo Signorile, the Gays and Lesbians editor for the Huffington Post, “would likely be to infuse evangelical Christian doctrine into public schools.”

Signorile also calls Falwell Jr. an “enemy of LGBTQ rights” and states, “It’s hard to believe Falwell would continue the Obama administration’s pro-LGBTQ programs if he actually became Secretary of Education, nor would he likely take the job with any stipulation that he must so.”

Need more evidence that Trump will usher in an education agenda largely dominated by the evangelical community? Another candidate Trump also considered for education secretary was Larry Arnn.

The Hillsdale College Connection

As the Daily Caller reports, “Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College, a small conservative liberal arts school in Michigan known for declining all federal funds.”

Hillsdale College, located in Hillsdale, Michigan (the Devos family’s home state), is regarded as “the conservative Harvard,” in some circles, and has been the recipient of generous donations from numerous funders of the rightwing conservative movement including the Koch brothers' family foundation. Hillsdale also sponsors the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Hillsdale students overwhelmingly supported Trump for president, according to the campus newspaper, and at least seven Hillsdale professors and administrators publicly endorsed him.

According to an article in The Atlantic, Hillsdale is one among a number of conservative private colleges that rejects federal funds including financial aid for students. Many of these colleges, while they are rejecting federal funds, “are seeking, exemptions from the US Department of Education from provisions under Title IX of the laws governing higher education, which protects students from discrimination in housing, athletics, and access to facilities on the basis of such things as gender, sexual orientation, sex or pregnancy outside marriage, or having an abortion.”

Hillsdale has a long-held reputation for discriminating on the basis of gender preference and identity, and news outlets in the LGBT community have reported incidents in which Hillsdale staff and officials openly discriminated against gay students.

Arnn also came under fire from many liberal sources for describing nonwhite students as "dark ones" during a state legislature subcommittee hearing regarding the adoption of Common Core State Standards. Hillsdale’s official apology for that incident was arguably worse than Arnn’s remark, a Michigan blogger notes, as the college used its apology as another opportunity to take a swipe at government enforcement of affirmative action policies.

In addition to Hillsdale’s strong resentment of federal intrusion, especially on issues of civil rights, the college also has deep commitments to another favorite of conservative, religious advocates: charter schools.

A Chain Of Religion-Based Charter Schools

As I report in an in-depth investigation of the conservative movement’s influence on charter school expansions in Colorado, in addition to reinforcing gender and race inequity, Hillsdale operates the Barney Charter School Initiative, which is essentially a consultant service for a chain of 16 charter schools called Classical Academies. These charters purport to offer “the same course of study that helped propel Western Civilization to the top of the world,” according to what at least one of these schools says on its website.

The Barney project’s strong political agenda was revealed in its former mission statement, since taken down, which said the Initiative seeks to “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” The statement also said, “The charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education.”

Charter schools created with the help of the Barney Initiative are also proving to be an ideal vehicle for evading laws enforcing separation of church and state. Since my investigation into the opening of a Barney-related charter in Colorado called Golden View Classical Academy, an independent news outlet in that state confirms the school indeed provides students a religion-based curriculum on the taxpayers’ dime.

As Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent reports, charter schools like Golden View “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”

Goodland recalls when Golden View applied to the district school board for approval, the school’s director “assured the board Golden View would not use a religious curriculum” and “agreed to comply with the intent of Colorado’s sexual education law by providing ‘appropriate instruction on human anatomy, reproduction and sexuality.'”

Yet, she notes the school’s family handbook, “adopted before the charter application was approved includes references to teaching about sexual intercourse only “in the context of a monogamous relationship between two people of opposite sexes,” a focus on abstinence, admonitions on “the moral and physical consequences of promiscuous sex,” and the “limited effectiveness” of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

Goodlad blames a loose, unregulated waiver process for allowing charter schools like Golden View to skirt state laws, and she points to Colorado public officials  who provide charters ample leeway to ensure they have the  “autonomy” which they claim justifies their existence.

Keep in mind, Barney-related charters like Golden View, that essentially function like private religious schools while receiving taxpayer money, are scattered across the country; their network is growing, and a Trump administration that has pledged to provide more money for “school choice” will only help fuel more rapid expansions of these schools.

“Neither the public nor lawmakers understand the extent of the problem,” Goodlad concludes.

How DeVos And Hillsdale Intersect

Unsurprisingly, Hillsdale president Arnn says Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, “is someone he ‘knows and admires,'” according to right-wing news outlet Breitbart.

And why not, since Hillsdale also has strong ties to DeVos and her immediate family.

As the Hillsdale campus newspaper reports, DeVos’s “roots in Michigan philanthropy run deep and also intersect with Hillsdale College. Betsy DeVos’ brother is Erik Prince, a 1992 graduate of Hillsdale College and the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, now named Academi. In 2009, the DeVos family also founded ArtPrize, an international art competition that featured the work of five art professors and students this year. Most notably, Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, co-founded Amway with Jay Van Andel. Van Andel’s son, Steve, was a 1978 graduate of Hillsdale and currently serves as the chairman of Amway. In 2013, after he donated to graduate school scholarships and operations, Hillsdale named its graduate school of statesmanship in his honor.”

Jay Van Andel was also, at the time of his death, a trustee of Hillsdale College, according to Wikipedia.

Most Extremist Administration Ever?

“Those who know DeVos say her goals are not sinister,” Politico reporters caution, “though they acknowledge the policies she’s likely to advance would benefit Christian schools. In fact, Trump’s $20 billion school choice program that would allow low-income students to select private or charter schools was devised with the help of the advocacy group DeVos headed until recently.”

Despite the strong evidence Trump’s education agenda may be driven by right-wing evangelicals, advocates for charter schools in the Democratic Party keep looking for reasons to believe Betsy DeVos is not going to be the extremist she is often portrayed as in media reports.

On hearing the news of the DeVos nomination, the politically centrist hedge fund-backed Democrats for Education Reform released a statement congratulating DeVos on her appointment and applauding her “commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools,” while at the same time regretting that her nomination is the outcome of a political campaign driven by “bigoted and offensive rhetoric.” (Never mind the charter schools DeVos helped grow in Michigan seem less than “high quality.")

Another centrist Democrat deeply embedded in the investment community, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Partners, hopes a Trump administration will offer up a plan for charter school expansion that includes “sweeteners for the Congressional Black Caucus” – a condescending and white privilege phrase if there ever was one.

Emma Brown, the education reporter for the Washington Post, notes many advocates for charter schools “worry” Trump’s embrace of charter schools may be identified with his “rhetoric about immigrants, inner cities, and women,” but still hope some kind of “strong accountability” will be in the new administration’s charter school governance, even though those accountability measures have proven to be easily gamed by the savviest charter operators.

“Playing the politics of niceness has never been so convenient for the Dems of education reform,” writes college professor and former charter school leader-turned reform critic Andre Perry. “DeVos’s belief in limited state oversight, for-profit charter management, and vouchers didn’t give Democrat proponents of charter schools any pause in the past. And for many it doesn’t now.”

If Perry is correct, that’s a shame, because anyone who strives for a clear-eyed view of the Trump administration’s oncoming education agenda will find there is no evidence—zero—of anything other than the most extreme policy agenda for the nation’s public schools.

Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America's Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy.

==

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/01/04/senate-schedules-confirmation-hearing-for-betsy-devos-trumps-pick-for-education-secretary/

The Senate education committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to helm the education department, for Jan. 11.

DeVos, who has spent more than two decades advocating for charter schools and taxpayer-funded school vouchers, is one of eight Trump nominees that Democrats have singled out for additional scrutiny. Two of the others are Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, and ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state.

DeVos’s hearing is scheduled to take place on the second day of Sessions’s scheduled two-day hearing with the Judiciary Committee and the same day that Tillerson is tentatively scheduled to face the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[so much for deal not to overlap?]

[Here are the eight Trump Cabinet picks Democrats plan to target]

A billionaire power broker and major Republican donor, DeVos has not held elected public office nor worked as an educator. She is likely to face questions about her advocacy track record, particularly in her home state of Michigan, where she played a key role in shaping a fast-growing charter-school sector that even many charter-school supporters criticize as lacking in oversight and quality. Senators also are likely to ask her about her support for using public money to pay tuition at private and religious schools — one of the most polarizing ideas in education.

But committee members also likely will use the confirmation to question DeVos about her views on a range of other Education Department subjects about which she has previously said little or nothing publicly. Those include her view of for-profit colleges, which have faced intense scrutiny under the Obama administration; her plans for implementing the new Every Student Succeeds Act; and her plans for theOffice for Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in schools and which some Trump surrogates have said should be stripped of power.

DeVos has not yet responded to the committee’s questionnaires and requests for financial disclosures, according to an aide to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the education committee’s ran..

Many Republicans are hopeful that DeVos, an avowed conservative, will oversee a shrinking of the federal footprint in education. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) previously said he hoped that she would “implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind just as Congress wrote it, reversing the trend to a national school board and restoring to states, governors, school boards, teachers, and parents greater responsibility for improving education in their local communities.”

[Education Department civil rights officials urged to work through tough times ahead]

Murray has said that she will ask DeVos to explain her plans to expand early childhood education and address college affordability and student debt. Murray also said she will press DeVos on her views of campus sexual violence, which many colleges are now handling very differently under pressure from the Obama administration, and school bullying.

“Right now students, parents, teachers and school leaders across the country are demanding to know how his Secretary of Education will ensure the safety and respect of all students, of all backgrounds, all across this country — and I will be focused throughout this process on how his nominee intends to do just that,” Murray said in a statement in November, when Trump named DeVos as his nominee.

==

smd

knew she was a privatizer. As a billionaire heir to the Amway fortune, Betsy DeVos has funded ALEC and the American Federation for Children for decades promoting bill after bill to siphon funds from public schools to fund fly-by-night private and religious schools.

We knew she was a profiteer. Her “Hunger Games” model of school competition has led to the “total and complete collapse of education” in the city of Detroit, according to the New York Times.

But until we dug into it, we didn’t know that Betsy DeVos wanted to blow up public schools “to advance God’s Kingdom.”

CMD uncovered disturbing interviews with Betsy and her husband, Dick DeVos, speaking frankly about their views behind closed doors.

In an interview for "The Gathering," a group focused on advancing Biblical capitalism through philanthropy, DeVos says they focus on education because the "Lord led us there.”

They don’t want to just fund religious schools, they want to get their hands on public education dollars. Betsy DeVos explains:

"There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education versus what is spent every year on education in this country... So, our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's Kingdom” or "to impact our culture [in ways] that may have great Kingdom gain in the long-run by changing the way we approach things."

Her husband is upset that schools have replaced churches as the center of communities. Dick DeVos explains:

"In my opinion, the church has sadly retrenched from its central role in our community…It is certainly our hope that churches would continue no matter what the environment whether there is government funding someday through vouchers or tax credits or some other mechanism...that more and more churches will get more and more active and engaged in education.”

As Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos’ family and her friends on Wall Street will use every trick in the book to advance taxpayer vouchers for private and religious schools. In their view, public education is an untapped "market" for privatizers and profiteers. Also deeply disqualifying: DeVos has no degree in teaching or administering public schools and even refused to send her kids to great public schools in her posh neighborhood. She hired a politician to push her school privatization who was charged and then convicted of felonies for using public tax dollars to do partisan political work.

This year CMD has continued to use the Freedom of Information act to uncover how much money ($4 billion and counting) the federal government is dumping into charter schools, including “ghost schools” that apply for funds but never open.

==

The ALEC agenda for this year’s State and Policy Summit contains the usual potpourri of anti-worker, anti-government proposals along with quite a few important pay-to-play measures for big telecom, health care companies, and nuclear utilities. But much of the agenda will be taken up with speculation on opportunities presented by a new Trump presidency to advance ALEC’s corporatist agenda and its politicians.

TRANSPARENCY FOR UNIONS AND SCHOOL TEACHERS, BUT NOT FOR BILLIONAIRES OR CORPORATIONS BANKROLLING ALEC

ALEC’s offshoot for local governments, ACCE, is taking a page from the ALEC play book and advancing a measure to harass public sector workers.

ACCE’s “Public Employee Bargaining Transparency Ordinance” targets public sector workers by opening up public sector collective bargaining negotiations to public scrutiny and participation. The bill is nothing but an effort to advance the harassment of a targeted group of public-sector workers. There are no ALEC bills opening closed partisan caucuses or opening up economic development loan negotiations, other areas of state government where millions are spent with no public participation.

Similarly, ALEC’s bill “Substantive Transparency in Education Act” is up for renewal vote by special interest lobbyists and legislators in the Education and Workforce Development Task Force. The bill requires public schools to open up their instructional materials for review by any parent or guardian. Note that the bill does not apply to private schools and many private charters refuse to abide by state open meetings and open records laws.

ALEC, however, is for secrecy when it benefits itself and its donors.

It is notable that another ALEC bill under consideration at this week’s meeting “Resolution in Support of Nonprofit Donor Privacy” recommends that the public be kept in the dark when it comes to finding out which millionaires or corporate interests are bankrolling ALEC, because the poor souls might be subject to public criticism or public pressure to drop their ALEC membership.

The resolution highlights 501 (c) (3) organizations like ALEC, but the operative language also protects 501 (c) (4) dark money groups like the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. ALEC along with the State Policy Network, the Wall Street Journal, and leaders of dark money groups have been fighting donor disclosure for dark money non-profits active in campaigns and elections. Wrapping dark money in the American flag and the Federalist Papers, they argue in endless articles, books, and speeches, that “anonymous speech” goes back to the founding fathers. But back then no Supreme Court had embraced the deeply flawed and corrosive concept that money is speech. They are sparing no effort to promote the idea that secrecy of donors is essential to protect First Amendment rights, despite the hundreds of millions now being secretly spent in elections without the disclosures the public supports to guard against corruption.

It comes as no surprise that Wall Street Journal editorial writer KimStrassel, who has become the key proponent of this propagandistic effort to shield the billionaire class from scrutiny with her fact deficient new book “The Intimidation Game,” will be addressing the ALEC meeting. Her book attempts to smear concerned citizens and small community organizations across the country that have successfully convinced over 100 ALEC firms to stop funding ALEC’s extreme agenda.

HOSTILITY TO RAISE THE WAGE EFFORTS

ALEC’s offshoot organization for local officials ACCE is advancing a series of muddled measures geared toward keeping wages low and handicapping activist federal agencies.

The “Local Resolution in Support of a State Minimum Wage Law” sounds like ACCE is in support of raising wages, but the cookie-cutter ordinance instructs local governments notto raise the minimum wage and to embrace preemption of local control by state legislatures. This is a rather odd position for a group whose model “Founding Philosophy and Principals Act” teaches American school children government “as close to the people as possible” is best.

But ALEC and its key funders like the billionaire Koch Brothers have long opposed any measure to raise the wage, including living wages and prevailing wages, and the Kochs have even characterized the federal minimum wage as an “obstacle to prosperity.” ALEC opposes even having a minimum wage for workers.

While ACCE favors state preemption of localities on some issues, on others it seeks unconstitutional local preemption of federal policy making. ACCE’s draft “Ordinance for Local Coordination on Federal Regulations” suggests that any local government — from a city or county to a school or water district — or even an NGO can invoke a theory of “coordination” to “force” the federal government to meet with them on an equal basis to work out their differences. “Coordination” is defined as “the process by which an agency of the federal government brings its regulations, whether proposed or established, into consistency with the public policy of [the local jurisdiction.”

So for instance if Superior, Wisconsin, thinks that the federal mercury standards for walleye and perch are too strict, ACCE thinks they should be able to impose their own notions on the federal government. In truth, ALEC has no consistent position on federalism or local control and simply attempts to hamstring any policy it or its funders don’t like.

ALEC’S EXTREME EDUCATION AGENDA ADVANCES WITH TRUMP PICK OF BETSY DEVOS

ALEC education bills were not publicly available at the time of this writing, but the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is a big win for the ALEC crowd and will be a hot topic at the ALEC meeting.

DeVos and her husband of the AmWay fortune have long bankrolled the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which spends big each election cycle on politicians advancing her agenda to transform Americas public education system into a for-profit “cash for kids” enterprise. As CMD reported recently, AFC aggressively promotes school vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and even sham virtual schools through ALEC where DeVos lobbyist Scott Jensen, the disgraced former Speaker of the Assembly, has played a leadership role.

CMD has also documented how charter schools promoted by DeVos in her home state of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never opened. The New York Timeshas covered in depth how they are failing the state’s children. Even charter advocates acknowledge that her efforts in Detroit represent “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”...

==

http://www.prwatch.org/files/new_charter_school_black_hole_report_oct_21_2015.pdf

ref cmd report:

MICHIGAN Michigan provided the least information to CMD of any of the 12 states/jurisdictions within our investigation. However, information from CMD’s federal FOIAs and other sources sheds light on Michigan and reveals significant problems with oversight of charter schools. In many ways, state officials appear to be still reeling from a critical blockbuster series published last year by the Detroit Free Press about the serious failures in charter schools in Michigan. As part of that series, the leading state paper documented that Michigan spends about $1 billion in state taxpayer money on charter schools that are accountable to no one. 31 (Overall, Michigan has approximately 1.5 million public school students, and nearly 10% are in charters.32) According to information CMD has obtained about federal funding for charters, charter schools in Michigan received $34,997,658 between 2010-’15 under the CSP umbrella, after the state was awarded $43.9 million under the CSP expansion in 2010. 33 (This discrepancy is based on appropriations amounts and cycles and other differentials.) Almost half (139) of the charters in Michigan were subsidized in part by federal tax dollars, in the past five years. (Michigan itself calls charter schools “public school academies” (PSAs).) As of 2014, Michigan had 297 charter schools operating in the state, and 141,204 students were enrolled in charters, in the most recent school year with complete data.34 Since the inception of charters in the state, more than 100 charters have closed (108).35 Many of them have closed due to lack of “academic viability” (poor results) while other have closed due to lack of “financial viability” (such as inadequate enrollment) and some for both or other failings. The total amount these schools have received is not known, but they certainly consumed well over $1 million in federal CSP grants before shuttering. Other charter operators in the state have been accused, and convicted, of crimes: These crimes include felony fraud and tax evasion. For example, the “Bay City Academy,” landed a $200,000 CSP grant. Its founder, Steven Ingersoll, had obtained a construction line of credit to convert a church into the Bay City Academy, but instead funneled $934,000 to his private account. Union members with LIUNA Local 1098 “blew the whistle” on Ingersoll for improper asbestos removal, and eventually prosecutors discovered Ingersoll’s financial fraud, even though the “neither the school’s board nor Lake Superior State University, the authorizer of the charter school, nor the Michigan Department of Education found anything illegal in the school’s audits."36 In 2015, Ingersoll, pleaded guilty of two felony counts for tax evasion and “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”37 Bridge Magazine called this “the most significant federal criminal case in the history of Michigan’s 20-year-old charter school industry.”38 “If this happened in public schools, the public would be up...

==

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/12/betsy-devos-big-giving-relatives-family-qualifies-gop-royalty/

I’s no secret that Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, is a political fundraising juggernaut. Her contributions to candidates and school choice causes around the country have been all over the news since she was named the nominee.

More consequential, though, are the depth and breadth of contributions by her family — by birth and by marriage — going back decades. The donations have helped make the clan a pillar of the Republican Party, immensely influential in steering GOP politics and causes.

Since 1989, Betsy DeVos and her relatives have given at least $20.2 million to Republican candidates, party committees, PACs and super PACs, according to an OpenSecrets.org analysis. (A tabbed spreadsheet is here.)  Amway, the multilevel marketing giant now known as Alticor that earned much of the family its wealth, gave another nearly $3.6 million to the party prior to 2002. And that’s just at the federal level — family members have given hundreds of millions more to state and local level politics and to nonprofit groups, think tanks and media outlets championing their favored conservative causes.

*At the federal level since 1989

In the 2016 cycle alone, the family had given at least $10 million as of late October to a host of GOP candidates and committees. Much of that — $4.4 million — went to super PACs: those  supporting the White House bids of Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, and the Koch brothers-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund and the super PAC started by Republican strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads; the latter two groups helped support numerous Republicans in tight House and Senate races.

Betsy herself, along with her husband, Dick DeVos, Jr., has contributed more than $7.7 million to federal candidates, committees and parties since 1990, including almost $4.8 million to super PACs. DeVos and her husband ramped up their gifts significantly in the 2016 cycle, setting a new personal record of about $2.7 million. None of that, however, went to Trump or his supporting super PACs.

Not so for her brother, Erik Prince, co-founder of controversial private security contractor Blackwater (now known as Academi). He made two donations to Make America Number 1, a super PAC that backed Cruz and then Trump;  Prince’s $150,000 in gifts came after Trump had become the Republican party nominee. Since 1990, he and his ex-wives have given $519,546, including $175,309 in 2016.

Betsy DeVos voiced her thoughts about her family’s abundant political giving in a 1997 piece in Roll Call, in which she wrote that she had decided “to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American values.”

The definition of “traditional American values” is in the eye of the beholder, of course.

It was Dick Jr.’s father, 90-year-old Richard “Rich” DeVos, Sr., who first established the family as a force in conservative fundraising. The elder DeVos, who co-founded Amway, which his sons have helped lead in various capacities, and owns the NBA’s Orlando Magic, has an estimated worth of $5.1 billion, according to Forbes. He’s a past president of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative leaders of which he was an early funder.

*At the federal level since 1989

This cycle, he and his wife, Helen, also contributed their highest-ever cash totals, donating almost $2.9 million – the first election cycle they have crested $1 million since 1998. Overall, the elder DeVoses have given nearly $6.8 million in federal elections since 1990.

These are big numbers, relatively speaking. On the Center for Responsive Politics’ list of top individual donors for 2016, Rich and Helen DeVos came in at No. 61 and Dick and Betsy DeVos at No. 65. Family members also made the list in previous election cycles – Dick and Betsy were 53:{rd:(style="position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: in 2014 and the “Richard DeVos Family” ranked 54:{th:(style="position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: in 2010.

More broadly, Amway’s employees and PAC combined also rank highly among organizational donors: They placed 19th in 2004 and fourth in the nation in 1994.

A web of nonprofits

Savvy political players like the DeVoses don’t engage only in direct electoral action. Through organized giving by its various foundations and strategic involvement in the institutions that receive their money, the DeVos family has leveraged extensive influence in nonprofit networks structured around their pet causes.

Most DeVos giving in this sphere is done through five foundations: the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation; the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation; the Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation; Cheri DeVos’ CDV5 Foundation; and the Douglas and Maria DeVos Foundation. (Daniel, Cheri and Douglas DeVos are all siblings of Dick Jr., Betsy’s husband.) According to one analysis of foundation tax records, the DeVos family donated more than $90 million in 2013 altogether and around $94 million in 2014 — with nearly half going to groups involved in education.

The DeVos family’s philanthropic efforts have a more social conservative bent than those of, say, the Koch brothers; for years the DeVoses have providedgenerous grants to religious-based organizations and — in particular — religious schools. Still, they have found common ground with the Kochs on a number of issues. Regular attendees at Koch network biannual donor meetings, the DeVoses have provided substantial support to the Koch-seeded charitable arm of their Americans for Prosperity, a very active dark money group; the FreedomWorks Foundation, which is connected to another dark money outfit that originated with one started by the Kochs; and the Mercatus Institute, a “market-focused” research center at George Mason University that has received funding from the Kochs since the 1980s.

Betsy DeVos may have married into the DeVos dynasty, but her own family has its own strongties to the conservative movement. Her father, Edgar Prince, helped Gary Bauer create the Family Research Council, an influential conservative group. And along with her siblings, Betsy sits on the board of theEdgar & Elsa Prince Foundation, a major donor to groups that include the Education Freedom Fund, the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defense Fund.And the family has actively fought to sweep away restrictions on money in politics with substantial contributions to nonprofits that litigate against such limits. Those include theCenter for Competitive Politics and the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a nonprofit set up by Citizens United attorney James Bopp and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) thatconsistently funnels nearly the entirety of its funds to Bopp’s firm each year. Bopp has taken a broadsword to campaign finance restrictions nationwide, mounting legal challenges to them at the federal, state and local levels.

Trump’s choice to run the Education Department holds strategic advisory positions with a number of nonprofit organizations that lobby to varying degrees on education issues, including Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. But her baby is the American Federation for Children a 501(c)(4) “dark money” group that promotes school voucher programs and charter schools across the country. AFC has significantly increased its efforts in recent years: It told the IRS that it made just $250,000 in political expenditures in 2009, a figure that increased to over $1 million by 2010 and nearly $1.7 million by 2011. In 2014, the number dropped a bit to just over $1 million.

But that year, AFC and its affiliated organizations boasted spending $4.5 million between the primary and general elections on 242 races in nine states — without ever disclosing its donors. It reported that pro-school choice candidates — mainly governors, state legislators and other non-federal politicians — won in 92 percent of the general election races it targeted, distinguishing AFC, with Betsy DeVos as its chair, as a powerhouse in the movement.

And AFC’s efforts go far beyond direct involvement in political contests. Among other activities, it has funneled money into other “dark money” groups thatsupport contenders for state supreme court seats deemed likely to be friendly to policies advocated by AFC that could be legally challenged.

The Education nominee also heads All Children Matter, a political committee that lobbies for school choice. Started with seed money from DeVos’ Advocates for School Choice, the predecessor to AFC, All Children Matter has been funded by millions from the DeVos family over the years, but has also received substantial sums from the Walton family (of Walmart fame) and other high profile conservative donors. Though DeVos was not personally named in the case, All Children Matter has millions in outstanding fines for election law violations dating back to 2008 — a record amount that is nearly a decade past due. Betsy DeVos led the group at the time of the violations — in fact, she is the only person who has been listed on All Children Matter’s leadership page since 2006.

Supporting the bench

Megadonors tend not to focus their contributions only on those in the majors; they direct some of their investments to minor leaguers, too, as well as those who might have a more direct local impact on their concerns. The Grand Rapids, Mich.- based DeVoses are no exception, giving extensively in state and local elections. They’ve contributed, for instance, a combined $9.5 million to the Michigan Republican Party in the last 20 years.

In that contest, DeVos family members (including the candidate) [accounted for](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=1,2,3&c-t-eid=23175#{1|gro=d-eid,d-ccg) three of his top four donors. But DeVos, who was challenging Democratic incumbent Jennifer Granholm, [fell short in the general election by a 56-to-42 percent margin.According to National Institute on Money in State Politics data, Betsy DeVos [has given](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=23375#[{1|gro=f-eid) over $1.9 million in state and local elections since 1996, a total that pales in comparison to her husband Dick’s [$40.2 million](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=26310921#[{1|gro=f-eid). To be fair, the lion’s share of that sum was the nearly $35.4 million that he gave to his own 2006 gubernatorial campaign.

Overall, Dick DeVos’s siblings have cut large checks at the state and local levels. [Doug DeVos](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=28726#[{1|gro=f-eid), the current president of Amway, has donated almost $2.8 million in these elections with his wife, [Maria](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=28519#[{1|gro=f-eid), according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. [Dan](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=161510#[{1|gro=f-eid), a sports executive and the current chairman of the Orlando Magic, has contributed a little less than $2.4 million with his wife, [Pamella](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=342588#[{1|gro=f-eid). Their sister, Cheri DeVos, a former Amway vice president, [has given](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-fc=2,3&d-eid=342612#[{1|gro=f-eid) more than $1.25 million at the state and local level.

State-level advocacy organizations have also drawn significant DeVos largesse. For example, eight DeVos family members [together gave an even $2 million](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-eid=15794497#{1|gro=d-eid) to Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, a [group that sought (unsuccessfully) in 2015 to repeal Michigan’s prevailing wage law, which ensures state construction contractors pay union wages to their workers.

But if the family has adopted a second state, it’s Florida. DeVos ownership of the Magic dates back to 1991, and family members have donated to a number of Florida politicians and advocacy organizations. In 2008, when the group Florida4Marriage sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that would limit the definition of marriage to a heterosexual union, Dick DeVos [contributed](http://www.followthemoney.org/show-me?f-eid=10243918#[{1|gro=d-eid)$100,000, making him the second-highest donor to the effort. The measure passed — but it was later struck down by the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Researchers Doug Weber and Alex Baumgart contributed to this post, as did Ashley Balcerzak, our money-in-politics reporter, and Brendan Quinn, our outreach and social media coordinator.

Categories: 501(c) groups Influence & Lobbying Presidential Super PACs

Tags: American Crossroads, amway, Anna Massoglia, b3, Betsy DeVos, blackwater, Carly Fiorina, devos, Donald Trump, Doug Devos, Erik Prince, Florida4Marriage, Freedom Partners Action Fund, jack noland, Jeb Bush, Jennifer Granholm, Make america number 1, Marco Rubio, Orlando Magic, Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, richard devos, Ted Cruz, transition

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/betsy-devos-child-labor

Now that we know President-elect Donald Trump has tapped right-wing megadonor Betsy DeVos as his pick to lead the Department of Education, now is a good time to examine some of the many shady organizations she’s funded.

One such organization is the Acton Institute, a think tank on whose board DeVos has served, and whose self-described goal is “to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.”

And one way to promote a virtuous society, it seems, is to bring back child labor.

As *Politico’s*Blake Hounshell notes, a blog post on the think tank’s official website extols the virtues of child labor, which it says is a “gift” to children everywhere.

In praising child labor, author Joseph Sunde acknowledges that the practice has gotten something of a bad reputation over the years, and he points to a *Washington Post* photo gallery of children working in harsh conditions as evidence for why.

Nonetheless, he sees a lot of upside to it.

“The photos surely point to times of extreme lack, of stress and pain,” he writes. “But… they also represent the faces of those who are actively building enterprises and cities, using their gifts to serve their communities, and setting the foundation of a flourishing nation, in turn. Turns out there is dignity and meaning in that, too.”

He concludes that many kids today have it too easy, and that doing well in school just isn’t enough to properly cultivate good character.

“Let us not just teach our children to play hard and study well, shuffling them through a long line of hobbies and electives and educational activities,” he writes. “A long day’s work and a load of sweat have plenty to teach as well.”

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/betsy-devos-education-secretary

breitbart & malkin ~ common core

==

Trump announced Wednesday that he is appointing as education secretary Betsy DeVos, the billionaire Republican who is a major champion and founding funder of the modern education privatization movement. Bringing no significant experience in public education, DeVos is a billionaire member of a family that has cultivated extensive power and influence in conservative circles thanks to its fortune from the Amway Corporation.

Trump’s appointment immediately provoked objection, with writer and historican Diane Ravitch slamming DeVos as someone who "does not hide her contempt for the public schools.”

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, declaredWednesday that DeVos has “done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers—which take away funding and local control from our public schools — to fund private schools at taxpayers’ expense. These schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education.”

“By nominating Betsy DeVos,” said García, “the Trump administration has demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators and communities.”

Trump has also appointed white nationalist Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist, overt racist Jeff Sessions as attorney general and hawkish anti-Muslimcrusader Michael Flynn as national security adviser.

DeVos is among a handful of billionaires who have created and underwritten the rapid expansion of charter schools since 2000. As detailed in an e-book published this fall by AlterNet's parent organization, Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, DeVos has long supported using taxpayer funds for voucher programs, parochial schools and charters, all of which undermine and replace public schools and locally-elected school boards. She neither attended public schools nor sent her children to them. (Click here to read the ebook for free.)

The former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, DeVos backed a failed ballot initiative in 2000 to amend the state constitution to allow students to use taxpayer dollars to attend nonpublic schools. She heads the American Federation for Children, which was described in Political Research Associates by Rachel Tabachnick:

The American Federation for Children is now the umbrella organization for two nonprofits that have been at the center of the pro-privatization movement for over a decade. In addition to the renamed Advocates for School Choice, it includes the Alliance for School Choice, formerly known as the Education Reform Council. Both entities received extensive funding from the late John Walton, one of the Wal-Mart heirs. The boards of the two related entities included movement leaders Betsy DeVos–scion of a Christian Right family who married into the Amway home goods fortune–William Oberndorf, Clint Bolick, John Kirtley, Steve Friess (son of Foster Friess), James Leininger, John Walton, and Cory Booker.

In a 2013 interview, Betsy DeVos indicated that she found inspiration in the article by notorious libertarian economist Milton Friedman titled, “The Role of Government in Education.” Notably, Friedman stated in that article, which was published in 1955, that he is amenable to racial segregation in “privately conducted” schools. He wrote, “So long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma ... Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools."

But to understand DeVos’s political footprint, it is necessary to examine her powerful family dynasty, whose well-heeled members chair the Orlando Magic.

As Benjy Hansen-Bundy and Andy Kroll previously noted in Mother Jones, “Members of the DeVos family rank among the most generous benefactors of the conservative movement and the Christian right, up there with the Bradleys, the Coorses, and the Kochs. Not only has billionaire Amway cofounder Richard DeVos Sr. cut checks to anti-union and anti-tax efforts, but these days he's also a fixture at the Koch brothers' invite-only donor summits. Name an organization—Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation—and odds are a DeVos family member has donated to it.”

Betsy DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary company Blackwater that profited off of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Four of the company’s employees were found guilty for a 2007 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, including a child as young as 9. Following bad publicity, the company has since changed its name to Academi, and Prince, no longer working there, is reportedly under investigation for money laundering.

Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick played an instrumental role in pushing in 2012 for legislation to make Michigan a right-to-work state, and disgraced Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder responded to her appointment with accolades.

“Donald Trump’s pick of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education proves that having a shortage of experience means nothing as long you don’t have a shortage of money,” Progress Michigan executive director Lonnie Scott saidWednesday. “The DeVos family has been using their deep pockets to influence the Michigan legislature for years and it looks like they have finally bought their way into a presidential administration as well. The DeVos family education plan has been a disaster for Michigan and we are truly saddened that Trump decided to import their failed ideas to Washington D.C. Progress Michigan remains committed to holding the DeVos family accountable and fighting for all children to have access to excellent public schools.”

Sarah Lazare

http://www.alternet.org/education/trumps-disastrous-education-pick-billionaire-heir-right-wing-dynasty-and-champion-school

==

'School Choice' Just Part of DeVos Family's Far Right Agenda

SUBMITTED BY Peter Montgomery on Wednesday, 3/2/2016 12:25 pm

Members of the DeVos family, which made billions with the Amway direct marketing company, have long been funders of far-right causes and Republican politicians. Over the years, they’ve appeared in PFAW and PFAW Foundation reports like Buying a Movement and Predatory Privatization. This week Inside Philanthropy has taken alook at DeVos funding, which has been instrumental in driving anti-public education efforts all across the country.

The story’s author, Rick Docksai, writes that the DeVos family’s success at pushing “school choice” reflects its “remarkable talent for moving money by the truckload into socially conservative causes and putting it to work to shift voters’ and lawmakers’ mindsets in a rightward direction.”

Among the right-wing groups DeVos has funded are the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Federalist Society, Council for National Policy, Traditional Values Coalition, the Acton Institute, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. But education policy is a top priority.

Betsy DeVos is quite the political ringleader in her own right. She formerly chaired the Michigan Republican Party. And she's been called "the four-star general of the voucher movement," for her activism on this issue, which includes her present-day gigs as a board member of Advocates for School Choice and as head of All Children Matter, a group that has been pumping contributions into state elections since its inception in 2003. Conservative education reforms—school vouchers, in particular—are its rallying cause, and the organization claims a "win/loss record" of 121 to 60...

Docksai contrasts the DeVos family’s commitment to Religious Right and and social conservative causes with the Koch brothers’ more libertarian leanings. But, he notes, the DeVos family is just as far-right as the Kochs on economic policy:

DeVos' influence helped turn Michigan into a "right-to-work" state (e.g., no company in the state can obligate its employees to pay dues for union representation), for example. And they firmly back opponents of affirmative action: The Center for Individual Rights received funding from Dick and Betsy DeVos in 2001 after it challenged the University of Michigan's race-based admissions process in court, a lengthy legal fight that resulted in new court-imposed restrictions on the use of race as an admissions factor.

Inside Philanthropy says that Jeb Bush’s failed presidential campaign got “a significant share of its funding from Richard DeVos,” but says that’s a departure from the DeVos’s political win-loss record: “The family has been a major shaper of policymaking at the state and national levels and will surely remain so for years to come.”

FILED UNDER

ORGANIZATIONS:

American Enterprise Institute, Acton Institute, Heritage Foundation,Traditional Values Coalition, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Council for National Policy,Federalist Society

PEOPLE:

Jeb Bush, Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos

TOPICS:

Vouchers, Public Education

see acm:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/All_Children_Matter

All Children Matter (ACM) was founded by Amway founder and far-right philantrhopist Richard DeVos and his wife, Betsy DeVos. The organization became the pet project of Walmart heir John Walton, who put more than $4.1M into the organization in 2006 before he was killed in a plane crash.^[1]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Fines for illegal election activity
• 2 Mission
• 3 Organization
• 4 Officers
  • 4.1 Executive Director
  • 4.2 Directors
• 5 Key Staff
• 6 Funding
  • 6.1 2005 to 2007 Donations
• 7 Contact Information
• 8 Website
• 9 External References
• 10 References

Fines for illegal election activity

In 2008, All Children Matter was fined $5.2 million by the Ohio Elections Commission for pumping millions of dollars into helping get pro-school voucher candidates elected in Ohio, Wisconsin and other states. Three years after the Commission imposed the record-breaking fine, the group had not yet paid it, according to the state attorney general. In 2008, the Elections Commission ruled unanimously that All Children Matter, then headed by former Michigan Republican Chairwoman Betsy DeVos, had illegally funneled $870,000 in contributions from its Virginia political action committee to its affiliate in Ohio. The payment violated a $10,000 cap on what Ohio-based, political-action committees could accept from any single entity. All Children Matter was also fined $500 in Wisconsin for providing media support for candidates without registering as a PAC.^[2]

Mission

ACM was started in the spring of 2003 with the mission of training and funding candidates who promote school vouchers nationwide.

Organization

ACM Inc is a federal "527" organization, which can donate money directly to other PACS and can set up guerrilla Super PACs that campaign on behalf of political candidates without any direct coordination by the candidate's organization, in theory.

Its base of wealthy funders includes most of the Dead Billionaires Club (DBC)^[3], including the DeVos family, the Koch brothers and ability to stealthily intervene in local, state and federal political races, the ACM network is an effective tool for the movement to privatize public education.

Officers

Executive Director

Greg Brock

Directors

• Betsy DeVos
• Richard Sharp
• Greg Brock

Key Staff

• Lisa Lisker
• Keith Davis

Funding

ACM takes in massive amounts of money from a Who's Who list of radical right wing wealthy patrons.

2005 to 2007 Donations

According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP)^[4]:

Contact Information

229 S. Washington Street - Suite 115 Alexandria VA 22314

Website

www.allchildrenmatter.org

External References

• All Children Matter - Right Wing Watch - People for the American Way

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Rachel Tabachnik Pro-Voucher Astroturfing: Campaigns Across Nation Coordinated by DeVos, Funded by a Few Mega-Donors, Talk to Action (Talk2Action.org)(blog/reporting site), April 24, 2011
2. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Associated Press/The (Wheeling, West Virginia) Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register School choice expanding as record fine languishes, published article/newspaper article, March 29, 2011
3. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Brian Ross The Dead Billionaires Club: The Dead Can't Vote, but Should They Give? Truth-2-Power, December 13, 2011
4. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ All Children Matter - Money In - 2005-2007

Categories: 

• Right-wing
• Education
• Politics (U.S.)
• Astroturf

rww

d Trump announced that Betsy DeVos, a Michigan Republican operative who has been called “the four-star general of the voucher movement,” is his choice to be secretary of education, a fox-guarding-the-chicken-coop appointment if ever there were one. DeVos has been a major proponent of school vouchers and other tax schemes that divert dollars away from public education and into religious schools, private schools, and profitable but ineffective online charter schools. In addition, organizations that she has helped run have been major players in state politics, pouring money into both state legislative campaigns and state lobbying.

The DeVos family’s wealth comes from the direct marketing company Amway, which made Richard DeVos and his wife Helen among the wealthiest people in the United States. In a profile published in March, Inside Philanthropy credits the expansion of voucher programs since 2000 largely to the DeVos family, “which operates three philanthropic foundations and has a remarkable talent for moving money by the truckload into socially conservative causes to shift voters’ and lawmakers’ mindsets in a rightward direction.” The DeVos family has funded major right-wing institutions pushing conservative policies, including the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Council for National Policy, the Acton Institute, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and more.

Betsy, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, is married to Richard’s son Dick, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in Michigan in 2006. She has been a board member of Advocates for School Choice and headed All Children Matter, which “has pumped contributions into state elections since its inception in 2003.”  She played a central role in All Children Matter, its successor the American Federation for Children and AFC-affiliated state political action committees, like one that raised more than $6 million for the 2010 election cycle in Pennsylvania alone.The American Federation for Children also spent heavily helping Wisconsin Republicans who faced recall elections.AFC is affiliated with the Alliance for School Choice.

Researcher Rachel Tabachnik noted in a 2011 Alternet profile of the DeVos family’s school privatization efforts  that after voucher initiatives were consistently defeated by voters, the DeVos family shifted their strategy to a legislative one, and began spending millions on both campaign contributions and lobbying.

Like many privatization advocates, DeVos has resisted efforts to hold charter schools and non-public schools to the same standards reformers apply to private schools. As Chalkbeat notes, since she and her husband helped get Michigan’s charter school law past, they have “worked to protect charters from additional regulation.” That may be why there has been little action in the state to improve or close low-performing charter schools.

When Michigan lawmakers this year were considering a measure that would have added oversight for charter schools in Detroit, members of the DeVos family poured $1.45 million into legislators’ campaign coffers — an average of $25,000 a day for seven weeks. Oversight was not included in the final legislation.

The DeVos attacks on public education are part of a broader push by right-wing DeVos-funded groups to attack public employee unions. The New York Times reported in 2011 that FreedomWorks was “pushing anti-union legislation in several states, and saw the school choice legislation as part of that larger battle.” A 2014 Mother Jones story detailed the DeVos clan’s anti-union agenda and the hardball it played with its political money to jam through right-to-work legislation. “Nowhere has the family made its presence felt as it has in Michigan, where it has given more than $44 million to the state party, GOP legislative committees, and Republican candidates since 1997.”

DeVos is a board member of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which supports Common Core standards – trashed by Trump on the campaign trail – as well as “school choice.” Betsy has also served on the board of the Acton Institute, which promotes right-wing economics as undergirded by conservative theology.

The Religious Right DeVos family also “gave heavily to efforts to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan” and “helped turn Michigan into a ‘right-wing work’ state. Betsy’s brother Erik Prince, founder of the controversial military contracting company formerly known as Blackwater, is also a right-wing funder; her industrialist father helped found the Family Research Council.

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