betsy devos 2 bak

some NEW perhaps a bit neglected // djt

FIRE?

funded mich lockdown protests? // koch mich freedom fund meckler?

claremonsters

renamed 2 619

chao and devos bailed out of apparent principle but chao never opposed trump on anything, covid mask fail; devos tried to use covid to push charters

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/betsy-devos-2653467292/

list fails

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/betsy-devos/

no lnx

Betsy DeVos’ foundation is giving $640,000 to right wing group whose 'scholar' wrote Trump-Pence coup memos

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement January 12, 2022

The foundation belonging to anti-public school activist and former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband, is handing a right wing group, The Claremont Institute, $640,000.

“The Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation donated $240,000 to Claremont in 2020 and approved another $400,000 to be paid out in the future, tax records show,” Rolling Stone reports in an article titled, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust.”

The Claremont Institute is home to John Eastman, who was best known (and currently serves) as the chairman of the anti-LGBTQ organization NOM, the National Organization For Marriage. Eastman agreed to “retire” as a law professor at the Chapman University School of Law exactly one week after he delivered a speech, on stage with Rudy Giuliani, at Donald Trump’s rally that preceded the violent and deadly January 6 insurrection.

But only later would Americans learn that John Eastman was the architect and author of several documents, now called the “coup memos,” detailing how Vice President Mike Pence could, effectively, steal the election for Donald Trump on the fateful day of the insurrection.

Eastman continues to serve as a Senior Fellow at The Claremont Institute, and in his role as the Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

The Bulwark, founded by prominent conservative never-Trumpers, last year wrote: “That Claremont has been unparalleled in its intellectual submission to Trumpism should give us pause.”

In 2019, Claremont welcomed as a Lincoln Fellow the conspiracist and “ king of fake news” Jack Michael Posobiec III. Posobiec, already well known as a promoter of the Pizzagate hoax and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, was then working as a correspondent and host for the One America News Network (OANN), which became one of the major promoters of false claims about the 2020 election. Claremont remains proud of the affiliation with Posobiec, with an institute official recently calling him “one of the best public political voices in America”—just days before it was revealed that a right-wing website Posobiec frequently promoted was a Russian disinformation project.

And among the latest crop of Lincoln Fellows is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth-mobilizing group Turning Point USA. Kirk bragged about sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight” for Trump on January 6. After his slimy “Falkirk Center,” co-founded with Jerry Falwell Jr., imploded, Kirk was ousted from Liberty University. The Claremont Institute has welcomed him with open arms.

As Americans now know, Eastman also counseled President Donald Trump in other areas, but in a shocking revelation which The New York Times and other news outlets reported late last year, Eastman sat in the Oval Office with Trump attempting to pressure the outgoing vice president to act to overturn a free and fair election.

Later, on January 6, Eastman, The Washington Post reported, would blame Pence for the violent attempted coup which included Trump supporters hunting for Pence inside the Capitol, a gallows and noose just outside, chanting repeatedly, “hang Mike Pence.”

What was essentially an attempted assassination of a sitting vice president came barely hours after Eastman – who to this day remains a Claremont Institute “scholar” – at the Jan. 6 spouted “conspiracy theories about voter fraud.”

Here is John Eastman, chairman of a Federalist Society practice group, at the pre-insurrection rally spouting conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He concludes: \u201cAnybody that is not willing to stand up and [vote to overturn the election] does not deserve to be in the office!\u201dpic.twitter.com/auD2vXSjNE

— Mark Joseph Stern ***FAIR COLAs FOR SLATE*** (@Mark Joseph Stern ***FAIR COLAs FOR SLATE***) 1610553789

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Disturbingly Kafkaesque': Judge slams Betsy DeVos for denying 94% of student debt forgiveness claims

Igor Derysh Salon

October 22, 2020

Arguing that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had undermined the agreement, a federal judge on Tuesday denied approval for a class action settlement over the Trump administration's handling of a student debt forgiveness program.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-pushes-school-privatization-but-keeps-public-schools-biggest-foe-hidden-from-sight

education Sec. Betsy DeVos has spent her life—and lots of her family’s money—pushing to destroy public education. And now the coronavirus pandemic is giving the Trump administration a tool to do just that, but DeVos is being all but erased from the public effort.

There’s a reason for that: DeVos has beenunpopular from her Senate confirmation hearing on. As people struggle with school reopening plans that are confusing, inadequate, unsafe, or all of the above, it might be counterproductive to remind them that the Trump administration’s proposed answers are in fact part of the same war against public education DeVos has been waging for a long time.

“School choice,” or, in translation, funneling public money away from public schools and into private schools and privately run charter schools that don’t have to follow the same rules as public schools, was a centerpiece of the Republican National Convention (RNC). Donald Trump talked about it—lying about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s position on charter schools—as did Melania and Don Jr., among other speakers.

But while “school choice” was everywhere at the RNC, DeVos was entirely absent, not even included in a video about women in the Trump administration. That’s a decision. Not “we didn’t have time to include her as a convention speaker” but an intentional omission of one of the highest-ranking women in the administration.

deVos may be a particularly unappealing messenger with her yachts and mansions and fumbling about “potential grizzlies.” But it’s also worth thinking about how much Team Trump is trying to use the pandemic as a stealth attack, separating DeVos’ relatively unpopular longtime efforts against public schools from the push to replace public schools with privatized options in this specific pandemic moment. The coronavirus is a chance to rebrand school privatization away from Betsy DeVos, presenting it as an answer to a specific problem now.

That two-pronged attack—the longstanding one built on DeVos’ money and the current one masquerading as a solution to a new problem—is powerful. This is an existential crisis for public education. But don’t mistake the idea that privatized education is the answer to the coronavirus crisis for anything but the same old assault on the public good of an education system that serves all kids.

Betsy DeVos accused of diverting coronavirus relief funds from poor students to wealthy private schools: ‘As immoral as it is illegal’720 an

jim h

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/meet-the-true-trump-loyalists-influence-peddlers-practicing-the-dark-art-of-bending-government-power/

the Donald is in a funk. He’s been outsmarted by an inert virus. His poll numbers are tanking, and even his demagogic pep rallies are falling flat.

So, who to turn to for political comfort? Why, of course, Trump’s true loyalists: his diehard cadre of Washington’s corporate lobbyists. I don’t merely mean those elites of K-Street and Wall Street who dominate his Cabinet, constituting the official Trump government of, by, and for corporate greed. He also has a “kitchen cabinet.” Operating out of public view, it’s an unofficial collection of highly paid influence peddlers who’re still practicing the dark art of bending government power to the wishes of selfish corporate interests. Each of them is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by brand-name clients — from Amazon to Walgreens — to get favors from Trump. In turn, these little-known lobbyists have now adopted The Donald as their chief client, funneling millions of special-interest dollars into his reelection campaign with the understanding that he’ll keep channeling tax breaks, regulatory exemptions and public dollars to the corporate donors. It’s the Washington money-go-round, merrily corrupting our government.

Who are these no-name corrupters?David Urban is one, considered the best-connected corporate huckster in the Trump swamp. He’s an old college pal of both Pentagon chief Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Moreover, he’s become such a close buddy of Donald himself that he’s known as a “Trump Whisperer,” able to work around the furies that rage in that strange orange head.

Such cozy ties to the top mean Urban gets his calls returned, an invaluable asset for his favor-seeking clientele, including Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, Bayer, Nike and Toyota. They, in turn, have made Urban rich, paying the once-obscure lobbyist more than $25 million since the Trumpeteers took office. And why wouldn’t they? For example, in 2019 the giant weapons maker Raytheon wanted to sell several billion dollars’ worth of missiles to Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers, but there was a congressional ban on such sales. No problem: (1) Raytheon enlisted Urban as their fixer; (2) he asked his pal Pompeo to meet with Raytheon’s CEO; and (3) voila! — the arms dealer promptly got a state department waiver to make the sale.

So, Washington lobbyists like Urban are now the top strategists and fundraisers for Trump 2020, hoping to get another four-year ride on the corrupt money-go-round.

During today’s COVID-19 crisis, the PR departments of every brand-name corporation are running slick ads nobly proclaiming: “We’re all in this together!”

Simultaneously, the corporate lobbying departments are ignobly using the public’s focus on the health crisis as cover for selfishly grabbing government favors for the corporation — everyone else be damned. And Trump’s totally corporate White House has been their corrupt cohort, serving as a front-end loader for everything from more corporate tax giveaways to jiggered labor rules that stiff workers.

One of the grabbiest special interests are well-off corporate and parochial private schools, where students from some of America’s wealthiest families get their education. For years, the nonpublic entities have been lobbying relentlessly to make taxpayers finance their schools, even though the schools are not open to all and usually have a narrow ideological or religious curriculum — including some extremist courses teaching that public schools should be eliminated.

That extremist nook is where Betsy DeVos resides. She’s a multibillionaire heiress and long-time funder of far-right causes. Chosen by Trump to run America’s education department, she’s been trying — by hook or crook — to run our schools straight into private hands… but with no success. Along came the COVID-19 federal relief package, including funds to help meet the education needs of low-income students in hard-hit public schools.

Hallelujah! shouted DeVos, grabbing the coronavirus as a way to advance her ideological agenda. In May, she issued an edict from on high requiring local public school districts to divert millions of the relief dollars from their disadvantaged students, forcing them to share their allotment with even the richest private schools. Astonishingly, Trump’s haughty education secretary rationalized her directive as a matter of economic fairness, piously informing locals that they must not “discriminate” against the rich.

DeVos’ “share-with-the-rich” dictum can be a bit imbalanced. Officials in New Orleans, for example, note that under her formula, 77% of its allotment would end up in private hands. Luckily, her “order” does not have the force of law, and public schools are fighting back. For information and action, go to the National Coalition for Public Education: NCPEcoalition.org.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/besty-devos-denounced-for-new-craven-public-school-privatization-scheme

with the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next Covid-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda.

“It is telling that, after spending more than three years doing nothing to help the public schools that 90 percent of children attend, Betsy DeVos races to divert resources into private hands 48 hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, referring to the high court’s ruling Tuesday that religious schools cannot be excluded from taxpayer aid programs.

“With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she’s spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda,” said Weingarten. “And it’s especially sickening that, in the middle of a national reckoning over race, when poor schools are in desperate need of funds to reopen safely, DeVos hijacks the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to shift support away from where it’s needed most.”

“DeVos’ craven attempts to divide and privatize would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high,” Weingarten added.

mcClatchy reported Thursday that the Trump administration intends to ask Congress “for a ‘one-time, emergency appropriation’ for a new grant proposal” that would “be provided to states to distribute to nonprofit institutions that disburse scholarships to qualified students who want to attend non-public schools.”

“The White House is seeking to have 10% of the amount that Congress approves for state and local educational agencies set aside for the grants,” according to McClatchy. “Trump will also seek approval of $5 billion in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to the scholarship programs.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned in a statement Thursday that “Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools that serve approximately 90% of students across the country.”

“Right now, our public education system is facing unprecedented challenges—public schools are scrambling to implement safety protocols with limited funds, millions of education jobs are on the line due to looming budget shortfalls, and families across the country are struggling with a chaotic, uncertain reality,” Murray said.

“On the anniversary of Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s also important to note the pandemic has exacerbated severe racial inequities that have long existed in our education system,” the Washington Democrat continued. “If Republicans have any sincere interest in addressing these inequities, they should show it by working with Democrats to invest in public education and address systemic racism rather than siphoning resources away when they’re needed more than ever.”

never waste a crisis: disaster capitalism poster child

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/betsy-devos-openly-admits-shes-using-the-pandemic-to-further-her-private-school-choice-agenda/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/government-leaders-including-betsy-devos-push-their-personal-agendas-as-economic-tsunami-crashes-into-americas-schools

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all states have ordered or recommended school buildings stay closed for the rest of the academic year, according to Education Week’s most recent count, and “schools are likely to stay shut for months,” according to the New York Times. Teachers are responding to the crisis by continuing their heroic efforts to ensure students are getting fed, staying engaged, and receiving ongoing instruction via remote learning in some form. Meanwhile, economists and policy leaders are warning that public schools are headed toward a financial crater unless governments at all levels come up with emergency funds for schools.

But instead of rushing to rescue schools from financial calamity, many government leaders—including U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—are using the pandemic to advance their personal agendas, whether it’s to privatize public education or balance budgets on the backs of school kids.

The predicted shortfalls will compound harm that’s been done to a public education system already in financial trauma.

Public schools haven’t fully recovered from the beating they took as a result of the Great Recession, argues a new report from the Albert Shanker Institute, a research center affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. The downturn in the nation’s economy that started in 2007 hit schools hardest in 2009 to 2011, after states had slashed education budgets and aid that came from the federal stimulus package had run out. The results were “fewer teachers and support staff, larger classes, and a narrower array of academic and extracurricular programs,” the report explains.

The report’s authors, Rutgers professor Bruce Baker and Shanker Institute senior fellow Matthew Di Carlo, call on the federal government to respond to the pandemic with a large aid package for public schools and requirements for states to direct money where it’s needed most—to high-poverty communities in deepest distress and “according to student needs.” State leaders, the authors contend, must move to restore state funding levels to what they were before the recession hit.

Instead of taking this advice, what we see are political leaders in both parties going in the opposite direction.

DeVos Doubles Down on Privatization

It’s bad enough that emergency aid for schools provided by the federal government is woefully short of what is needed, according to a broad coalition of education groups, but what’s worse is that some of it is in danger of being hijacked by Secretary DeVos.

As Matt Barnum reports for Chalkbeat, DeVos has announced she will direct $180 million in federal coronavirus relief for schools into grant programs for funding two of her pet projects: turning public education into a voucher system and transferring learning from classrooms to the internet.

“It’s the latest example of the department aligning its coronavirus response to the Trump administration’s political preferences,” Barnum writes.

The vouchers, what DeVos calls “microgrants,” mimic what are commonly called education savings accounts (ESAs), a policy idea promoted by right-wing policy advocates including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), former Florida governor and failed presidential candidate Jeb Bush, and Charles Koch and his late brother David.

ESAs are “the most market-based and the least accountable” form of school choice, says Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, which has called on Congress to stop DeVos from going forward with these options.

The way the programs work, Burris explains, is that tax dollars designated for education are given to parents in a “savings account” with a debit card that can be used to pay for education products and services such as tutors, home schooling, online courses, and private school tuition.

ESAs were first created in Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, and Mississippi as a way around prohibitions against using public dollars for religious schools. The vast majority of parents who participate in Arizona’s program use the money to pay for private school tuition, according to the New York Times. Given that most private schools in Arizona are religious schools, it’s likely ESAs are mostly used to supplement parents choosing to opt out of public schools for religious reasons.

DeVos’s second option for states to expand online learning programs is also problematic. A widely cited national study found students enrolled in full-time, online-only schools lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math over a 180-day school year—meaning, in math, an entire year of lost instruction. Studies of statewide online learning programs have found disappointing results, including those in Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, and Ohio.

DeVos wraps her ideas in the bold rhetoric of “rethinking” education, but “the secretary is a longtime advocate of alternatives to public schools,” notes NPR’s Anya Kamenetz in her report on DeVos’s announcement, pointing to DeVos’s years of supporting home schooling and vouchers.

DeVos’s determination to direct more public money to private pockets is explicitly written into the new grant program’s instructions that students who attend private schools must be eligible to participate.

Averting ‘An Educational Catastrophe’

While DeVos’s efforts to direct federal emergency aid for schools toward privatization efforts are perhaps expected, what’s more than disappointing are reports that a number of state governors are already calling for deep cuts to public schools.

Similar to what happened in response to the Great Recession, these leaders are looking to balance the state’s books by cutting spending rather than increasing taxes, and education and health care will suffer most.

Among the state leaders calling for deep cuts to education is New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who “plans to slash aid to localities by $8.2 billion and cut state agency budgets by 10 percent,” according to City & State New York. “Cuomo has made a big point of opposing tax hikes all year long,” the local outlet notes, and the governor answered a reporter’s question about what local officials should do by saying, “Call Washington.”

No doubt, states and cities are heading into uncharted financial territory. Big city school districts including Denver, New York City, and across Ohio are expecting severe budget trauma. A survey of city leaders found nine in ten believed budgets were headed to shortfalls, and they were already planning to cut services, including education.

Unless the federal government and state leaders take action to increase funding for local schools, there will be an “educational catastrophe,” warn the leaders of the nation’s largest school districts in a letter to Congress, and as many as 275,000 teachers would lose their jobs.

“For states facing catastrophic revenue declines, asking more of taxpayers with a clear ability to pay is far preferable to cutting state budgets, which would lead to mass layoffs, steep cuts in public services, and a downward spiral in the economy,” write fiscal policy analysts in a report for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

They point to a range of sources state leaders should consider tapping to shore up funding for local schools, including personal and corporate income taxes, sales and consumption taxes, and getting rid of laws that restrict taxation.

New York is an excellent example of a state that has for too long neglected to address the wealth and power structures that limit funding for public goods and services like education.

In response to Cuomo’s budget warning, public school advocacy group the Alliance for Quality Education New York states, “There are 112 billionaires in New York that have a combined wealth of $525 billion—almost 5 times New York State’s annual budget. A small tax on New York’s ultra-rich would close the budget deficit, without sacrificing our children and their future.”

“We cannot avoid a budget crisis, but we can attenuate its negative effects and shorten its duration,” write Baker and Di Carlo in their Shanker Institute report.

But ideologues like DeVos and state governors like Cuomo who want to use a crisis to advance their own beliefs and careers are making matters worse.

an 520

a New Low’: Betsy DeVos sued for garnishing wages of nearly 300,000 student loan borrowers during pandemic

Common Dreams

Michigan governor slams Betsy DeVos for her ties to a far-right anti-lockdown protest group

Alex Henderson

Americans still support social distancing measures — 83% of Democrats, 72% of independents and 62% of Republicans, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll released this week.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/this-is-wrong-bipartisan-lawmakers-slam-betsy-devos-for-yanking-funds-from-800-schools

no lnx

‘This is wrong’: Bipartisan lawmakers slam Betsy DeVos for yanking funds from 800+ schools

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 3, 2020

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos came under fire after her department made a bookkeeping change that would result in major funding cuts for America’s rural schools.

The Department of Education quietly informed state education officials that it would change how districts report the number of students who live in poverty, which could result in funding cuts for more than 800 of the “poorest” and “most geographically isolated” schools, according to The New York Times.

The changes to the Rural and Low-Income School Program came after the department found that some districts “erroneously” received funding despite being ineligible. The department previously allowed schools to report the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which it used to calculate poverty rates, for nearly two decades. Under the new rule, districts will be required to use data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine if they meet the threshold of 20% of students living below the poverty line to qualify for the program.

Education spokeswoman Liz Hill told The Times that the department’s new rule follows existing law, but added that it had “drafted the legislative fix needed to use a free-and-reduced-lunch funding formula.”

“When you discover you’re not following the law Congress wrote, you don’t double down. You fix it,” Hill said. “If that’s what Congress wants, Congress should pass it, and the Education Department will happily implement it. We will also continue to look for ways to help ensure students are not unnecessarily harmed.”

The move stunned rural school leaders, who said they rely on the funding.

“Rural districts have budgeted for these resources, and the administration has given no consideration to how they will be impacted by this immediate cut to their funding,” Sasha Pudelski, the advocacy director at the School Superintendents Association, told The Times.

Some southern states are expected to be hit especially hard.Oklahoma, for example, will likely see the number of schools eligible for the program shrink by half. Matt Holder, the superintendent of Sulphur Public Schools in Oklahoma, said the cuts will force him to cut resources for students in a district where 60% live in poverty.

“It’s important for us to have someone on staff to work with these students and get them where they need to be,” Holder told the outlet. “I feel like we’re cutting from the most vulnerable.”

The move was met with bipartisan criticism. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee which oversees education, said he was “very concerned” about the rule change. Alexander vowed to work with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to “solve this problem for hundreds of rural schools around the country,” a committee spokesperson said in a statement.

“There is no reason that a change was made this year and the Department of Education should listen to Congress and fix this problem quickly,” the statement said.

Collins, one of the authors of the Rural Education Achievement Program, said in a letter to DeVos that 100 of the 149 Maine schools that qualified for the program would lose funding, which would result in about $1.2 million in cuts.

“If this decision is not reversed,” Collins said, “the department risks denying thousands of students living in rural Maine the chance to reach their full potentials.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., wrote to DeVos that impoverished school districts would lose $400,000 from the rule change.

“The department should be focusing on elevating school districts with the fewest resources instead of punishing small schools with harmful, last-minute policy changes,” Tester said.

The funding cuts come as rural schools struggle to stay afloat. The nonpartisan advocacy group Rural School and Community Trust issued a report warning that many of these districts “face nothing less than an emergency.”

“Many rural students are largely invisible to state policymakers, because they live in states where education policy is dominated by highly visible urban problems,” the report said.

Alan Richard, a board member of the group, shared his hope with The Times that the Trump administration would focus on rural issues because rural voters played such a large part in his election.

“Rural education advocates definitely hoped that a president elected, in part, because of rural and small-town voters would pay more attention to rural children,” he said. “Even after the last election, with all the attention to rural America, little has been done to correct the inequity so many rural students face.”

“This is wrong,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., one of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, tweeted.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer added that the move was an example of Trump’s “war on America’s rural communities.”

“First, it was the tariffs that hurt farmers, now he’s targeting students in rural school districts,” he wrote.

“Providing a quality public school education is one of government’s biggest responsibilities. With this decision, Trump and DeVos earn yet another ‘F,'” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, adding that the move was particularly suspicious because Trump is “also doing everything in his power to undermine he accuracy of the 2020 census.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/watch-betsy-devos-cornered-by-congressman-for-lacking-basic-information-about-the-us-education-system-you-dont-know-the-answer/

no lnx

Betsy DeVos cornered by congressman for lacking basic information about the US education system: ‘You don’t know the answer?’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 27, 2020

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos testified before a House Appropriations subcommittee Thursday and was repeatedly unable to answer basic questions, got snippy with Democratic lawmakers, and falsely claimed research cited by top Democrats was wrong and had been “debunked.”

(The numbers behind that research came from DeVos herself, according to this piece in the Washington Post.)

In an exchange with Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), DeVos got heated, refuted his claims, and yet was unable to give a correct answer.

“Everything you’re citing is debunked, ridiculous, so I don’t accept the premise of your question,” DeVos, putting the word “question” in air quotes, told Pocan.

Congressman Pocan was referring to reports that show more than 40 percent of charter schools funded in full or in part by the federal government “collected the grants and then either did not open, or have opened and shut down,” as the report’s author wrote in The Washington Post.

Pocan responded by correctly saying the reports have “actually not” been debunked.

Minutes later Pocan revisited the 40 percent failure rate of charter schools, to DeVos’ anger.

“That is not true, that has been a totally debunked report,” she declared, waving her finger. “It’s nothing but propaganda by an individual who has an in for charter schools.”

“So what percent of charter schools are failing?” Pocan asked.

DeVos’ mouth opened and her jaw dropped but she did not speak for several seconds.

“Do you have an idea?” Pocan pressed.

“I don’t have a state – national,” DeVos, flustered, replied.

“You’re the Secretary of Education and you don’t have this? You ‘know’ this report’s wrong, but you don’t –” Pocan said before being cut off.

“Charter schools are chartered by states, they are not chartered by the federal government,” DeVos said, smiling, as if she won a debate. She had not. She had, however, ignored that the report shows 40.5% of charter schools received some if not all of their funding from the federal government.

“You know that number’s not right but you don’t have a correct number,” Pocan responded.

“What I know is parents and families are choosing to send their children to charter schools,” said DeVos.

“So you don’t know the answer?” Pocan again asked.

“Parents and children are going to charter schools by choice,” DeVos repeated, showing she has little interest in anything but continuing to fund charter schools, regardless of the cost to taxpayers or the cost to students who don’t receive a good education, and the cost to public school students who lose funding every day a student attends a charter school instead of a public school.

That, too, is somewhat false. After three years of an anti-public schools Secretary of Education, parents are learning that charter schools “make up an outsized share of the number of public schools persistently graduating less than half of their students.”

Americans are “turning against” charter schools reveals another Washington Post report.

Watch this exchange between Devos and Pocan:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

.@repmarkpocan: 40% of charter schools that you're giving grant to are closing down

BETSY DeVOS: That's a totally debunked report. It's just propaganda

POCAN: So what percent of charters are failing? Do you have an idea?

DeVOS: ¯_(?)_/¯

P: You're the secretary of education!

Embedded video

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/obama-closed-an-agency-that-accredited-a-university-with-no-faculty-or-students-then-betsy-devos-saved-it/

no lnx

Obama closed an agency that accredited a ‘university’ with no faculty or students. Then Betsy DeVos saved it

Written by Daily Kos February 16, 2020

If you have never heard of Reagan National University, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, you’re not alone. But like many small colleges you’ve never heard of, this one boasted (at least until this month) full accreditation as sanctioned by the federal government.

There’s just one small problem.

By all appearances, at present it has no students, no faculty and no classrooms.

As an investigation for USA Today by Chris Quintana and Shelly Conlon found, this institution of higher learning was accredited by the Department of Education under the auspices of Trump-appointed Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Or more precisely, it was accredited by an “approved” and sanctioned agency of DOE with a track record so dismal that, back in the good old days (known as the “Obama administration”) when the federal government was actually being run by competent people who worked for the interests of American ciitizens, it had been summarily shuttered and put out to pasture.

The agency in question, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools, has a history of approving questionable colleges, with devastating consequences. It accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges and Brightwood College, massive for-profit universities whose sudden closures last decade left thousands of students without degrees and undermined the value of the education of those who did graduate. Those closures led President Barack Obama’s Education Department to strip ACICS’ powers in 2016.

After a Federal Judge ruled that the Obama Administration had failed to consider a substantial number of documents that ACICS had submitted to appeal its closure, DOE was ordered to reconsider its decision, which it did. DOE career employees again found that ACICS failed to meet appropriate standards in its accreditation process.

But by then Trump acolyte and billionaire-by-marriage Betsy DeVos, who, following standard Trump-appointee procedure, was proceeding to reverse every single action taken by the prior administration, no matter how sensible or helpful to the American people, had begun to remake the Department. DeVos reinstated the ACICS agency despite its horrid past record of promoting colleges that exist solely to rip off American students (usually poorer ones and disproportionately students of color).

Since its short-lived disbandment, the agency had lost many colleges as “members” and, as Quintana and Conlon note, lost their “membership fees” as well. It needed money, and fast. So, apparently it was time for some quick calls to those “institutes of higher learning” out there.

Accreditation is the key to obtaining federal grant and loan money for students who want to attend college. Of course, that money then goes straight to the “accredited” college. But as USA Today found out, “Reagan National University” is a very strange college. To begin with, when the reporters attempted to learn more about the college itself, its website links were all dead. They still are.

Adding further to the mystery, “[n]o students or graduates could be found on LinkedIn or Facebook.”

When USA Today tried to contact faculty from this so-called college, they could find none. People whose names were listed on the “college’s” website swore they’d never heard of or taught at Reagan National University. Other names had absolutely no internet history, something quite unusual for academics. Phone calls to the University ended in curtly disconnected lines. Attempts to physically visit the school were similarly unavailing, yielding locked offices. Peering through the window, a vacuum cleaner and some insulation were visible.

As the USA Today investigation found, ACICS specializes in accrediting “for profit” colleges, the same ones notorious for ripping off students with phony promises of inflated job prospects and providing worthless degrees. But since the Obama administration shut it down, its members have dwindled from 290 in 2016 to 63 at present. ACICS told USA Today that Reagan had somehow met its stringent accreditation standards, but it refused to provide any details on how that may have occurred.

Michelle Edwards, CEO and president of ACICS, defended the council’s accreditation process in emails this month to USA TODAY. ACICS first accredited Reagan in 2017, though Edwards said the university had to address some areas where it was initially out of compliance. She declined to say what those areas were.

But hey, ACICS pulled out all the stops to get Reagan National U. up to snuff! In January 2019, it sent an (apparently) sternly worded letter to its accredited so-called college, informing Reagan that its job placement rate was a whopping 0%. Of course, the agency’s standard procedure provided a window of time for an institution to “show cause” why its accreditation should not be pulled in such an instance. For Reagan, that “window” expired in May, 2019. According to the agency CEO, “Reagan” provided some sort of satisfactory information to ACICS (we’re not told what that was), and the “show cause” order was lifted.

But in December, 2019, ACICS really laid the hammer down.

This time accreditors raised concerns about the language in a course catalog and the university’s grading system. It also hinted at more existential issues, such as a lack of evidence of a qualified person to run the business programs. And the computer science program didn’t have the materials necessary to teach.

It’s not clear who ACICS was talking to at “Reagan,” if they were actually talking to anyone at all. This entire shoddy episode reeks of either purposeful negligence or something worse. As Antoinette Flores, with the Center for American Progress who studies accreditation asks, how could this agency possibly have accredited a “school” with no faculty and no students?: “You accredited this institution. How did you miss this?”

In February of 2020, while USA Today was conducting its investigation, “Reagan National University” voluntarily withdrew its accreditation.

The USA Today investigation found something that provides a clue to exactly what “Reagan National University” is. It seems that in 2011, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement visited another questionable institution, called the “University of Northern Virginia” on “suspicions” that it was operating to exploit the issuance of visas through legal loopholes for foreign visitors rather than acting as an actual educational institution. That university was shut down by the state of Virginia because of its lack of accreditation in 2013, but popped up again, listing an address in South Dakota—the same address used by “Reagan National” in its corporate filings. It even listed the name of its agent as “Xianhua Fan”, seemingly the same name as Reagan’s president (in its business filings spelled as “Xuanhua Fan,” although the official “website” listed president of the University was a fellow named “Harold Harris”).

South Dakota, as the authors of the USA Today article point out, is probably not the ideal place to go to college: “State officials merely ask colleges whether an accrediting group has approved them — they don’t independently hold universities accountable.”

If it seems that all of this should have been obvious to ACICS, the agency DeVos stepped in to save, it should. The article describes the many criticisms and problems that agency has, including denial of recognition by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, a university-member body that sets stringent standards for accreditation.

But ultimately, as the article notes, this is all traceable back to DeVos and the Trump administration philosophy of rolling back every regulation in favor of business interests, no matter who is harmed in the process.

The education secretary wants to cut back the rules governing accreditation. Fewer regulations could allow colleges to implement new training programs swiftly to fill holes in the workforce, she says — an approach cheered by for-profit colleges like the ones accredited by ACICS.

Critics argue these rollbacks will make it easier for shoddy or predatory institutions to take advantage of students. They have pointed to the high-profile closures of several for-profit colleges over the past decade as a need for more regulations to protect students, rather than fewer.

What this all boils down to has nothing to do with learning or “education,” and everything to do with political campaign contributions from the “for-profit” college mill industry and lining the pockets of the investors that fund such scam schools. As noted by Jeff Bryant of the Campaign for America’s future,”The favors Trump and DeVos are granting to the for-profit college industry reflect the generosity of campaign contributions the sector has generally showered on Republicans, especially since the advent of the regulatory constrains issued in the Obama years.”

And whether those colleges actually have any faculty or students, or whether they even can provide degrees, is apparently not a major concern.

2/20 d ravich new book Yale Broad-ies

1/2 kids in public school elig free lunch, 20% really poor?

DR says billionaires admit charters do not work, but persist? eg bloomberg

Goliath 50M$ 440M$ betsy has control

NH, MI, WI ~ refuse to meet w/ besty and v pence?!

reed hastings ~ school bd, just corps?!

ALEC walton koch devos;

joann weiss sp?

uniform nat stds common core boon to vendors

sotu

gov't school dog whistle to evang?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/betsy-devos-approval-rating-is-28-percent-as-voters-back-investigations-into-student-debt-scandal-poll/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/betsy-devos-foundation-funds-right-wing-propaganda-operation-tax-filing/

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Betsy DeVos’ foundation funds right-wing ‘propaganda operation’: tax filing

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 19, 2019

The family foundation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her billionaire husband, Dick, gave more than $1 million to purportedly “independent” right-wing groups that have helped boost her assault on public education, according to a recent tax filing obtained by the government watchdog group Allied Progress and shared with Salon.

The 2018 filing shows that the couple put $5 million into the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation while doling out more than $11.6 million in contributions and pledges. As in previous years, much of the funding went to Christian charities and local initiatives in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the couple’s home. But more than $1 million went to supposedly independent right-wing think tanks and groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the National Review Institute, which have heaped praise on Secretary DeVos and helped promote her agenda.

“Secretary DeVos is effectively funding an outside propaganda operation to help her bash teachers’ unions and promote private voucher schemes that undermine public education,” said Jeremy Funk, communications director for Allied Progress, a nonpartisan watchdog organization.

The DeVos Foundation contributed $500,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for public policy research last year and pledged another $250,000 in future payments to the organization, according to the filing.

AEI, whose board includes Dick DeVos, is a libertarian think tank that maintains a “close relationship with incoming Republican administrations,” according to The Guardian, and assists them with “staff and readymade policies.

AEI officials have repeatedly publicly praised DeVos and her policies.

Frederick Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies, recently backed DeVos’ push to gut the Borrower Defense Rule, which allows defrauded students to seek debt relief. Hess praised DeVos’ proposal to base debt forgiveness on student income as “clearly better for colleges, taxpayers, and students” in a National Review op-ed. A judge later blocked the initiative, although DeVos is now implementing new rules that again seek to restrict the amount of debt that can be forgiven to students defrauded by for-profit colleges.

AEI senior fellow Peter Wallison also praised DeVos’ controversial changes to Title IX, which made it harder to report sexual abuse on campus, in an op-ed last year. Wallison wrote that DeVos’ rule change puts “sexual harassment rules back into compliance with the Constitution and laws” and “should be an example for other administrative agencies.”

The DeVos Foundation also donated $10,000 to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group whose top officials have publicly backed DeVos’ proposal to require colleges to allow cross-examination of sexual assault and harassment accusers that advocates say would discourage victims from coming forward.

FIRE later promoted DeVos’ comments at the Independent Women’s Forum earlier this year, where she criticized Title IX.

“FIRE has long expressed sentiments much like that of Secretary DeVos” on Title IX, the group said, and its leadership was “heartened by the positions signaled in Secretary DeVos’ speech.”

The DeVos Foundation also made a $350,000 contribution to the Mackinac Center, according to the filing.

The Mackinac Center is a longtime opponent of teacher unions that urged teachers to opt out of their unions after the Supreme Court ruled that non-union workers cannot be forced to pay fees to public-sector unions.

Secretary DeVos herself attended Supreme Court arguments in the case. DeVos is a longtime supporter of “efforts to reduce the power of public-sector unions” and previously made a $125,000 donation to a Michigan group that opposed collective-bargaining rights, according to The Washington Post. Employees at the Department of Education employees have also accused DeVos of “gutting a long-standing labor agreement” and enforcing a new deal that was “roundly rejected” by their union, according to the Post.

The DeVos Foundation also contributed $100,000 to the National Review Institute,whose board of trustees includes Dick DeVos, according to the filing.

After receiving the donation in 2018, the National Review Institute hosted Secretary DeVos at its 2019 Ideas Summit in March, where she vowed to make school choice a “top priority.”

That same month, The National Review praised DeVos’ school choice plan and her Education Freedom Scholarship program, a tax-deductible private scholarship program similar to school vouchers that critics say will reduce tax revenue that could otherwise pay teacher salaries. The National Review hailed it as a “bold” plan and a “huge step in the right direction.”

The DeVos Foundation also contributed $10,000 to the Institute for Justice, according to the filing, a group that funds a “variety” of lawsuits defending school vouchers and tax credit programs supported by DeVos, according to The Times.

Prior to the contribution, DeVos met with the group’s top officials so they could “suggest a few areas where the department could facilitate school-choice efforts and offer the [secretary] help in those areas,” The Times reported.

Earlier this year, the Education Department hosted a blog post by the Institute for Justice’s Tim Keller in which he promoted school choice efforts.

The foundation’s 2017 filings showed similar contributions that included nearly $3.2 million to conservative nonprofits that favor school choice and promote other right-wing policies.

Along with giving or pledging $1 million to AEI in 2017, the DeVos Foundation also contributed or pledged $1 million to the Alliance for School Choice, which Secretary DeVos previously chairedbefore joining the Trump administration. DeVos also chaired the American Federation for Children, which controls the Alliance for School Choice. The federation has continued to lobby the Education Department even after DeVos took over.

Along with contributing to right-wing organizations that promote education policy, the DeVos Foundation has also contributed to numerous advocacy groups that oppose abortion and deny climate change.

The DeVos Foundation and the Education Department did not immediately return a request for comment. Dick DeVos told MLive in 2017 that the majority of their donations are not political.

“These are not political organizations that are advocating or advancing any political agenda. They are trying to serve people,” he said.

Mark Brewer, the former longtime chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, dismissed the other contributions as “nothing more than a smokescreen to divert attention away from the disclosures of the political contributions.”

Lonnie Scott, the head of progressive advocacy group Progress Michigan, told NPR that the family foundation’s contributions are an example of how conservatives wield their charitable foundations’ checkbooks for political power.

“I think what we see overall is really the purchasing of political power that crosses the spectrum of political and foundation giving,” he said. “The right is very quick to use foundation funding in a way that the left does not in supporting specific policies.”

See the DeVos Family Foundation’s full 990 tax filing below:

DeVos Foundation 990 2018 by Igor Derysh on Scribd

Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

rep federica wilson

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/frederica-wilson-betsy-devos-you-are-out-to-destroy-public-education-926539/

the conv 1119 duh

When U.S Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos discussed the results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, she described them as “devastating” and part of a worsening crisis in education.

The results showed a slight decline in reading scores and a flattening in math scores.

She noted that two out of three of the nation’s children aren’t proficient in reading. She also decried as ineffective the US$1 trillion in federal spending on education over the past 40 years, saying it has done nothing to stop the widening gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students.

“We cannot abide these poor results any longer,” DeVos stated. “We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

As an education scholar, here are several issues that I see with DeVos’ take on the state of American education.

1. DeVos continues to trash public education

DeVos’ comments are part of a long-running critique of American primary and secondary school education.

“This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” DeVos stated.

In this, the education secretary follows a long line of critics – from former Secretaries of Education William J. Bennett and Margaret Spellings to author George H. Smith – who see American schooling as a shambles, dating back to the famous 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report, which criticized mediocre academic performance as being akin to an “act of war.”

2. DeVos uses test scores to push her privatization agenda

DeVos uses the “student achievement crisis” turned up by the latest national test scores to urge support for alternatives to public K-12 education. For instance, when she spoke about “expanding education freedom,” she is alluding to greater support for voucher systems and charter schools as alternatives to, and in competition with, public primary and secondary schools. This is a stance she has taken throughout her time in the Trump administration.

It’s important to note that DeVos does not call for reforming public schools or increasing support to teachers or students, either of which could potentially boost future test results.

3. DeVos is pushing a free market approach to education reform

Reducing the federal government’s role and increasing privatization is the essence of the DeVos approach to education. Her approach is based on a free market philosophy that focuses on private good rather than public benefit. For example, she believes personal benefits – not social benefits – will follow what she describes as the administration’s “transformational plan to help America’s forgotten students escape failing schools.” This approach sees personal material gains in the form of compensation and skills-building as more important than cultural change or broader social good.

DeVos sees vouchers and charter schools as the means of escape from failing schools, saying, “students can break out of the one-size-fits all system and learn in the ways that will unlock their full potential.”

4. DeVos diminishes inequity

DeVos offers just a hint of recognition of inequity in her remarks, such as when she decries the school experience of “our most vulnerable students.” Yet, there is no clarity on what – be it race, class, geography or gender – defines or makes these students vulnerable. Nor does DeVos call for directing resources these students’ way.

5. DeVos is silent on educational technology

Despite how deeply K-12 schools have invested in educational technology to improve education, DeVos makes no mention of adapative learning, multimedia materials, rich media classrooms or students learning to code. She doesn’t call for technological fixes to improve student outcomes, nor criticize badly implemented tech as a cause of unfortunate scores.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/betsy-devos-held-in-contempt-and-gets-100000-fine-for-gauging-defrauded-students/

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Betsy DeVos held in contempt and gets $100,000 fine for gauging defrauded students

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court and slapped with a $100,000 fine (which the government will pay) for continuing to collect loan payments from students who were defrauded by the now-closed for-profit Corinthian Colleges. U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim had ordered the Education Department to stop collecting on loans owed by around 16,000 former Corinthian students, an order the Education Department mostly ignored.

In issuing the rebuke, Kim said that “the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply with the preliminary injunction.” In some cases, the government even seized tax refunds or wages to collect the money that the former students were not supposed to have to pay.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren confronted DeVos over this issue at a Senate hearing earlier this month, DeVos tweeted, “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans.”

Again, 16,000 borrowers are involved. Blaming loan servicers is the Education Department’s strategy for responding to the contempt citation, because, as usual, when rich people like Betsy DeVos get called out on their abuses, they scream that it’s unfair and demand to evade accountability, even as they insist that students who were literally defrauded by a for-profit college should get no relief.

The Education Department is refunding “at least 3,200” of the borrowers, but 3,200 is a long way from 16,000. The $100,000 fine will go to help some of the students. The judge is also requiring the Education Department to provide monthly updates on what it’s doing to make things right, and if the agency continues dragging its feet, she might “impose additional sanctions, including the appointment of a Special Master to ensure compliance with the preliminary injunction.”

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/devos-slams-union-bullies-for-opposing-her-plan-to-send-federal-tax-dollars-to-private-and-religious-schools/

w. kellyanne at aei]

US. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was the headliner at an American Enterprise Institute event Tuesday morning to promote “Education Freedom Scholarships,” the Trump administration’s education tax credit proposal. In her remarks, DeVos attacked opponents of the plan as “union bullies” and declared that “union bosses don’t put kids first.”

Vilifying teachers’ unions is standard operating procedure for DeVos. In January, she used a Heritage Foundation event marking the avowedly “nonpolitical” National School Choice Week to complain that teachers’ unions were “the only thing standing in the way” of more “school choice.” As Right Wing Watch noted at the time:

DeVos is an old hand at this. She has, in the words of Mother Jones’s Krisina Rizga, been “trying to gut the public schools for years.” Indeed, DeVos and her allies have spent many years and many millions of dollars engaged in bare-knuckled politics to elect politicians who will advance an anti-public-education, anti-labor, pro-privatization agenda, and her family has played a key role in building right-wing anti-public-education infrastructure.

At AEI, DeVos and White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway promoted the administration’s plan, which was proposed in February but hasn’t moved through either house of Congress. One news report from today’s event called it DeVos’s effort to “breathe new life” into the proposal by “calling out Republicans in Congress who have refused to entertain the idea and conservative education policy experts who’ve opposed the plan.”

At AEI, DeVos and Conway said conservatives who worry about increasing federal involvement in education are off-base, because states would have the freedom to use the federal money to design their own programs or simply supplement existing programs.

State “tax credit scholarship” programs are basically a way for legislators to divert tax dollars to private and religious schools without using vouchers, which have been consistently unpopular with voters. The Trump-DeVos proposal would allow for up to $5 billion every year in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to state-based “scholarship granting organizations.”

In response to a questioner who said he was from the Alliance Defending Freedom, DeVos said the administration’s proposal included language that would require participating states not to prevent religious schools or nonprofits from accessing the tax dollars. DeVos has previously slammed state restrictions on public funding for religious schools.

DeVos and Conway had a lot of praise for Florida, one of the states that has most aggressively pushed “school choice” proposals. RWW’s Adele Stan reported last year that DeVos and her family had pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a political action committee promoting voucher proponent Ron DeSantis, who narrowly defeated Andrew Gillum in last year’s governor’s race.

Following DeVos’ and Conway’s appearance was a panel conversation featuring officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Tennesseetouting their own school–choice programs and backing the administration’s proposal.

When Trump announced DeVos’s nomination, People For the American Way called it “a high-water mark in the right wing’s long war on public education.”When DeVos was confirmed, the secretive right-wing Council for National Policy had its own ambitious policy agenda for her: “a gradual, voluntary return at all levels to free-market private schools, church schools and home schools as the normative American practice.”

Tags: Betsy DeVos Kellyanne Conway Church-State School Choice Vouchers American Enterprise Institute Trump Administration

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/betsy-devos-is-at-it-again-the-education-secretarys-new-rule-is-a-win-win-for-everyone-but-defrauded-students

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Betsy DeVos is at it again: The education secretary’s new rule is a win-win for everyone but defrauded students

Written by Christopher Brauchli / Common Dreams September 8, 2019

They’re back — the folks in the Education Department.

Remember Betsy DeVos? Trump made her Secretary of Education. She had no experience in education but was a big fan and supporter of charter schools in Michigan. Those schools were, by most measures, less successful than their public school counterparts and scored much lower on various comparative measures than schools in other states. Nonetheless, she was very wealthy and that, as we have learned over the years, is all that is required for someone to be invited to play in the Trump playground.

Remember Diane Auer Jones? She is a senior adviser to the Department of Education on post-secondary education. She was an early hire by Betsy. Before starting work there she spent five years as a senior vice-president at Career Education Corporation.

Career Education Corporation was a company in the for-profit education world that in early 2019 agreed to forgive $494 million in student debt as a result of an investigation into its practices by 49 State Attorneys General. The Attorneys General concluded that Ms. Jones’ employer had engaged in deceptive tactics in order to recruit students. Among other things, the students were charged for vocational programs that did not have the proper accreditation for students to obtain licenses to work in their fields of study. The forgiven loans were for money owed to the institution. The practices in question had all occurred during the time Ms. Jones was a senior vice president at the company.

Now, Mesdames Jones and DeVos are at it again. On August 30, 2019 , the Education Department announced that it was making it more difficult for students who had been defrauded by for-profit institutions to receive relief from their debts. They were reforming rules known as the “borrower defense to repayment” rules. Those rules had enabled recipients of educational loans to avoid repayment under certain circumstances.

The new rules apply to loans made after July 2020. The loans significantly tighten up the ability of a student to get a loan discharged when, for example, the for-profit institution closes its doors before the student has graduated. Under the Obama era rule there was something called the “automatic closed school discharge.” That rule provided that, if a for-profit school, such as Ms. Auer’s, closed its doors before a student had gotten a degree, the student could apply to have the loan discharged. Under the Obama era rules, there was no time limit on when the student had to apply for debt relief.

Under the DeVos rule the student must apply for relief within three years after the school closing. As Ms. Auer explained: “We believe that within three years, the borrower will know whether or not there has been misrepresentation.” In masking that assertion she is probably drawing on her own experience while working at Career Education Corporation.

Under the Obama rules, the student debt was automatically discharged if the student did not enroll elsewhere within three years. Approximately 20,000 borrowers availed themselves of that provision resulting in the discharge of close to $222 million in student loans. That will no longer be permitted.

The burden of proof on the student seeking loan forgiveness has been increased. A student seeking relief will have to prove that the college made a deceptive statement “with knowledge of its false, misleading or deceptive nature or with reckless disregard for the truth” and that the student relied on the statement in deciding to enroll or stay in the school.

The burden the new rules place on students seeking relief from for-profit schools that scammed them, is offset by the benefit received by the taxpayer. As Ms. Devos said when announcing the new rules, fraud in higher education “will not be tolerated.” But, she went on to explain, the rules include “carefully crafted reforms that hold colleges and universities accountable and treat students and taxpayers fairly.” The “fairness” means that the amount of student debt being forgiven will be reduced by more than $500 million annually. Over the next ten years it is estimated that the taxpayers will save more than $11 billion. The savings to the taxpayers will, of course, rest on the backs of the defrauded students.

Commenting on the new rules, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois said: “This rule is another Trump-DeVos giveaway to their for-profit college cronies at the expense of defrauded student borrowers.” Rep. Bobby Scott (D.Va.) said that “the Trump administration is sending an alarming message: Schools can cheat [their] student borrowers and still reap the rewards of federal student aid.”

Betsy DeVos is pleased with the new rule. So is Diane Auer Jones. So is Ms. Jones’ former employer. It is pleased because the new rule makes it less likely that it will be on the hook for paying back students it scammed. Ms. Jones is pleased because her new position enabled her to do a favor for her former employer and other companies in the student loan business she got to know when working in the business. Ms. DeVos is pleased because she could do a favor for taxpayers like herself. It’s a win-win for everyone but the defrauded students.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/betsy-devos-linked-christian-adoption-agency-exposed-dozens-of-childrens-highly-sensitive-medical-data-online-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-betsy-devoss-department-of-education-props-up-for-profit-educational-companies-and-help-financially-troubled-colleges-rip-off-veterans/

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How Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education helps financially troubled colleges rip off veterans

Written by Jillian Ambroz / DC Report August 2, 2019

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s move to reverse Obama-era restrictions on for-profit colleges and reinvigorate the shady industry has backfired spectacularly.

Since DeVos and team greenlighted the accreditation of one of the nation’s largest chains of for-profit colleges, Dream Center Education Holdings, and its purchase of schools, thousands of students have been affected by school closures and conversion to nonprofit status. One group of students that have been greatly affected are military veterans, who have racked up useless credits and massive debts that can become the burden of taxpayers and the federal government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The deregulation efforts of the for-profit college sector began back in 2017, soon after Dream Center—a charity affiliated with aLos Angeles-based megachurch with no higher-education experience—acquired some colleges from a major for-profit player in bankruptcy. DeVos had made it a priority to bolster for-profit schools, according to an article by The New York Times. In addition to relaxing oversight on the sector, DeVos also allowed for-profit schools to convert to non-profit status by loosening the rules of that process.

School closures also cost taxpayers and our federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in financial losses in discharged federal student loans.

It’s also come to light that a DeVos aide, Diane Auer Jones, a former lobbyist and executive for for-profit colleges, was granting personal favors to help Dream Center, which controls more than 100 campuses with 50,000 students, to help the company gain accreditation. DeVos, before becoming Education secretary, had invested in companies with ties to for-profit schools.

Back in 2016, Dream Center had its eyes on the failing ITT Technical Institutes but the Obama administration astutely blocked that acquisition as part of its crackdown on the for-profit college sector. And ITT ultimately shuttered its doors. But Dream Center found a new deal that would be blessed and moved forward by DeVos and team to purchase three large for-profit chains, the Art Institutes, Argosy University and South University from the bankrupt Education Management Corp.

Fast forward to the present. Dozens of Dream Center’s campuses are out of money and set to close, more than a dozen more campuses have already been sold—some to a New York private equity firm in a deal arranged by DeVos and team—and more than 40 other schools are under the control of a court-appointed receiver. In total, some 26,000 students have been affected by the demise of Dream Center Education Holdings.

Thousands of those students left scrambling to salvage their education plans are Post-9/11 GI Bill recipients, who are hard targets of the predatory for-profit schools because they can use the GI Bill funds to collect up to 100% in federal aid. For-profit schools must pull in at least 10% of their funding from sources outside of federal aid, the so-called 90/10 rule. But Congress wrote a big loophole, excluding GI Bill funding from the 90% limit, and for-profit schools actively seek-out veterans as students.

“For-profit schools really aggressively target veteran students and spend a ton on marketing, but spend little on instruction,” Walter Ochinko, research director at Veterans Educations Services, told DCReport. “They have large marketing teams that do robocalls all the time and use lead generators to reach out to veterans.”

With the closures of ITT Technical Institutes schools and the failing of Corinthian Colleges Inc., another 12,000 GI Bill students were affected by the failings of the for-profits in the past few years.

“Deregulation efforts have created a situation where vets are being harmed, they don’t have much recourse,” Ochinko said. “When a school closes, there’s only a partial restoration of benefits for veterans. Essentially they are left out in the cold.”

When these schools close, students transferring from for-profit to public schools could lose an estimated 94% of their credits. And if they retain their credits, they often don’t apply toward fulfilling their degree requirements toward their majors, according to a report filed in June by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). For many veteran students, school closures and transfers can exhaust their GI Bill benefits.

School closures also can cost the federal government and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in financial losses due to discharged federal student loans.

Lax Oversight

For GI Bill beneficiaries, the Department of Education works with the Veterans Business Affairs agency and State Approving Agencies (SAA), known as “the triad.” State Approving Agencies, state employees under contract with the VA, have the authority to shut down schools and remove GI Bill benefits, the VA does not. But DeVos’ deregulation efforts would undermine protections for GI Bill beneficiaries by making it more difficult for state approving agencies to hold schools accountable, according to a report by Veterans Education Success, which works with military service organizations to educate federal and state policymakers to ensure the success of the GI Bill and its beneficiaries.

The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) conducted an audit of the Veterans Business Affairs and state approving agencies oversight of all programs for military veterans from February 2015 through January 2016, and estimated 44 of the 51 state agencies “did not adequately oversee the education and training programs to ensure only eligible programs participated in the Post-9/11 GI Bill program.”

The report, published in December 2018, found that out of an estimated $585 million paid for these “improper payments,” a staggering 81% or $473.8 million went to for-profit schools. If the Veterans Business Affairs agency does not implement oversight and better recommendations to the SAAs about $2.5 billion in related improper payments will go to potentially ineligible programs over the next five years, “putting billions of dollars at risk for fraud and waste and hindering efforts to provide quality education to eligible students,” according to the audit.

Poor Performance

Then there’s the problem of performance at these schools. The for-profit colleges examined in the GAO report showed the lowest graduation percentage of any type of college, at 22% for a four-year program, compared with 73% for public schools and 66% at nonprofit schools. Retention rates for full-time students also lagged, at 56%, compared with 88% for public schools and 85% for nonprofit schools.

The Department of Education recently filed a regulation in June stating plans to loosen requirements and oversight of accreditation agencies, which will only create more incentives for the Dream Centers of the nation.

“Essentially, they are up a creek,” Ochinko said. He and his organization, Veterans Education Success, recommend that Congress restore full benefits to GI Bill students in these circumstances.

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) recently introduced a bill to close the 90/10 loophole at for-profit colleges, a small step in the right direction.

Betsy DeVos shows her true colors with effort to block help for disabled students

Jillian Ambroz / DC ReportJuly 11, 2019

The U.S. Department of Education’s various attempts to stall the implementation of federal regulations created by the Obama administration to address racial disparities in special education has blown up into…

mma

no lnx

Veterans groups have been asking Congress to close a loophole in the GI Bill that enables for-profit colleges to exploit veterans. The main lobbying group of the scam-plagued industry is fighting back and has recruited Fox News host Pete Hegseth to support their cause. Hegseth has denied that for-profit schools have preyed on veterans, attacked veterans groups as being “really drunk on the swamp,” and said he could potentially lobby President Donald Trump on the issue.

Hegseth also wrote a FoxNews.com opinion piece in support of for-profit colleges, saying they are “improving the lives of veterans every day!” But Fox News didn’t disclose that Hegseth is working with the lobbying group.

Hegseth is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. He also regularly advises Trump on military issues, including lobbying the president to pardon accused and convicted war criminals. Trump at one point last year reportedly considered Hegseth to serve as secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU) is a trade association that serves as the main lobbying organization of the for-profit college industry. The group spent $362,000 lobbying the federal government in 2018.

The for-profit college industry has been plagued by reports of scams and fraudulent advertising that lead to many students ending up with essentially worthless degrees and large debts. Multiple states have taken action against the industry while the Trump administration has protected it. As NBC News reported in April, the Obama administration had “created new rules intended to help rein in the worst-performing schools and to protect taxpayer dollars. … Now, the Trump Administration is trying to overturn those rules — and veterans and low-income Americans are the most at risk.Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has begun a months long process to unwind the Obama-era rules, easing oversight of for-profits’ use of tax dollars and protections for defrauded students.”

The industry has also exploited veterans over the years. In a February New York Times op-ed, Veterans Education Success President Carrie Wofford and Student Veterans of America Executive Vice President James Schmeling explained that for-profit colleges target veterans because they “milk a federal loophole that allows them to count G.I. Bill benefits as private funds”:

Why are veterans the targets? Because for-profit colleges milk a federal loophole that allows them to count G.I. Bill benefits as private funds, offsetting the 90 percent cap they otherwise face on their access to taxpayer-supported federal student aid. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general have said this accounting gimmick — known as the “90/10 loophole” — “violates the intent of the law.”

Hundreds of for-profit schools are almost entirely dependent on federal revenue, and if the 90/10 loophole were closed, they would be in violation of this federal regulation. Taxpayers, in other words, are largely propping up otherwise failing schools.

In December, a damning Department of Veterans Affairs internal audit estimated the risk of G.I. Bill waste was exceptionally high at for-profit schools, which received over 75 percent of improper G.I. Bill payments. The report highlighted the schools’ deceptive advertising campaigns used to recruit veterans and warned that the government will waste $2.3 billion in improper payments over the next five years if changes are not made to reel in the abuse.

As a result of systematic problems, veterans groups have urged Congress to close the 90/10 loophole.

In response, CECU recently formed Veterans for Career Education, which it claims “supports the right of veterans to use their earned education benefits to gain career skills at the college or institution of their choice.” CECU has also recruited Hegseth, an Army veteran, as a public face of its campaign.

Hegseth gave a June 3 speech in New Orleans, LA, for CECU, during which he announced that he was working with the organization and attacked critics of the for-profit education industry.

Hegseth said that he’s “so excited to be working with” Michael Dakduk, a Marine Corps veteran who is CECU’s executive vice president, director of government relations, and a lobbyist for the organization. Hegseth later said: “I’m all-in on this effort. I cannot wait to get even more involved, go to Washington, be with this organization, be with the vets, travel around the country, put pressure on the folks that deserve to have pressure put on them.”

During his speech, Hegseth offered an unapologetic defense of the for-profit schools industry, stating, “The fact that profit is made only makes these schools better”:

PETE HEGSETH: There’s a condemnation of profit. Since when did profit become a dirty word? There’s a belief that if you’re making money that’s a bad thing. I think the fact that profit is made only makes these schools better because it means you treat your students -- and having talked to a number of you before I came up here, there’s a beloved feeling toward the students you have in your institutions. They’re not just students, they’re also customers and as customers, you want to serve and meet their needs just like you want to meet the needs of the companies that would hire them in the future. And when you treat someone like a customer, it means you want them to come back. Or you want them to refer new customers to you. There’s an incentive. And if you look -- I’m going to talk a little bit about the VA and my fight against the VA and the VA bureaucracy. When bureaucracies and places treat you like a number, that’s when you are treated poorly because there’s no accountability to treat you like a customer. Profit is a good thing when channeled properly, and I’m not talking about the few cases where folks are messing around and not doing the right thing. Everybody knows that can happen. There’s bad actors in any industry, in any place. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Hegseth later claimed that “some of these extreme leftists, Democrats, unfortunately at this point, they’ll say that these college degrees are mediocre, worthless, that schools prey on vets. These are direct quotes. And you and I both know that is just not true. I can’t get involved in something that I don’t fundamentally believe in.”

He criticized veterans groups, claiming, “There are a lot of veteran organizations in Washington that say they support vets, but they also -- they really just want to get invited to the cocktail parties. They really just want to be loved by both sides. They’re really drunk on the swamp and the power and the access they have there, and they’ve forgotten about all the guys at the VFW post level or the Legion post level who are doing those jobs throughout America. They’re not the ones they serve anymore; it’s the special interests in Washington that they serve.”

Hegseth spoke about his relationship with Trump, stating that he thinks “if anything were to ever pass in the House, in the Senate right now that restricted veterans choice it would get the fastest … veto stamp or pen you’ve ever seen. So, right now you've got a president that would veto the bad stuff. And if he ever gave me a call -- and sometimes he does -- I’d tell him that.”

Hegseth also wrote a June 25 FoxNews.com opinion piece defending for-profit colleges, writing: “I’ve met these veterans. I’ve met these college administrators. Nobody is being duped. In fact, to the contrary, these schools are improving the lives of veterans every day!” He additionally attacked Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) for introducing legislation seeking to end the 90/10 loophole and criticized Democratic presidential candidates for allegedly "targeting veterans’ educational choices." The piece did not mention Hegseth’s ties to CECU.

It’s not immediately clear whether the multimillion-dollar lobbying organization is compensating Hegseth for his work. CECU did not respond to a request for comment. But the organization also worked with commentators Newt and Callista Gingrich -- the latter of whom is now the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican -- and compensated at least Callista. According to her financial disclosure report, the organization paid her an amount “exceeding $5,000 in a year.”

Hegseth’s work on behalf of the for-profit college industry is another example of how Fox News has held the host to a low standard. The network has allowed Hegseth to keynote numerous Republican fundraisers and receive compensation for the speeches. Hegseth also repeatedly interviewed then-2018 Michigan Senate candidate John James on Fox News despite appearing with him at one of those fundraisers. (James is running for U.S. Senate in 2020.)

Posted In

Education, Military Personnel & Veterans

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Pete Hegseth

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/public-service-loan-forgiveness-is-in-trouble/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/these-student-journalists-were-barred-from-a-betsy-devos-school-choice-event-and-now-theyre-firing-back/

y Betsy DeVos does not have a reputation for being friendly to public schools, and her latest dustup with a group of student journalists isn’t helping her case.

The editorial board at the newspaper for Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Lexington, Kentucky, was excited to cover a roundtable discussion hosted by the state’s Gov. Matt Bevin and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on April 17. Having a Cabinet official in driving distance for a public event is a big deal for a student journalist in Kentucky to cover, and they were excited to attend. The event focused on DeVos’ most prominent and controversial priorities: Her promotion of school choice programs, which critics say harm public schools.

But, as they document in an editorial about their experience for their paper, the PLD Lamplighter, the student journalists were turned away by staff at Bluegrass Community Technical College where the event was held.

“It was heartbreaking to us, as young journalists fired up to cover an event regarding the future of education, to leave empty-handed,” the board, composed of three students, wrote.

It turned out, they were told, that they needed an “invitation” to attend the event. But the event has been listed as open to the press, and none of the public information they had reviewed about it indicated that they would need such an invitation. After they were turned away, they discovered that the Education Department’s website had said the event required an RSVP. Other professional journalists had received press releases that provided information about the RSVP, but the students had not.

“We are student journalists who wanted to cover an event in our community featuring the Secretary of Education, but ironically, we couldn’t get in without an invitation,” they wrote. “We can’t help but suspect that the intention was to prevent people from attending. Also, it was held at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. What student or educator is free at that time?”

The department put out a statement in response to the backlash: “No one from the Secretary’s staff was made aware that student journalists were attempting to attend the roundtable. We welcome student journalists and would have been happy for them to be in attendance. We are looking into what, if any, miscommunication might have happened between other staff on site for the event.”

The PLD Lamplight editorial board found that one student was invited to the event: a scholarship recipient from a private school. Another event the secretary held appears to have welcomed student journalists, the editorial board wrote, but it was not on a controversial issue like school choice.

The board concluded:

We wonder if the topic of school choice at the roundtable in Lexington is what kept public school students from being able to attend. Don’t they want student input? After all, Secretary DeVos once said at a town hall meeting that “It is easy to be nasty hiding behind screens and Twitter handles,” she said. “It’s not so easy face-to-face.”

I guess we won’t get that face-to-face opportunity.

…

The bottom line is that we do not think that it is fair to have a closed roundtable about education when it affects thousands of Kentucky teachers, students, and parents.

DeVos was confronted with her department’s charter school fraud — and things did not go well

Jeff Bryant / Independent Media InstituteApril 22, 2019

During a series of recent congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had to respond to a recent report finding the U.S. Department of Education ha...

big cuts for dept, boost for charters

infamously

DeVos throws Trump administration under the bus for cutting Special Olympics funding

Sarah K. Burris / Raw Story

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) let Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have it during the second day of Appropriation Committee hearings.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) let Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have it during the second day of Appropriation Committee hearings dealing with the budget cuts coming out of President Donald Trump’s administration. However, his questions revealed that the Trump White House was behind the cuts to the Special Olympics.

During the questioning Thursday morning, Durbin asked DeVos about her $18 million cuts to the Special Olympics and even more substantial cuts to special needs programs around the country.

“Madam Secretary, there’s been some press reports about your testimony yesterday related to the Special Olympics,” Durbin began. “Did you personally approve the elimination of the $18 million from your budget to help the Special Olympics?”

“Well, Senator, as you know, [the] budget process within the administration is a collaborative one and it’s been my responsibility to present the budget here on behalf of the administration, the president’s budget. As I said then, and I’ll say again, this — we had to make tough choices around the budget priorities and we elected to hold harmless Title I and IDEA funding and funding for English language learners, knowing that that’s really going to reach the greatest number of students.”

Durbin interrupted to ask his question again, if she was the one who personally approved the significant cuts to special education.

“I think a yes or no will do,” Durbin said.

“No, I didn’t personally get involved in that,” DeVos admitted. It poses the question who was responsible for the Trump budget for the departments and if it was the Education Department or someone at the White House who chose to force special ed students to search for private alternatives.

“Whoever came up with that idea at OMB gets a Special Olympic medal for insensitivity,” Durbin blasted.

Durbin suggested that if the department wants to save money that they can give to the special ed programs they could bar student loans for those attending to for-profit colleges. He noted that those students are significantly more likely to default on their loans than at legitimate higher education institutions.

Trump celebrated Down Syndrome Day this week with guests at the White House.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reveals plan that ‘blurs church-state boundaries’ for school funding

NEW

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/betsy-devos-right-wing-school-indoctrination-program-betrays-a-fundamental-misunderstanding-of-the-differences-between-public-and-private-schools/

What do you do when thinking people reject your political ideology?

You get rid of thinking people.

That’s Betsy DeVos’ plan to rejuvenate and renew the Republican Party.

The billionaire heiress who bought her position as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary plans to spend $5 billion of your tax dollars on private, religious, and parochial schools.

This would be federal tax credits to fund scholarships to private and religious institutions—school vouchers in all but name.

It’s a federal child indoctrination program to ensure that the next generation has an increasing number of voters who think science is a lie, white supremacy is heritage and the Bible is history—you know, people just gullible enough to believe a reality show TV star who regularly cheats on his many wives with porn stars is God’s chosen representative on Earth. A measure to make child kidnapping, imprisonment, and wrongful death seem like a measured response to backward immigration policy. A measure to make collusion and fraternization with the world’s worst dictators and strongmen seem like global pragmatism.

To make matters even more galling, consider the timing of DeVos’ proposal.

In the beginning of February, Donald Trump Jr. criticized “loser teachers” who he said were indoctrinating school children into—gasp—socialism.

At the end of that same month, DeVos proposed funding Christian madrasas from sea-to-shinning-sea.

Apparently indoctrination is just fine for conservatives so long as it’s the right kind of indoctrination.

But even beyond the blatant hypocrisy, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between public and private schools.

Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted that if a school receives public funding—whether it be a charter or voucher institution—it is a public school.

To which DeVos tweeted her glowing approval.

This makes a few things strikingly clear: either (1) these folks have no idea what happens at authentic public schools or (2) they’re pretending not to know so as to further their political and financial ambitions.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate children into socialism or any other ideology.

They’ll teach what socialism is and how it has functioned historically without commenting on its merits or deficiencies. It’s up to individual students to decide whether it’s a good thing or not.

Public schools are supposed to be ideologically neutral.

At most, they teach children how to think. They teach media literacy, skepticism, and critical thinking skills.

If that leads kids away from Republican orthodoxy, it’s not the fault of the teacher or the child. It’s a problem with your orthodoxy.

You can’t proclaim the benefits of a marketplace of ideas and then decry that too many ideas are on display.

Nor can you conflate the way a school is funded with what that school actually does and how it teaches.

There is a world of difference between authentic public schools and their market based alternatives—especially the parochial and religious variety.

It’s the difference between telling students the answer and getting them to think about the answer. It’s the difference between total certainty and doubt, between trite truths and useful skills that can help you arrive at deeper truths.

When you ask children to think, you never know what conclusions they’ll draw. When you tell children what to think, you know exactly what conclusions you want them to hold.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate. Conservatives graduate from these hallowed halls the same as liberals, moderates, and the politically checked out. The difference is that in a world where facts are prized and logic is exercised, conservatism becomes less appealing.

I’m not saying liberalism or progressivism is guaranteed, but they are certainly more fact-based world views than their opposites.

The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.

They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.

We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.

The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know—all the greatest Trump campaign hits!

We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.

Frankly, DeVos’ ambitions have little chance of coming to fruition.

Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she wanted to spend $20 billion on the same nonsense. Her party refused to back her.

Now with Democrats in control of the House, it seems even more unlikely that her plan will pass.

But sadly smaller scale versions of it have been allowed by state legislatures throughout the country—often with full support from Democrats.

My own state of Pennsylvania spends $125 million in taxpayer dollars on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs to send children to private/religious schools. And every year legislators ask for more.

Why any Democrat would support conservative indoctrination programs is beyond me.

And this is true even though indoctrination is sometimes unavoidable.

To a limited degree, it may even be desirable. You might even say it’s a normal part of growing up.

Even the most fair-minded parents often want their children to hold at least some of the same values as they do. They want to be able to relate to their kids and view them as a continuation of the kinds of lives they lived.

But what’s okay for parents is not okay for governments.

If Mom and Dad want their kids to have a Biblical education, they should pay for it. The burden should not be shouldered by society since it’s not in society’s interest.

Governments have no right taking public money and using it to prop up private interests. And that’s exactly what this is.

It is political and religious interest. It is a way to circumvent skepticism and free thought.

It’s a way to ensure that in a time where information flows freely and dogmas crumble, people like Donald Trump continue to be elected.

exspell 3.5 x

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-how-the-trump-administration-wants-to-give-racists-free-rein-to-discriminate/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/betsy-devos-turns-school-gun-violence-commission-tool-will-hurt-minorities-and

In the weeks after the Parkland school mass shooting that left 17 people dead, the Trump administration was highly criticized for doing nothing to protect students. As the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student survivors quickly became student activists, and heroes to the left, the NRA and President Trump knew they were losing ground.

So President Trump tasked Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to create a commission to study the epidemic of gun violence in schools and come up with recommendations to make schools safer.

Secretary DeVos took her time to get the Commission up and running.

Her first step was to appoint members to the Commission: just four Trump Cabinet Secretaries, with no Democrats, experts, or students.

That was a red flag.

The next red flag came when DeVos testified before Congress, and was forced to admit that her commission on gun violence would not study the role of guns in school shootings.

It continued to get worse.

This summer DeVos announced a plan to allow schools to use federal funds to buy guns.

And now, according to The New York Times, Secretary DeVos will use her school safety commission as a tool to rescind or roll back Obama-era guidelines designed to protect Black and other minority students from racially-motivated punishments – while suggesting they are responsible for a rise in school violence.

"The Trump administration is planning to roll back Obama-era policies aimed at ensuring that minority children are not unfairly disciplined, arguing that the efforts have eased up on punishment and contributed to rising violence in the nation’s schools," The Times reports.

"The decision culminates a nearly yearlong effort begun by the Trump administration after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla."

The Times notes that this was the plan almost from the start, when DeVos' commission ignored the role of guns in school shootings, "and instead scrutinized the Obama administration’s school discipline policies, though none of the most high-profile school shootings were perpetrated by black students."

The suspect in the Parkland massacre is white.

Documents from DeVos' commission that were obtained by The Times "focus significantly on race and promote the idea that the [Obama-era led] federal crackdown on potentially discriminatory practices has made schools more dangerous."

Federal data shows Black students are three times more likely to be punished, the Times notes.

Vox took a deeper dive. Among its findings, Black girls are suspended six times more than white girls, and Black boys are suspended three times more than white boys. That's just for starters.

Rescinding guidelines on protecting Black and minority students from being punished more than their peers is yet another attack on minority students by Secretary DeVos.

One of DeVos' first acts was to rescind Obama-era guidance protecting the civil rights of transgender students. She quickly told conservatives at a political conference the guidelines were a "huge overreach" by the Obama administration. Later, DeVos threw out complaints from transgender students, and later formalized policy to reject complaints filed by them.

She has rescinded guidance protecting students with disabilities and eliminated Dept. of Education documents on protecting them.

It's not just minority students DeVos is targeting. Victims of sexual assault are on her list as well. DeVos has worked to expand protections for accused rapists and others accused of sexual misconduct, including assault and harassment.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-trump-devos-and-mulvaney-helped-banks-and-colleges-steal-students

Trump Administration hid a study documenting financial abuse of students by some banks working hands-in-glove with colleges, the latest example of how instead of “draining the swamp” Donald Trump is turning official Washington into a paradise for swamp monsters.

The suppressed fee gouging report was made by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB.

Students attending colleges which have marketing agreements with banks and other financial institutions paid much higher overdraft and account fees than students at schools with no such deals, the study found.

“Wells Fargo charged students the most of all those with college campus marketing agreements—an average of $46.99 per account per year, while banks without such deals charged students an average of $11.93 in fees,” Kate Berry of American Banker reported.

Some nonprofit credit unions also engaged in fee gouging. The University of Kentucky Federal Credit Union, for example, charged $37 per account annually, the study found.

One lender has charged $600 just to issue loan checks.

The Trump administration wants to kill the CFPB, as we have documented in nine previous DCReport articles. Lacking authority to do that, Team Trump has turned the bureau into a protection agency for the worst banking practices, damaging millions of consumers. Hiding findings of abusive practices and disloyalty to customers are key parts of this Trumpian strategy.

We know of the study only because it was mentioned last August in a scathing resignation letter by Seth Frotman, a CFPB assistant director and student loan ombudsman. Frotman accused Mick Mulvaney, who is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as acting director of the CFPB, of suppressing the report because it showed large banks knowingly ripped off students by charging high or inappropriate fees.

Frotman’s resignation letter charged that under Mulvaney the bureau was “shielding bad actors from scrutiny” while both undercutting enforcement of laws to protect consumers and undermining the bureau’s independence.

Referring to his extensive travels and especially his talks with military families who were conned by financial product sales agents,Frotman wrote that “American families need an independent consumer bureau to look out for them when lenders push products they know cannot be repaid, when banks and debt collectors conspire to abuse the courts and force families out of their homes and when students loan companies are allowed to drive millions of Americans to financial ruin with impunity.”

Mulvaney offered a cavalier response in a CNBC interview. Mulvaney said that he had never even heard of Frotman and had been told that while ombudsman Frotman never complained about the issues raised in his resignation letter. He avoided dealing with the substance of the issue—lender disloyalty to customers.

The study was pried loose by Allied Progress through the Freedom of Information Act, a nonprofit consumer watchdog created in 2015, during the Obama Administration, by Karl Frisch, a lifelong communications adviser for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations.

The fees in the study Mulvaney suppressed are modest compared to a test of student loan fees I made in 2008. The cost to a bank of sending a payment electronically is so minute that many banks charge nothing for the service.

After failing to get NelNet, a student loan servicer, to discuss its fees, I took out a Sallie Mae student loan for one of my children, an action I described in my 2012 book The Fine Print. NelNet divided the loan into two payments, one for each semester. It levied a $300 fee for the cost of issuing the first check. I repaid the loan immediately to avoid a second $300 charge.

Responsibility for protecting students from lenders falls to the CFPB under the law creating it. That law was sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat whom Trump loathes. The duty to police colleges so they do not help banks abuse students falls to the federal Department of Education, where Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has repeatedly taken the side of bankers against the interests of students, as well as parents and grandparents who co-sign student loans. Some of her anti-student actions are detailed in It’s Even Worse Than You Think, my book about the Trump administration.

Hiding the study until it was flushed out using the 1966 Freedom of Information Act is just the latest example of how Trump has aggressively worked to do the opposite of what he promised in his inauguration speech:

“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people… January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

A core finding of the suppressed report is that marketing deals between colleges and banks enrich the banks at the expense of students.

“The bureau and other government entities have expressed concern over the relationship between revenue sharing provisions in contracts and fees charged to student accountholders,” the report says. “These provisions raise questions about potential conflicts of interest, including whether revenue sharing encourages higher-fee financial products that crowd out competition from providers of accounts for which student accountholders” would pay less.

Bank representatives say the report is hooey.

The report found that 573 colleges had marketing agreements. About 1.3 million students paid $27.6 million in fees to 14 banks and credit unions in the 2016-17 academic year, the report states.

In a form of what is apparently a legal kickback, 116 colleges were paid $16.7 million by banks and credit unions to promote financial accounts in 2017, deals designed to capture young customers whose financial resources would be expected to grow over time. PNC Bank paid colleges $7.6 million, U.S. Bank paid $3.2 million and Wells Fargo paid $2.1 million.

Significantly, lower fees were paid by students at the 457 colleges which did not get kickbacks. The estimated 839,000 students at colleges without marketing agreements paid $11.93 on average in fees, compared with $36.52 for the 482,000 students who used accounts at colleges with marketing agreements.

These fees differences indicate there is no enforcement of a 2015 Obama era rule by the Education Department requiring colleges to exercise reasonable diligence to make sure that under marketing agreements with banks students pay fees “consistent with or below prevailing market rates.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/devos-inspector-general-to-audit-dismissals-of-civil-rights-complaints

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/betsy-devos-and-family-bankroll-florida-governor-candidate-desantis-a-school-voucher-enthusiast

Betsy DeVos and Family Bankroll Florida Governor Candidate DeSantis, a School Voucher Enthusiast

ByAdele M. Stan | October 24, 2018 5:54 pm

The third in our three-part series on the right-wing players around Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for governor of Florida.

When Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, found himself in hot water—once again—over his beliefs about black people and America’s racial history, a handful of wealthy donors swooped in to try to rescue his campaign.Polls showed him in a dead heat against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is African American.

Among the angels to alight in his coffers was the heiress Betsy DeVos, who currently leads the U.S. Department of Education, and whose family enriched a pro-DeSantis political action committee this month with hundreds of thousands of dollars. The DeVos family has long invested in the project of building a right-wing political infrastructure that is designed to elevate the policy prescriptions of white evangelical leaders, as has DeVos’ family of origin, the Princes. (Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, is DeVos’ brother. Her parents, Elsa and Edgar, helped found the Family Research Council, which is classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

It’s not surprising that DeVos would want to rescue DeSantis. Take a look at the education agenda he has put forward and you’ll find a wish list of goodies for Religious Right leaders and other “small-government conservatives.” And even more than that, the specter of a progressive Democrat like Gillum leading education policy in a state as populous as Florida (20 million) could create a significant pocket of resistance to any federal policy imposed by DeVos.

While DeSantis may not be especially involved with the evangelical community, he knows on which side his bread is buttered. DeVos, champion of the privatization of education, and the Trump administration’s secretary of education, descends from Religious Right royalty. When Trump chose DeVos for that spot, it was because he knew on which side his base is buttered—the evangelical side.

Right-wing evangelicals and Catholics favor school voucher plans and supports for homeschoolers that siphon money away from public schools, as well as from the public-sector unions that represent teachers and other school personnel, all positions DeVos advances. The vouchers amount to tax dollars applied to tuition at private schools and those run by churches and other religious organizations. (For more on DeVos’ record as a school privatizer, see PFAW’s 2017 report, A New High Water Mark in Right Wing’s Long War on Public Education.)

In fact, on a visit to New York City last spring, the U.S. secretary of education seemed to go out of her way to insult public-school students and teachers by choosing two religious schools for a visit, but none of the city’s public schools. From a May 18 New York Times report:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos toured two New York City schools on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the city’s public schools, with their 1.1 million students, were not among them.

Instead, Ms. DeVos visited two Orthodox Jewish schools, and offered her strongest comments to date in support of public funding for religious schools in a meeting with Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and other Catholic dignitaries.

In addition to his pro-voucher position, DeSantis stood behind Amendment 8—a measure ultimately struck from the 2018 ballot by the Florida Supreme Court for being “misleading”—which would have yanked control of charter schools from local school boards and handed it to the state—through changes to the state constitution. Conservatives have found certain localities to be unwelcoming to charter schools.

The measure would also have imposed eight-year term limits on local school boards. Absent the ballot measure, DeSantis has folded those positions into his own education policy agenda.

The court’s actions stirred right-wing ire about the ideological balance of the state’s highest court. Governor Rick Scott, who is currently challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson for his seat, had planned to replace three of the court’s justices just hours after he leaves office, but the court overruled his power-grab. Because of term limits on the state’s Supreme Court justices, three retirements will kick in automatically in January, leaving the next governor to determine the shape of the court.

SINCE WINNING the Florida GOP gubernatorial nomination, DeSantis’ attitudes towards African Americans have attracted scrutiny, beginning with comments he made at the outset of the general election campaign, when he urged Floridians to “not monkey this up” by electing Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, who is black. Something of a steady trickle commenced, with DeSantis having to ditch a fundraiser, state Rep. Ralph Arza, who had used the “N” word in threatening voicemails to a colleague 12 years ago, and who has a reputation for using racial slurs. Next, the Washington Post published a report on DeSantis’ participation in the far-right conferences convened by David Horowitz, where he appeared on the same stage as the professionally offensive, white-nationalism-sympathizer Milo Yiannapoulos, and other far-right figures. Then, on October 8, the American Ledger blog published by the American Bridge super PAC unearthed a book he authored that made excuses for slavery in the U.S. The DeSantis campaign was losing momentum, virtually tied with Gillum in the polls.

Three days later, the candidate’s PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis, received a total of $200,000 from four members of Betsy DeVos’ family, as well as infusions from others in the donor network created by the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Each of those donors no doubt has his or her own checklist of expectations and demands, but DeSantis’ school privatization agenda seems robust, hitting all of the key constituencies: the homeschoolers, the religious schools, the union-haters.

Some of the candidate’s education agenda, as posted on the Ron DeSantis for Governor website:

Support School Choice Options.To ensure that all Florida students can go to a good school and empower parents to make educational decisions for their children, Ron DeSantis will support school choice options such as public magnet schools, district & non-district managed public charter schools, Florida Virtual School, home education, and the various other choice options. DeSantis will also look at the possibility of creating Education Savings Accounts for more Florida students including those from low-income and working-class families.

[…]

Ensure Equal Access for Parents Who Home School Their Children.To support the families of the nearly 90,000 students in Florida that are home schooled, Ron DeSantis will ensure that these children have equal access to resources available to other students, such as dual enrollment and extracurricular activities. The decision on how a child should be educated is best left to their family, as no far-away bureaucrat could ever understand a child the way a parent does. For many Florida families, homeschooling provides the best opportunity to educate their children.

DeSantis also embraces a so-called “merit pay” scheme that seems designed to pit teacher against teacher, and teachers against non-teaching staff, by pledging to cut “wasteful” spending on the education “bureaucracy,” and funneling that “savings” into merit increases for selected teachers.

Like DeSantis, DeVos is a fan of charter schools, which also draw their funding from tax dollars, but exist outside the traditional public school system. In April 2017, DeVos visited the Excel Academy, a public charter school in Washington, D.C., describing it as a “shining example of a school meeting the needs of its students, parents and community.” By January 2018, the school had closed because of its poor performance.

Of course, there are reasons beyond DeSantis’ education agenda that make him an attractive repository for DeVos dollars. The family owns the Orlando Magic basketball team, a business, like any, that could always use a friend in the governor’s mansion.

Read more in our series on DeSantis and the right:

**Ron DeSantis’ Appearances at Horowitz Events: Even Worse the Closer You Look**

**Ron DeSantis Embraces Right-Wing Plan to Rewrite U.S. Constitution**

Tags: Andrew Gillum Betsy DeVos Edgar Prince Elsa Prince Erik Prince Ron DeSantis Election 2018 Amway Department of Education Family Research Council Southern Poverty Law Center

Betsy DeVos Back to School To-Do List

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the infamous billionaire political donor with a Cayman Islands-chartered yacht, has been awfully busy lately.

https://corporatepresidency.org/universityofgreed/

TRUMP TRANSITION TEAM

The placement of all these lobbyists as de facto — or actual — high-level agency staffers “raises the appearance that you could be attempting to influence public policy in favor of your former client,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One. “This isn’t saying that lobbyists are bad or evil, it’s simply saying the reason that you should have rules governing lobbyists in government is because they have been paid by private interests to promote the interests of their employer.”

It makes a difference whether an individual lobbied last year of 10 years ago, McGehee said. Revolving door restrictions are written with time limits, because it’s understood your relationships with clients and freshness of information cool over time.

One former for-profit college lobbyist has already resigned from his beachhead position at the Department of Education, where he worked for about a month. Taylor Hansen lobbied for Career Education Colleges and Universities until July 2016, where he focused on trying to weaken the “gainful employment” rule that puts for-profit schools’ federal funding at risk if their graduates don’t earn enough to pay back their student loans.

*ProPublica* reported that soon after Hansen started working at Education, the agency began delaying deadlines for the gainful employment rule and is reviewing the implementation of the rule. Hansen told ProPublica he didn’t work on gainful employment while at the department.

OpenSecrets Blog contacted the federal agencies with former lobbyist beachhead members about their ethics policies. The Department of Homeland Security was the only one to get back to us, and its response was vague:

“Ethics training, consistent with U.S. Office of Government Ethics regulations, is provided to all political appointees,” said DHS spokesman David Lapan in an email. “DHS ethics attorneys conduct reviews for potential conflicts of interest and provide guidance to employees.”

Nine beachhead members were registered lobbyists as recently as last year; eight of them have filed forms with the Senate deregistering from that work. General Mills has not filed paperwork that shows Erika Baum ending her lobbying gig at the food company, although she is now an executive assistant to the Secretary of Transportation, according to ProPublica‘s data and lobbying records....

ref

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-20/betsy-devos-hands-victory-to-loan-firm-tied-to-adviser-who-just-quit

Americans who default on some of their federal student loans are likely to pay more after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reversed an Obama administration directive limiting some fees. But it turns out the Trump administration decision has some beneficiaries — including the father of a key DeVos lieutenant who just quit.

DeVos's decision, announced Thursday in a memorandum to the student loan industry, allows companies known as guaranty agencies to charge distressed student debtors fees equivalent to 16 percent of their total balance, even when borrowers agree within 60 days to make good on their bad debt.

The reversal is almost certain to hand United Student Aid Funds Inc., the nation's largest guaranty agency, a victory in its two-year legal battle against her department. The fees could translate into an additional $15 million in annual revenue for the company, filings in a related lawsuit suggest. Until Jan. 1, United Student Aid Funds was led by Bill Hansen, who served as Deputy Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. His son, Taylor Hansen, a former for-profit college lobbyist, was until three days ago one of the few DeVos advisers with professional experience in higher education.

The younger Hansen resigned from the Education Department on Friday, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said in an email. Hansen couldn't be immediately reached for comment on his departure.

Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a persistent critic of the new Republican administration, said on Twitter the rule change was "an early Father's Day gift in the Hansen household." Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, was equally blunt: "There's no question" that Taylor Hansen's family ties posed a conflict of interest.

Tens of millions of dollars in revenue was at stake for companies such as United Student Aid Funds, which until 2015 had regularly charged borrowers the fee.A senior executive there last year warned in a court filing that the Obama administration's decision to prohibit the fees-and to remind the industry that such fees had long been banned-generated "potentially massive retroactive liability" for companies such as United Student Aid Funds in the form of federal fines and lawsuits from aggrieved debtors. The company reckons it levied as much as $119 million in these fees from 2007 to 2015, or about $15 million annually.

Meanwhile, other companies active in student loan matters faced the prospect of having to reverse years of assessed fees and unravel tens of thousands of borrowers' accounts to recalculate their balances, according to a legal filing last year by the National Council of Higher Education Resources, a Washington trade association. Had the Obama administration's decision stood, a federal judge warned in 2015 that the entire student loan industry faced the prospect of being sued for allegedly violating anti-racketeering laws by imposing the fees.

DeVos's decision is likely to put those concerns to rest.

With almost all senior positions at the Education Department vacant — and few political hires with professional experience in higher education — the younger Hansen may have wielded significant influence on DeVos's policies. With his departure, the department has yet another post to fill.

"We have no idea what Betsy DeVos thinks about or wants to do on higher education policy. If one of the key people advising her is someone whose close family member is hoping to charge defaulted borrowers a lot more money, that's not a good sign of her agenda," Miller said before the department announced Taylor Hansen's exit.

Both the Education Department and Bill Hansen's current organization, of which he is chief executive, Strada Education Network (formerly known as USA Funds), said there's no impropriety.Taylor Hansen recused himself from "all matters" related to United Student Aid Funds' lawsuit challenging the Obama administration directive, Bradshaw said. "He served ably and without conflict and decided his service had run its course," Bradshaw said Monday, declining further comment. But it's unclear whether Taylor Hansen's recusal extended to internal department discussions over the appropriateness of the fees. Bradshaw didn't answer additional questions, and Taylor Hansen didn't respond to emails, phone calls, and a message sent on social network LinkedIn seeking comment.

Bob Murray, a spokesman for Bill Hansen, said no one representing the company had asked Taylor Hansen to intervene on its behalf in its dispute with the department. Furthermore, he said, United Student Aid Funds is now owned by Great Lakes Higher Education Corp. Murray said that Bill Hansen declined to comment.

United Student Aid Funds said in court filings that the Obama administration unfairly changed longstanding Education Department policy when it announced in 2015 that fees added to quickly resolved defaulted loans were illegal. For example, according to industry lobby National Council of Higher Education Resources, the department had never flagged the fee as inappropriate in any of the more than 135 audits or reviews it conducted of companies such as United Student Aid Funds since 1992. The feds, the group said, "knowingly acquiesced for years." In the eyes of the industry, DeVos is simply righting a wrong by reversing Obama's move.

Bill Hansen nonetheless benefits from DeVos' decision. Strada is still liable for potential costs stemming from United Student Aid Funds' lawsuit against the Education Department, as well as a related class action lawsuit filed by borrowers over the same issue, said Richard George, chief executive of Great Lakes.

United Student Aid Funds reached a proposed settlement in January to resolve the proposed class action, filed by Minnesota resident Bryana Bible in 2013 on behalf of borrowers charged what she alleged to be illegal fees. The deal calls for 35,516 borrowers, and their lawyers, to split $23 million to partially reimburse them for as much as $119.1 million in fees assessed over eight years that, under Obama administration guidelines, they shouldn't have been charged. A federal judge is due to decide on the proposed settlement in June.

The now-permissible fees could also beneficially impact Strada's future revenue under an agreement that calls for Great Lakes to give Strada grants partly based on how United Student Aid Funds' loans perform, a person familiar with the matter said. When annualized, the fees represent about 13 percent of United Student Aid Funds' average annual income over the past five years, according to its financial reports.

For struggling borrowers, said Rohit Chopra, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America who previously advised Obama's Education Department and was the top student loan official at the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "this just adds insult to injury."

Business Briefing from St. Louis Post-Dispatch

\no lnx

818 AN

In the latest of her many rollbacks of Obama-era rules designed to protect students from for-profit college scams -- like Trump's own defunct university -- Education SecretaryBetsy DeVos announced plans to kill the "gainful employment rule," which "sought to punish for-profit college programs that left graduates with heavy debt compared to their incomes."

According to Collin Binkley at *The New Republic*,it was "the second planned rollback of a major Obama-era rule in a matter of weeks. On July 25, DeVos proposed changes to the so-called borrower defense rule to toughen the process by which defrauded students can get their loans erased."

******

https://www.alternet.org/deluxe-charter-schools-serve-opportunities-taxpayer-funded-white-flight

no lnx

arter schools are often billed as benefiting disadvantaged urban kids—but in lots of places around the country, charters are segregating school systems by offering rich white families a way to get their kids away from students of color and poor students. In reality, 115 charter schools nationwide have student populations at least 20 percentage points whiter than public schools in their districts; more than 700 charter schools nationally are whiter than their district’s public schools.

Why charter schools do this is no mystery: racism pays. As for how they they do it, Emmanuel Felton reports on common tactics like not offering school bus service so that parents have to have the flexibility and the reliable vehicle to get their kids to and from school. Or they require uniforms from Land’s End that low-income families can’t afford. Or they create “priority attendance zones” that ensure that kids from mostly white neighborhoods will get an admissions advantage.

Felton reports in depth on Lake Oconee Academy in Georgia, which is 73 percent white while public schools in the district are just 12 percent white. It was founded essentially at the behest of a company selling luxury lakeside properties, and when the school opened, 80 percent of its spots were reserved for people living in that company’s properties. Lake Oconee Academy has a “piano lab” with 25 pianos. It has 17 Advanced Placement courses. And just 10 percent of its students are black in a district where 68 percent of public school students are black.

Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day.

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As one mother, who ruled out trying to send her kids to Lake Oconee Academy because there was no school bus to get them there, said, “It’s like a black and white thing, who has money and who doesn’t have money.” It’s not just Lake Oconee Academy, and it’s the kind of education policy the Trump administration, with Betsy DeVos heading the Education Department, is pushing.

Laura Clawson is the Labor editor at Daily Kos Labor, and a contributing editor at Daily Kos.

...

Betsy DeVos' Extreme Right-Wing Education Agenda: Report Card for Her First Year

DeVos continues to be painted as an unqualified naif. The truth is much scarier.

By Jennifer Berkshire / AlterNet February 3, 2018, 6:55 AM GMT

In the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast, AlterNet education contributor Jennifer Berkshire and co-host Jack Schneider examine the DeVos education agenda, one year in. They revisit some of her most controversial statements, including her comparison of public education to food trucks and her infamous hat tip to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Among their key takeaways: while DeVos continues to be painted as an inexperienced naif, she is a profoundly political actor, and deeply involved in the efforts to transform the U.S. along right-wing, libertarian lines.

The following is an edited transcript. Listen to the entire episode.

Have You Heard: Betsy DeVos is fond of invoking Uber as a model for how public education should be 'disrupted.' What does her fondness for this particular analogy tell us about her larger vision?

Jack Schneider: In remarks DeVos made at the Brookings Institution in the spring, she likened traditional public schools to taxicabs, arguing that “just like the traditional taxi system revolted against ride sharing, the education establishment feel[s] threatened by the rise of school choice.”

What’s so telling about this statement isn’t just the comparison of educating a young person to driving someone from point A to point B. It’s also the implication that there are lots of choices out there. DeVos lists them for us: Uber Pool, Uber X, Lyft Line, Lyft Plus. So far I really only hear two options. If we unpack this analogy about Uber and Lyft what we see is the rise of two dominant for profit providers seeking to gain as much market share working towards as much of a monopoly as either one might be able to get and putting the publicly regulated option taxicabs out of business. Now taxicabs are problematic in many ways but they are publicly regulated in a way that Uber and Lyft are not. And so I think that this is really interesting as a kind of display of her thinking and her ideological agenda.

Have You Heard: One of DeVos’ other go-to lines is a paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous 'There is no society' quote. In fact, DeVos cited Thatcher as an idol when she spoke to the ALEC conference last summer.

Jennifer Berkshire: DeVos didn’t mention in that speech that Margaret Thatcher also earned the nickname “milk snatcher” for her decision to eliminate milk in British schools for kids over the age of seven. I heard DeVos make her “there is no education system” argument when I traveled to Northwest Ohio to a school that she visited jointly with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and it really landed like a lead balloon. It doesn't make any sense to people in places like Van Wert, OH, whose schools really bind their communities together, that they are totally on their own.

Have You Heard: DeVos’ controversial statements, like the time she compared schools to food trucks, attracted tons of attention. Anything that went down during her first year in office that should have gotten more scrutiny?

Schneider: The nature of the staffing at the Department of Education really got lost in the shuffle. So staffing has been a big issue across the Trump administration for a couple of reasons. One many departments have been understaffed whether intentionally or through a lack of capacity by the administration. And another issue has been the political nature of appointments. which of course is characteristic of all administrations. But what you see with this administration is the appointment of individuals who’ve got some tie to the industries they’re now supposed to be regulating. Take Carlos Muñiz, who is the nominee to be General Counsel for the Department of Education. As a top aide to Florida's Attorney General, Muñiz helped defend the AG’s decision to sit out legal action against Trump University.

Berkshire: I think people, including journalists who cover education, continue to miss just how political Betsy DeVos is. For example, one of the most underreported parts of the Betsy DeVos story is the role that she and her extended family played in really delivering that Citizens United Supreme Court case that now allows for unlimited political spending. Just as she believes that parents have an inalienable right to choose a school for their children, DeVos also feels very strongly that wealthy individuals have an inalienable right to spend as much money as they want to determine the course of elections because money is speech. To a major extent, DeVos and her family are responsible for the political landscape that we now find ourselves in.

Listen to the entire episode.

see main and tag

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.

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 theJames 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?

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.”

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; andPatrick 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 departmentofficial 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

Education	Derrick A. Bolen† va gop	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-07	1/20/2017
Education	Michael Jason Brickman	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	2/2/2017
Education	Deborah Cox-Roush	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/23/2017
Education	Sarah Delahunty jeb, keith perry	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-11	2/6/2017
Education	Kevin Richard Eck carmel trump	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Matthew Robert Frendewey	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-14	1/30/2017
Education	Holly Ham	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Ronald Holden	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/30/2017
Education	Alexandra October Hudson	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-13	1/30/2017
Education	Amy L. Jones	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Andrew James Kossack	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Ebony L. Lee	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	2/2/2017
Education	James F. Manning USA Funds consulting (loans)	Senior Advisor to the Secretary		1/20/2017
Education	Michael Joseph Oberlies	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-11	1/30/2017
Education	Cody James Reynolds	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Neil Thomas Ruddock III	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	2/6/2017
Education	Patrick Burke Shaheen	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-11	1/20/2017
Education	Jana C. Toner	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	2/6/2017
Education	Eric Michael Ventimiglia	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/2017
Education	Patrick Young	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/23/2017	1/23/2017	1/23/2017

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

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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:

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?

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.

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?

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, itprompted 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

— 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.

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.

seemed to back bathroom bill/

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."

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.

Education	Nathan Bailey*			2/1/17
Education	Derrick Bolen	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-07	1/20/17
Education	Jason Botel	Senior WH Advisor	SES	1/20/17
Education	Michael Brickman*			2/2/17
Education	Stanley Buchesky	Senior Advisor Budget and Finance	SES	1/20/17
Education	Michael Chamberlain*			1/30/17
Education	Deborah Cox-Roush	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/23/17
Education	Sarah Delahunty*			2/6/17
Education	Kevin Eck	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Gillum Ferguson	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-12	1/30/17
Education	Matthew Frendewey*			1/30/17
Education	Holly Ham	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Ronald Holden	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/30/17
Education	Alexandra Hudson	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-13	1/30/17
Education	Amy Jones	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Andrew Kossack	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Ebony Lee*			2/2/17
Education	Michael Oberlies	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-11	1/30/17
Education	Beatriz Ramos	Confidential Assistant to Secretary	GS-12	1/23/17
Education	Cody Reynolds	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Jeffrey Riemer*			2/6/17
Education	Laura Rigas*			2/6/17
Education	Neil Ruddock III*			2/6/17
Education	Patrick Sheenan	Confidential Assistant to the Secretary	GS-11	1/20/17
Education	Lee Simmons*			2/13/17
Education	Jana Toner*			2/6/17
Education	Teresa Unrue*			1/20/17
Education	Joshua Venable	Senior Advisor to the Secretary	SES	1/20/17
Education	Eric Ventimiglia	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Jerry Ward	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/20/17
Education	Patrick Young	Special Assistant to the Secretary	GS-15	1/23/17

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

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, theAlliance 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

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]

[hide]

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

Key Staff

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]:

John Walton	Bentonville, AR	$4,151,750
Advocates for School Choice	Phoenix, AZ	$500,000
Bruce Kovner	New York, NY	$500,000
Bill Oberndorf	Mill Valley, CA	$500,000
Julian H Robertson, Jr	New York, NY	$500,000
Virgina Manheimer	Lambertville, NJ	$350,000
Betsy DeVos	Grand Rapids, MI	$260,000
Robert Kern	Waukesha, WI	$250,000
Rick Sharp	Henrico	$250,000
David Brennan	Akron, OH	$150,000
Dino Cortopassi	Stockton, CA	$150,000
John Fisher	San Francisco, CA	$135,000
Peter Flanigan	New York, NY	$125,000
Bruce D Benson	Denver, CO	$100,000
Foster Friess	Jackson, WY	$100,000
Riverstone Group LLC	Richmond	$100,000
Alliance for School Choices in Education	Milwaukee, WI	$92,000
John Bryan	Lake Oswego, OR	$75,000
Koch Industries Inc	Wichita, KS	$75,000
Roger Hertog	New York, NY	$70,000
Richard Gilder	New York, NY	$50,000
Marcia Kern Peterson		$50,000
Joseph E Robert, Jr	Mc Lean	$50,000
Lovett Peters	Chestnut Hill, MA	$30,000
Helen DeVos	Lake Worth, FL	$25,000
J.C. Huizenga	Grand Rapids, MI	$25,000
Lawrence J DeGeorge	Jupiter, FL	$20,000
Ted Forstmann	New York, NY	$15,000
Richard Devos, Jr	Grand Rapids, MI	$12,500
Richard DeVos	Lake Worth, FL	$12,500
Frank Baxter	Los Angeles, CA	$10,000
William J Hume	San Francisco, CA	$10,000
William Simon	Pacific Palisades, CA	$10,000
Paul Henkels	Blue Bell, PA	$9,500
Jim Blew	Valencia, CA	$5,000
Republican State Leadership Committee	Alexandria	$5,000
Lewis M Eisenberg	Rumson, NJ	$2,500
Evelyn Holtzman	Palm Beach, FL	$2,000
Chase Investment Council Corp	Charlottesville	$1,000
Thomas N Chewning	Richmond	$1,000
Kevin L Gentry	Fairfax	$1,000
Whitney Tilson	New York, NY	$500

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

:{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
:{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
:{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
:{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:

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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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betsy devos 2 bak

Disturbingly Kafkaesque': Judge slams Betsy DeVos for denying 94% of student debt forgiveness claims

Michigan governor slams Betsy DeVos for her ties to a far-right anti-lockdown protest group

1. DeVos continues to trash public education

2. DeVos uses test scores to push her privatization agenda

3. DeVos is pushing a free market approach to education reform

4. DeVos diminishes inequity

5. DeVos is silent on educational technology

Betsy DeVos shows her true colors with effort to block help for disabled students

DeVos was confronted with her department’s charter school fraud — and things did not go well

DeVos throws Trump administration under the bus for cutting Special Olympics funding

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reveals plan that ‘blurs church-state boundaries’ for school funding

Betsy DeVos and Family Bankroll Florida Governor Candidate DeSantis, a School Voucher Enthusiast

Betsy DeVos Back to School To-Do List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Warren Grills DeVos on Her Higher Education Experience

DeVos Experience Includes Ties to Student Debt Collection Company

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

HOSTILITY TO RAISE THE WAGE EFFORTS

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

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

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ORGANIZATIONS:

PEOPLE:

TOPICS:

Contents

Fines for illegal election activity

Mission

Organization

Officers

Executive Director

Directors

Key Staff

Funding

2005 to 2007 Donations

Contact Information

Website

External References

References