Charter school failures must be addressed

Education leaders and advocates in Alabama have expressed hope that Donald Trump’s presidency will mean fewer federal mandates for states to comply with, and more school choice for parents.

DeVos has spent millions of dollars of her family fortune to buy-off Republican politicians like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and to fund her American Federation for Children (AFC), which has spent almost $5 million in Wisconsin elections since 2010.

Numerous teachers joining in the protest have expressed deep concerns over DeVos shifting the focus of national education towards private and religious schools and away from public schools, where most of the country’s students are educated.

Evangelista and others in the sector also disagree with DeVos’s apparent stance on charter-school regulation, which she fought in her home state of MI.

Philanthropist Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, did not succeed in getting a school voucher program off the ground in her home state of MI. She’ll either be the best thing that has happened to public schools in years or a threat to their very existence, depending on your source. Meanwhile, new ESSA guidelines clearly signal that federal overreach in schools will be knocked back, she said. The primary education secretary in a child’s life is the parent.

DeVos is a national advocate for school choice and charter schools.

Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union’s advocacy center, undoubtedly will be keeping a close watch on any Capitol Hill movement on vouchers. Most of the non-religious schools that accept vouchers cost far more than the cost of the voucher, making them unaffordable for low-income families. We continued to fine tune those learning goals and renamed them to make absolutely clear they were for Arizonians, by Arizonians. “As You Were Saying” is a regular Herald feature.

General church/state separationists were less circumspect.

DeVos comes from a wealthy family herself, but also is married to Dick DeVos, who is an heir to the Amway fortune and the company’s former president.

A rationale for vouchers – and one DeVos has offered – is that they let families escape low-performing public schools that aren’t helping their kids.

Joe Crabtree, a teacher at Indian Trail Intermediate School and president of the Johnson City Education Association, isn’t hesitant to criticize DeVos’ stances on public education reform.

“We found ways to spend public dollars for remedial education, for transportation, for special needs” for Orthodox Jewish day schools, Weingarten said. Adversaries in the debate over education reform quickly weighed in with praise (a savior and visionary) and condemnation (the end of public education).

Once these programs are in place, fly-by-night private schools crop up to take advantage of voucher and tax-credit money.

“Mrs. DeVos has long demonstrated a commitment to providing families with improved public school options and we look forward to working with the administration on proposals allowing all students in California to access their right to a high quality public education”, according to the prepared statement.

Fears of sweeping changes may be overstated. But the standards, which cover English language arts and math only, were drawn up by teachers and state education chiefs and were adopted by 42 states voluntarily. Dubbed “The New Kochs” by an article in Mother Jones, Betsy and her husband Richard earned multiple mentions in Dark Money, the authoritative book on the topic by Jane Mayer.

Ms. DeVos’ own words demonstrate she understands it’s time to move on and that her leadership won’t be fenced in or dictated by more squabbling. In addition to providing the greater part of the land described in the Ordinance for private use, it also provided for a section of land to be used for public purposes for education in each township to be controlled by the states.

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“It may have some implications for the chasidic community, where accountability has been a hot-button issue in recent years”, Stern said.

The idea that money follows the student began to fail when the student population started to decline, but the number of schools kept rising.

“What if you have to admit children of gay marriages?” he asked. In 2013 the Program for International Student Assessments (PISA) found that MA public schools ranked with the elite worldwide.