Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, and her husband Dick devote a chunk of their $6 billion fortune to funding the political campaigns of candidates who are for more charters, private school vouchers and the rest of the privatization/”education reform” agenda. The couple also has a family foundation which contributed more than $10 million in 2015. Politico looked over a copy of the Foundation’s 2015 tax forms and listed some of the recipients. The money makes Betsy DeVos’s priorities clear. She likes school choice in its many forms and has a soft spot for religious organizations. Here are some highlights from the Politco list.
The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation is a primary funder of a reasonably recent news-format education website, The 74, begun by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, which is pro-privatization/”education reform” and pro-DeVos. The Foundation gave $400,000 to the website and another $400,000 to Brown’s nonprofit, The Partnership for Educational Justice.
New York’s Success Academies, a chain of charter schools, got $150,000. Success’s founder, Eva Moskowitz, was being talked about as a possible Secretary of Education pick until she took herself out of the running. (Word has it she’s angling for the New York City mayor job.)
The American Enterprise Institute is a major voice of the conservative movement. It received $750,000.
The School of Missionary Aviation Technology (Goal: “to equip men and women to serve God in mission aviation”) received $250,000.
The Grand Rapids Christian School Association received $350,000.
That only totals a bit over $2 million. Other donations are listed, including some which aren’t directly related to education. Politico’s complete list which includes “a number of Christian ministries, churches and pro-life groups” is on Politico Pro, which is subscription only, and I don’t have a subscription.
A DeVos-Money-Is-Small-Potatoes Note: If Ms. DeVos wasn’t Trump’s Ed Sec pick, the education donations of her foundation would hardly rate a mention. Ten million dollars? That’s chump change compared to what the Walton Foundation, funded by the Walmart fortune, gives away in support of a similar agenda. The Walton folks put up in the neighborhood of $200 million a year, 20 times the multi-million-dollar pittance Betsy and her husband provide.
Some deep, deep pockets are funding the push to discredit and dismantle our traditional public education system and replace it with private, often-for-profit schools.
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2016.
Let’s be HONEST, David, shall we? (I know honesty and journalistic integrity are values you believe in deeply, as you’ve told us repeatedly since November 8.)
Districts like TUSD do not need the “education reform / privatization” camp to discredit them. Under the leadership of people like the Board members you have endorsed and the chief administrator you love to exucse, they discredit themselves. And you enable them and propagandize relentlessly for them.
Will you be doing a piece on all the manifold reasons HT Sanchez should be fired in January 2017, as soon as his Board majority rubber stampers, all three of whom you endorsed, loses its death grip on governance? No, probably not. Because you don’t actually hate lies. When Democrats lie, or allow the mis-use of public funds, or improperly receive campaign donations from companies to which they’ve voted to award multi-million dollar contracts, or give a pass to outrageous compensation packages and bonuses in central admin while teachers get by on starvation wages, our outsource the management of substitute teachers, or look the other way as the district continues to fail to implement the desegregation order or picks fights with the desegregation authority or changes the law firm managing the desegregation case three times and the legal costs multiply like rabbits, you — great defender of THE TEACHING PROFESSION and STUDENTS WHO ARE UNDERSERVED that you are, keep your mouth shut or come up with lame excuses or create, with great shows of smoke and fire, elaborate distractions to mislead the ignorant.
Haven’t you figured it out yet that people like you are the YIN to Betsy De Vos’s YANG? People like YOU, supposed staunch defenders of public district schools, allow them to go down in flames while you lie about what is actually happening in them and excuse politicians who mismanage them. It is David-Safier-style-propagandizing-and-enabling that creates the case studies these people look at when they propose that the only way to save the children in neighborhoods with schools like these is to give them an “out.”
My child’s TUSD school had rodents in it. Textbooks were chronically undersupplied. Ceiling tiles crumbled and fell on the desks while class was in session. The electrical system in one of the building repeatedly shorted out, triggering building evacuations more than once. Testing was mis-used, to benefit the district’s stats and not the district’s students. Financial processes were mismanaged, negatively affecting the functioning of staff and the delivery of supplies. Central admin lied about any number of things, repeatedly, shamelessly. And no, it was not just underfunding that caused all this. It was MISMANAGEMENT and POOR GOVERNANCE, from politicians and a malfeasant administrator you constantly excused and / or endorsed, for three long years.
So do what you like here, blogging away in your largely idle retirement from the teaching profession, but please don’t pretend that your commentary has anything to do with STUDENT BENEFIT or SOCIAL JUSTICE. Your writing is in devoted pursuit of brown nosing your political network and forwarding their aims, which have nothing to do with making the lives of students in local public district schools better, or enabling the public district schools system to fulfill its promise as a democratically governed, responsive and transparent institution.
And opponents of Ms DeVos fund abortion providers. Are you really advocating for children, or a political party and their donors?
Americans now know the difference.
“Some deep, deep pockets are funding the push to discredit and dismantle our traditional public education system…”
Yeah, Americans. We’re going to root out the corrupters of our children, the ones that have profited from destroying our public education, YOU!
That she has long supported organizations which share her vision is a strong plus for her nomination. This stands in testament that she truly cares about education issues and sees a path forward to help. I wish we had more like her.
Her contributions to Christian organizations is another very positive factor in her character and character is sadly lacking in the whole of the current administration; indeed totally lacking. When we, as Tucson locals, give to our church on a regular basis, we too support similar intuitions, albeit in a small way. This is a very good thing.
A great choice by Donnie!
That she has supported Christian schools is not a strike against her as a person or as a philanthropist, but that she has no professional expertise in education or in the management of public school districts is a serious strike against her as a nominee for Secretary of Education.
Yes, some of our public districts in this country are troubled. From a real-world analysis point of view, it is important to remember that the public district system still educates 80-something percent of the population and no degree of investment in an under-regulated alternative sector where the existing institutions need greater oversight and transparency infrastructure than they currently have can throw up a system of high functioning schools quickly enough to provide reliable alternatives to everyone currently enrolled in public districts. If the head of the American Department of Education has a distaste for the public district school system and no expertise in how to work with existing districts to help them improve services to students, that is a serious problem. We don’t need more test-and-punish style federal interaction with our schools, which benefits testing companies and the hedge fund managers backing charter chains, not the majority of the kids we are trying to educate in this country, who desperately need the services delivered in their neighborhood schools improved.
Where are the heroes in this sad drama? When you look at a district like TUSD, there are none. On one side of the fence you have people like Sanchez and his backers running a public district serving tens of thousands of students into the ground while their enablers in the media lie about or ignore or excuse their malfeasance, on the other side you have people like De Vos bringing ideological commitments that cannot possibly heal the wounds in our public district school system to the job of head of the federal department of education. De Vos’s nomination does not bode well for TUSD or other districts that need HONEST analysis, reform and the right kind of support, not more malfeasant administrators and politicos benefiting from awarding their multi-million dollar contracts and not more top-down, federal scorched earth campaigns of test-and-punish.
Wrong, Again:
Calm down cupcake.
You are not taking the friendly advice I gave you. If you remember correctly, which I understand is a challenge for you, I gave you some great pointers on how to actually get the attention of those who utilize more of their brain than you do. It starts with being CORDIAL. I get that this would be the toughest thing you’ve ever done in your life, but if anyone needs to step outside of their comfort zone…it’s you.
Someone who is obviously as uneducated as you are should never comment on an article that focuses on education. Hell, as uneducated and ignorant as your dumb ass is, you should never comment on anything.
It’s better to burn out than fade away. So please, just burn out already.
I don’t get all of the snarky comments on David’s well researched report. He is not talking about TUSD, HT Sanchez, he is simply sharing data on the educational philosophy of our soon to be U.S. Secretary of Education. Betsey DeVos is not an educator, nor has she nor any of her family attended public schools. She is a wealthy heiress who married into wealth. So she has little first hand knowledge either of public schools or the struggles of people not born into wealth. Consequently she eschews our publicly run community schools in favor of for profit corporate run private schools. She has contributed a great deal of money towards supporting legislators in these United State, including here in Arizona, who will continue to dismantle our public schools. Vouchers for all!! Sadly this is a cruel joke particularly in the inner cities and in rural areas.
Our public schools have made our country great, turning education over to corporate interests will simply deny a thorough and efficient education to a large portion of our population.
David Safier: Please keep shining a light on this.
We know you “don’t get” many of the comments in these streams, Michael S. Ellegood, because your own commentary has repeatedly made that clear.
If you are referring to the first comment, it is not “snarky.” It is honest, factually based (if you know recent TUSD history and the history of the political networks that feed on the district) and justifiably angry. Not “snarky,” a term of disparagement that that comment, and others like it, does not deserve.
Some of us who are well acquainted with healthy, high functioning pubic district school systems in other states know how to recognize a diseased system when we see one. TUSD is that in spades, and Safier, while running down the people who are involved with promoting access to alternative school systems, feeds TUSD’s disease and the need for alternatives locally. The two irresponsible sides of this misleading and heavily propagandized debate are intrinsically related, as the yin-yang comment above tried to point out: when people like Safier excuse malfeasant governance and administration in public school districts and lie about what is going on in them, this gives people like DeVos portfolios of dysfunction to justify their misguided ideological programs.
I support public school systems, but unlike you and other apologists for David Safier, unlike various local PCDP politicos who backed egregiously under-performing TUSD school Board members 100% in their sad bids for re-election, I recognize that part of supporting public district school systems is telling the TRUTH about them. Part of supporting them is doing what’s necessary to increase transparency and to recruit QUALIFIED administrators — not sadly underqualified, dishonest, self-serving hacks like HT Sanchez.
I hope to God January 2017 will bring about a move in the right direction in TUSD, but based on what I’ve seen to date it will probably not happen. This being the case, much of the commentary which you term “snarky” will probably continue. No one will be able to silence those who are speaking honestly about the problems tens of thousands of families utilizing these schools are experiencing and those who are speaking honestly (and angrily) about what needs to happen with governance and administration (and media commentary on education) for the problems to be solved.
Until this district is reformed, the FACT of the matter will be that its students do need alternatives, and public dollars applied in some of our alternative institutions will probably be better spent: they will better meet student needs and produce better educational outcomes. I’ve seen the insides of many schools in Tucson both as a teacher and as a parent — public, private, and charter. There is no question that every single one of the schools with which I have direct experience was serving its students better than TUSD is at this point. That is a FACT that no amount of misleading propaganda can get around: when we talk about education policy, local and national, FACTS like this have to be recognized, acknowledged, and dealt with. Successful policy cannot be formulated by sweeping them under the rug and pretending they do not exist.