The impending demise of K12 Inc., the for-profit online school corporation, has been an occasional source of schadenfreude in my posts. Online education as the sole source of schooling for K-12 students is a bad idea for all but a few people, and K12 Inc. needs millions of students, which requires a regular infusion of new students, to make a profit. The corporation’s schools are failures by nearly every standard you can apply to them, and its stock prices have fallen steadily as a result. It had all the earmarks of a failing corporation, and I watched expectantly for it to crash and burn.
That changed November 9, the day after Trump’s election. As you can see on the stock report at the top of the post, K12 Inc.’s stock price has soared since that fateful day. The Trump-era market is bullish on for-profit privatization in all its forms, including education.
Now, along comes Betsy DeVos as Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education. DeVos is a champion of school choice—charters, vouchers and homeschooling. So long as it helps dismantle the school district model of public education (and where possible, promotes religious education), she’s for it. In Michigan, DeVos’ home state where she spends millions of dollars buying pro-school-choice politicians and setting up nonprofit advocacy groups, 80 percent of the charter schools are for profit, and accountability is kept to an absolute minimum. Even charter advocates complain that the Wild West approach to charters allows too many low quality Michigan schools to remain open.
But charter schools don’t do well in sparsely populated areas where distances work against them. That’s one reason DeVos and other school choicers support online education, where your “school” is always as close as your computer. Distance is no obstacle for distance learning, so online schooling opens up rural education markets.
We know DeVos held an “investment interest” in K12 Inc. before it went public, but we have no way of knowing if that continued. We may find out if she makes a full financial disclosure during her confirmation hearings.
AFC K12 Inc. made a clever move last week when it elected Kevin P. Chavous to its board of directors. Chavous was one of the founding members of American Federation for Children as well as its executive counsel. Funded by DeVos, AFT AFC gives lots of campaign money to pro-charter and pro-voucher candidates around the country, including in Arizona, and is closely allied with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council).
If DeVos is our next Ed Sec, expect a continuing rise in the K12 Inc. stock price. She’s on the side of online education anyway, and having her friend and compatriot Kevin P. Chavous sitting on the board will make her relationship with the corporation that much closer.
A School-Choice-Makes-Strange-Bedfellows Bonus. You may have heard of Democrats for Education Reform. Like the AFT AFC, it’s a vocal charter supporter, though a somewhat quieter voucher supporter. It was created by a group of Democratic hedge funders, so it, like the AFT AFC, has lots of money to throw at candidates who support its agenda. The difference is, DFER gives money to Democratic candidates its funders hope will break from the rest of their party and vote for a school choice agenda. The DFER/AFT AFC connection is Kevin P. Chavous, who was a DFER board member and on his website lists himself as “the founder and Board Chair Emeritus for Democrats for Education Reform.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misidentified the AFC as the AFT.
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2017.
How about shadowing a student through the school day at one of the recently de-magnetized TUSD schools, David, and getting back to us about whether choice policy is needed in Arizona?
These are schools in a district with the highest (desegregation-augmented) per-pupil funding rates in our region, and as magnet schools for a number of years they had authorization to utilize specially designated “magnet” funds. Part of the reason they lost magnet status was they failed to apply the funds in ways authorized by the desegregation authority, i.e. failed to use the funds properly to achieve benefit for target populations and attract students of a different demographic from outside the neighborhood.
What should students whose neighborhood public district school is one of these malfunctioning institutions do? Go down and speak in the Call to the Audience at a TUSD Board meeting to “I-take-home-$500K-per-year-of-your-tax dollars” HT Sanchez? It’s hard to find many signs in this man’s record in office that he gives a good Goddam about supporting school sites serving primarily the disadvantaged, as he uses newly available funding sources to give band uniforms to UHS before any other school in the district, and now this year to Tucson High Magnet: both schools that have among the largest tax credit donation totals in the district and also private foundations raising money for them. Then there were his repeated attempts to create a Fruchthendler to Sabino direct-feed pipeline, relieving parents utilizing an affluent-area TUSD elementary school (the one his own children happen to attend) and an affluent-area TUSD high school from having to enroll their children in a TUSD middle school serving (shudder) the disadvantaged.
Don’t know about you, but if I were a parent with limited resources who’d had an up-close-and-personal view of what TUSD offers to its less affluent constituents, I’d be taking advantage of AZ’s choice policies. Before running another article like this, David, I suggest you interview a few families who’ve used choice policies to opt out of Ochoa or Utterback or a few Hispanic families who use tax credits to enroll their kids in a Catholic school that is higher functioning than their neighborhood public school. But — oops — that would be something a real journalist does, not a propagandist pitching the same sad, hollow ideological BS you usually pitch here.
The day we see the majority of Fruchthendler parents with other options available enrolling their kids in Magee (or Utterback) for Middle School is the day I’ll believe it’s safe to start opposing choice policy. Until then, blocking choice policy serves families utilizing public district schools in affluent neighborhoods — families like the (TUSD Sup) Sanchez family and the (Arizona Education Network former TUSD Board candidate and anti-choice organizer) Darland family. It does not serve the poor.
Students from k-12 have been helped by the election of Donald Trump. As they ask “what is the electoral college and why do the progressives keep talking about winning the popular vote, when it means absolutely nothing?” They seem to be acting more childish than we as students act.
Students band together and ask for a real honest education that includes real historic figures that wrote the Constitution to protect us from enemies from both domestic and foreign. You kids deserve to know the truth so you might as well ask them why they have hid so much from you in some sort of a childish partisan way. Progressive elites use their minions to accomplish sinister goals that uneducated would never fall for.
Then ask, “teacher what happened to Kenny?’
http://unclesamsmisguidedchildren.com/hillary-clinton-vanishing-school-children/
K12 is a great alternative to public schools in Tucson. You can get the required work done in approximately 2 hours per day and then use the rest of the day for advanced learning or life lessons away from liberal indoctrination and the out of control discipline issues occurring in the classroom.
Get your kids out of the liberal Plantation, they are exploiting them for their own personal gain.
Nice article but disagree with final assessment. The bounce K12 received will not continue if their quarterly reports miss the mark. The election and DeVoss bounce will not support a company whose earnings disappoint.
Liberal plantation?
Sometimes I come back and read my commentary and realize just how much of an ignoramus I truly am.
At least I’m still more of a know it all than the average pinko commie Tucson “progressive” liberal.
Pardon me, my incontinence has struck again. Time for me to get myself unsoiled.
Fwiw, DFER announced its opposition to DeVos today….
“You may have heard of Democrats for Education Reform. Like the AFC, it’s a vocal charter supporter, though a somewhat quieter voucher supporter.” Not sure where you’re getting your information from because DFER has never supported vouchers, only charter schools. However, given the fact that you misidentified AFC as AFT throughout the article, perhaps it’s not surprising you don’t have your facts straight.
Public Ed wouldn’t be so broken if certain people weren’t so unsupportive of it. Certain people, you know, the type that don’t give a deuce about anyone but their own children, or anyone but themselves.
Public ed wouldn’t be so broken if the public in large districts like TUSD had not completely given up on holding governance and administration ACCOUNTABLE.
Your first job as a parent is to ensure that your own child’s best interests are well served. If there is a critical mass of other parents in the school system you are using who have the same concerns, the school system in question may have a chance of being responsible. In healthy, high functioning school districts, concerns that motivate and unite parent advocacy have included:
1) that funds are properly applied to benefit the education of students
2) that qualified and responsible educators are employed and retained
3) that administrators are held to account for using their authority to serve students and support teachers, not to enrich themselves or benefit their cronies or the business associates / political donors of the governing board members who hired them.
The problems with TUSD that prevent constructive, successful parent advocacy from forming, or, when it tries to form, prevent it from being sustained, are legion. The people who propose to solve our problems in Southern Arizona by dumping more money into this corrupt, malfunctioning district are irresponsible, dishonest, and self-interested.
They know that while “choice” exists, districts like Vail, Foothills, Tanque Verde, Flowing Wells will do just fine because they are well managed enough that there will actually be reasons for constituents to continue utilizing them. When it comes to TUSD, which “educates” tens of thousands of students in this region — a significant proportion of all students in public schools in Pima County — choice must be stopped by any external-authority-derived, coercive method available because there is, for most constituents not utilizing a few exceptional (and well-connected) schools in TUSD like Sam Hughes, Fruchthendler, Sabino, UHS, there is no valid reason to choose this district over other districts or over the various private and charter alternatives. If dissatisfied families using malfunctioning schools cannot be stopped from exiting, their departure will bleed too much money out of the PCDP political machine.
Look at all the rabid anti-choice / “anti-privatization” activists: their connections to the PCDP machine are all obvious and strong. David Safier has made a little cottage-blog industry for himself out of characterizing charter and private operators as for-profit scam artists (some are irresponsible, others are not, but you never hear about the responsible ones from Safier) and attacking the opponents of the politicians who benefit from the TUSD machine. The reason? A valid perception of the superiority of services TUSD offers? No. It has nothing to do with the validity of what happens in TUSD or the invalidity of what supposedly happens in the sectors that compete with TUSD and everything to do with supporting politicians who benefit from TUSD and their filthy quid-pro-quo dealings with hiring and the awarding of contracts.
Readers would have to be stupid indeed not to see through the scam, but Safier still now and then manages to dredge up a few die-hards who drink the PCDP Kool-aid — including several PCDP Precinct Committee-people regulars — into making lame comments thanking him for his “research” and advocacy.
What a crock.