Betsy DeVos is Bad Mmmmkay ...you can help
 

Help needed! 3 votes short of blocking Betsy DeVos. If you live in ME, TN, AK, GA, UT, NC, WY, LA, KS, SC, or KY, call your US Congressman 202-224-3121 or 202-2253121.

Here in Michigan we've lived her ill-informed, personal-agenda-driven religiously-motivated attempt to eradicate public education. It failed (so far) ....but left such a wake of shit we're dealing with that instead of teaching kids. Many new charter schools failing to reach the basic standards of numeracy and literacy and yet taking funding away from public schools which meet those standards and then some. This is (almost entirely) a non-partisan issue here -we all think she's a disaster. Please trust us.

This is not good for Americans of any political leaning. She has no education credentials, no true experience...... but knows about making money and how she wants to promote the kingdom of god and replace schools with churches as the social centers of communities. (Don't believe me on that? Google it)

Think about how often you ever see me get seriously political..... I HATE politics. But this is not politics, it's education and the future of everything -including politics. This REALLY matters.

/lecture. (please call them)

If charter schools are so permitted, then anyone who applies must be accepted. That school cannot expel anyone unless some other school is willing to accept that student. Charter schools only want what is easiest for them. Sometimes to great profit for top management.

My experience with charter schools: they were trying to drive lesser students out rather than do remedial education. Then the public school took those student in; solved the problem. In every case, that student then went on to be accepted in a 4 year college. No thanks to those two charter schools.

Experience of my acquaintances also ...they make life unpleasant for the low-achievers and difficult kids so they leave and return to public-school (...and yet some of the schools still get shitty test scores). But their students all wear a nice uniform and don't have weirdly colored hair or facial piercings, and say yessum and no sir. My kids' K-8 school was an alternative program within the public school system and taught kids to learn and be part of the community, rather than teaching to test ...and they still got better standardized test scores than many of the charter schools. But they had really weird colored hair and called teachers by their first names.

Sounds exactly like the Catholic parochial schools of my youth, I don't know anything about the Christian Academies. My Ex was still bitching 20 years later that she missed a perfect score on her English test because she said, "John loves Mary" was a proper sentence. Isn't it? Nope, John can only "love" God. :rolleyes:

I went to public schools, so there's that.

Monster: I'm with her.

Which her?

You claim to be a reader....


pffft.

You want me to make conclusions from wild speculation? One can easily be the loyal opposition and still stand with Betsy Devos.

So again, is "her" Monster, Betsy Devos, or someone else? I believe I know. But that would only be speculation. Which her?

Am I suppose to read your lips? Apparently those cards distorted your answer.

I am fine if you continue your long-standing tradition of making conclusions from wild speculation.

As for the rest of your questions, I leave them as an exercise for the student.

Here's a clue: read.

Shit on Betsy DeVos all you want--but saying charter schools are bad is like saying movies are bad: obviously there are bad ones, and also amazing ones, just like there are bad public schools and amazing ones. Often the bad ones are motivated by money or religion, in my experience.

What's a Betsy DeVos?

Some best advance courses I took came from a 'for profit' operation. However that post-graduate university is completely different from other 'for profit' operations.

What is the purpose? If purpose is profit, then education is bogus. In my case, that school was driven by providing good courses. Profiting because their purpose was teaching - not profits.

It comes down to a strategic objective. What is the purpose - profits or product? Must be one or the other. Many charter schools are only for profit - kids be damned.

Charter schools that do not take every applicant should be banned. Can a grocery store restrict customers based upon color of skin, religion, height, or body odor? Of course not. Businesses offer relevant services to all potential customers. Or must be terminated with prejudice.

Charter school must provide education to everyone who applies. That includes even special education students.

I was only joking - taking a vague point to demonstrate how you might love Besty Devos. It loses its humor now that I must explain it to someone so emotional. Please continue pissing on others like a douchebag. It might even be entertaining.

Or should I also speculate that your nastiness of some kind of joke? Maybe I could if you were a nicer person. Apparently that also requires too much speculation.

So you can read *and* speculate. Attaboy! New skills! Congratulations!


By the way, your "joking" needs some work. Keep trying though!

I don't think I said all Charter Schools were bad? I certainly didn't mean to. But the ones that sprung up suddenly when this system was introduced mostly were. There are plenty of fine charter schools around here. covering almost every aspect of educational approaches, and they've been around for a while. Ann Arbor Prep High School -in which you almost certainly would enroll yours if you lived here- is a shining example. Also Honey Creek K-8. But all of a sudden there was an influx of schools sponsored by institutions of dubious repute based on tenuous mission statements and nobody really monitored them until it was too late. Charter schools will not go away if this woman goes away. Nor should they.

What IS bad is the high-grading of the children in the neighborhoods for the primary goal of increasing private profit with public money.

I'm completely fine with private schools--run with private money. Religious schools, private money. Having public funds pay to teach *any* child that humans rode around on dinosaurs is wrong.

Back on topic, this DeVos character should be kept far, far away from the levers of power that control our educational system, such that they are. She's a dangerous ideologue. LOCAL CONTROL is her guiding star. On the surface, a good idea. But not to the exclusion of everything else, like federal laws and common fucking sense.

Let's go to the video tape!



DeVos says guns in schools... meh, I don't want to tell people what to do. JFC.

And she's unwilling to commit to not taking money away from public schools...

The beat goes on and on and on. She's a hard core.. capitalist in the area of public education. She's consistently displayed attitudes similar to timber barons who surveyed the endless forests in the west and saw resources ripe for the picking. Don't regulate me, just keep making schoolkids for me to harvest money from.

Fuck Betsy DeVos.

(are we clear now tw?

Parents all ready have the power to make the right choices for their children. They chose to be involved with their kids education or not. Unfortunately a lot of parents do nothing except push the kids out the door in the morning. :(



Here's the background on the family.

She has zero control over that but have fun storming the castle.

~

There's only one question I would like to ask your fellow Sec of Ed protesters, and that is, who was Obama's Sec of Ed?

The first one.

Don't look it up, you have 5 seconds, go.

I said don't look it up.


ETA: this is the snarkiest I get now and I still want to apologize. The point I make is unfair. Carry on

So why is Amway not a Ponzi scheme?

They already are (in Texas at least).

You are correct in that Trump will do what he wants to anyway, but someone with different views might try to persuade him differently. Sitting in the room does have power, though significantly less with this admin, it's true.

Ok, explain it to me then.

There's plenty of federal money in public schools. If the head of the department of education, from whence the money flows has "zero control" over that, then who the hell does? It's not Trump's job, right? DeVos would have to just ... accept that the money flows out, with no input in how it's allocated?

I'll cut you slack you denied everybody else, google the hell out of it. You're big on knowing names, let's hear one.

Yeah, I don't know the name.

What's your point?

You seem to be saying that my strong opinions against the current nominee are less valid because I failed your pop quiz.

But, I could be wrong, again. It's a well-traveled road to greater understanding. I'm looking forward to see where this road leads.

That's because Obama's first Sec of Ed was a reasonable choice when nominated, not having a fascist background and all.:p:

Via Wikipedia, "The Constitution also grants Congress exclusively the power to appropriate funds. This power of the purse is one of Congress' primary checks on the executive branch."

The Pres can request a budget, but it's up to Congress to actually pass one. They're the ones who actually decide what the budget is. They pass legislation that creates Programs, and then fund the Programs, and that goes to the Dept of Ed to oversee. The DoE doesn't actually decide to fund them or not.

~

But even then, the Programs are not "the schools", right? When we think of "the schools" we think of the money paying teachers and administrators, heating the buildings and whatnot. Most of that money comes from the states. (Around here, local property taxes)

At the link below, look up what Programs the Feds are funding in your own state. It's mostly Pell grants, Special Ed, and that sort of thing. Very little is direct grants to schools, and that is only in disadvantaged areas. (Seen the results, they need more money)

https://ed.gov/about/overview/budget...histbyst14.pdf

About 0.5B goes to schools in Washington State in the forms of various Federal Programs and Special Ed. Washington State spends over 21B on public education.

No no, the point I make with that is unfair. Your concerns are your own, and real, and I have absolutely no grounds to deny them.

It's the Next Trump Outrage ~ but I dunno. It's weak and it steals the air from bigger outrages.

And the entire campaign season 2016 was one outrage after another; result, President Trump. Outrages were at the least ineffective, at the most somehow worked in his favor.

The link doesn't work for me.

Are you saying everyone should wait for Trump to make a huge fuck up so the outrage will be more effective? What about the people who think this is the biggest fuck up on their list of concerns? I find it hard to believe any fuck up induced outrage will have any effect on Trump, the mid-terms in congress at best.

They will do what they like. But when they protest about the closing of the public schools, and the schools don't close? Trump electorate, which is not in their bubble, will notice the now-empty outrage, and vote to reelect. It's probably part of Trump's game, because he's playing this like it's game theory.

Not just my idea, here's Scott Adams, Democrat who noticed Trump's persuasion power. This paragraph will make you very angry, but...

True, but I know a lot of Trump fans who are Yabuts. They have one or two things that they want Trump to do, and if I say maybe he will, but he's also likely to do x, y, and z. They say, yabut I don't care about that. They're also oblivious to the power of congress to make laws and collect/spend money.

Presidents generally have a 100 day honeymoon to do mostly what they want. The honeymoon exists. Question is whether this president will somehow subvert his honeymoon. He is not entirely liked by many Republican power brokers.

Destruction is easy and fast. Construction is hard and takes a long time.