Cross-posted from http://www.skyislandscriber.com.

Last week the New Yorker explored the plan to break public schools that is laid bare by Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos to head the Department of Education. I’ll go along and focus on public education and the threat of choice for the sake of choice. But take heed: as the author points out, putting an enemy of public ed at the head of the education department is an example of the Trumpian implementation of the X-antiX formula. Many of the rest of his cabinet picks, including the recent pick for OMB fit the formula for a given agency X, choose antiX to lead destroy it.

Among the points that can be made in favor of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s billionaire nominee for the position of Secretary of Education, are the following: She has no known ties to President Vladimir Putin, unlike Trump’s nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, who was decorated with Russia’s Order of Friendship medal a few years ago. She hasn’t demonstrated any outward propensity for propagating dark, radical-right-leaning conspiracy theories, unlike Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s designated national-security adviser. She has not actively called for the dismantling of the department she is slated to head, as have Rick Perry, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, and Scott Pruitt, the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

That the absence of such characteristics should bear noting only underlines the dystopian scope of Trump’s quest to complete his cabinet of cronies. On the other hand, DeVos has never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one. She is a graduate of Holland Christian High School, a private school in her home town of Holland, Michigan, which characterizes its mission thus: “to equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.”

To bring this down to earth, substitute “50 million school children” for “world” and you have essential DeVos.

How might DeVos seek to transform the educational landscape of the United States in her position at the head of a department that has a role in overseeing the schooling of more than fifty million American children? As it happens, she does have a long track record in the field. Since the early nineteen-nineties, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been very active in supporting the charter-school movement. They worked to pass Michigan’s first charter-school bill, in 1993, which opened the door in their state for public money to be funnelled to quasi-independent educational institutions, sometimes targeted toward specific demographic groups, which operate outside of the strictures that govern more traditional public schools. …

As a board member of Children First America and the American Education Reform Council, and later as the chair of the American Federation for Children, DeVos lobbied for school-choice voucher programs and tax-credit initiatives, intended to widen the range of institutions—including private and religious—that could receive funding that might otherwise go to both charter and traditional public schools. In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos expressed her ultimate goals in education reform, which she said she saw encompassing not just charter schools and voucher programs but also homeschooling and virtual education: “That all parents, regardless of their zip code, have had the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children. And that all students have had the best opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential.”

So how well does all that work?

… How have such DeVos-sponsored initiatives played out thus far in her home state? Earlier this year, the Detroit Free Press published the results of a yearlong investigation into the state’s two-decade-long charter-school initiative—one of the least regulated in the country. Almost two-thirds of the state’s charter schools are run by for-profit management companies, which are not required to make the financial disclosures that would be expected of not-for-profit or public entities. This lack of transparency has not translated into stellar academic results: student standardized-test scores at charter schools, the paper found, were no more than comparable with those at traditional public schools. And, despite the rhetoric of “choice,” lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools, while the parents of more privileged students were better equipped to navigate the system. Even Tom Watkins, the state’s former education superintendent, who favors charter schools, told the newspaper, “In a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

As the Republican nominee, Trump campaigned on a platform of educational reform, proposing to assign twenty billion dollars of federal funds to a block grant aimed at opening up school choice. The assumption is that productive competition between schools will result. “Competition always does it,” Trump said in September, as if he were speaking about air-conditioner factories rather than academic institutions. “The weak fall out and the strong get better. It is an amazing thing.”

… through her past actions, and her previously published statements, it is clear that DeVos, like the President-elect who has chosen her, is comfortable applying the logic of the marketplace to schoolyard precincts. She has repeatedly questioned the value of those very precincts’ physical existence: in the Philanthropy interview, DeVos remarked that, “in the Internet age, the tendency to equate ‘education’ with ‘specific school buildings’ is going to be greatly diminished.”

Scriber actually agrees with the latter quote. The internet is a powerful transformative agent. Consider as one example, the Kahn Academy, featured in this 2011 Wired article, How Khan Academy is changing the rules of education. However, this melding of technology and education is an entirely separate set of issues from DeVos’ push for public funding of private (including religious) schools.

The New Yorker author, Rebecca Mead, sums up:

Missing in the ideological embrace of choice for choice’s sake is any suggestion of the public school as a public good—as a centering locus for a community and as a shared pillar of the commonweal, in which all citizens have an investment. If, in recent years, a principal focus of federal educational policy has been upon academic standards in public education—how to measure success, and what to do with the results—DeVos’s nomination suggests that in a Trump Administration the more fundamental premises that underlie our institutions of public education will be brought into question. In one interview, recently highlighted by Diane Ravitch on her blog, DeVos spoke in favor of “charter schools, online schools, virtual schools, blended learning, any combination thereof—and, frankly, any combination, or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of.” A preëmptive embrace of choices that haven’t yet been thought of might serve as an apt characterization of Trump’s entire, chaotic cabinet-selection process. But whether it is the approach that will best serve current and prospective American school students is another question entirely.

Trump himself, I point out, is an example of the X-antiX formula. He will shortly be appointed by the American people to head a government much of which he despises and intends to diminish.

Yes, I am, damn it. I am in the educational elite. My degrees are from land-grant universities which were created to move America ahead by establishing educational institutions that would benefit the peoples of the various states. I returned to teach and do research in one such institution for the better part of my academic career. So, of course, I say: I am elite. And it enrages me that our country has now stooped so low as to devalue facts, the means to make them as such (research), and the institutions charged with enabling that knowledge (public education).

The [Morrill act][wiki] says about land-grant colleges:

without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. (my emphasis)

In other words, our predecessors in Congress saw education as the way to create the American Dream. Trump and his minions are out to reverse that process. The reason why is that Trump and Putin know the value of having uneducated serfs at the base of the economic ladder.

Here are excerpts from a report comparing the Obama and Trump cabinets so far with respect to their educational qualifications, The Difference In Education Between Trump & Obama’s Cabinets Is Staggering (h/t Michele Manos).

While there are no educational or professional restrictions barring our citizens from serving the public as part of a presidential administration, traditionally Presidents opt to choose the highest-qualified men and women for important positions, while usually being well-learned themselves. No longer is that the case. Trump and his administration are without a doubt the most wildly unqualified team to ever darken the door of the White House.

It’s called kakistocracy.

It should ring all sorts of alarm bells when you realize that the most educated man on the Trump staff is the sole black man, Dr. Ben Carson, who is a skilled surgeon but whose religious extremism clouds his muddled judgment. Trump himself will be the first president in 25 years to not have a graduate degree of any kind, and his proud ignorance has already become a major source of contention in national security circles.

The rest of his team is largely horrendously unqualified to run the departments they have been given control of. Here are a couple of what I think are the most egregious examples.

The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has billions of dollars but just a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College. The current Secretary of Education, John King Jr., “has a B.A. from Harvard, a master’s degree and doctorate from Columbia, and a law degree from Yale.”

The Department of Energy will now be run by former Texas Governor and Dancing With The Stars washout Rick Perry, who famously couldn’t remember the name of the department he wanted to abolish and will now run. Perry has a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M and failed his college chemistry courses. He will be replacing Ernest Moniz, who is a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist with a PhD from Stanford University.

Trump has staffed his administration with the wealthy and the connected, rewarding megadonors and appointed GOP sycophants to run departments they want to abolish.

That is what dictators do.

The smoothness and talent with which our nation was guided over the past eight years has all been taken for granted; now we shall truly see what happens when the captain of the Titanic and all of his mates are drunk at the wheel.

According to the Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required), AZ State Senator Steve Farley is thinking about running for governor.

State Sen. Steve Farley is considering a run for governor in 2018, the first Democrat to publicly express interest in challenging Gov. Doug Ducey in his reelection bid.

The Tucson lawmaker, who’s spent 10 years in the Legislature, said he hasn’t made a final decision yet, but is seriously considering a run against Ducey. He said he won’t make any decisions until after the 2017 legislative session is over.

Farley said Ducey’s education and tax policies are among the driving factors leading him to consider challenging the governor.

“I’ve seen up close his priorities over the last couple of years, what he’s done or not done. I think that it’s been proven pretty clear to most people no matter which side of the aisle they’re on that simply more corporate tax giveaways aren’t the recipe for success for our economy or for our people. It’s got to be investment in our education system,” Farley said. “And while he may think funding 70 percent of inflation for our public schools is solving the whole problem, that’s not the case.”

Here is why Scriber thinks Farley would be an excellent governor. Following are excerpts from Steve’s “Farley Report” – an email that you too can subscribe to. I’ve selected two topics.

On education and our work force

It’s been more than a year since the special session that placed Proposition 123 on the ballot, the measure that finally forced the majority and the Governor to pay 70% of inflation funding for our public schools, something we thought we forced them to do 16 years ago. Not 100% of inflation, 70%. That was just enough to raise us from last in the country in state support for K–12 to somewhere around 48th or 49th.

But it is most emphatically not enough to make a real difference for our kids and our economy. Even Governor Ducey spent a lot of time before the 123 election admitting that it was “just a start”. He promised to get right to work on enacting a Step Two for education funding.

Since we passed 123, we haven’t heard a peep from Governor Ducey about that step two. In fact, he just released a self-aggrandizing “Year In Review” which all but declares the education funding crisis solved. In it, he even brags about a “a $28 million investment in Joint Technical Education Districts [JTED] to help students learn what they’re passionate about and prepare them to succeed in post-secondary education.”

Governor Ducey fails to say that the previous year he signed the budget that cut $30 million from JTED, a move that set them on a path to destruction, and earlier this year he resisted all attempts to restore the funds until he was forced to relent by a strong bipartisan majority.

It’s time to stop messing around with this. We must prioritize teacher recruitment, training, and retention, as well as immediate upgrades in classroom resources like technology, curriculum, tutoring and teacher aides, and we must start now with what little money we have left in our budget, given that $4 billion a year in corporate tax cuts have been drained from our general fund by the majority since 1996.

Our state tax system needs REAL reform

Then we need to have the guts to finally tackle the monster that is our sales tax code. As Farley Report readers know well, we bleed more than $12 billion each year from loopholes that have been placed in law over the past decades, never to be examined ever again. Some are defensible, and some are even good for us as a society. But many, many more are nothing but special-interest giveaways engineered by corporate lobbyists in order to save their clients millions of dollars, and they do nothing to help our economy in general.

Here’s a place to start: If we charge sales tax on securities brokerage, financial portfolio management, and investment advice — which tend to be used by only by those like our Governor who can easily afford to pay it without even noticing — we can gain another $185 million per year that can be invested in educating the entrepreneurs and the workforce of the future so that we ALL can thrive in the upcoming decades — including those at both ends of the pyramid.

To subscribe to the Farley Report, contact Steve at sfarley@igc.org.