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arne duncan
Democrats Rebuked for Backing GOP War on Public Schools, Trump Voucher Expansion
"Don't let the far right's demonization of public education fool you," said one commentator. "People support their local public schools."
Aug 06, 2025
Evidence is mounting across the United States that school vouchers are harming public schools—and numerous studies have shown they largely do not benefit students academically as proponents have long claimed—leaving education advocates to wonder why the issue of so-called "school choice" is a fault line within the Democratic Party.
The Trump administration's recent cave on K-12 public education funding, more than $6 billion of which President Donald Trump was pressured to release after temporarily freezing it, showed that "public schools are a winning issue, everywhere," wrote commentator David Pepper at his Substack blog, Pepperspectives last week.
Yet when Education Week asked the governors of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. whether they would opt in to the nation's first federal school voucher program that was passed last month as part of Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, only one Democratic governor—Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico—clearly stated she would not take part in the $26 billion program, which allows taxpayers to claim a 100% tax credit for up to $1,700 in donations to scholarships to private schools, and allow lower-income families to receive scholarship funds.
Lujan Grisham expressed concerns about the lack of accountability measures for private schools that would be funded with tax dollars, a loss of funding and enrollment for public schools, and the possibility of private schools discriminating against children with special needs.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also expressed doubt that his state would participate, saying "it doesn't seem fair" to support a program that "is taking away money from people who can't afford to go to a private school, who would like to go to a public school."
But several other Democratic governors didn't respond to Education Week's query, and others who have been supportive of school vouchers in the past, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, said they were "reviewing" the program, which does not go into effect until 2027.
"Governor Polis is still reviewing the details of this legislation, but is excited by the possibility of unlocking new federal tax credits for donations to help low-income kids achieve," said Polis' office.
The survey of governors was taken as two reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post detailed the damage school vouchers have already done to public school districts.
As the Times reported Wednesday, a decline in the number of babies being born in the U.S. and the rise of the "school choice" movement, particularly in Republican-controlled states, have led public schools in cities including Orlando, Florida; Newark, New Jersey; and Memphis, Tennessee to confront their emerging enrollment crisis by hiring consultants to help combat right-wing claims that children will suffer if they attend public schools.
Although Florida is one of a few states that has a growing instead of shrinking population of children, its public school systems are facing "significant declines," reported the Times, with more than 400,000 children in the state using the Florida school voucher system, called the universal education savings account—the largest voucher program in the United States.
In Orange County, where Orlando is located, the school-age population has grown by 5% since 2020—but the school district is expecting a 25% decline in kindergarten enrollment this year—and a potential loss of $28 million in federal funding, since schools are funded according to the number of students they enroll.
In Arizona, the Post reported, nearly 89,000 students receive vouchers the state government calls Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, while 62,000 receive taxpayer-supported scholarships for private schools through another voucher program and more than 232,000 students attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.
The state's embrace of the "school choice" movement left just 75% of Arizona children attending public schools in 2021, according to the Post, and school districts are responding by closing schools. Roosevelt Elementary School District in the Phoenix area will operate just 13 schools this year—a third less than last school year.
"You're taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces," Rick Brammer, a consultant who analyzes school enrollment, told the Post. "As we've created and funded alternatives, we've just emptied out school after school from the districts."
Instead of adopting an anti-voucher, vehemently pro-public school stance as a signature issue, the Democratic Party is split on the issue, with a number of Democratic governors backing charter schools and vouchers and some veterans of the Obama administration, including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, backing a group called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which has advocated for states to embrace the federal voucher program in Trump's domestic policy agenda.
As the Times reported Monday, DFER's chief executive, former Democratic Providence, Rhode Island Mayor Jorge Elorza, traveled to a Democratic Governors Association in Madison, Wisconsin this past weekend with the goal of convincing governors who are still "reviewing" the federal voucher program, as many told Education Week, to opt in.
"This is literally free money that is broadly supported by the majority of voters who have steadily drifted away from the party," Elorza told the Times, referring to Black and Latino voters, who some polls have shown believe public schools are failing children. "It just makes sense."
Other Democratic strategists who have previously been involved with DFER have shifted their focus to growing charter school networks in southern states.
Former Georgia state lawmaker Alisha Thomas Searcy, who co-founded the Center for Strong Public Schools Action, which is pushing the charter school effort, told Chalkbeat Tennessee on Monday that the group will not embrace vouchers.
"I want to be clear about what sets us apart," Searcy told the outlet. "It's our commitment to public education. It is foundational for us, and it's nonnegotiable. We're committed to remaining focused on strengthening public schools, not creating pathways that take away from them."
Public education advocates have warned charter schools, like vouchers, drain funding from public schools with less oversight, and research has shown mixed results in terms of academic improvements.
Many Democratic lawmakers, said Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-90), "have an education plan, it’s fully funding public education so every child has a well-resourced classroom, providing wraparound services so families have needed resources, smaller class size, and teacher autonomy."
Jennifer Berkshire, host of the education-focused podcast "Have You Heard," noted that popular Democratic politicians including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper have been vehement critics of school vouchers and defenders of robust funding for public education.
"And yet there is intense pressure to get Democrats to embrace vouchers in order to 'stay relevant,'" said Berkshire last week.
Vouchers were resoundingly defeated in a number of states last November—including those that votes for Trump.
A ballot initiative in Kentucky that would have sent public money to private schools was defeated by a 30-point margin, and in Nebraska, nearly every county voted to repeal an existing voucher program. Colorado voters, despite their Democratic governor's support for school vouchers, voted against adding a "right to school choice" to the state constitution.
Considering the broad public disapproval of school privatization, Pepper offered advice to Democrats last week.
"Don't let the far right's demonization of public education fool you," he wrote. "People support their local public schools. Whether it's an attack from Washington, an attack from your statehouse, some new privatization scheme, a billionaire-backed referendum or a candidate who is all-in on attacking public schools—oppose them fiercely and call them out bluntly. Go on offense for public schools, and against efforts to attack public schools."
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The Federal Government Has Poured Millions into Failing Charter Schools in Louisiana
Parents in New Orleans are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children
May 19, 2019
When Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama, said Hurricane Katrina was the "best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," he was no doubt referring in part to how the storm and its aftermath led to the spread of charter schools across the city.
The very first charter school created in the post-Katrina era to close was Free Academy, which shuttered in early 2009... due to financial problems, lack of academic progress, and disputes with the school's for-profit management company.
But if he had looked more closely before making his remark (he eventually apologized for his poor word choice), he would have noticed some of the new charter schools being created in New Orleans were already failing.
The very first charter school created in the post-Katrina era to close was Free Academy, which shuttered in early 2009--well before Duncan made his remarks--due to financial problems, lack of academic progress, and disputes with the school's for-profit management company.
After Free Academy closed, many of the students scrambling to find new schools likely ended up in the Crocker Arts & Technology School, another charter school, which opened in the fall in the same building. But that school proved to be a false promise too when, on a Thursday evening in early December, parents learned Crocker had to close, literally overnight, due to its unsafe building.
The century-old structure was close to collapse, a condition that existed no doubt when the school was Free Academy and when Crocker decided to occupy the building. Officials at both schools either didn't know or knew but didn't bother to warn parents their children were in an unsafe building.
Duncan should have been concerned about these failed charters not only because of the potential harm the schools posed to students but also because the federal government helped to fund the schools.
Government Funds for Failed Schools
In 2006, barely a year after Katrina's devastation, Duncan's predecessor Margaret Spellings awarded $24 million to Louisiana to create charter schools, primarily in New Orleans.
The grant came from the Department of Education's Charter Schools Program (CSP), which provides grants to individual charter schools and charter school management companies, and for states to award to charter subgrantees. Louisiana used its 2006 grant to fund individual charters, mostly in New Orleans, including $283,847 awarded to Free Academy and $600,000 to Crocker.
After two more relocations, Crocker would eventually close for good in 2014.
Another reason Duncan should have been more inquisitive about how charter schools had used federal grant money in Louisiana is because his department, during the first year under his leadership, awarded the state yet another huge grant--this time totaling $25,576,222, mostly to bolster the state's existing charters and start new ones in Baton Rouge.
Since Duncan's tenure, the CSP's annual budget has ballooned to $440 million, in the current budget year, and the total amount spent by the program since inception exceeds $4 billion.
But like those early grants to charters in post-Katrina New Orleans, much of that money has gone to schools that eventually closed--and some that never opened at all.
According to a recent report, up to $1 billion of the money given out nationwide by the CSP was wasted on charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of fraud, poor performance, financial mismanagement, and other reasons. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, was published by the Network for Public Education and written by this author and Carol Burris, NPE's executive director.
In compiling our report, we found the grant program that provides federal dollars to state departments of education, or other approved "state entities," is the largest of the CSP funding streams and presents some of the worst examples of federal tax dollars being wasted on charter schools that failed. Louisiana has one of the worst records for slipshod management of its federal grants.
In a follow-up to our report, Burris looked at the grants given to create and expand charter schools in Louisiana between 2006 and 2014. She found that of the 110 charters that received the money, at least 51 (46 percent) were closed. Some may have never opened at all, but because the Louisiana Education Department doesn't provide a list of closed schools, that figure is unknown. The total amount of money given to those closed and never-opened schools is at least $23,819,839.00.
An 'Illegal Experiment' on Children
While the numbers alone are startling and a cause for concern, individual examples of charters in Louisiana that received CSP money and then closed throw into further doubt the prudence of using federal seed money to spread schools that open and close, repeatedly, and fund charter organizations that churn through districts and neighborhoods without any obvious regard for what parents and local officials want.
One of the examples I singled out from Burris' research is Benjamin Mays Prep School in New Orleans, which received a $600,000 CSP grant. Mays Prep had long-standing academic issues and persistent budget shortfalls. The school had to move to a different building in 2012 and then lost that location in 2014 when its charter wasn't renewed and a different charter moving into the space refused to enroll the Mays students. The school closed officially in 2014.
Another New Orleans charter, Miller McCoy, received a $600,000 CSP grant but eventually closed in 2014 after "a long downward spiral," according to a local news source. The charter school's two founders left in 2012 under alleged ethics allegations, and the school had a series of unsuccessful leaders after that. An "F" academic rating from the state seemed to have been the final straw.
The school had promised to be equivalent to a prestigious all-male private prep school in New Orleans, only free. Its closure left the teachers and remaining students and families with "a sense of loss, sadness, a grieving for what could have been," reported a different local news outlet.
Another New Orleans charter, Gentilly Terrace, received a $600,000 CSP grant. The school was operated by a charter management group, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, that was cited for being out of compliance with several federal laws, including misdirection of federal funds for Title I schools--money earmarked for high-poverty students. New Beginnings also had chronic problems with employee turnover in its schools and non-transparent practice by its board of directors.
Gentilly Terrace closed in 2014 with a "D" rating from the state's academics report card. Recently, the CEO of New Beginnings resigned amid allegations of falsifying public records and allowing one of its three remaining schools to engage in grade-fixing.
CSP grants that were awarded to schools in Baton Rouge often led to the same results.
When the Recovery School District that transformed New Orleans started taking over "low-performing" Baton Rouge schools in 2008, one of the first seven schools taken over and handed to charter operators was Glen Oaks Middle School. Glen Oaks received $772,750 from the CSP.
Parents in New Orleans who are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community are organizing to repeal the state law that legalized charters, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children.
By 2013, the takeover effort was already "rebooting," and Glen Oaks was closed, supposedly temporarily, for the 2014-15 school year in order to find a different charter management group. Students were told to transfer to a different school operated by a different charter but were presumably able to return to Glen Oaks the following year.
But instead of reopening as a middle school, Glen Oaks was occupied by three new charters: a kindergarten, an elementary school, and a different middle school operated by a different charter management company.
Glen Oaks closed officially in 2016, according to state reports, and by 2018, both the kindergarten and the elementary schools had moved elsewhere too.
Today, what remains inside Glen Oaks Middle School is a much smaller middle school under a different name. That school is currently rated "F" academically by the state, which recently recommended the school be handed over to yet another charter management group.
Some Louisiana charter school CSP grant recipients that have managed to stay open seem on less than firm ground.
Baton Rouge's Tallulah Charter School, which was awarded a CSP grant of $75,000, was threatened with shutdown in 2018 for persistent low academic performance and testing errors.
What saved the school was an offer from an online learning charter school to move students to a blended curriculum that included more computer-based instruction. The online charter recently dropped its affiliation with an out-of-state for-profit company and changed its name. The school has a 54 percent graduation rate compared to the state's 79 percent.
Parents in New Orleans who are sick of the instability that temporary charter schools have brought to their community are organizing to repeal the state law that legalized charters, calling the schools an "illegal experiment" on their children.
Widespread Violations of Federal Laws
These kinds of examples eventually drew the attention of the education department's own Office of Inspector General to examine the agency's oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program in 2016, after Duncan had resigned and John King became secretary.
The audit made recommendations for improvement on the oversight of federal grants given to charters that close, but it's not at all clear how those recommendations were implemented under King's leadership, or under Betsy DeVos, who took over as secretary in 2017.
In 2018, OIG published another examination of how states with charter schools that closed accounted for federal grant funds. This time, Louisiana was included in the audit because it was the state with the highest ratio of closed charter schools to total charter schools.
The audit found charter schools in Louisiana that received federal money and then closed likely had widespread violations of federal laws and regulations for closing out their grants, disposing of property purchased with federal funds, and ensuring student information and records had been protected and maintained.
The audit found charter schools in Louisiana that received federal money and then closed likely had widespread violations of federal laws and regulations for closing out their grants, disposing of property purchased with federal funds, and ensuring student information and records had been protected and maintained.
In its comments included at the end of the report, the department did not explicitly agree or disagree with the findings but stated it "did not consider charter school closures to be a risk to federal funds" and that OIG's recommendations "would be inconsistent with the federal role in education." The department asked instead for "a single recommendation that recognizes the balance between federal and state responsibility for the oversight of charter schools."
Recently, House Democrats proposed a substantial cut to CSP grants, declaring the education department has not been "a responsible steward" of taxpayer dollars. House members cited, as part of their rationale for the cuts, evidence of financial waste and mismanagement like those Burris and I found. And the Democrats directed the education department implement recommendations from the 2018 OIG report.
Among those recommendations are for the department to determine which states receiving charter school grants pose the most risk to federal funds and help those states develop and implement effective charter school closure procedures. Should the House bill pass, you can be sure Louisiana will be on that list.
But the legacy of the federal government's charter school grants in Louisiana should not be understood just by the sheer waste of precious education funds, but also by the real human consequences of spreading makeshift charter programs that throw communities into confusion, distress, and a sense of betrayal. That's probably something you won't hear Arne Duncan apologize for.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute. Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text. This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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3 Questions That 'Created Havoc' in Betsy DeVos' Department of Education
My latest brush with the education policy edifice's imperviousness to outside inquiry occurred while researching the Education Department's Charter School Program
Apr 07, 2019
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is famous for giving a nonresponse to fairly straightforward questions. More than one commentator has had fun with her contorted evasions, but her inability to explain the rationale for current education policies isn't confined to her own personality and ideology.
It's actually been endemic in the education policy world for years, particularly in how the federal government continues to hide its agenda to further privatize the nation's public school system by creating and expanding charter schools.
Arne Duncan, who served as secretary for the longest period of time before DeVos, was famous for being the consummate non-listener, often talking over people with his prepared remarks and ignoring the advice of teachers and education experts.
This is not a partisan issue. Teachers demanded Duncan's resignation, and Republican members of Congress have complained that DeVos' department isn't responsive to requests for information.
Of course, any comparison between DeVos and Duncan can find some very big differences, but a constant throughout both administrations has been to ignore, wall-off, or obfuscate when confronted with any inquiry aimed at the federal government's efforts to create and expand charter schools.
A History of Hiding
My latest brush with the education policy edifice's imperviousness to outside inquiry occurred while researching and writing a new report on the Education Department's Charter School Program (CSP). I coauthored the report Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride with Network for Public Education executive director Carol Burris.
Burris and I found that up to $1 billion awarded by the CSP--in more than 1,000 grants--was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud.
During our investigations, we came across a previous report published by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in 2015, during the Obama presidential administration, that found similarly disturbing results, where federal grants had gone to hundreds of charter schools that had basically taken the money and run.
To compile its report, CMD had submitted 33 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Education and was told these records would be forthcoming. The promised records never came.
The department also refused to provide CMD with public records regarding communications between federal and state officials about charter school grants and oversight. The largest grants by far had gone to state education agencies (SEAs) to disburse in subgrants to charter school startups and expansions. Federal officials claimed releasing such information would "constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
After CMD repeated its requests, the department released a list of some charter schools receiving the SEA grant money in a PDF that was "partly illegible." Other information CMD requested related to the applications for the state grants never came. CMD concluded in its report summary, "Public information about funds received and spent by charters is severely lacking."
The information CMD was eventually able to piece together came out in its report in October 2015, receiving widespread coverage by education policy blogs and community organizers.
Two months after the CMD report appeared, the Charter School Program released a dataset showing all grants awarded between school years 2006-07 and 2013-14, with information on grants given to start-up, replicate, and expand charter schools. The dataset was released on Dec. 23--just two days before the holiday break--to minimize attention.
Also in the same year, perhaps in anticipation of the CMD report, the department issued a "Dear Colleague" letter to SEAs emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars. The letter recommended SEAs conduct regular independent audits and strengthen authorizing practices. And the department provided an "Overview of the 2015 CSP SEA Review Process" explaining how the program awarding charter grants to states is administered.
Given the department's 2015 efforts to disclose information on charter school grants and provide guidance in how the grants should be administered, it seemed only fair, before issuing our report, to ask the agency what had been done since, especially under this new administration.
Three Seemingly Simple Questions
Consequently, on March 8, I sent emails to contacts provided for three CSP grant programs that were the subject of our report. The three emails repeated basically the same three questions, but the email I sent to the contact overseeing the SEA grants, now called "Grants to State Entities," follows:
This is to inquire about the current grant application review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities. Specifically, in 2015, the Department published an "Overview of the 2015 CSP SEA Review Process." My questions:
- Can you provide a similar document describing how the grant review process is currently being conducted for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities?
- If not, can you briefly comment on how the grant review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities aligns with or varies from the Overview referenced above?
- Regarding a "Dear Colleague" letter sent to State Education Agencies in 2015 emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars, was there any follow-up by the Charter School Program to ascertain how many SEAs complied with this request and what was the nature of the new systems and processes put into place by SEAs to provide for greater accountability?
On March 15, I received a voicemail message from an official in the public affairs division of the department asking me to call her back. The message started out nice enough but then veered toward criticism. "Apparently you have sent his request to multiple people," she said (emphasis original), "and that just creates havoc for everyone."
When I immediately called her back, I explained I had merely sent my inquiry to the contacts provided on the relevant sections of the department's website. "That's understandable," she replied, but for "future reference" I was told to send inquiries to "a director"--though I'm not sure who that is. And I was told again my questions had "created havoc" in the office but that department staff members were "working on it" and would "take a few days."
As of this writing, I've yet to receive any other replies.
One Thing Clear
What followed my phone exchange with the department official was, among other things, a very bad, awful day for the secretary when news of our report broke on page A4 of the Washington Post on the very same day she had to appear on Capitol Hill before a House committee hearing.
During the hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat of Connecticut, referred directly to our report, citing the $1 billion stain on the department's charter school grant program, and told DeVos, "This budget is full of cruel cuts to education programs, and it baffles me that you found room for a $60 million increase to the Charter School Program... especially when you consider recent reports of waste and abuse in the program."
When Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, asked DeVos what was being done to recover the $1 billion in alleged financial mismanagement involving charters, DeVos said she "would look into the matter."
On the issue of how a federal agency could allow charter operators to rip off American taxpayers with impunity, and generally suffer no adverse consequences for their acts, DeVos acknowledged that waste and fraud in the charter grant program had been around for "some time."
That much is true.
It was under Arne Duncan's watch that the federal charter grants program was greatly expanded, states were required to lift caps on the numbers of charter schools in order to receive precious federal dollars, and the administration Duncan served in insulted public school teachers by proclaiming National Charter School Week on dates identical to what had always been observed as Teacher Appreciation Week.
And most of the wanton charter fraud we detailed in our report that ran rampant during the Duncan years is now simply continuing under DeVos, with little to no explanation of why this is allowed to occur.
So at least we have that clear.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a selection of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the complete text.
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Backing Teachers, Sanders Says LA Strike Exposes National Need for 'Revolution in Public Education'
"What we accept as normal today with regard to education, I want your grandchildren to tell you that you were crazy to accept," said the Vermont senator
Jan 16, 2019
Tens of thousands of public school teachers and support staff with the Los Angeles Unified School District--the second-largest district in the country--continued the city's first strike in three decades on Thursday.
The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) kicked off the long-promised strike on Monday over unmet demands for higher payer; smaller class sizes; more special education staff, bilingual education instructors, nurses, counselors, and librarians; and stricter regulation of the city's many charter schools.
UTLA charges that district superintendent Austin Beutner--a pro-charter school former business executive with no education background--is unqualified for the job. The district has 640,000 students, and while about 500,000 are enrolled in public schools, Los Angeles has more charter schools than anywhere else in the United States.
As negotiations resumed at City Hall on Thursday, with Los Angeles' Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti mediating between the district and union representatives, strike supporters and participants shared updates from the streets with the hashtags #LAUSDStrike, #UTLAStrong, #WeAreLA, and #RedForEd.
Even though California is the world's fifth-largest economy, public schools across the state have struggled for decades to adequately serve students, particularly in communities of color and regions with low incomes.
The strike--which has cast a spotlight on rifts within the Democratic Party in the solidly blue state--has garnered support from multiple Democrats in Congress, including Reps. Ted Lieu (Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.).
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in an email sent to his supporters on Thursday, expressed solidarity with the teachers, tying the protests to the broader issue of "a rigged economy" that gives major tax breaks to billionaires and corporations rather than investing in educating children.
"What we accept as normal today with regard to education, I want your grandchildren to tell you that you were crazy to accept," Sanders wrote. Calling for free, full-day, high-quality childcare for every child, starting at age three, and tuition-free public college, he concluded that "what we really need in this country is a revolution in public education."
The ongoing strike in Los Angeles follows various #RedForED walkouts and rallies that public school teachers and unions organized last year across Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
And the push to improve L.A. schools has inspired even more teachers to protest. According to Payday Report, on Jan. 28, "thousands of teachers marching under the banner of Virginia Educators United are planning to call off from school for only one day in order to march on the state legislature."
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Arne Duncan's Attack on Los Angeles Public Teachers Shows He Doesn't Care About Real Student Needs
Public education is a right. But the former secretary of education has treated it like—at best—an afterthought
Jan 15, 2019
Literally tens of thousands of Los Angeles public schoolteachers and support staff are on strike this week, demanding that the wealthy elites who run LA's school district address the desperate need for more resources and supports for their students. But just weeks before the strike began, former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote an op-ed in The Hill essentially telling educators to back off their demands because there's not enough money to fund them - even though those public school educators live in one of the wealthiest states in the nation.
Let's be clear. Arne Duncan has never taught a day in his life. He sent his children to an elite private school with small class sizes and great resources. He landed his job as CEO of Chicago Public Schools through insider ties--where he pushed policies that hurt our public school students' access to the very same resources his own children had. He's pushed endlessly for school privatization, and he's been a national proponent of the teacher blame game as a way to dodge the real need for more resources for public education. Now he wants to silence Los Angeles teachers who are demanding the very supports for their students that Duncan's children received--in a state with the fifth largest economy on the planet.
"We need the opposite of what [Arne] Duncan brought to the table in Chicago and what he proposes in Los Angeles."
LA teachers know what their students need: smaller class sizes, more staff for special education and bilingual education, and the resources and wrap-around supports that allow low-income students of color to thrive as life-long learners and productive adults. Duncan has instead promoted the opposite, by starving neighborhood public schools, promoting privatization and austerity, and purging Black educators from our classrooms.
Public education is a right. But Duncan has treated it like--at best--an afterthought, and has promoted policies for years that undermine rather than support strong neighborhood public schools. He has zero credibility with parents, educators and community residents who care about equity for all public students for a reason: he's indifferent to the needs of their students.
He also essentially lies by omission about the real dynamics behind the struggle for the soul of public education in Los Angeles. Duncan ignores the toxic impact of right-wing tax policy on Los Angeles' Black and Latinx students. He conveniently fails to mention Eli Broad or the Broad Foundation and their scheme to orchestrate the mass privatization of Los Angeles public schools. Instead, Duncan says the union should 'cooperate' more with the very management that is seeking to undercut public schools through mass charter expansion.
That mirrors his statement almost a decade ago that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the 'best thing' to happen to New Orleans' public schools, because it opened the ground for mass charter privatization. As in Chicago under Duncan and his successors, privatization in New Orleans has slashed the number of Black teachers, and more than ten years on, New Orleans' Black working class parents, students and residents charge that the experiment has failed them. Duncan's policies profit private operators - and undermine parent voice, public accountability and the educational needs of students.
And just as Duncan regularly shortchanged CPS by refusing to identify and raise progressive sources of revenue for our schools, he massively expanded selective enrollment schools for well-off white students. He continued those policies as education czar in the nation's capital, to the detriment of school districts across the nation.
The educational policies that Duncan put in motion in Chicago and pushed in Washington have helped drive out thousands of Black families from cities like Chicago, where families struggle to find stable schools for their children at the same time they confront racist, classist city policies in housing, policing and economic development.
"We need an end to the failed school privatization experiment. And we need respect for the voices of parents and educators who are sick of being shortchanged by the political elites that Duncan serves."
As a central architect of Chicago's disastrous school closure experiment, Duncan was CEO during the first wave of massive charter expansion in Chicago - forcing neighborhood public schools that had been under-resourced for decades into brutal educational hunger games that have left neighborhood schools starved for resources. As US Education Secretary, he promoted the misnamed 'Race to the Top' program, publicly blaming teachers for the dire consequences of racist school funding practices and endless austerity. He's dismissed class size as an issue--an excuse to purge thousands of Black public educators in Chicago, at a time when a growing body of research shows that our schoolchildren need more, not fewer, educators of color.
We need the opposite of what Duncan brought to the table in Chicago and what he proposes in Los Angeles. We need smaller class sizes, respect for veteran teachers of color, progressive forms of revenue to adequately support public school students, adequate staffing for special education and bilingual education, and a school nurse in every school. We need an end to the failed school privatization experiment. And we need respect for the voices of parents and educators who are sick of being shortchanged by the political elites that Duncan serves.
Instead of asking Los Angeles teachers to shut up and accept less for their students, Duncan should be denouncing the very policies he implemented that have so profoundly harmed public education across the nation.
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Beginning Walkout, Los Angeles Teachers Find Support From Sanders--But Not Corporate Democrats
"The choice is very clear. You can be on the side of teachers or you can be on the side of Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, and those who want to privatize and undermine public education."
Jan 13, 2019
As more than 30,000 educators and supporters prepared Monday to protest the Los Angeles school district's overcrowded classrooms, low teacher salaries, and refusal to hire sufficient support staff, observers noted how the lines being drawn reflect divisions within the Democratic Party regarding education policies: corporate-backed privatization versus strengthening public schools.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attacked teachers across the country for going on strike last year over their chronically low wages, claiming Oklahoma teachers were allowing "adult disagreements" to get in the way of "serving the students"--ignoring the fact that educators there walked out of classrooms last April largely because funding cuts had left schoolchildren with dilapidated textbooks and insufficient supplies.
But the fight over the future of education and teachers' rights in Los Angeles is revealing rifts among Democrats and progressives, with former Education Secretary Arne Duncan also expressing support for the school district while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) stands firmly on the side of the educators.
Sanders has vocally supported other teachers' strikes in recent months, expressing solidarity with educators in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona last year as demands for fair wages and sufficient resources spread through several states.
Meanwhile, Duncan, President Barack Obama's education secretary and a charter school proponent, released a statement over the weekend saying Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) "is spending half a billion dollars more each year than it brings in and is headed toward insolvency in about two years if nothing changes... It simply does not have the money to fund UTLA's demands."
LAUSD posted the comments on its Twitter account along with the claim, "The community agrees: a strike will hurt our kids."
As Common Dreams reported last week, the demands that the teachers' union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), has made of the district include a 6.5 percent raise, the hiring off more educators to ensure smaller class sizes, and more nurses, counselors, and librarians to support L.A.'s 600,000 public school students.
Supporters of the teachers have noted that L.A. school superintendent Austin Beutner, a Democrat, has a background in hedge fund management and investment banking rather than education, and that it shows in his proposal to divide the district into 32 "networks" to create a "leaner, more efficient" school system.
Duncan's support for the school district, which in fact has nearly $2 billion in a reserve that teachers say it should use to fund salary increases and new hires, including nurses and counselors, is indicative of establishment Democrats' harmful alignment with corporate interests--while traditionally Democratic teachers' unions are finding themselves supported mainly by progressives.
"Nearly every leader in this fight is a Democrat, with the two sides representing larger fissures within the Democratic Party about the future of public education," wrote Rebecca Klein at the Huffington Post. "What happens with this teachers strike could set the stage for how these issues play out in the 2020 election and beyond."
"The choice is very clear," wrote Nikhil Goyal, author of "Schools on Trial," on Twitter. "You can be on the side of teachers or you can be on the side of Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, and those who want to privatize and undermine public education. We need a clean break with the Duncan-DeVos agenda."
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Arne Duncan Never Learns
Duncan still thinks, apparently, his biggest mistake involved poor communication rather than the substance of the policies
Aug 13, 2018
Arne Duncan never seems to learn.
Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama's education secretary for seven years and was more powerful than any of his predecessors, is hitting the interview and lecture circuit to promote his new book, "How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation's Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education." It starts with this sentence: "Education runs on lies.
Really?
Education doesn't run on lies (the sentence begs the services of a good editor), and Duncan makes clear several pages later that he means the "education system" runs on lies, which isn't accurate, either.
There is not a monolithic "education system" in the country that spews lies. There are, rather, more than 13,000 school districts in the United States, locally operated. Some of the people who run them may indeed tell lies about student achievement -- though, to be fair to them, Duncan said a lot of things during his tenure that critics said were sheer fiction.
Given the unprecedented era of political lying we are witnessing in the Trump administration (with The Washington Post's Fact Checker finding that President Trump made 4,229 untrue claims in his first 558 days), you might think a former member of a Democratic administration would be careful about accusing too many people of lying. Not Duncan.
He has been calling people liars for a long time, starting just after he became education secretary in a May 29, 2009, speech at the National Press Club: "And so we have to stop lying to children. We have to tell them the truth. We have to be transparent about our data. We have to raise the bar so that every child knows on every step of their educational trajectory what they're going to do."
And he didn't stop:
February 2010 to the National Governors Association: "We have to stop lying to children. We have to look them in the eye and tell them the truth at every stage of their educational trajectory."
March 2010 to the National League of Cities' Congressional City Conference: "We simply have to stop dummying-down standards due to political pressures. We have to stop lying to children and families by giving them a low bar and telling them that they will be okay, when we know they are not adequately prepared to go on to college or a job."
August 2010 in Little Rock: "I congratulate your state, Arkansas, on taking this bold step for your students last month. These higher standards are an absolute game-changer -- as a country we will finally stop dummying-down standards and stop lying to our children and their families."
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now, he's is back at it, essentially painting wide swaths of American society "liar" with this excerpt from a conversation on Sunday with journalist Margaret Brennan on CBS's "Face the Nation," who asked him about his book:
BRENNAN: So, some colors and personal anecdotes but you also really, it's not so much about how schools work but really an indictment of how schools aren't working. It's a very critical take in this book about the education system, and you say, "the education system runs on lies." What do you mean by that?
DUNCAN: That's a tough statement to make. But let me just give you a couple of notes. We say we value education, but we never vote on education. We never hold politicians accountable, local, state, or national level, for getting better results, higher graduation rates, more people graduate from college. We say we value teachers, but we don't pay teachers. We don't support them. We don't mentor them the way they need to do their incredibly important, tough, complex work. And then maybe the toughest lie, for me, Margaret, is that we say we value kids and we've raised a generation of young people, teens who have been raised on mass shootings and gun violence. And that simply doesn't happen in other nations. So I don't look at what people say. I look at their actions. I'd look at their policies. I'd look at their budgets. And our values don't reflect that we care about education, we care about teachers or that we truly care about keeping our children safe and free and free of fear.
Well, yes, there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around on some of these scores (though some people do actually win and lose elections on education issues). No, we don't pay teachers enough or support them or mentor them enough. But Duncan didn't talk much about that when he had seven years as education secretary to make that a priority.
No, we don't pay teachers enough or support them or mentor them enough. But Duncan didn't talk much about that when he had seven years as education secretary to make that a priority.
What he did focus on was pushing teacher evaluation systems that relied in large part on standardized test scores -- a method of assessment that experts warned was unreliable. He also emphasized expanding charter schools and adopting and implementing Common Core State Standards, spending $360 million to create Core-aligned standardized tests that he said would be "an absolute game-changer" for public education. They weren't. (Was he lying?)
He embraced Teach for America, which spent just five weeks training new college graduates to teach in some of the country's neediest schools. He extolled the virtues of big data alongside his ally in school reform, Bill Gates, who funded the creation and implementation of the Common Core. He did talk about the importance of early-childhood education but not until Obama's second term, when no money was left for big federal education initiatives. He spent $7 billion between 2010 and 2015 -- exceeding the $4 billion spent on Race to the Top -- on School Improvement Grants, but a major department report found no positive effect on student achievement.
Many teachers found his policies to be so abhorrent and detrimental to education and their profession that the National Education Association, the largest teacher union and the biggest labor union in the country, called for him to step down in 2014. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher union, came close to doing the same thing in the same year. The unions were big Obama supporters, incidentally. Even some teachers who supported some of his efforts, such as the Common Core, thought the federal government was pressuring states to implement the standards before there was enough training and material design.
In his new book, Duncan can't seem to wrap his brain around the truth of his own policies and behavior. For example, on Page 144, he writes:
Because Race to the Top was a federal program that encouraged shared higher standards among the states, and because the Common Core State Standards were available as the Race was happening, critics of the Common Core conflated them with federal overreach.
Critics conflated them with federal overreach?
Critics weren't the ones doing the conflating. It was the administration that did that.
While the Obama administration did not mandate that states adopt the Common Core, it coerced them by dangling federal dollars in front of them during the Great Recession. Federal involvement in local education policy during the Obama administration was so extreme that Congress, in late 2015, finally rewrote the No Child Left Behind law -- eight years late -- with the express purpose of ending federal micromanaging. And it was done with bipartisan support.
Duncan's simple belief in test scores as the key measure of effectiveness and even goodness remains unchanged, as he writes so definitively on Page 102:
On the subject of tests, it's also important to note the distinction between proficiency and growth. Not everyone understands this, including the current secretary of education. Raw scores are important, but what we're really after is growth. A teacher who starts with a class that's on average three years behind, and who teaches these kids so well that, by the end of the year, they are only one year behind is better than a teacher who starts the year with a class at grade level and ends with that class at grade level.
Really?
It is true that Betsy DeVos, the current education secretary, stumbled at her Senate confirmation hearing in January 2017, seeming not to understand a question about whether test scores should measure student proficiency or student growth.
[Six astonishing things Betsy DeVos said -- and refused to say -- at her confirmation hearing]
But can we really call one teacher better than another based on a set of test scores, regardless of how well the tests are designed or what the students have gone through? Let's say the kids who started the year performing at grade level and ended the year performing at grade level had been affected by a mass shooting (an event Duncan talks a great deal about in his book and on his tour)? Is their teacher really not as good as the first teacher?
That's just one of the holes that can be punched through his definitive statement of teacher effectiveness.
There is also his continued belief that standardized testing is important and good. On Page 147, he writes:
We absolutely made some mistakes here. Our Department of Education could have done more to help the states communicate why annual testing was important for students and teachers.
He writes about a moment in November 2013 when "I infamously jammed my foot in my mouth." That's when he said he found it "fascinating" that some of the opposition to Common Core was coming from "white suburban moms who -- all of a sudden -- their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were." (We will ignore that Duncan just denied in an Atlantic interview that he "ever" felt that parents were an obstacle to his reforms.)
In Duncan's analysis of that episode, he again puts the problem down to poor communication, on Page 150:
This is where we really failed. These folks should have been our natural allies. But because we were miserable at communicating how and why these things were happening, and why they were important, it made things worse. For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry that we contributed to that.
Duncan still thinks, apparently, his biggest mistake involved poor communication rather than the substance of the policies. If only the Education Department had better communicators, the states could have convinced everyone that standardized testing is valuable in holding schools and teachers accountable -- even though there's no evidence of that in the testing era that began with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.
Let's be clear: Ample evidence exists that Duncan's push for annual standardized testing for high-stakes decisions on teachers, students and schools was destructive and in some cases nonsensical. In some places, teachers were evaluated on students they didn't have and subjects they didn't teach simply because test scores had to be used as an evaluation metric.
He still insists the problem was lousy communication.
Duncan is now focused on gun control and says he has long been concerned about the subject, but he didn't make it a priority when he was education secretary.
Back then, he talked about the importance of kids being in class every weekday and supported expanding the school day, but now he is trying to build support for a nationwide strike of public schools until Congress passes comprehensive gun-control legislation. (Given the importance of education to him, it is unclear why he didn't call for a general strike of workers, while kids and teachers continued to show up at school, but never mind.) He's been to Parkland, Fla., where 17 people died in a high school shooting, seeking the community's help with the boycott idea.
In his book, he wrote that if he could do the education-secretary stint over again, he would push even harder for his policies. It is reminiscent of the insistence by Margaret Spellings, the education secretary under President George W. Bush when No Child Left Behind was passed, that the federal law was great long after its fatal flaws had been revealed to most everyone else.
Arne Duncan never seems to learn.
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Did Obama Administration's Policies Contribute to Chicago's Deadly Violence?
For many years, parents and education activists in Chicago have warned that the deliberate destruction of neighborhood public schools was causing a rise in violence. The city, first under Arne Duncan, now under Rahm Emanuel, ignored the critics, and made a virtue of closing public schools, opening charter schools, and sending kids long distances to new schools. Mayor Emanuel recognized that the critics' complaints had some validity. He didn't stop the school closings-in fact, he closed 50 public schools in a single day, an unprecedented action in American history.
Sep 10, 2016
For many years, parents and education activists in Chicago have warned that the deliberate destruction of neighborhood public schools was causing a rise in violence. The city, first under Arne Duncan, now under Rahm Emanuel, ignored the critics, and made a virtue of closing public schools, opening charter schools, and sending kids long distances to new schools. Mayor Emanuel recognized that the critics' complaints had some validity. He didn't stop the school closings-in fact, he closed 50 public schools in a single day, an unprecedented action in American history. But to assuage the critics, he established "safe passages," supposedly to assure students' safety as they adapted to new and longer routes to their new schools. In 2013, a student was raped while walking to school on a "safe passage" route.
Nonetheless, murders and violence in Chicago are at a 20-year high this year.
Arne Duncan expressed his sorrow about the spike in violence, but still sees no connection between his policies as City Superintendent and Secretary of Education and the nasty consequences of destabilizing neighborhoods and communities.
Duncan was first to use school closings as "reform." The first school he closed and restaffed was Dodge Elementary School. He was proud of Dodge, which was his first turnaround. When President Obama announced that he was appointing Duncan as Secretary of Education in 2008, he did the announcement at Dodge. The president said Duncan had the "courage" to close the school and start over. A few years later, Dodge was rated a failing school and closed again.
Opening schools, closing schools, breaking up neighborhoods and communities. Making children walk through unfamiliar neighborhoods and gang territory to get to school. Not a recipe for safety or success.
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Obama's Education Secretary Pick a 'Lackey of the Corporate Machine'
Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, education experts among those criticizing policies supported by John King
Mar 04, 2016
Noted intellectual Noam Chomsky, author and activist Naomi Klein, and education historian Diane Ravitch are among those urging the U.S. Senate to reject President Barack Obama's pick for the next education secretary. They say the policies he's supported "have been ineffective and destructive to schools, educators, and most importantly students."
Their concerns are outlined in a letter published by the Washington Post on Thursday.
Obama's choice is John King, who's held the position of Acting Secretary of Education since the departure of Arne Duncan. King has already received an "astounding pass" from the Senate education committee last month, as Valerie Strauss wrote in an earlier story for the Post. At the hearings, he "was not asked one single direct question about the tumultuous 3 1/2 years he spent as the commissioner of education in New York state. Not by Republicans, and not by Democrats," she wrote.
King's critics have previously pointed out that he was a teacher for a mere three years, has been a fervent supporter of charter schools and high-stakes testing, displayed "autocratic behavior as state commissioner of education [which] spurred a massive parent opt-out from state testing," and was hit with the charge of being "responsible for more attacks on public educators than almost anyone else."
The new missive against his holding the position, which award-winning author Jonathan Kozol signed, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, and the Network for Public Education, charges, "John King is the wrong candidate, and he will follow the failed strategies of Mr. Duncan."
It was penned in great part by 20-year-old Nikhil Goyal, author of the just published book, Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice.
Goyal told Salon that the letter is "yet another sign of the growing resistance in the United States against corporate, neoliberal reform -- school closures, standardized testing, and Common Core standards."
He also said,"[King's] agenda is just as terrible and oppressive as the former Secretary Arne Duncan," adding, "This country needs a secretary of education who will help bring some sanity into our classrooms, not a lackey of the corporate machine."
The letter is posted in full below:
To the U.S. Senate,
As educators, students, parents, and activists, we are writing to strongly urge you to reject the confirmation of John King, President Obama's nominee for the Secretary of Education. We believe he is the wrong choice for the position.
Research and evidence demonstrate that the education policies that John King has supported throughout his career, such as the Common Core standards, the collection of private student information, and high-stakes standardized testing, have been ineffective and destructive to schools, educators, and most importantly students.
As New York State Education Commissioner, he was an unapologetic supporter of the Common Core standards and inBloom. His policies failed. While test scores are flawed metrics, in 2013, just 31 percent of students in New York passed the English and math standardized tests, the first tests to be aligned to the Common Core and in three years the scores have barely budged. The achievement gap grew. Last year, over 200,000 students opted out of the tests.
Educators, parents, and students as well as the state teachers union and other public education advocacy groups called for King's resignation. His style is inflexible and he is quick to criticize the motives of those with whom he disagrees. He persistently refused to consider the desperate pleas of students and teachers who were reporting that the Common Core and value-added teacher evaluations were not working.
The American public deserves a Secretary of Education who will advocate for their interests, not those of the testing corporations who profit from the Common Core. We also deserve a Secretary who respects the importance of schools governed by communities, not by federal mandate.
Senators should not be misled by vague promises to do better as King offered at a recent hearing. John King is the wrong candidate and he will follow the failed strategies of Mr. Duncan. We strongly urge you to reject his nomination and recommend to President Obama that he nominate a candidate who will bring a progressive perspective to the department as it implements the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Signatures:
(Individuals)
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), MIT
Naomi Klein, Award-winning journalist and author
Diane Ravitch, Research Professor, New York University
Jonathan Kozol, National Book Award-winning author
Deborah Meier, Senior Scholar, New York University and 1987 MacArthur Fellow
Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate
Lucas Neff, Actor
Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union
Jeff Sharlet, Associate Professor of English, Dartmouth College
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor, Center for African American Studies, Princeton University
Carla Shedd, Assistant Professor of Sociology & African American Studies, Columbia University
Alfie Kohn, Acclaimed author on education
Nikhil Goyal, Author of the book Schools On Trial and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree
Linda Nathan, Senior Lecturer, Boston University
Steve Cohen, Lecturer, Tufts University
Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Professor emerita, Lesley University
Mary Beth Tinker, Free speech activist
Andrew Hartman, Associate Professor, Illinois State University
Henry Giroux, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University
Mark Naison, Professor of History, Fordham University
Robert Buchanan, Undergraduate Faculty, Goddard College
Eva Swidler, Undergraduate Faculty, Goddard College
Lois Weiner, Professor of Education, New Jersey City University
Lawrence Brown, Assistant Professor, School of Community Health and Policy, Morgan State University
Jeanette Deutermann, Founder of Long Island Opt Out and parent
M. Zachary Mezera, Executive director of the Providence Student Union
Israel Munoz, Co-founder of the Chicago Student Union
Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education
Raynard Sanders, Radio host of The New Orleans Imperative
Howie Hawkins, 2014 Green Party candidate for NY Governor
Brian Jones, 2014 Green Party candidate for NY Lieutenant Governor
Benji Cohen, Doctoral history student, University of Virginia
Brian LeCloux, Wisconsin high school psychology teacher
Doug Henwood, Journalist and NYC public school parent
Liza Featherstone, amNY columnist, educator and NYC public school parent
Julian Vasquez Heilig, Professor of Education, California State University Sacramento
Wayne Au, Associate Professor of Education, University of Washington, Bothell
Jeff Bryant, Associate Fellow at Campaign for America's Future
Arnold Dodge, Associate Professor/Chair, Department of Educational Leadership and Administration, Long Island University Post
Anthony Cody, Author and educator
Lisa Edstrom, Brooklyn parent and educator
Rita Green, Alaska, Oregon, WA, Seattle/King County NAACP Education Chair
Nancy K. Cauthen, Sociologist
Jia Lee, Educator and 2016 UFT presidential candidate
Julie Cavanagh, Educator and 2013 MORE/UFT presidential candidate
Michael Klonsky, Executive Director at The Small Schools Workshop and educator
Monty Neill, Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest)
Jason Endacott, Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies Education, University of Arkansas
Chris Goering, Associate Professor, English Education, University of Arkansas
Lisa Rudley, Executive Director and Founding Member, NYS Allies for Public Education
Meg Norris, Founder/Director of Opt Out Georgia
Bianca Tanis, NYS Allies for Public Education
Katie Zahedi, NYS Allies for Public Education
(Organizations)
The Network for Public Education
New York State Allies for Public Education
Change the Stakes
New York City Opt Out
NYCpublic
Save Our Schools
Long Island Opt-Out
Parents Across Rhode Island
Opt Out Georgia
Time Out From Testing
Badass Teachers Association
Network for Public Education Action
Philly Neighborhood Networks
The Opt Out Florida Network
The North Country Alliance for Public Education
National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest)
United Opt Out National
Half Hollow Hills Teachers' Association
Teaching, Not Testing: A New Narrative for Education
Citizens for Public Schools, Massachusetts
Rethinking Schools
Save
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No More Excuses: Sen. Warren Lambastes DOE on Student Loans
Democrat from Massachusetts says US Department of Education goes to 'extraordinary lengths' to protect student loan companies—at borrowers' expense
Mar 04, 2016
Can the U.S. Department of Education be trusted to protect the millions of Americans with federal student loans?
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has tussled with the federal agency before, isn't so sure.
She said as much in a letter (pdf) sent Thursday to acting Education Secretary John King Jr., in which she describes an independent audit published this week as "a stunning indictment of the Department of Education's [DOE] oversight of student loan servicers, exposing the extraordinary lengths to which the Department will go to protect those companies when they break the law."
Warren's letter was in response to a DOE inspector general's report (pdf), which found that the agency conducted a deeply flawed investigation of its student loan servicers--companies like Navient, which collect borrowers' monthly payments--and knowingly misled the public about the findings.
In fact, she said, the review released Tuesday raises "serious questions about whether the Department and its Office of Federal Student Aid can be trusted to protect the millions of borrowers under its care."
As the Huffington Post explained, the latest controversy "was prompted by a 2014 Justice Department lawsuit accusing Navient of violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act by intentionally and systematically overcharging troops on student loans for nearly a decade." To have done so would have constituted a violation of their contract.
At the time, then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan said a DOE probe would help determine whether Navient got to keep its contract.
Instead, HuffPo writes,
the department renewed the contract before it completed its investigation. Last year, after the Education Department gave Navient a new contract and a pay increase, it cleared Navient and its other major loan contractors of wrongdoing in what its inspector general described this week as a bogus investigation marred by errors and other anomalies.
"To date, the department has done nothing but generate excuses for why it will not act to hold Navient accountable, and has put no serious effort into trying to remedy--or even identify--this problem to the extent it occurred," Warren said in her letter.
A press statement from Warren's office notes that King was recently nominated to serve as Education Secretary and his nomination is being considered by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, on which she sits.
To that end, her letter includes more than two dozen "Questions for the Record," directed toward King.
Question Number 25 is deceptively simple: "What's the Department's full explanation for how this happened," it reads, "and how will the Department ensure that this never happens again?"
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