@Zinhead --she said what she said. There’s nothing fake about reporting her words. Whether or not they’re connected to supporting HBCU’s, she compared Jim Crow education to school choice. That’s the overt meaning of the statement.
perfect–I am stealing this!
Historically, this misses the mark in that the main problem with children attending public schools in the South even into the early 20th century was they were still needed on the farm. Those White local elites could have built a grandiose building, and hired top notch teachers, but if kids needed to work, those teachers would be lecturing to a nearly empty classroom. It also ignores how prevalent private schools were in the NE due to the large Catholic presence, and how BS were where the NE elite sent their kids. And I’m not sure how you connected this to vouchers. Some of the largest voucher programs skew disproportionately toward minorities.
What is fake about DeVos’ actual statement, straight from the government DoE web site this morning?
In terms of the executive order, it was not signed or published earlier today (when the DeVos statement was available), but it appears to be published now at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/28/presidential-executive-order-white-house-initiative-promote-excellence .
The existing White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities is described at https://sites.ed.gov/whhbcu/ .
It was, of course, a very ignorant statement that truly twists truth to the breaking point. But those against school choice often do the same thing when failing to recognize self-evident truths.
Monopolies, by their very nature, are inefficient and often fail to meet their customer’s needs. Does anyone think that a monopoly grocery store would do a good job? The very idea is silly on its face. First of all, what is a “good grocery store”? Some would say “Whole Foods” while others might repond “Aldi”. Both are very different but serve their demographic well (or go out of business).
Just think if you could only go to the grocery store that you were “zoned for”. Very few would accept that as reasonable. But with schools, for some reason, people accept it. Of course, they buy homes in “good school districts” and game the system of equally good schools until it only exists in their imagination. These are the same people that had “school choice” when they choose to live in a certain district. The poor don’t have this hidden “school choice”.
Make no mistake that the poor students trapped in failing schools would be helped tremendously by school choice. Unfortunately, the teacher unions have spun a web of half-truths into supporting the status quo position. What appears as support “for the children” is instead a thinly veiled argument from teachers that don’t want to compete for their jobs like everyone else in the private sector.
Competition hones every industry and monopolies only make sense where it results in infrastructure that isn’t overly redundant (think about 10 water companies, each with their own pipes). Of course, most industries don’t require this level of infrastructure. And in these cases, you tend to benefit from more competition than from the monopoly.
Make no mistake that it’s no Shangri-La and some student may get less out of the new system. Anecdotal arguments rely on this fact to demonize what would be a change for the better for most students.
Perfect has been and will always be the enemy of good!
As others have noted, this doesn’t speak well for Betsy’s private education.
“They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution.”
No, they provided a work-around. The system was working perfectly and doing what it was designed to do. HBCU founders created a way to cope with the problem. The solution to the problem was to end government-mandated and mob-enforced segregation, which took another hundred years.
Your post ignores the real news story here which is the White House initiative on HBCU’s. Instead of creating a thread on that issue, you choose to focus on a relatively innocuous press release which brings up a group of responses as rational and programmed as the actors in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvGmOZ5T6_Y
This whole thread is fake news.
The DeVos statement showed up this morning, before the executive order was signed and posted this afternoon. Perhaps she should not have made her statement before the executive order if she did not want any reaction to it.
Here is the thread on the executive order:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1967836-executive-order-relating-to-historically-black-colleges-and-universities.html
Again, how is it fake news to report on exactly what is said/written publicly by someone who presumably wants everyone to listen/read it?
“Some people would criticize Betsy DeVos is she said 2+2=4 as she is becoming this administrations Emmanuel Goldstein. Enjoy your four years of hate.”
When we criticize her inappropriately, then you can point fairly it out. This is not that time. Schools like Howard were formed after the Civil War to all African Americans the opportunity for an education because they were shut out of other colleges. That is racism not school choice.
You’re forgetting the fact that the entire US including the NE/Mid-Atlantic was mostly an agrarian society well into the early 20th century. Also children in the 19th and early 20th centuries were also “needed” to work in the urban factories created in the wake of the industrial revolution in the urban NE so that’s a bit of a non-sequitur. In fact, the latter issue was one which concerned both labor movements and concerned socially minded citizens of the period and it is the reason why we have regulations and protections limiting the hours and harsh conditions minors are permitted to work.
While urbanization started earlier in the NE, we didn’t really become a majority urbanized/suburbanized society until after WWII.
As for the Catholic schools, a large part of why they were founded was due to the strong anti-Catholic prejudices prevalent in the then prevailing WASP dominated mainstream society in the 19th and well into the mid-20th century as shown by the anti-Catholicism expressed by JFK’s political opponents in the late '50s/early '60s.
Incidentally, this was one of the major reasons why Boston College was founded as in the mid-19th century, the strong anti-Catholic/anti-Irish immigration sentiments by many anti-immigrant/anti-Catholic WASPs was such Irish and a few decades later, Italian-Americans weren’t always considered “White” by many WASPs of the period.
“Just think if you could only go to the grocery store that you were “zoned for”. Very few would accept that as reasonable.”
Creating a false equivalent does not bold well in a debate, but we can use use your apple to the orange.
If you were “zoned” for a grocery store AND had a vote for who managed it AND had the change to be a manger AND had a vote for its pricing AND had a say in what they carried And… you get the idea.
Your local public school is not a monopoly as your cable company may be (as it is where I live.) I have absolutely no say in the structure, pricing, selection, etc of the only cable company in my area. While I may choose satellite for TV the cable company is the ONLY one here who offers high speed internet. I do have a say in what goes on in my local public school.
Sorry that was off topic. Whether you approve of DeVos as a good choice or not, her statement is uneducated at best.
Government officials don’t get to dictate which of their actions we pay attention to. This is an area where the public has real choice. If we think that the man behind the curtain is the more important part of the story, then it is.
Only Orwell could surpass this language. Burning people alive if they set foot in your school is “an absence of opportunity.” Keeping people enslaved is “an absence of freedom.” Strangling someone is “an absence of breathing.”
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This is false. Nationwide, farmers became a minority around 1870, and by the early 20th century were little more than a third of the population. Those percentages would be even lower in the NE/Mid-Atlantic region.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/trouble/timeline/
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-since-1850-s.html
Compulsory education laws were passed in the North far earlier than in the South. A combination of unions and public laws worked to increasingly restrict the ability of children to work in factories during the 19th century in ways that weren’t applied to farming. So no there weren’t the same job requirements for children in the NE, at least between the civil war and WWI, as there were for children in the South.
This is odd logic. Imagine, if someone said, I don’t think public schools will ever be adequately funded, and even if they did in the beginning, I wouldn’t trust them to remain that way, so let’s not fund them at all.
The best way to improve education is to separate the smart kids from the dumb kids and enforce discipline. You want a school whether private, charter, or public magnet that has selective admissions or at least the ability to counsel out students who aren’t performing to standards either academically or behaviorally.
That’s not such “odd logic”–after all, they haven’t always remained that way and this voucher proposal is exactly the kind of thing that must be pushed against if we’d like public schools to be well funded and supported in policy at the national and state levels.
You say this as if it’s settled pedagogical truth. It is not, and there is a constellation of research and writing in disagreement (as there is in support), much of which hinges on how you define “best” and what you see as the role of education. Your comment reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, who said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:
DeVos’s statement about HBCUs is as ignorant as claiming that having segregated water fountains was a matter of “beverage consumption choice.”
And it’s ironic considering President Wilson’s southern roots and sympathies with the Confederate cause and their ruling elite’s ideal society was one arranged in a rigid feudalistic hierarchy.
And that ideal is embodied to some extent in that very quoted statement he made in that 1909 speech.
Won’t students be able to choose go to public schools that fit their needs, I didn’t think school choice would be limited to private schools.