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by Stephanie Wang and Chelsea Schneider
IndyStar
November 26, 2016

As governor, Mike Pence strongly advocated for education reforms, overseeing a vast expansion of the state’s private school voucher program and a boost in funding for charter schools.

Now as the incoming vice president, Pence has the chance to promote those same policies on the national stage.

And his boss is on board.

Consider this: Donald Trump has hinged his education plans on a $20 billion federal voucher program that would allow low-income families to send their children to the public or private school of their choosing. Details on how the program would work and how it would be funded are  few. But Trump has pledged to be “the nation’s biggest cheerleader for school choice.”

With Pence as his No. 2 and Betsy DeVos, a Michigan philanthropist and staunch voucher advocate, set to head the U.S. Department of Education, school choice policies that have come to define Indiana’s educational landscape could gain an unprecedented prominence on the federal level.

While the administration of President Barack Obama has supported the expansion of charter schools nationwide, educators expect the Trump-Pence administration to provide a bully pulpit for national discussions on school choice.

They point to Pence’s record in which he pushed for laws to ease the ability for families to use taxpayer funds to pay for private schools and for charter schools to receive a $500 per student grant on top of their regular funding.

[…]

Jeanne Allen, founder of The Center for Education Reform, called Trump and Pence “unabashed school choice supporters.”

“Opportunity scholarships or vouchers, like those in D.C. and also in Indiana, will be more likely to thrive and grow with people in office who are willing to buck the status quo,” Allen said.

To read the full article visit IndyStar

by Chad Livengood, Jonathan Oosting and Michael Gerstein
The Detroit News
November 25, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump’s planned nomination of west Michigan philanthropist Betsy DeVos for education secretary has ignited a debate about how the country delivers a high-quality education for every child.

DeVos, 58, supports increasing school choices, which she has called an attempt to “empower” parents to find good schools for their children, whether they be traditional public schools, alternative public academies known as charters, virtual schools or private and religious institutions.

“Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate,” Trump said Wednesday in a statement. “Under her leadership, we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.”

[…]

Under Republican presidents, education secretaries have operated in the background or used the office as a bully pulpit, as Ronald Reagan’s second-term secretary Bill Bennett did. Truscott said indications are DeVos may be more in the spotlight.

“So much depends on what the president wants from an education secretary,” he said. “Donald Trump is looking to be a strong, visionary president — he lays out the agenda and expects people to implement it.”

But the incoming Trump administration may run into a road block within the Republican Party, even though Trump and DeVos are the most pro-choice advocates in recent memory, said Jeanne Allen, founder and CEO of the Washington-based Center for Education Reform.

“Trump is a much more committed, more vocal proponent of vouchers and charter schools than George W. Bush, as is his secretary designate a stronger supporter than those once in the same position,” Allen said Friday.

To read the full article visit The Detroit News.

by Post Editorial Board
New York Post
November 17, 2016

New York City school kids caught a break Thursday when Eva Moskowitz took herself out of the running to be Donald Trump’s secretary of education.

The Success Academy Charter Network CEO met with Trump a day earlier and was rumored to be under consideration for the job. But the kids need her here. And here, it seems, she’ll stay. That’s good news.

True, Moskowitz would have made an excellent education czar. She’s been fearless in taking on the teachers union. Her charter schools have broken records for achievement. And as a former City Council member, she’d have come with valuable government experience.

But losing Moskowitz to DC would’ve been a tremendous loss — not just to Success Academy families, but the whole city.

Fact is, her charters have proved that poor, inner-city kids can achieve just as much as their wealthier, suburban peers — that is, when they’re not trapped in failing traditional public schools. And her fight to expand that kind of opportunity for minority and even middle-class kids is unparalleled.

That has served the city well, particularly given the fierce opposition charters have endured from the unions and folks — like New York’s mayor — who do their bidding.

If Moskowitz left, “who would keep an eye on Mayor de Blasio?” she asked half-jokingly at a press conference Thursday.

Still, President-elect Trump and his team are clearly on the right track if they’ve been considering candidates like Moskowitz. Other names, too, that have surfaced — former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and Center for Education Reform president Jeanne Allen — show Trump clearly interested in shaking up America’s sclerotic public-school system and expanding opportunity

by Richard Whitmire
The 74
November 16, 2016

Donald Trump will be “the greatest thing that ever happened” to charter schools, Rudolph Giuliani recently declared, speaking as vice chairman of Trump’s transition team.

That could happen — but there’s an equal chance he will be the worst.

The former New York City mayor’s assertion is based on a simple campaign vow: President Trump will create a $20 billion grant program for states to fund “choice” programs, such as vouchers and charters.

For a supporter of top-performing charters such as me, what’s not to like?

The biggest fear is the possibility that Trump will kick away the bipartisan political stool that has long supported charters. If charters become a right-wing cause (historically, their biggest underpinnings, in fact, have come from the liberal side), the first applause you’ll hear is from the charter-hostile and Democratically aligned national teachers unions, which will correctly sniff vulnerable prey.

“The rhetoric we hear from the Trump people, ‘Choice is good and school districts are bad,’ sets us back a decade,” said Robin Lake from the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. The unions have invested heavily in promoting that exact line, said Lake, painting reformers as wanting to destroy public schools.

“The last thing we need is for the president to play into that narrative.”

The next possible setback: promoting “choice” without making it clear that choice is a useless tool unless it creates new, high-performing schools.

Those in the school reform movement learned the hard way that choice alone does not produce more seats in great schools. If that were the case, we’d all be praising the early voucher program in Milwaukee and the widespread charters in Ohio and Michigan. But in all those cases, choice alone produced nothing.

In Milwaukee, for example, which I visited repeatedly while researching my book On the Rocketship, about the creation of one best-in-class charter network, the more-than-two-decade-old voucher experiment proved to be a clear flop. (Note that I didn’t say unpopular. Who objects to free tuition for their kid’s parochial schools?)

But from a school reform perspective, it was a disaster. Not only did vouchers fail to arrest white flight, they also failed to create high-performing schools. That’s why Milwaukee business leaders reached out to the Rocketship group: Maybe top charters can jump-start a move to high-performing schools, they hoped.

And the charters in Ohio and Michigan? I just finished The Founders, a book about the birth and growth of the country’s strongest-performing charter schools. No charters in these two states were mentioned. Enough said.

Bottom line: If you set out with a plan to promote choice, rather than promoting the creation of good new schools, your plan is pretty much doomed from day one.

Another issue: the $20 billion for Trump’s choice plan appears to ignore some of the most promising school innovations out there — collaborations between charters and districts such as arefound in Denver. Blurring the lines between charter and district schools isn’t politically easy, but in heavily Democratic big cities it becomes a non-starter if the president does nothing but bash traditional schools.

Is it possible I’m being too negative? Perhaps.

Some charter advocates, however, are even more dire: “I can’t think of anything more potentially harmful to the charter school movement, or anything more antithetical to its progressive roots, than having Donald Trump as its national champion,” said Shavar Jeffries, president of Democrats for Education Reform.

“If Trump thinks he can buy off progressive education reformers by merely increasing funding for the federal charter school program while simultaneously advancing destructive policies like throwing millions of families off of federally subsidized health care and deporting millions of Dreamers and their parents, he’s in for a rude surprise.”

On the other end of the range, some advocates are far sunnier.

“There’s no question that Trump-Pence will create tremendous new opportunities for students and families around the country,” said Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform. “First, with its bully pulpit — the charter school community has been beaten up and badgered for the last several years.”

Allen also applauds their promotion of vouchers, predicting that programs such as D.C.’s controversial Opportunity Scholarship Program, which last year gave scholarships to 1,244 poor students to attend private school, will come off “life support.” The House voted to extend the federally funded program last year, but the measure stalled in the Senate.

“Private school choice is alive and well in the states and actually showing better persistence and success in college and life than the little we know now about charter school effects,” said Allen. “We need all kinds of opportunity, not just one that still is reliant upon public regulators,” she said, referring to charters.

by Monica Jacquez, KXTV
ABC 10
November 16, 2016

Natomas Charter School in Sacramento is getting national attention after HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver launched a piece on failed charter schools, ultimately criticizing how they are run.

“If we are going to treat charter schools like pizza shops, we should monitor them at least as well as we do pizzerias,” said John Oliver in the segment, which aired in August.

In response to the television comedian’s piece, the Center for Education Reform held a video competition called, ‘Hey John Oliver, Back Off My Charter School.’ Natomas Charter School entered the contest and won first place.

“I honestly couldn’t believe it, not because the video didn’t deserve to win or anything, but it was a national competition,” Samira Darabzand said.

Darabzand is a high school senior at Natomas Charter School Performing and Fine Arts Academy. She, along with a dozen students took part in the contest, which landed the school a $100,000 prize.

“The thing that got me the most about John Oliver’s video was that it was an unfair representation of a very large system of education,” said Matthew DeMeritt.

DeMeritt is the coordinator of the Performing Arts Fine Arts Academy. He wrote the script and organized the video.

“I feel like our voices and our student’s voices really needed to be heard,” DeMeritt said.

In the end, DeMeritt said it was an educational experience for the students.

“Knowing that we got the recognition that the school deserved, it really meant the world to me and the whole school,” Darabzand said.

As for the $100,000 prize, school leaders said they are still trying to figure out how to best spend the money.

Bill Martinez Live
November 15, 2016

Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of The Center for Education Reform, calls on the president-elect to unite the nation’s families and communities around improving education through innovation and opportunity.