Public education

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Public education governance should rest with the public

Laurie French

By: Laurie French.

In some areas of the country, there is an increasing erosion of the fundamental rights of Canadians with regard to local democratic voice in public education. Governance of the education of children and youth in Canada has been entrusted to locally elected trustees across the country for decades. Protecting local voices to ensure local choices is the responsibility of citizens.

Local education governance requires regular focused attention by trustees close to the community. Education is a significantly funded portfolio, and the governance provided by locally elected school boards helps to ensure a transparent and accountable system.

Adding public education to the long list of responsibilities already held by MLAs or MPPs is untenable and is a loss of responsive local voice when questions or concerns at the grassroots arise. This can be seen in ill-informed decisions at the provincial level to make cuts to education and programming that will have drastic effects on students at the local level. Without an understanding of community needs, decisions made at a higher level can be devastating. No two communities are alike, and the needs of one education district can differ from those of another. School boards, accountable to their local constituents, ensure that decisions reflect the needs and priorities of their community.

While school advisory/planning councils play an important role in providing advice to local schools, it is essential to understand that councils are advisory and do not take the place of democratically elected school boards, nor are they accountable to their broader communities. Citizens are encouraged to connect with their local school board trustees to discuss the role they play and gain a better understanding of their work.

Any erosion of democratic representation in the governance of public education must be a concern to all Canadians, regardless of whether their first language is French or English, and whether or not they have school-aged children. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right of minority language parents to govern the education of their children. However, we should all be concerned when majority French and English parents are losing their right to have a local democratic voice in the education of their children.

In areas where school boards have been eliminated, communities, media, and education partners have felt the loss of transparency in public education. Democratically elected school boards and trustees have one portfolio on which to focus – public education. They meet and make decisions in open meetings, ensuring the public and media have access to debate and insight into how taxpayer money is allocated. This influence is at risk where locally elected school boards are eliminated or when their authority is reduced.

It is incredibly concerning that Canadians are increasingly placed in situations where we must fight to maintain the vital right to be democratically involved in public education. Centralization of control is, by definition, an erosion of local voice and greatly affects the education of children and youth.

In provinces where governing school boards, their provincial associations, and the provincial ministry enjoy a positive, productive co-governance relationship, great things are happening. This is not about power and control – this is about being responsive and responsible to communities and citizens to ensure the success of future generations of students.

We therefore call upon all Canadians to contact their MPP or MLA to express support for locally elected trustees and school boards. At the end of the day, supporting elected school boards is support for public education and the future. As Canadians, we have a right to local voices, local choices.

Fuente del artículo: https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/opinion-public-education-governance-should-rest-with-the-public-274812/

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English schools are broken. Only radical action will fix them

Melissa Benn

By Melissa Benn

From failed free schools to poor funding and inequality, education needs drastic reform to create a fairer model

Even for the sceptical, the suddenness and speed with which the academy schools project has fallen from public grace is remarkable. After years of uncritical acceptance of official claims that academies, and free schools, offer a near cast-iron guarantee of a better-quality education, particularly for poorer pupils, there is now widespread recognition of the drear reality: inadequate multi-academy trusts failing thousands of pupils, parents increasingly shut out of their children’s education, and academy executive heads creaming off excessive salaries – in some cases almost three times higher than the prime minister – from a system perilously squeezed of funds.

Crisis can be an overworked term in politics, and our schools are good examples of public institutions, subject to years of poor political decisions, that continue to do remarkable work. But along with the academy mess, we can add the following to the current charge sheet of what should be (along with the NHS) our finest public service: pressing problems with recruitment and retention of teachers; rocketing stress among young children and teenagers subject to stringent testing and tougher public exams; and the ongoing funding crisis.

For those who have been closely observing developments in education over the years, none of this comes as much of a surprise. The reckless damage of the coalition years was, after all, only an exaggerated version of cross-party policy during the previous two decades: central government control-freakery allied to the wilful destruction of local government and the parcelling out of schools to untested rich and powerful individuals and groups, including religious organisations. From early years to higher education, every sector of our system is now infected with the arid vocabulary of metrics and the empty lingo of the market.

So what now? It is clear that the Tories have run out of ideas, bar the expansion of grammars. This autumn, following widespread consultation, the Labour party will publish its eagerly awaited plans for a national education service, an idea that Jeremy Corbyn has made clear he would like to see form the centrepiece of any future Labour administration.

For the progressive left, then, this is an important but tricky moment that requires two distinct approaches, both of which befit a potential government-in-waiting and an avowedly radical party.

The first is a calm, collegial pragmatism: addressing the immediate problems of our system, from teacher workload to reform of school accountability, loosening the screws on university teaching and research, and properly funding the all-important early years.

Here, a little political inventiveness might not go amiss. Why not tot up the money spent on unnecessary, damaging reforms and announce that equivalent sums will now be redirected to areas where they are clearly needed? Billions have been spent on the academy transfer market, failed free schools, funding the shadowy regional schools commissioners, subsidising private education: in future, let’s use that kind of money to improve special-needs provision, build up adult and further education, or send teachers to regions where it is proving impossible to recruit and retain staff.

Stop the excessive testing of primary-age children and spend the money on steadier, less cliff-edge forms of assessment. Implement the Headteachers’ Roundtable proposal for a national baccalaureate, an initiative that would immediately broaden the educational experience of every secondary-age pupil, with minimal disruption. Time, too, to learn the lessons of our global neighbours and phase out selection, reform unfair school admissions, and bring education back into public hands. As Lucy Crehan shows in CleverLands, an absorbing study of top-performing school systems around the world, many of these – including Finland and Canada – do not select or even stream until 15 or 16, and education is provided by a mix of national and local government. The result is a stable public service, capable of far greater innovation than our own fragmented school market.

Expert organisations and individuals are already considering ways to unpick the semi-privatisation of our schools. These include: opening up currently unaccountable academy trusts to parents, staff and local communities; shifting contracts currently held with the secretary of state to local authorities; and designing a bespoke mechanism by which schools could rejoin the local education authority.

But there’s an even bigger job for the progressive left, and that is to kickstart an honest public debate about what’s really wrong with English education and how we might develop a better, fairer model. Such a conversation would have to break with the current cross-party consensus – in reality, a stubborn silence – on the relationship between selective and private schools and the often beleaguered state system. Let’s ditch, once and for all, the idea that the selective schools are an inspiring model for – rather than a major block to – high-quality public education, and start to talk seriously about how to create a common system.

As Alex Beard argues in his recent book Natural Born Learners: Our Incredible Capacity to Learn and How We Can Harness it, developments in everything from artificial intelligence to neuroscience seriously challenge once rigid ideas of ability and potential – excellence only for the few. He reports on a rainbow of experiments, from improbably fun-sounding Finnish maths lessons to Californian high schools deploying “open source” learning and teamwork, that are producing skilled, enthusiastic students and responsible, questioning citizens. Beard consistently identifies a highly trained, highly valued, autonomous teaching force – another area in which the English system has, with depressing predictability, gone into reverse, truncating teacher education and controlling teachers more tightly than badly behaved teens.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With generous investment, expert teachers and heads given room to breathe, a broad but stimulating curriculum, an accountability system that supports rather than punishes, we could move in a more engaging direction. Much of the ground work has already been laid, from early comprehensive reform to the dramatic improvements to London’s schools in the 00s, through to the recent conversion of large parts of the Tory party to the benefits of high-quality comprehensive schools.

Any future government committed to such an aim needs to engage the energies of the thousands of passionate young educators, first drawn in by the academy and free school movement, as well as the mass of weary professionals in their middle years. We don’t need silent corridors or an obsession with league tables to make clear that schools must always be places of order, collaboration, high expectations and constant encouragement – and vital hubs for local communities. I don’t underestimate what a shift in substance and tone these proposals represent for the Labour party. But as Beard suggests, quoting the genius of West Wing scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, “We don’t need little changes; we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens.” Not a bad place to start when building a national education service for the 21st century.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/09/schools-broken-radical-action-education

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The Slow and Fast Assault on Public Education

Henry Giroux

By: HENRY A. GIROUX

Since Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, there have been few occasions to feel hopeful about politics. But now we are witnessing a proliferation of causes for hope, as brave students from Parkland, Florida, and equally courageous teachers throughout the United States lead movements of mass demonstrations, walkouts, and strikes.

The United States is in the midst of a crisis of values, ethics, and politics. It has been decades in the making, produced largely by a neoliberal system that has subordinated all aspects of social life to the dictates of the market while stripping assets from public goods and producing untenable levels of inequality. What we are now living through is the emergence of a new political formation in which neoliberalism has put on the mantle of fascism.

The assault on public education, the slow violence of teacher disenfranchisement, and the fast violence of guns can only be understood as part of a larger war on liberal democracy.

Amidst this cataclysm, public schools have been identified as a major threat to the conservative ruling elite because public education has long been integral to U.S. democracy’s dependence on an informed, engaged citizenry. Democracy is predicated on faith in the capacity of all humans for intelligent judgment, deliberation, and action, but this innate capacity must be nurtured. The recognition of this need explains why the United States has, since its earliest days, emphasized the value of public education at least as an ideal. An education that teaches one to think critically and mediate charged appeals to one’s emotions is key to making power accountable and embracing a mature sense of the social contract.

Now, as our public schools are stretched to their breaking, their students and teachers are leading the call for a moral awakening. Both argue that the crisis of public schooling and the war on youth are related, and that the assaults on public schooling can only be understood as part of a larger war on liberal democracy.

No one movement or group can defeat the powerful and connected forces of neoliberal fascism, but energized young people and teachers are helping to open a space in which change looks more possible than at any time in the recent past. The Parkland students have embraced a grassroots approach and teachers are following their lead. Both are primed for action and are ready to challenge those eager to dismantle the public education system. They recognize that education is a winning issue because most Americans still view it as a path through which their children can gain access to decent jobs and a good life. The usual neoliberal bromides advocating privatization, charter schools, vouchers, and teaching for the test have lost all legitimacy at a moment when the ruling elite act with blatant disregard for the democratizing ethos that has long been a keystone of our society.

All of the states in which teachers have engaged in wildcat strikes, demonstrations, and protests have been subject to the toxic austerity measures that have come to characterize the neoliberal economy. In these states, teachers have faced low and stagnant wages, crumbling and overfilled classrooms, lengthening work days, and slashed budgets that have left them without classroom essentials such as books and even toilet paper—necessities that, in many cases, teachers have purchased themselves with their paltry salaries. It is significant that teachers have refused to confine their protests to the immediate needs of their profession or the understandable demand for higher wages. Rather, they have couched these demands within a broader critique of the war on public goods, calling repeatedly for more funding for schools in order to provide students with decent conditions for learning.

Likewise, students protesting gun violence have contextualized their demands for gun control by addressing the roots of gun violence in state violence and political and economic disenfranchisement. Refusing to be silenced by politicians bought and sold by the NRA, these students have called for a vision of social justice rooted in the belief that they can not only challenge systemic oppression, but can change the fundamental nature of an oppressive social order. They recognize that they have not only been treated as disposable populations written out of the script of democracy, they also are capable of using the new tools of social media to surmount the deadening political horizons preached by conventional media outlets and established politicians.

The attack on public education is one side of the neoliberal ledger. The other side is the explosion of the punishing state with its accelerated apparatuses of incarceration and militarization.

What is so promising about the student-led movement is that not only is it exposing the politicians and gun lobbies that argue against gun control and reframe the gun debate while endangering the lives of young people, they have also energized millions of youth by encouraging a sense of individual and collective agency. They are asking their peers to mobilize against gun violence, vote in the midterm November elections, and be prepared for a long struggle against the underlying ideologies, structures, and institutions that promote death-dealing violence in the United States. As Charlotte Alter pointed out in TIME:

They envision a youth political movement that will address many of the other issues affecting the youngest Americans. [Parkland student leader David] Hogg says he would like to have a youth demonstration every year on March 24, harnessing the power of teenage anger to demand action on everything from campaign-finance reform to net neutrality to climate change.

This statement makes clear that these young people recognize that the threat they face goes far beyond the gun debate and that what they need to address is a wider culture of cruelty, silence, and indifference. Violence comes in many forms, some hidden, many more spectacularized, cultivated, valued, eroticized, and normalized. Some are fast, and others are slow, and thus harder to perceive. The key is to address the underlying structures and relations of power that give rise to this landscape of both spectacular gun violence and the everyday violence experienced by the poor, people of color, the undocumented, and other “disposable” people. The attack on public education and the rights and working conditions of teachers is one side of the neoliberal ledger. The other side is the explosion of the punishing state with its accelerated apparatuses of containment, militarized police, borders, walls, mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the creation of an armed society. These issues need to be connected as part of a wider refusal to equate rapacious, neoliberal capitalism with democracy.

The Parkland student movement and the teacher walkouts have already advanced the possibilities of mass resistance by connecting the dots between the crises that each group is experiencing. The “slow violence” (to borrow Rob Nixon’s term) of teacher disenfranchisement needs to be understood in relation to the fast violence that has afflicted students, both of which arise from a state that has imported the language of perpetual war into its relationship with its citizens. As Judith Levine points out, every public sphere has been transformed into a virtual war zone, “a zone of permanent vigilance, enforcement, and violence.”

In the face of this, the need is for disruptive social movements that call for nothing less than the restructuring of U.S. society. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., this means a revolution in values, a shift in public consciousness, and a change in power relations and public policies. The Parkland students and the teachers protesting across the nation are not only challenging the current attacks on public education, they also share an effort in constructing a new narrative about the United States—one that reengages the public’s ethical imagination toward developing an equitable, just, and inclusive democracy. Their protests point to the possibility of a new public imagination that moves beyond the narrow realm of specific interest to a more comprehensive understanding of politics that is rooted in a practice of open defiance to corporate tyranny. This is a politics that refuses “leftist” centrism, the extremism of the right, and a deeply unequal society modeled on the iniquitous precarity and toxic structures of savage capitalism. This new political horizon foreshadows the need to organize new political formations, massive social movements, and a third political party that can make itself present in a variety of institutional, educational, social, and cultural spheres.

The teacher and student protests have made clear that real change can be made through mass collective movements inspired by hope in the service of a radical democracy.

What the teacher and student protests have made clear is that change and coalition-building are possible, and that real change can be made through mass collective movements inspired by hope in the service of a radical democracy. This is a movement that must make education central to its politics and be willing to develop educational spheres which listen to and speak to the concrete problems that educators, students, minorities of color and class, and others face in a world moving into the abyss of tyranny.

The long-term success of the movements begun by the teachers and students will likely hinge on whether they connect with wider struggles for minority rights, economic justice, and social equality. If they open to a vision of shared struggle, they may find their way to a radical democratic recuperation that benefits all people whose needs are being sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal fascism. What we have learned from the student and teacher demonstrations is that politics depends “on the possibility of making the public exist in the first place” and that what we share in common is more important than what separates us. At a time when tyranny is on the rise and the world seems deprived of radical imagination, such courageous acts of mass resistance are a welcome relief and hopeful indicator of an energetic struggle to secure a democratic future.

Source:

https://bostonreview.net/education-opportunity/henry-giroux-slow-and-fast-assault-public-education

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EEUU: Could protest curb school violence? Lessons from the opt-out movement

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Por: theconversation.com/27-06-2018

In the wake of the Santa Fe, Texas, school shooting, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan voiced support for a school boycott. The boycott – which Duncan has said could take place in September – would involve keeping kids out of school until changes are made to the nation’s gun laws to make America’s schools safer. It is unclear how long the boycott would last.

If parents, students and others decide to stage a national school boycott, it would pay for them to take a few pages out of the playbook from a different protest: the opt-out movement that seeks to reduce burdensome testing. I make this observation as the author of books on political dissent in schools and the state of public education.

A more compelling argument

The opt-out movement draws attention to the suffering of children, reveals political and economic concerns with individuals and corporations who benefit from testing, and exposes the learning time lost to testing. Since school safety carries more significance than testing, a school boycott to change gun laws may employ similar justifications in an even more compelling way.

The opt-out movement has effectively raised awareness about problems introduced by testing, including the stress inflicted on teachers and students. It has done so through public demonstrations at sites such as the Department of Education, but also by generating smaller local conversations with other stakeholders.

Importantly, opt-out leaders have invited a wide and diverse collection of parents into their movement. They have proposed alternative forms of assessment. They have effectively pressured legislators to reduce testingin states like New York and to remove “zero score” penalties for children who do not take the test.

Overcoming complacency

The consciousness-raising actions of opt-out organizations have forced some people who see testing as an unavoidable part of life in schools to rethink their assumptions. A school boycott could lead to rethinking among those who feel powerless to stop school shootings.

The school boycott cannot just focus on troubling, but rare mass shootings. Based on what I know about effective political dissent, boycotters would need to expose widespread smaller forms of violence in our schools in order to paint a more complete picture of the problem and spur change. Like the Opt Out movement, boycotters would also need to highlight related practices, such as lock down drills and the arming of teachers, to expose ways in which those practices deprive classrooms of educational time, concern teachers, and cause fear in children. Boycotters should reveal how insecurity due to violence create a climate that lacks the stability and focus children need to learn well.

More than just skipping school

Finally, boycotting doesn’t mean simply staying home. It requires public demonstrations to raise awareness and to pressure legislators by letting them see the dissatisfaction and demands of the public. It entails a call to deliberate with other citizens, gun advocates, teachers, legislators and others to reach moments of compromise and consensus as well as to craft alternatives.

These alternatives might take the form of particular gun laws, but may also relate to other aspects of school culture that impact school violence, such as bullying, stress and exclusion.

How do we preserve educational opportunity if classrooms are empty? At a minimum, boycotters must model quality political dissent for students so that they learn how to be effective citizens, one of the most longstanding and widely accepted educational aims.

Moreover, parents should join up with students who’ve already led the charge through staging national school walkouts in the wake of Parkland and other shootings. And they should collaborate with organizations like Black Lives Matter, who have already been championing the need for safety in schools, in order to craft better informed plans for change.

A sufficiently robust boycott could prompt new forms of gun legislation and bring new practices to curb violence to America’s schools. All the while, parents may become more active citizens in the democratic process of public education and students may witness – and participate in – political dissent in action.

*Fuente: https://theconversation.com/could-protest-curb-school-violence-lessons-from-the-opt-out-movement-96975

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The Difference Between Roads And Education: The Human Mind

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By: forbes.com/Neal McCluskey / 06-06-2018

Should people be able to take government funding for their own private parks, roads or police? It’s a rhetorical question frequently used against policies such as vouchers that enable people to choose private schools rather than have their tax dollars go only to public institutions. The answer opponents are typically looking for is, “No, they should not. Like all those things, public education is a public good.”

It is a weak analogy, but much worse, it dangerously downplays what education is: nothing less than the shaping of human minds.

On a technical note, as my colleague Corey DeAngelis recently explained, education does not meet the economic definition of a public good; something “nonexcludable” and “nonrivalrous in consumption.” Basically, a good that non-payers cannot be prevented from using, and that one person using does not prevent others from enjoying it equally. An example is a radio broadcast; anyone with a receiver can listen, and one person listening doesn’t prevent others from doing the same.

That said, what wielders of this rhetorical club are probably trying to hammer home is not that education is a public good as economists see it, but that to work it needs to be provided and controlled by government.

If the intent of establishing parks is to ensure that natural space is preserved for all to use, regardless of ability to pay, it seems reasonable that government must control park lands. To build an interstate, there will be lots of privately-held property on the best potential routes. Lest road creators be gouged, or highways forced to slalom along inefficiently circuitous paths, the power of eminent domain seems important. And the job of government is to keep people from forcibly imposing on each other—e.g., assault, theft—so giving government the power to stop the use of force and punish transgressors appears logical.

But education is fundamentally different from these things. For starters, there is no logical or demonstrated need for government to provide schools. Schools do not require great geographic space, education has been provided privately at significant scale, and there arenumerous private schools operating today despite users having to pay once for public schools, and a second time for private. And as Nobel laureate Milton Friedman observed, government can ensure people can access education without providing the schools.

Far more important, education is inherently about the shaping of minds, and that puts people’s intimately held values and identities—things that make them who they are—in the balance. Requiring all, diverse people to fund a single system of government schools thus forces conflict and, even worse, threatens to implant standardized thoughts in all people. Parks and roads aren’t close to comparable threats to basic freedom and diversity.

The reality of treating education like interstates has often been painful. In the beginning of the “common schooling” era, many Protestants objected to public schooling “father” Horace Mann’s essentially Unitarian vision of what religion the schools should inculcate. The arrival of millions of Roman Catholics led to decades of conflict—including the 1844 Philadelphia Bible Riots that killed and injured scores of people—over the Protestant character of many public schools. Numerous Catholics ultimately felt they had no choice but to forsake their tax dollars and start their own schools, which by their peak in 1965 enrolled roughly 5.5 million children. Many African-Americans, after finally being allowed into the public schools, have had to fight to have meaningful power in the schools to which their children are assigned. And they are not alone.

Today, battles over people’s cultures, ethnic identities, and values are widespread and perpetual. The Cato Institute’s Public Schooling Battle Map, which I maintain, includes nearly 2,000 such conflicts, and with its content drawn mainly from major media reports, there are likely many conflicts missing.

Parks, roads, even policing, don’t come close to the intensely and fundamentally personal—fundamentallyhuman—purpose of education. To assert that letting taxpaying families choose their schools is akin to letting them build private thoroughfares or parks with public dollars at best trivializes education, at worst threatens basic freedom. Indeed, far from calling for government control, the nature of education cries out for letting all people choose.

*Fuente: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nealmccluskey/2018/06/05/the-difference-between-roads-and-education-the-human-mind/2/#3a478ef55fab

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United States: Another Voice: Opt-out movement offers a vision for public education

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United States/March 31, 2018/By: Chris Cerrone/Buffalonews

Resumen: Otra voz: el movimiento de exclusión ofrece una visión para la educación pública.

Six years ago, my family began a journey to take a stand for our children’s education. We were among handful of parents across New York State to publicly announce that our children would “opt-out” of (boycott) the grade 3-8 state assessments. Since then, thousands more families have joined us in defending public education, with over 225,000 students opting out of New York State exams in 2017.

While motivations vary in the testing boycott, the majority of families were driven to action because they witnessed their children’s classrooms becoming focused on test preparation and a system that forced teachers to concentrate on a limited set of ELA and math skills, instead of a well-rounded education.

So, what has the opt-out movement achieved? The opt-out movement influenced changes, resulting in shorter assessments in both the number of questions and the days spent testing. Opt-out families also motivated the Board of Regents to offer more pathways to high  school graduation.

While these changes are positive steps, the boycott of state assessments must continue, because schools are still forced to focus on test scores over true learning, and the assessments continue to be flawed measures of student achievement. While Every Student Succeeds Act has replaced No Child Left Behind as federal education law, politicians in Washington and Albany continue to fail our children. Seventeen-plus years of test-based accountability for schools mandated by federal law have failed to close achievement gaps for vulnerable groups of young people. Why should schools continue a policy that has obviously been unsuccessful? Additionally, in New York, teacher evaluations are still legally tied to student test scores, despite ESSA removing that federal mandate. Making state assessments high-stakes for adults harms our children, as focusing on raising test scores does not necessarily equate with improved learning outcomes. It is time for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to repeal the current teacher evaluation law so we can give schools local control of their employment and curriculum decisions.

The opt-out movement is not just about refusing to take a test, but, instead, offering a vision for public education that rejects a focus on assessment skills, workbooks and teacher-centered classrooms. Families who boycott yearly standardized tests instead advocate for student-centered learning and creative activities that include hands-on and real-world simulations. Imagine every classroom and school system engaging students, to promote imaginative, higher-order thinking that goes well beyond the narrow scope of a test-focused education system. These are the skills our children need to truly be ready and flexible to meet a rapidly changing world as they graduate.

Fuente: http://buffalonews.com/2018/03/28/another-voice-opt-out-movement-offers-a-vision-for-public-education/

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United States: DeVos gets cold shoulder from White House after interviews

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United States / March 18, 2018 / Author: MARIA DANILOVA / Source: WFTV

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos got a less than ringing endorsement from the White House on Monday after a pair of uncomfortable television interviews raised questions about her commitment to help underperforming schools and support for President Donald Trump’s proposal to curb school violence.

Less than a day after DeVos was appointed to chair a federal commission on school safety, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders downplayed DeVos’ role in the process. Asked whether DeVos would be the face of the commission, Sanders said, «I think that the president is going to be the lead on school safety when it comes to this administration.»

Sanders also said that the focus is «not one or two interviews, but on actual policy.»

In an interview with CBS’ «60 Minutes» that aired Sunday night, DeVos said years of federal investment in public education had produced «zero results» and that American schools were stagnating and failing many students. But asked by CBS’ Lesley Stahl whether she had visited low-performing schools to understand their needs, DeVos, an ardent proponent of school choice, admitted to having visited none.

«I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming,» DeVos said.

«Maybe you should,» Stahl said.

«Maybe I should,» DeVos said.

DeVos’ spokeswoman Liz Hill said that the secretary’s focus was on promoting successful innovation, including in traditional public schools.

«The secretary has been very intentional about visiting and highlighting high performing, innovative schools across the country,» Hill told The Associated Press in a statement. «Many of these high performing schools are traditional public schools that have challenged the status quo and dared to do something different on behalf of their students – many where teachers are empowered in the classroom to find what works best for students.

DeVos took to Twitter on Monday to defend her comments.

«I’m fighting every day for every student, in every school – public and private – to have a world-class education. We owe that to our children,» she wrote. She also suggested that some of her remarks were unfairly left out of the show.

This wasn’t the first time DeVos faced criticism following an uneven performance at a public forum. She was ridiculed last year after suggesting at her confirmation hearing in the Senate that some schools needed guns to protect students from grizzly bears.

Elizabeth Mann, an education expert with the Brookings Institution, said that DeVos’ failure to tour struggling schools undermines her credibility as an advocate for the children that they serve.

«It’s difficult for her to establish credibility in speaking about those issues when she hasn’t visited an underperforming school as secretary,» Mann said.

But Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the criticism was unfair and that the questions and the tone of the interview were tough. He added that he is not sure that DeVos’ predecessors in the Obama administration would have done a better job in a similar interview.

«She is facing the glare of the spotlight much more than they did and the press is much less friendly to her,» Petrilli said.

Source of the News:

http://www.wftv.com/news/devos-gets-cold-shoulder-from-white-house-after-interviews/714942234

Source of the Image:

The DeVos Dynasty: A Family of Extremists

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