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InformED ReportSchool ChoiceDepartment of EducationK-12

Are Public Schools Under Attack?

by EdCircuit Staff
written by EdCircuit Staff 6 minutes read

Play video: The InformED Report: Episode 16 (1 minute 55 seconds)

The InformED Report: Episode 161 min 55 sedCircuit on Vimeo

In January 2017, Betsy DeVos was waiting for the Senate to take up her nomination as U.S. Secretary of Education. The InformED Report for January 17, 2017 gathered the main voices in the argument over what she would mean for public schools, from school choice groups to Detroit educators who saw her record as a warning. It then turned to two stories about students with disabilities, one in Virginia and one in Connecticut, and to a fight in New York City over space for charter schools.

In this edition

  • President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos, a leading voucher and charter advocate, drew praise from school choice groups and alarm from public school supporters.
  • Virginia students with disabilities helped publish a guide that gives schools activities for building disability awareness and inclusion.
  • Parents in Greenwich, Connecticut, objected to proposed special education cuts in a year of reduced state aid.
  • A charter school group ran TV ads accusing New York Mayor Bill de Blasio of keeping 40,000 children on charter waiting lists.

Betsy DeVos and the fight over public school dollars

Donald Trump named DeVos as his choice for education secretary in late November 2016. She was a Michigan philanthropist and Republican donor who chaired the American Federation for Children, a group that promotes school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. In eSchool News, Laura Ascione Devaney reported that she had no professional experience working in schools, and that Trump had proposed a $20 million fund to support school choice through charters and vouchers.

The New York Times summed up the concern in a line that MSNBC’s Steve Benen quoted: “It is hard to find anyone more passionate about the idea of steering public dollars away from traditional public schools than Betsy DeVos.” Benen read the nomination as a sign that a major fight over school privatization was coming.

CNN’s Sara Ganim and Linh Tran reported that DeVos and her husband had spent millions over the years lobbying for changes to Michigan schools, and that Detroit educators from both parties said her push for school choice and loosely regulated charters had not worked for the city’s children. Tonya Allen, president and CEO of the Skillman Foundation and a member of a coalition working to fix Detroit schools, put it plainly: “When I hear her name and I think about education, I think about choice without quality.”

Supporters argued that vouchers free students from the limits of where they live or what their families can afford; opponents said they move public money to private schools that are not always accountable. For district leaders, the practical question was how far a federal secretary could shift that balance, since most decisions about charters and vouchers sit with states.

Virginia students write a guide to inclusion

Students in the Virginia Board for People with Disabilities’ Youth Leadership Forum and the Virginia Department of Education’s I’m Determined project published “A Guide to Planning an Inclusion Project,” NBC 29 reported. The guide offers sample activities for elementary, middle and high schools that want to build disability awareness and inclusion.

In one elementary exercise, students use tablets, an app and resources from the American Dyslexia Association to see what learning mathematics is like for a classmate with dyscalculia. In a middle school activity, a team builds an obstacle course that shows the daily challenges faced by students who use wheelchairs, walkers and other mobility devices.

Greenwich parents push back on special education cuts

In Greenwich, Connecticut, Superintendent Sal Corda proposed several cuts to special education as part of the district’s 2017-18 operating budget, Emilie Munson reported in Greenwich Time. They included less money for private school placements and for tuition settlements with dissatisfied parents. Corda said the cuts would not affect the services students are entitled to by law.

Parents were not reassured. The proposals came after a $41.6 million cut to the state’s Education Cost Sharing grant earlier in 2016, which had already reduced state support for special education. Parents said their children would not get the support they needed. They also pointed to a tension many districts know well: the central office staff who help decide what a student’s individual education plan requires also build the budget that pays for it.

Charter school space and the New York City mayor

In New York City, the group Families for Excellent Schools began a television ad campaign accusing Mayor Bill de Blasio of keeping 40,000 children on charter school waiting lists while the city had more than 200 half-empty school buildings, the New York Daily News’s Jennifer Fermino reported. A Department of Education spokeswoman, Devora Kaye, called the ad “simply inaccurate” and said the city worked closely with charter schools on the use of school space.

More than 100,000 New York City students attended charter schools, yet most local charter leaders stayed quiet about her, Monica Disare reported in The Atlantic. Her emphasis on private school vouchers and lighter charter oversight looked very different from New York’s more tightly regulated sector, and Steve Wilson, CEO of the Ascend charter network, said many charter founders were “deeply troubled by the idea of vouchers.” It was a reminder that “school choice” covers several very different policies.

Further reading from that week

Sources

About the InformED Report

The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on January 17, 2017. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.

Subscribe to edCircuit to stay up to date on all of our shows, podcasts, news, and thought leadership articles.

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K-12Education Policy and GovernmentStudentsInformED ReportHigher Education

InformED Report 11/10/16

by EdCircuit Staff
written by EdCircuit Staff 5 minutes read

Play video: The InformED Report: Episode 7 (1 minute 37 seconds)

The InformED Report: Episode 71 min 37 sedCircuit on Vimeo

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election on November 8, 2016 was widely unexpected, and education reporters spent the next day working out what it could mean for schools and colleges. The InformED Report for November 10, 2016 looked at what the result might change for families paying for college and for federal education policy, and at the protests that broke out on college campuses and in at least one large California high school the day after the vote.

In this edition

  • Money advised families that the short-term effect of the election would be felt mainly in the markets and college savings, with larger changes to student loans possible later.
  • Trump advisers had discussed taking the federal government out of student lending, and his calls for less regulation pointed to lighter oversight of for-profit colleges.
  • The Atlantic expected more power to shift to states, a push for school choice, and a smaller federal Education Department.
  • About 1,500 students, half of Berkeley High School, walked out of class, and protests spread across college campuses.

What the election could mean for college costs and federal policy

Writing the morning after the vote, Money’s Kim Clark, Greg Daugherty and Kaitlin Mulhere told families that in the short term, not much would change. Until the inauguration in January 2017, the main effect would be on financial markets and college savings. Families saving through a 529 plan in an age-based portfolio, which held about 80 percent of 529 assets, were somewhat protected, while money in individual stocks, bonds and mutual funds would rise and fall with the market. The New York Times reported that U.S. stock futures had plunged 5 percent overnight before recovering nearly all their losses once trading began.

The longer-term changes could be larger. Sam Clovis, the Trump campaign’s national co-chair and policy director, had discussed handing federal student lending to banks and other private lenders, and had suggested charging students different interest rates based on their expected earnings. Trump had proposed an income-based repayment plan capping payments at 12.5 percent of income for 15 years, said he would push colleges to cut costs, and repeated his wish to eliminate the Education Department, an idea most experts considered far-fetched. Money also noted that his stated desire to reduce regulation could mean less oversight of for-profit colleges, and that shares of several large for-profit companies rose between 4 and 10 percent on the morning after the election.

For K-12 schools, The Atlantic’s Emily DeRuy laid out what was likely. Closing the Education Department entirely seemed highly unlikely, she wrote, but its scope could be scaled back sharply, and with Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, more decisions were likely to move to states and districts. Trump had proposed $20 billion for school choice, and a federally backed voucher program had a real chance of advancing. “You’re going to see Trump making a push for parental choice,” said Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute. DeRuy added that Trump’s pledge to “repeal” Common Core was not something a president could do, since the standards were adopted by states, and that the Obama administration’s pending rules under the Every Student Succeeds Act looked unlikely to survive.

For district leaders, the practical advice at the time was to watch rather than react. Very little of what was said in the campaign had become policy, and the education secretary had not been named. Districts with budgets built on federal grants, and states still writing their ESSA plans, had reason to follow the transition closely and to expect more of the decisions to land with them.

Students walk out after the election

Protests began on campuses as the results came in. The Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga reported that students at colleges across the country, especially on the West Coast, took to the streets that night. John Baughman, an associate professor of politics at Bates College, noted that college students belonged to the most Democratic-leaning of all age groups, after a decade of generational shift toward the party.

High school students followed the next morning. The Los Angeles Times reported that at Berkeley High School, about 1,500 students, half the student body, walked out after first period began at 8 a.m., according to Berkeley Unified School District officials. Reuters reported that students and teachers rallied in the school’s courtyard before marching toward the University of California, Berkeley, carrying signs and using the hashtags #NotMyPresident and #BHSWalkout. One student told the rally that people of color feared discrimination and that immigrant families now worried about deportation.

For principals, the walkouts raised questions every school faces after a divisive public event: how to keep students safe when they leave campus, how to respect their right to speak, and how to support those who come to school afraid. Schools that had thought through those questions in advance were better placed to answer them on the day.

Sources

About the InformED Report

The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on November 10, 2016. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.

Subscribe to edCircuit to stay up to date on all of our shows, podcasts, news, and thought leadership articles.

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