Review of the DeVos Confirmation Hearing

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Karen R. Effrem, MD – President

Betsy DeVos at her 1/17/17 Confirmation Hearing

I strongly agree with Shane Vander Hart at Caffeinated Thoughts that Betsy DeVos’ confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Education was not terribly informative. Aside from a brief mention of Common Core by Senator Cassidy (R-LA) where she said she wouldn’t mandate it from the secretarial level and her answer to a question from Senator Alexander (R-TN, chairman of the HELP Committee holding the hearing) that she wouldn’t implement school choice from the federal level, none of the major concerns in our national parent coalition letter about Common Core, privacy, and school choice were asked or answered.

Here is a brief discussion of several issues that did come up and those that should be closely monitored during her control of the U.S. Department of Education:

Common Core – Mrs. DeVos answered Senator Cassidy’s brief yes or no question, that she would not continue Common Core from the federal level. it is interesting that she said in her prepared opening statement:

And every teacher in America dreams of breaking free from standardization, so that they can deploy their unique creativity and innovate with their students.

If she wants teachers to “break free from standardization” how is it that she has supported national standards and standardized tests that require “standardized” teaching for so long?

However, as stated in numerous writings by many anti-Common Core experts and activists, the foundation of the Every Student Succeeds Act mandates the Common Core by imposing secretarial veto of state plans and requiring states’ compliance with eleven different federal laws all mandating statewide standards and tests that are Common Core even if not labeled such. How she implements ESSA will be critical.

Federal School Choice – While it was somewhat reassuring that she said that she would not support a federal school choice law,  her answers about wanting accountability combined with her record of support for very regulated voucher plans in Indiana and Louisiana that require administration of the state (Common Core) tests along with that strong push by her allies John Engler of the Business Round Table and Michael Petrilli of Fordham as well as most of the Democrats is extremely concerning for the autonomy and viability of private schools. Education freedom groups across the nation, including Education Liberty Watch, Eagle Forum and the Cato Institute are all very concerned.

Implementation of ESSA

• We hope that she is extremely liberal with waivers for state plans that seek to truly eliminate Common Core and the associated federally mandated state tests in favor of various state options or changes the regulations altogether. This is the best way in our view that Donald Trump can keep his promise to get rid of Common Core.
• It is also critical that she not favor or implement any kind of social emotional/21^st Century skills standards or assessment programs in ESSA or its accountability scheme. This was one of our questions and is also an issue in the Strengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA) and the subject of a national commission.

Data Privacy – This topic did not come up during the hearing. Betsy DeVos  chaired the Philanthropy Roundtable, which published a report called Blended Learning: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Supporting Tech-assisted Teaching that lauds the Dream Box software that “records 50,000 data points per student per hour”

• Senator Hatch seemed to be promoting the lifting of the prohibition on the student unit record system which would then allow data mining and a federal dossier on students from cradle to career. This was one of our questions and this idea must be firmly resisted.
• The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was gutted by regulatory fiat during the Obama administration. At the very least, those privacy protections must be restored and preferably expanded to deal with all of the online data mining that is happening with technology-based education. Privacy was mentioned by Mr. Trump and was one of our questions not addressed during the hearings. It would be a huge improvement even to return to the previous regulations.

Preschool – Senator Isakson (R-GA) made the following very alarming statement during the hearing (1:02:55):

“She [Senator Murray] talked about her goal and my goal which we’ve shared with each other, that is to work toward requiring 4 year old prekindergarten for every student in the country…” (Emphasis added).

Thankfully DeVos demurred with her standard, “If confirmed, I look forward to working with you on…” statement. However, given how ineffective, harmful, invasive and expensive these programs are, including in Georgia, expanding preschool like this would be a “disaster” of Trumpian proportions.

GLBT issues – This was a key issue pushed by the Democrats and while we agree with her that no student deserves discrimination or harassment, we would have felt much better if she had also said that she also cared about protecting the First Amendment free speech, freedom of assembly and religious rights of all students and families. It will be important to see how she deals with the Title IX guidance.

Guns in Schools –  Her response on guns in schools satisfied no one. While right that it is a states’ issue, the “grizzly bear” response was quite ineffective. Far more satisfying would have been a mention that almost all school shooters have been on psychotropic medications at the time of their crimes, including Knewtown, Connecticut, the home state of Senator Murphy (D). These drugs have the well-known side effect of violent, murderous reactions in certain individuals and that guns in the hands of responsible concealed permit holders would likely reduce the carnage in these incidents as it did in Pearl, Mississippi and other mass shootings.

What’s Next – Betsy DeVos was required to have her letter from the government ethics agency documenting that she would serve with no financial conflicts of interest by the end of today as President-elect Trump takes the oath of office in order to have her committee confirmation vote on January 24th. We will see if that happens and what comes next. Please consider contacting the Senate HELP Committee members and your own senators with the concerns we have listed.

Phyllis Schlafly & Cato Long Understood Dangers of “Choice”

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School choice is becoming a very hot topic in education circles with the likely ascendancy of Betsy DeVos to the position of Secretary of Education in the new Trump administration.  Because so many are pursuing the noble goal of trying to help poor children escape from failing public schools, they are not or will not see the dangers of these programs to private and even home school autonomy.

Education Liberty Watch has been trying to warn of these dangers for several years and is honored to be working beside tremendous organizations like Eagle Forum and the Cato Institute to raise this alarm.

Eagle Forum just published an article by ELW President Dr. Karen Effrem discussing this work. Here is an excerpt:

In 2012, we published the School Choice Freedom Grading Scale. States like New Hampshire and Georgia that had accountability directly to parents scored A+ grades while states like Indiana and Louisiana that imposed the state standardized tests on entire private schools received failing grades.

The ever brilliant education analyst and conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly instantly understood the dangers of both Common Core and these alleged school choice plans to private school autonomy. Shortly after having the honor of presenting our Grading Scale at her wonderful 2012 Eagle Council meeting, she wrote these insightful words in her weekly column, titled Like ObamaCare, Obama Core Is Another Power Grab:

The Obama Core advocates are even planning to impose their standards on private schools. As the school choice movement grows, the attempt will be made to force any private or charter school that accepts public funds to adopt Common Core standards and have their students take the national tests. (Emphasis added).

President-elect Donald Trump’s appointee to become the next Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is undergoing her confirmation hearings starting on January 17^th. Despite protestations to the contrary, the Michigan billionaire has a long history of supporting Common Core and other education debacles like social emotional learning (SEL), data mining, and charter schools that only teach and test the Common Core.

As pointed out in our list of questions that the U.S. Senate should ask DeVos, she is a strong proponent of both voucher programs and Title I portability. The Indiana voucher law that she and her organization, the American Federation for Children (AFC), strongly supported and funded requires voucher recipient schools to administer the public school Common Core-aligned tests  and submit to the grading system based on those same Common Core-aligned tests.  The tests determine what is taught, which means that this law is imposing Common Core on private schools. Indiana “is the second-worst in the country on infringing on private school autonomy” according to the Center for Education Reform because of that and other onerous requirements, and the state received an F grade on our Grading Scale. It is also important that she be asked if as Secretary of Education, if she would require the same public school, Common Core tests and the rest of the federal regulations for private schools under a Title I portability program as her close friend  and colleague Jeb Bush recommended for Mitt Romney in 2012 (p. 24).

Jason Bedrick of the Cato Institute raised similar concerns in 2014 after Michael Petrilli of the Gates-funded, pro-Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute put out a policy “toolkit” demanding that Common Core tests be imposed on any educational entity receiving tax dollars. Bedrick responded well by saying:

By contrast, there is a significant body of evidence that school choice programs work without Fordham’s sought-after government regulation. Of twelve randomized controlled trials—the gold standard of social science research—eleven found that school choice programs improve outcomes for some or all students while only one found no statistically significant difference and none found a negative impact. None of these school choice programs studied were designed along the lines of the Fordham proposal.

In fact, Fordham’s preferred policy is undermined by a large body of evidence. A 2009 literature review of the within-country studies comparing outcomes among different types of school systems worldwide revealed that the most market-like and least regulated education systems tended to produce student outcomes superior to more heavily regulated systems, including those with a substantial number state-funded and regulated private schools. In short, the best form of accountability is directly to parents, not government bureaucrats and their tests.

Accountability Should Be To Parents

Fordham argues that school choice programs, including both vouchers and scholarship tax credits, should fall under the same accountability regimes as public schools because they utilize public funds. In Fordham’s words, “The taxpayer also needs assurances that schools are producing solid learning results for the children who participate in such programs.” This reasoning should not apply to scholarship tax credits which, as the U.S. Supreme Court held in ACSTOv. Winn, do not involve public funds at all:

Like contributions that lead to charitable tax deductions, contributions yielding [scholarship] tax credits are not owed to the State and, in fact, pass directly from taxpayers to private organizations. Respondents’ contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. That premise finds no basis in standing jurisprudence. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the … State Treasury.

If private schools are to be maintained as any reasonable alternative to public schools, their already adequate methods of accountability via nationally norm-referenced tests and to parents that pay the tuition should be maintained or no public money should go to private schools at all.

National Coalition Concerned About DeVos Grows & Receives Major Coverage

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Do not forget to contact the U.S. Senators on the HELP Committee (Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions)! Betsy DeVos’ rescheduled conformation hearing takes place tomorrow, January 17th at 5 PM EST with coverage available on C-SPAN.

Since that hearing was postponed, the national coalition letter’s list of signatures has rapidly grown to include 15 national groups and publications and 61 state level organizations and experts from 28 states.

It has also received national coverage from Dr. Susan Berry at Breitbart News which extensively quoted Dr. Effrem’s summary of the letter as follows:

1) From all the evidence we can find, her statement when she was appointed on November 23^rd was her very first against Common Core. Her statements and record via organizations that she has founded, funded, chaired, or on whose boards she has served and her political contributions have all been in support of Common Core and pro-Common Core candidates. Her statement and her interview with Donald Trump focused on “higher standards” which is a euphemism for Common Core, even though there is abundant evidence that the Common Core standards are anything but high.

2) Her American Federation for Children group has been strongly in support of state voucher laws in Indiana and Louisiana or federal Title I portability that imposes or would impose Common Core on private schools via the federally mandated state assessments. The education savings accounts that she touts could well place government regulations on home schooling for “accountability” purposes.

3) Although a strong supporter of charter schools, it appears she has never financially supported classical charter schools like the Hillsdale model in her own home state, only charters that require the teaching and testing of Common Core.

4) The Philanthropy Roundtable that she chaired until her appointment put out a report that is strongly in favor of extensive data mining of children without transparency of what data is collected and who receives it or parental consent and never mentions the word “privacy.”

5) We are also concerned about continued expansion of invasive, subjective social emotional learning programs at the federal level and need to know her position on those.

Additionally,  Sunshine State News, a major statewide news and political website also discussed the nomination and hearing. Allison Neilsen clearly explained parent groups’ concerns quoting Dr. Effrem as executive director of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition:

Other groups have suggested DeVos’ views and Trump’s campaign promises don’t match up, specifically on the controversial Common Core State Standards.

“Her statements saying that she opposes Common Core are really new [and came out] basically the day she was appointed,” Education Liberty Watch president and Florida Stop Common Core executive director Karen Effrem told Sunshine State News Wednesday. “Her record and the record of the organizations she founded, funded or chaired is strongly pro-Common Core and that’s a real concern given President-elect Trump’s promise to get rid of Common Core.”

Effrem told SSN she hoped committee members would pose questions to DeVos, pushing her to lighten the federal footprint in the country’s classrooms.

“I would hope she would vastly scale back federal control over states in education,” Effrem explained.

While DeVos wasn’t Effrem’s first choice for Ed Secretary, she said she hoped DeVos would team up with Trump to make good on his promise to abolish Common Core.

“Compared to some of the other people Trump could have chosen, I’m greatly disappointed, but I have to trust that he will keep an eye on her and make sure that she fulfills the promises that he made on the campaign trail,” Effrem said.

Thank you for your support and work to give us Education for a FREE Nation!

New Social Emotional Standards Make Common Core Look Tame

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Karen R. Effrem, MD & Jane Robbins

The battle over who will direct the hearts and minds of children is intensifying. Within the dangerous labyrinth of Common Core standards, testing, and data-mining is the even more concerning ramp-up of social emotional learning (SEL). Parents and teachers who believe in genuine education rather than pseudo-psychological evaluation are facing off against bipartisan big government and its affiliated corporations and foundations. An update:

This summer (2016) the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) announced it had chosen eight states to collaborate on creating K-12 SEL standards. All K-12 students would be measured on five “noncognitive” factors: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, including ethical decision-making. As we’ve written, the result is that overworked, untrained teachers essentially become psychotherapists to their classrooms of patients. Other problems we’ve warned about include subjectivity of the standards and assessments, indoctrination, danger to freedom of conscience, data-mining, and inadequate security of this sensitive data that resides for eternity in longitudinal databases.

Less than two months later, two CASEL states (Tennessee and Georgia) have already withdrawn from the initiative. Parents have begun to realize the dangers of SEL and to challenge their schools’ robotic march toward psychological manipulation of children. Interestingly, CASEL has removed the list of other states involved (California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Washington) from its altered website about the project. Either it’s embarrassed at losing 25% of its cohort or trying to hide from further parental opposition, or both.

Undeterred, CASEL presses forward. The group joined the liberal Aspen Institute’s new National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, led by CASEL board member Linda Darling-Hammond (the radical education professor whom terrorist Bill Ayers recommended to be Obama’s Secretary of Education). This commission is funded by the same gallery of rogues – including the ubiquitous Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — that have funded the pro-Common Core, pro-progressive education schemes of recent history.

The American Institutes for Research (AIR), publisher of many state Common Core tests and key SEL proponent, is also represented on the commission. AIR is also heavily involved in promoting the controversial LGBT agenda.

Parents should know about the agendas of CASEL and some of these important partnerships involved in the SEL effort.

CASEL has a definite ideological tilt. It’s funded partly by the federal government’s Institute for Education Sciences — the same agency that wants to assess mindsets in the National Assessment of Educational Progress and to have social emotional research become a federal mandate — and partly by a range of liberal foundations. These foundations promote socialized healthcare and bemoan the effect of climate change on “health and equity” (Robert Wood Johnson); push Buddhist “mindfulness” techniques (1440); and seek to use SEL to promote social-justice theories and transgenderism (NoVo).

How might CASEL use SEL to advance its partners’ agendas in areas such as healthcare, climate regulation, and sexual politics? This Cleveland eighth-grade standard referenced on the CASEL website creates gender confusion by asking students to “[i]dentify what you like about yourself, including things that might be considered atypical for your gender.” Sample lessons offered by a CASEL partner called Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility teach students the perils of climate change and fracking and encourage students to “take action toward transgender equity.” Thus does CASEL’s SEL accomplish its partners’ desires to change the world.

The criteria for SEL are so subjective that ideologues can twist them into almost anything. Suppose SEL curricula and guidelines adopted the argument of some psychiatrists that “extreme racism” and “extreme homophobia” should be classified as mental disorders. Could students then be “diagnosed” for those disorders, and perhaps treated with dangerous antipsychotics, as California prisoners have been? Already children have been screened without consent and forcibly treated with these drugs as a result of school-related mental-health programs. How far will this go?

At the very least, parents might object if SEL is used to turn their children into worker bees for the global economy. Former Michigan Governor John Engler, now chairman of the Business Roundtable (BRT), co-chairs the National SEL Commission. BRT has long promoted Common Core, SEL skills development, and treating children as widgets in the labor-supply chain.

In fact, BRT’s education and workforce committee chairman was Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who called American students “defective” “products” if schools don’t “step up the performance level,” apparently by implementing Common Core. BRT member Exxon is also a major funder of the data-mining, including SEL data, of the Data Quality Campaign. (We’ve provided an abundance of evidence of the coordinated effort by these business, government, and foundation entities to assess, record, and analyze personal characteristics of children.) When Hillary Clinton and Marc Tucker’s Goals 2000 and School-to-Work first made SEL part of the federal education lexicon for workforce-development, BRT was cheering them on.

SEL is the embodiment of what government schools should not be doing to children. Parents and other citizens must stand against this tyranny of the mind by vigorously opposing these programs, refusing to elect leaders that support them, and demanding that legislators defund them.

NOTE: This article was originally published at Conservative Review under the title Think Common Core is bad? New standards crank up the creep-factor to 11 on about November 20, 2016 but was lost after website revisions.