Brooklyn writer Bill Bradley warns Betsy DeVos is ‘Coming for your children’ in leftist denial of facts
Betsy DeVos will be the Secretary of Education and leftists appear to losing all common sense as the hit pieces continue. Bill Bradley posted an article titled “Betsy DeVos is Coming for your children” starting off by stating that “DeVos is highly qualified to implement her vision—children using vouchers to attend Kiddie Cato Institutes in the back of churches, more or less—for America. After all, she’s done it before.”
The post is one rant after another, calling the free market education advocate a “religious wingnut of the highest order” before quoting a public school activist from Detroit as a concerned mother. He notes that she’s a “community activist” who says she’s “terrified.”
The parent, Hilary Young, protests regularly, in Michigan and traveled to Washington to protest DeVos.
Is the education as bad a Young and Bradley claim?
“Graduation and dropout rates for the Class of 2015 show 79.7% of students graduated in four years — up from 74% five years ago. Meanwhile, the dropout rate declined to 9.1%, from 11% five years ago,” a Detroit Free Press reported last March.
Here’s the data they published:
Here are the 2015 rates for some school districts in metro Detroit:
- Detroit Public Schools: Graduation rate, 77.3%. Dropout rate, 11.4%.
- Utica Community Schools: Graduation rate, 92.4%. Dropout rate, 3.18%.
- Plymouth-Canton Community Schools: Graduation rate, 89.5%. Dropout rate, 2.5%.
- Dearborn Public Schools: Graduation rate, 89.8. Dropout rate, 3.8%.
- Southfield Public Schools: Graduation rate, 92.7%. Dropout rate, 3.9%.
- Warren Consolidated Schools: Graduation rate, 82.3%. Dropout rate, 4.5%.
- Grosse Pointe Public Schools: Graduation rate, 95.08%. Dropout rate, 0.96%.
- Bloomfield Hills Schools: Graduation rate, 95.3%. Dropout rate, 0.69%.
- Walled Lake Consolidated Schools: Graduation rate, 90.2%. Dropout rate, 4.4%.
- Chippewa Valley Schools: Graduation rate, 91.7%. Dropout rate, 2.75%
- Farmington Public Schools: Graduation rate, 91.8%. Dropout rate, 2.3%
- Troy School District: Graduation rate, 91.3%. Dropout rate, 2.91
- Livonia Public Schools: Graduation rate, 91.4%. Dropout rate, 3.09%
Bradley writes paragraph after paragraph bashing the charter schools in Michigan and it’s no surprise when we look at another article from the Detroit Free Press titled “Detroit charter schools show gains, but lag behind state“:
“MAPSA released data last fall that showed 17% of charter students in Detroit were rated proficient in math, compared with 13% of students in traditional public schools.” — Charter schools are better, but both are still horrible.
public domain pic from May 4 1916
“The 2013-14 MEAP data show 43% of charter students were proficient in reading, compared with 39% of students in traditional public schools.” — same result.
This is truly fake news.
Bradley writes that “A 2014 report found that charter and public-school students were essentially equally proficient in math and reading” – not equal, but close.
Moreover, it shows that the DeVos, free market, charter school movement is NOT as horrible as Bradley, Young and others believe it to be.
Bradley remoans the precious public school, government run system: “When a local student moves to the charter, the DPS schools loses not just a student but the cash that comes with it.”
Yes, and those parents would seemingly put their kid BACK IN PUBLIC SCHOOL if their education did NOT improve.
That is the FREE MARKET and it doesn’t appear to be as bad as you’d like it to be.
photo/ Pete Linforth via pixabay
