In 2000, Booker was brought to Michigan to tout a ballot initiative called Proposal 1 that would have made private school vouchers a constitutional right in the state. He was invited to speak in Grand Rapids at the Wealthy Theater (really) by Betsy DeVos and Richard DeVos Jr., who were leaders of the school choice movement in their home state of Michigan and around the country.

Why was he invited? “We wanted someone who wasn’t from the suburbs,” Dick DeVos told a reporter, as recounted by author and educator Jennifer Berkshire in this New Republic piece.

The voters crushed Proposal 1, but over 15 years, the DeVoses and their allies used the arguments Booker made — that parents should decide where public money should go, not school districts.

As mayor, Booker pushed education policies that supported school choice and measures that sought to operate public schools as if they were businesses. With the help of a $100 million matching grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and New Jersey’s Republican governor at the time, Chris Christie, Booker sought an overhaul of the school system. It focused on expanding charter schools, evaluating teachers with student standardized test scores, giving teachers performance pay, closing under-enrolled schools and other corporate-informed actions. This approach was popular in the Obama era but has largely failed to show the results supporters promised.

In Newark, the long-troubled public schools remain troubled, and the Zuckerberg experiment — announced on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” as Booker wanted — was deemed less than successful, with much of the money going to consultants. Zuckerberg has said he regrets the way the effort was undertaken, without input from teachers or community representatives.

Democrats traditionally have had good relations with labor unions, but Booker and the teachers unions often fought. The Newark teachers union opposed his reelection for mayor in 2010 and did not endorse him in a 2013 special election for a U.S. Senate seat, although the New Jersey Education Association did endorse him in the Senate race.

Booker held a seat on the board of directors of a DeVos education group, known first as the Alliance for School Choice and now as the American Federation for Children Growth Fund, and he spoke at federation events in 2012 and 2016. In 2016, he urged participants at a policy summit of the federation to “stay faithful to the work we are doing.”

Perhaps to DeVos’s surprise, Booker began to turn away from her after Trump was elected. Before her confirmation by the Senate in February 2017, he said he had “serious early concerns” about her becoming education secretary. In a speech on the Senate floor, he said he would not vote to approve her for a number of reasons, including concerns that she would not protect the civil rights of vulnerable students. I could find no record of him saying the same thing in public before that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/06/cory-bookers-close-ties-betsy-devos-go-back-long-way-including-campaign-donation-her-husband/?noredirect=on

(I also wasn't happy about Obama nominating Arne Duncan or "Race to the Top" )

If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided

SleeplessinSoCal

(9,107 posts)

8. I believe that Yang is a blight on the Democratic Party.

Reply to Archae (Original post)

Sat Sep 14, 2019, 05:21 PM

Sep 2019

I swear his $1,000 give away is meant to hurt Democrats. Just as Sam Elliot's character in "The Ranch" compares doing nothing to being a Democrat. "Half the time I don't feel like doing anything. That ought to make me an honorary Democrat".
I have relatives who I wish would stay silent on politics because of their work ethic.

How can the DNC be sure he isn't a mole?

If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden

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