The latest bit of creative pretzel logic on this issue came yesterday from Richard Zeile, a Republican member of the State Board of Education in an op-ed titled “School choice could be used as anti-bullying tool”. In his piece, he says that schools of choice are the answer to our state’s bullying issue. He recounts his own childhood where he was bullied and begged his parents to let him move to another school to escape it. Because his family attended a specific church, he was able to make the move and escape his bullying classmates, leaving them to bully other kids not as fortunate as him.

Make no mistake: this is simply a disingenous argument to further his anti-public school, pro-private school and school services privatization agenda. In fact, Zeile doesn’t call them public schools, he calls them “government schools”. Nothing raises the hackles of his conservative base like refering to them in that way. It’s just more red meat, suggesting that these schools are akin to indoctrination centers run by the government. And not just any government, either. The OBAMA government!

Meanwhile, the adults in our state are trying to enact a REAL solution: policies and rules that intend to eliminate bullying, not allow bullies to drive their victims to another school. And by adults, in this case, I’m talking about a 13-year old, Carson Borbely, and a 16-year old, Katy Butler. I have written about these two amazing students from Ann Arbor (HERE and HERE) and their Change.org petition. As I write this, their petition now has 56,248 signatures asking the Michigan Senate to do better by students.

Fortunately, Katy and Carson’s efforts have been getting noticed. Yesterday, they were featured in an article by the Detroit News.

Butler, the 16-year-old who was bullied in middle school, isn’t willing to compromise — nor are more than 56,770 people who had signed a petition as of this weekend that Butler posted on www.change.org. The petition asks for a bill that lists the reasons why students are most often bullied.

Under a headline that read “Help Michigan Students Stop the ‘License to Bully’ Bill,” Butler wrote: “As students, we deserve better.”

“I am not unique. Students all across Michigan have stories just like mine.”

It’s interesting to see two teenagers acting more responsible and intelligently on the issue of bullying than a member of our State Board of Education. They want to solve the problem by addressing the root cause: bullies. Zeile just wants to further his conservative, anti-public school political agenda.

Unfortunately, despite these efforts, the Senate took the easy way out today and, rather than strengthening the anti-bullying bill passed by the House, they passed it on a 35-2 vote. This bill does not contain language that spells out specific types of bullying (gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, etc.), something many advocates (and many Michigan Democrats) supported.

It now goes to Governor Rick Snyder who has indicated he will sign it into law.

Cross-posted at Eclectablog.

• Foundation for Educational Choice, which drove Indiana’s new school voucher program; 

• Muskegon’s Education Action Group;

• Michelle Rhee’s Student’s First (an AFC affiliate)

Those of us that lobbied the last few weeks on the anti-union tenure and collective bargaining bills know Student’s First was the driving force behind those bills. Students First can be depended on to fund the coming Right to Work (Freeload) campaign in Michigan, as it will set the stage for the kind of voucher campaigns they are funding across the nation.

Devos has also formed the AFC Action Fund, a 527 intended to elect pro-voucher candidates nation-wide. It spent $730,000 last year in Wisconsin alone. The ultimate target is to get public funding of private schools and the privatization of public education.

Thanks to the Citizen’s United case (funded in part by, guess who … Betsy Devos), tracking this kind of spending will soon be impossible, since qualifying PACs will no longer have to reveal their donor information.