Heavens to Betsy

Dems sell out and vote to roll back Wall Street reform; Conor Lamb proves every district is in play; a real education expert schools Betsy DeVos; and what’s missing from the opioids debate. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

After last Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made the rounds on the internet in a truly cringe-inducing clip. If you’re somehow not among the millions who’ve already watched it, the conservative billionaire mega-donor has been behind a decades-long charter school experiment in Michigan. But when pushed to answer for its apparent failure, DeVos was unable to come up with anything even approaching an explanation. So Rebecca talks to someone who can: Allie Gross, a reporter at the Detroit Free Press and a former charter school teacher in the city.

Later in the show: “Opioids fill the news with a steady stream of stories of lives lost from overdose and abuse. What we rarely hear is the other side — opioids are also the most powerful pain medication we have. For me, they were life-restoring.” So writes Kate Nicholson in an op-ed in The Hill titled “The Other Side of the Opioid Epidemic.” Rebecca talks with Kate about her experience with chronic pain — and how we address opioid misuse without making it impossible for people like her to manage their pain.

But first, everything you need to know about the #BankLobbyistAct just passed by the Senate, the blue wave continues with Conor Lamb’s upset victory in PA-18, and more, with Indivisible’s Associate Policy Director Chad Bolt (and The Slevinator, of course), in another installment of In Case You Missed It.

This week’s guests:

• Chad Bolt, Indivisible’s Associate Policy Director
• Allie Gross, reporter at the Detroit Free Press and a former charter school teacher
• Kate Nicholson, civil rights attorney, nationally-recognized expert in the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a chronic pain survivor

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read more about Detroit’s charter schools in Allie Gross’ in-depth examination for Vice; Detroit News breaks down the DeVos interview; The New York Times illustrates how the Michigan education system is transforming into a business.
• Kate Nicholson details her personal experience with chronic pain in this essay for The Hill and a Ted Talk; Anne Fuqua tracks the increasing suicides of her fellow chronic pain patients; Vice investigates the increasing suicide rate of those suffering chronic pain; States pursue stricter laws limiting opioid prescriptions.
• Check out Indivisible’s resources on their new Indivisible435 project in the lead up to November’s midterm elections; Vox explains the bank deregulation bill Democrats just helped pass

This program aired on March 15th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, following Betsy DeVos’s meltown on 60 Minutes, I talk with someone who actually knows something about education, Allie Gross a reporter at the Detroit Free Press and a former teacher at a charter school. Later in the show, the other side of the opioid epidemic, I talk with Kate Nicholson, a former civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice and a chronic pain survivor. But first, some of us have watched the vote on the so-called Economic Growth Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act happen so that, Jeremy, you’re giving away that you’re here. [LAUGHTER]. I was going to say so that you didn’t have to and then I was going to and guess who is here to help us know what was in it, Jeremy Slevin who has been watching it and also wait oh, hang on, it’s also Chad Bolt from Indivisible. Chad –

CHAD BOLT: Is this a taping of Off Kilter?

VALLAS: We’re taping Off Kilter right now.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Oh, you just happened to walk by.

BOLT: Am I welcome back in here because I was thrown under the bus last time for not watching a certain number of TV shows.

VALLAS: To be clear, Chad threw himself squarely under the bus. He didn’t need any help from me because it turned out that not only had he never seen Seinfeld but while I was telling him how bad it was that he hadn’t seen Seinfeld it came out that he also hadn’t seen Ghostbusters!

SLEVIN: Yeah, you got to go back.

BOLT: And yet, here I am another episode of Off Kilter.

SLEVIN: Can we make that a condition of having him back on the show?

VALLAS: Well, here’s the thing. Chad, we’ll let you back into the studio and join the segment if you bring in the wine that you’re holding that clearly has been helping you get through watching this painful vote. And oh good, thank you, I’d like some. I’m going to drink some. So while I drink this wine the bill is called the Economic Growth Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act and we are taping right after the Senate just passed it with 17 Democrats joining Republicans and voting for this bill which is a massive rollback of regulations protection the American economy from shenanigans by Wall Street that brought about the economic recession that we only recently come out of. Chad, you just watched the vote. Tell us what do we need to know about this bill now that it’s passed and why the heck were 17 Dems on it?

BOLT: Sure thing. Well you eluded to it just now.

VALLAS: Put your wine down first.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: Look, this is water. You eluded to it just now, the 2008 financial crisis was terrible. I think everyone remember that nightmare, everyone I think probably knows someone or had a family member that was dealing with foreclosure or got laid off or had a family member see their retirement account wiped out and we know that was all brought about in large part because of the lax oversight of big banks. And that federal regulators just didn’t know what was going on. So Congress stepped in at that point and said we can’t ever let this happen again because remember, all of these shenanigans as you called them Rebecca, also required billions of dollars worth of taxpayer funded bailouts and so Congress stepped in and said we can’t ever let this happen again. And so they put into place a number of sensible regulations and requirements that banks now have to comply with to prevent something like this. So they have keep more money in reserve, they have to write a living will that says what will happen in the event of a failure. They have to undergo annual stress tests that test out exactly what would happen to a financial institution under stress and it turns out well banks don’t really like having to do this. They would rather go back to a time where they were far more unregulated and unfortunately, that’s what this bill does. You mentioned there were 17 Democrats that also voted for it.

VALLAS: I’m taking another sip of wine as you finish the rest of that thought.

BOLT: I know, I’m just going to say every time maybe like Democrats voted for it, take a drink situation.

SLEVIN: Those playing along at home, feel free to do the same.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Only if it’s after 5 and you’re listening, of course.

SLEVIN: No pressure.

VALLAS: It’s a family show.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: So 17 Democrats voted for it.

VALLAS: Drink, drink, drink! You made up the rule.

SLEVIN: This thing doesn’t work on radio.

VALLAS: You’re in the studio next to him.

SLEVIN: I’m trying to sell it to the people at home.

VALLAS: Yeah, OK.

BOLT: Because they are talking about like oh, this is going to be really good for community banks and credit unions in our state. They just can’t lend, our rural communities can’t get access to credit and it’s because of all these big bad regulations from the federal government intended to prevent another economic crisis.

VALLAS: And that’s the line we keep hearing, from Senator Mark Warner in Virginia and others. Oh, this is really about helping community banks, that’s the lead talking point we keep hearing but that’s not what this is about at all.

BOLT: So the problem is there is relief in here from community banks but the bill goes so much further than that. In fact, banks with assets up to $250 billion, so that’s 25 of the 38 largest banks in the country, get some kind of regulatory relief from this bill. Their annual stress tests go from being annual to periodic. They’re allowed to keep less money in reserve. They have to comply with way less paperwork and regulations. So again, Democrats voted for it, drink.

VALLAS: Drink.

BOLT: Because they say they’re helping community banks but it really just goes so much further. In fact, it even goes beyond helping banks with under $250 billion in assets, it even helps bigger banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo because it gives them new legal footing to challenge Federal Reserve oversight. Basically the rules that they write for them. And so this just turned into a total big bank bonanza.

VALLAS: That’s fun to say, by the way.

BOLT: It’s a big bank bonanza. Way beyond how the bill started.

SLEVIN: And there was an opportunity for Democrats to make the bill better, right? They didn’t have to vote on the motion to proceed. There was an opportunity to say hey, we want to help community banks but we can do it without also deregulating Bank of America and giving all these hand outs.

BOLT: You hit the nail on the head, Jeremy. If Democrats wanted to pass a community bank bill they could have written and supported a community bank bill. That’s not the focus of this legislation at all. In fact one of the biggest problems with the bill is that it actually lets racial discrimination in mortgage lending go further unchecked because it exempts the vast majority of banks from collecting data under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, it’s called HMDA data. And that is the data that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau uses to spot red lining and put a stop to it. And this is not like an abstract thing, there are recent cases, one recent one is Hudson City where the CFPB used this data that banks are required to collect to substantiate their allegations of redlining which locks communities of color out of homeownership. That data will no longer have to be collected under this bill. That could have put a stop to it. They could have said, we’re not voting for the motion to proceed unless you take this section out of the bill. They didn’t do that.

VALLAS: So Jeremy just passed me a note saying that he actually wants to add a new rule to the drinking game which is that everytime you say Jeremy, you hit the nail on the head we drink. I’m totally fine with that because we’re never going to actually drink on that one so we might have to come up with another one.

SLEVIN: That’s the only time.

VALLAS: We only drink once for that one.

SLEVIN: Everyone else has to drink when you say that because then I’ll sound even smarter because you guys will be drinking more. It’s a well thought out rule, I hit the nail on the head.

VALLAS: I think you did. But so Jeremy, you know what I’m drinking because you said that. You said that about yourself, I didn’t say that the rule only applied when other people, ok I’m drinking. Ok, so this bill which is driving to drink while we talk about it which is now past the senate, we should talk about what comes next, Chad, with that bill but it’s not the only news this week which has caused us to reach for a bottle of wine. There has actually been really good news out of Pennsylvania’s 18th district in the form of Conor Lamb in a massive upset special election. He won in a district that Trump won by 20 points. This is a deep, deep red district that Democrats never thought they would be able to take back and yet he has been declared the victor. I’m curious Jeremy, how you feel that that news is hitting at the same time as we’re watching [PHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] Oh, Jesus Christ.

SLEVIN: I’ll talk while you field that call.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: We all know who that was because it was Bonjour ringing through my phone, Phil you’re in such trouble. Jeremy, please continue saying smart things.

SLEVIN: I think it shows two things. One is that you first of all, Democrats just need to show up. Like field a candidate, as Chad was saying before the show, we haven’t even fielded candidates, Democrats have not even fielded candidates in this district recently. So just showing up, half of life is showing up. And second –

VALLAS: Yeah, and not writing off the districts that you thought were totally lost causes.

SLEVIN: And you don’t have to adopt conservative or Republican principles to be an effective candidate in a red district. Conor Lamb, while not a perfect candidate at all, he ran squarely against the Trump tax cuts, he strongly defended Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these are programs have paid into, they are not welfare, stop trying to stigmatize people on that.

VALLAS: Not that there is anything wrong with welfare but that’s a whole separate conversation we’ve had many times on this show.

SLEVIN: But by and large on economic issues was not afraid to strike a populist tone. So the idea that we have to cater to bank lobbyists in order to win in red states I think was in large part proven wrong just last night and it’s ironic that Democrats the next day voted for this bank lobbyist bill.

VALLAS: So Chad, what are, Indivisible does a ton of work not just around trying to educate folks about the policy debates happening in Washington but really about trying to flip these house and the senate so that we’re in a position where we can actually advance policies that cut poverty, that expand opportunity, that restore the American dream. Tell us a little bit about what you think the lessons are coming out of the Conor Lamb victory and what you think they mean for what you can expect to see in November.

BOLT: That’s exactly right, Indivisible started as a project to demystify congress and our latest Indivisible 435 project is to demystify elections. Because I think Jeremy really hit the nail on the head –

SLEVIN: OOOooooh! Everybody else drinks.

VALLAS: Hang on, I need to pour myself a little more because I ran out the last time, Jeremy.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: I’m surprised you didn’t point at me.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: I’m learning the lessons of radio fast.

VALLAS: I’m actually holding the bottle. I’m actually going to just drink out of the bottle.

BOLT: I’m mean it’s right, when we fight we win but you have to show up to do that. So no Democrat filed to run in this district in 2014 or 2016 for two cycles in a row, Congressman Murphy was reelected without even so much as a fight. Groups in DC were sort of writing it off as an unwinnable district but over the last year we’ve seen dozens of Indivisible members and allies raising their hands to run for office. Every district is different of course, but we got to compete to win. As you said, Jeremy, Republicans in this district were counting on the popularity of the tax bill.

SLEVIN: It’s nonexistent popularity that if you put out enough corporate press release will apparently just manifest itself.

VALLAS: We’re relying on the popularity of the single most unpopular piece of legislation ever to be considered in Congress let alone become law until the Koch brothers poured billions of dollars into trying to market it.

BOLT: I think that’s exactly right. This is one of the important lessons, I think, from this special election is Republicans made such a huge investment, dumped a ton of money, the Congressional Leadership Fund and the NRCC, the pummeled the district with ads in February, they even attacked Conor Lamb for not supporting the tax law.

VALLAS: Oopsy!

BOLT: But by March, the tax ads had disappeared. They were off the air because Republicans found through their own polling and otherwise that voters were just not buying it. I mean listeners of this show will know the tax law was sold as helping the middle class, creating jobs, whatever, but in reality it was huge tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations and when the Republicans started trying to sell it in PA-18, again, this is a red, red district, plus 20 for Trump, voters weren’t buying what the Republicans were selling on the tax scam.

SLEVIN: And the narrative, I think, around the tax scam has been over the past few months, oh, people are starting to like it. Oh, “X” company put out a press release saying they’re going to give some bonuses when in reality, a, the bonuses are dwarfed by giant stock buy backs, they’re for workers who have been there for 20 years and are small bonuses. And meanwhile workers are not buying it. The tax bill is still deeply unpopular and the idea that the media was perpetuated by repeating these press releases that maybe the tax law will save them in November, we again learned that this is a really, really unpopular bill and it was never passed to be popular. They knew that.

BOLT: And the other thing that is unpopular actually is deregulating Wall Street.

VALLAS: My god!

BOLT: Another deeply unpopular idea, a vast majority of Americans don’t like it. They think banks should be more regulated than they are, not less. And yet you saw 17 Democrats voted, (drink!) in the Senate –

VALLAS: I was already drinking, does that count?

BOLT: To do that, but as you said Jeremy, Conor Lamb didn’t have to take on the mantle of the Republican tax agenda in a red district, just like these Democrats voting for this bank deregulation bill don’t have to take up a deregulation agenda to compete in their red states.

VALLAS: So where do things go from here now that the Senate has passed this bill and is there anything, people listening who are angry and possibly now drunk after this segment can do?

BOLT: Well it’s really important that you let your Democratic senator know that you’re upset about this bill passing, whether they voted for it or not. This bill isn’t going straight tto Trump’s desk to become law, it either has to go back to the House for a vote in the house or it has to go to conference committee which is where the House Republicans reconcile the differences between the two different versions of the bill that they passed. It’s looking a little more likely right now that it’s going to go to conference because guess what, House Republicans don’t think this bill is conservative enough, they’d like to see additional consumer protections repealed, they’d like to see additional deregulation measures before they vote on it, and so it will likely go to conference which means once the conference committee is done with their work and they put out a new version of the bill the senate will have to vote on it again and if it gets even worse than it already is, your Senate Democrats especially need to hear from you.

VALLAS: And Chad, just to end on a happier note because why would we all want to leave it there staring down the barrel of perhaps another economic recession which is certainly what a lot of experts are saying this bill could actually lead in the interim or long term, for folks who are thinking hey man, I’m into this resistance thing but I kind of what to don’t just go to, see I can’t even string together a sentence anymore, this is where I’ve ended after this segment, being fed wine.

SLEVIN: I was wondering who this character was.

VALLAS: Just stop saying, “Jeremy, you hit the nail on the head and I’ll be fine.” [LAUGHTER] Just stop. For people who don’t just want to go to rallies and marches and call their member of congress anymore and feel like they’re ready to take it to that next level and throwing their hat in the ring to run because they want to be part of the change here in Washington, where they can go to learn more and what can they do to get resources to do that?

BOLT: Absolutely, so check out Indivisible435.org. It is our one stop shop for everything you need in the electoral space and you’ll find there everything we are doing to support the big blue wave that we all hope is coming in November. I think we are obviously, that’s what we’re hoping for but the big blue wave isn’t going to build itself. We’ve got to start now to start working and building that tsunami so we all have a happy election night coming over.

VALLAS: Well the blue wave is everyone’s new favorite emoji, I know it’s mine so blue wave emoji to you too Chad and thank you for all of your work trying to help folks who are looking to run and also hold their members of congress accountable. Check out our Medium page syllabus where you can find all kinds of resources including the ones Chad just mentioned. And Jeremy, I think you really just hit the name on the head, there.

SLEVIN: Oh, well thank you.

VALLAS: So why don’t we drink to that on that note.

SLEVIN: I’m stone cold sober.

VALLAS: Chad Bolt is the senior policy manager among many other things at Indivisible and somebody who has terrible taste in television and movies. Jeremy Slevin is the Slevinator and needs no other kinds of outro, introductions.

SLEVIN: It’s because you don’t remember my title.

VALLAS: He’s many things on this show and at the Center for American Progress. So thanks to you both.

[LAUGHTER]

BOLT: Jeremy, you’re the director of advocacy at the Poverty to Prosperity program.

SLEVIN: Thank you, thank you Chad.

VALLAS: And he hit the nail on the head. He did, he did, that Chad there. [LAUGHTER] But that’s not a drink because that’s Chad, not Jeremy. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. After last Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made the rounds on the internet in a truly cringe inducing clip. If you’re somehow not among the millions who’ve already watched it the conservative billionaire mega donor has been behind a decades long charter school experiment in Michigan. But when pushed to answer for it’s apparent failure on 60 Minutes, DeVos was unable to come up with anything even approach an explanation. So I decided to talk to someone who can. Allie Gross is a journalist at the Detroit Free Press, she’s also a former charter school teacher in that city and she joins me by phone. Allie, thanks so much for joining the show.

ALLIE GROSS: Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: So just to kick off I don’t even know where to start after watching that interview, not even an interview really a meltdown on 60 Minutes, where should we even begin for people who saw it or who didn’t see it, what should we be taking away and what did you take away when you watched it.

GROSS: I feel like when Secretary DeVos, when she was going through her confirmation hearing it felt like everyone was paying attention to her and that you could go on any social media platform and people were constantly having opinions because that went so awry. But then almost for a year we really hadn’t heard a lot from her or about her, she wasn’t as public and I think that the 60 Minutes interview brought her back into the spotlight again. And I think you’re totally right where there it felt like so many different topics were covered and yet there was so little content that produced during the course of that interview but one thing, I think the clip that had been shared most was she had been asked about investing in students versus institutions and she made the point that it was more important to invest in students than systems. And I think that’s the part that most caught my attention because I think that most people could agree that obviously investing in schools, curriculum, teachers, is pretty fundamental and that is where and how one would become educated.

VALLAS: But it sounds pretty good when you put it in those terms. Investing in students, how could that possibly be a bad thing?

GROSS: So it definitely sounds great. I think that we also have to realize thought, how do students get educated and having, there have been so many studies that show that good teachers, a strong solid curriculum, school buildings where you have, I don’t know you remember when in Baltimore in the winter was having problems with heating. Those are conditions, those are systems, those are the institutions and to not invest in those can have really problematic and long term effects on how one would get an education. But the other thing that I think is interesting about Secretary DeVos is her whole thing is about choice obviously and she makes the argument often that wealthy families, they have choice, they can choose between a private school, a public school, a parochial school, those are all options that they have. And so why can’t low income families, why can’t families in the neighborhoods, quote, unquote, why can’t they have choices as well?

And something that has come up in so much of my reporting is that when you talk to families in urban communities where the charter movement really has been laser focused, what families typically want is they want that option, that choice, just a solid really good neighborhood school. That choice that doesn’t really necessarily exist in those communities anymore because when you have competition like charter schools and, I’ll speak to Michigan for a second but in Michigan you have money that follows students and so when you have competition and money following students it can become almost exacerbating the competition because when money follows students for example, each student is worth let’s say, quote unquote, if you’re investing in students, in Michigan it’s about $7,500. And if a student leaves a traditional public schools for one of those choices, they can, they take that $7,500 and then the overhead costs however, they don’t suddenly dissipate. So anything from being able to pay teachers, being able to heat the building, those costs don’t go away and so schools have to make cuts.

And when they have to make cuts,that can make it so the school is even less attractive. So suddenly maybe they’ll get rid of their sports program or they will not get a new curriculum. Maybe they wont get the latest updated technology for their school. Whatever they choose to do to make those cuts, the school becomes less attractive and so more students end up leaving the school as well. And so maybe the school, the competition will affect the ability for the neighborhood public schools to be really good public schools because they have less funding. And so I think her argument that choice should exist, what people are saying is they want that choice to have a good school in their neighborhood and too much competition can really hurt that ability to happen.

VALLAS: Now you have reported extensively on the experience of charter school in Detroit and the implications and consequences for the Detroit public school system. You actually wrote a piece a couple of years back for Vice looking at a really fabulous long form piece that I really highly recommend people read and which we will link to in our show syllabus but really looking at the aftermath of the experiment. Tell that story a little bit. What happened in Detroit and what did it teach us about the charter experience?

GROSS: Yeah, so the story that I focused on, I focused on a school on the west side of Detroit called Oakman Orthopedic and it was a school specifically, originally it was built for special needs students but it ended up opening up to the general population. But it was a really special, when you kind of go by it now it’s been closed, but when you go by it, it’s a magnificent beautiful building. It was built in 1926, every single, so much care went into it. Very small campus, teachers that were super focused and had a background in special education, the families that went there, it was very tight knit. And the school ended up closing and it closed when Detroit public schools, it was put under emergency management in 2009. And when that happened, you had a series of emergency managers who started trying to make cuts and one of those cuts was closing, 100s of schools were closed in that process. And to kind of flick back, one of the reasons these cuts had to be happening and that doesn’t always get addressed is typically people say that the DPS was mismanaged. There this narrative, public schools are failing, DPS, the board was not doing their job. But in reality, it was competition. It was the kind of chaotic system that had been put in place when charter schools came to Michigan in 1994. And when you had, as I was describing before, charters, money following students, the kind of positive feedback loop where if a child leaves this traditional public school district for whatever reason and then money leaves the district, the district has to make cuts, less appealing.

And so when the emergency managers came in and they decided to close Oakman, it kind of creating this devastating effect for these families where then they were given these choices but the choices that they were given, it was two public schools, one was 1.7 miles away, the other one 2.3 and there was no busing that was involved for the students, the students would have to walk there so again, their close neighborhood school was closed. And the schools, they weren’t even that good. And the charter schools that were nearby, they were also not that good. I think they were rated a D on a school wide accountability listserv. So you have parents, families, trying to find really good options around them but not being served in the best way because honestly money is just being spread so thin by all of the competition that exists.

VALLAS: Now speaking of money, that’s where Betsy Devos and her family comes in in terms of featuring promenantly in the story what happened in Detroit when it comes to the charter experience. What was Betsy DeVos and her family’s role in all of this?

GROSS: Right so the DeVos family, their role, they played a really bid part in bringing charter schools to Michigan in 1993. And so there is an article that came out in 1996 that details by Curt Guyette an investigative journalist in the city, he was working for the Detroit Metro Times at the time.

VALLAS: And who also played a big role in uncovering the Flint water crisis.

GROSS: Exactly, yes.

VALLAS: Which listeners of this show will remember him telling that really harrowing story in his reporting there so love hearing him in this story as well.

GROSS: Yes, Curt is amazing. Curt, and I love this piece because again it’s written in 1996, you have none of the analysis that goes into, or opinion that goes into debates on the charter school movement, it was written so closely to the inception of charters in Michigan and it’s cool to read it now because you’re reading it 20 years later and you can really see how so much that Curt was reporting on played out. It’s this incredible almost artifact I see it as. But what Curt describes, how there were four families, two of which were the Devos’s and the Princes, so Betsy DeVos’s parents as well as her mother and father in law. And they donated a quarter of a million dollars between 1989 and 1994 to school reform organizations pushing for the charter school movement to start in Michigan. And how Curt describes it in the article is that these families, this group who he calls the big four in the article, they had really been donating at the time to organization and groups in the United States that were religious and that were pushing for the Christian-ization of American politics. And Curt argues that the passage of the charter legislation was really a middle step to getting eventually funding for parochial schools, so “Paroch-aid”.

Because Michigan voted against charter vouchers in 1978, so this is viewed as another route to get eventually, the voters don’t want it; we’ll find another way to do it through legislation. And so he describes it as a two-prong approach. There was the first school, which was you had to make the case that traditional public schools were failing because if you could make that case it became more palatable to have this alternative, vouchers. And the second case was you had to convince the public that it was OK to give money to a private institution and charters kind of fall right in the middle, public dollars by private management. And so he describes it as this [INAUDIBLE] public and private and charters are this Trojan horse and so that one day the public would then say, oh you know what, we’re already giving money to charters we could totally give money to vouchers as well to private schools as well.

And there was the second benefit of this is it really also broke the teachers union, because charter schools are not typically, even though the first charter school was unionized in Michigan they are not typically unionized. And teachers unions, they typically support Democratic Party and so it would really hurt the funding and coffers of the teachers union and eventually it would hurt the funding of the Democratic Party. So this whole map that he has detailed in this article but in terms of the DeVos family, they continued to go on and support school choice efforts in the states.

So in the 2000s Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick, they got behind supporting again, putting on the ballot another try at voucher schools. They spent $12 million on promoting this initiative; this legislation and they were unsuccessful. Voters voted against it. And so the following year, 2001, Secretary DeVos started the Great Lakes Education Project, which up until this point she was nominated, she sat on the board of it. They helped bank roll it and start it and that was a massive vehicle by which they would give money to legislators to support school choice in the region and they had, they were very powerful in terms of eventually being able to get their way. They were the ones who pushed to lift the charter cap in the state. I believe that was in 2011 and so these efforts, school choice has really proliferated in Michigan and more so in other states, proliferated without a lot of checks and balances. We have more authorizers than any other state. So authorizers are who gives the go ahead for a charter school to open. And in Michigan you could basically be any public body to be an authorizer. And the authorizers, they get 3% of the per people funding so there’s also incentive for authorizers to keep opening schools even if they’re not necessarily living up to the goal of providing a really good education.

In some cases you have an authorizer, Bay Mills in upper peninsula, in northern Michigan and they’re authorizing schools in Detroit so like 7 hours away so I don’t know how easy it would be to keep tabs on the schools you’re authorizing.

VALLAS: It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

GROSS: It’s such a far distance.

VALLAS: Now you bring not just the perspective of a journalist who has been reporting extensively on this set of issues generally but very specifically in Detroit, you also bring as I mentioned up top, the perspective of a former teacher in a charter school and actually in Detroit. What was your experience in that work and I’m curious if you have anything you can share in the way of experiences or anecdotes of what it’s like inside a charter school and particularly such a troubled experiment with charter schools.

GROSS: Yeah so I did Teach for America, pretty naïve. And actually, when I think back on it, I pushed to work at a charter school because I was under the guise of so many people, even though I had such a limited perspective on education, but I was under the guise that charter schools were the solution and that charter schools were better schools. Had no actually evidence or reason why but it was the rhetoric of the time, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” it was just about to come out, I remember watching the trailer right before I got assigned to teach at the charter school that I was at. And the school I was at was by all accounts really beautiful, we had this million dollar football field that had just built. It was superficial, it looked great.

We did not have curriculum of any sorts. We had a head of curriculum on staff, really charming guy but we had no actual curriculum and there never seemed to be talks about curriculum. I think my third year they ended up buying a consultant to help with curriculum but there was never any follow through. We constantly were buying new things and then no follow up on it. I think my first year I was observed only twice by anyone on staff even though I was supposed to be observed once a week. It’s funny anecdotes but it’s serious because there are actual kids in these classrooms that are supposed to be learning but they got rid of Spanish my second year and they replaced it with Mandarin which seemed crazy. And their idea was to be able to compete with the global economy one day. But a lot of the kids were struggling with just learning to read in English. And now you’re just adding this whole, all these characters. And so these classes which, they were paying $140,000 for this Mandarin program, it devolved into like chopstick obstacle races and the kids were watching anime during class and it never progressed beyond a really superficial base level learning.

But for my school I became really interested in funding accountability at the school because our superintendent my second year, he announced he was leaving to go work this non-profit that was going to provide resources across the city. I found that to be odd because we didn’t have systems in place at my school but he was leaving. He continued to call meetings all the time even the third year, the 2012–2013 school year and we had already replaced him with our head of curriculum, became the interim superintendent so I was confused why this man still had power on camps. I had heard rumblings that he was still on payroll so at this final staff meeting that he called in may 2013, a year and a half after he said that he was leaving I asked point blank, I was fed up, I knew I wasn’t coming back to the school. Even though we weren’t unionized and none of my other colleagues would have asked this but I didn’t have any fear of repercussions, I just asked are you on payroll. He said no, I went to leave the meeting and he called after me and he said I’m not on payroll but my consultant company is. I found that bizarre because we were in May and no one seemed to know who is your consultant company, what is it called? Who are you consulting?

So I sent in a bunch of FOIAs when I left the school and it turned out he had a nine-month contract for either $60,000 or $70,000 to consult the school board. And after nine months it was renegotiated. And to me that was so bizarre, this vague really amorphous task of really consulting the school board. And a lot of money when you don’t have basics in your classroom like a pencil sharpener, much less curriculum, it seems kind of crazy that money is being spent that way. And because charter schools, we have over 90 charter schools in Detroit and each charter schools, these are almost sovereign nation because each one, you have to send in a FOIA to each one individually to try to find out what it happening or how funds are being spent and so if my school was spending money in such a questionable manner I became really curious about how other schools were spending their money. And that sent me on a quest, I started after leaving the classroom this program called Detroit charter data. Which the aim was just to FOIA, helping families and teachers be able to write FOIAs so that they could find out where money at their school was going.

Because the other thing that I find so interesting about the rhetoric around choice it’s all this conversation about parents being able to vote with their feet. They can make a choice but what often happens is once they choose a school, they choose a charter, their voice can sometimes be muted because the board is appointed and when a board is appointed families don’t necessarily feel like they, it’s unclear whether or not they can speak up because they didn’t vote for the board and board meetings, at least at my school, they were at really odd and inopportune times. It was hard for parents to go. I never saw parents at our board meetings and I never really saw teachers because often they would be in the middle of the school day. And so I think that what I found when I worked on the Detroit charter data site was a lot of people didn’t even realize that they could FOIA a charter school because that again, the blending of public and private, it can be confusing and it can make people question what they have a right to. But again, charter schools are getting public dollars and so that should be trackable and that should be traceable.

VALLAS: And we’re going to have to leave it there. Allie Gross is a reporter at the Detroit Free Press. She’s also, as you’ve heard, a former charter school teacher in the city. You can find her fabulous article in Vice called “Out of Options: School choice gutted Detroit’s public schools, the rest of the country is next” at Vice.com but also on our syllabus page on Medium. Allie, thank you so much for joining the show and for your work to shed light on all of this harrowing detail about what really goes on Detroit’s charter schools and elsewhere as well.

GROSS: Thank you for having me Rebecca, thanks.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. “Opioids fill the news with a steady stream of stories of lives lost from overdose and abuse. What we rarely hear, however is the other side. Opioids are also the most powerful pain medication we have. For me they were life restoring.” So writes Kate Nicholson in an op-ed in The Hill titled, “The Other Side of the Opioid Epidemic.” Kate is a former civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. She currently speaks and writes about pain and she joins me by phone to share her own personal experience with opioids. Kate, thanks so much for joining the show.

KATE NICHOLSON: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So you come to this issue because of your own personal experience managing chronic pain. Tell that story and help us understand how that got you into doing and thinking about this kind of work.

NICHOLSON: Sure, so I was working as an attorney for the Justice Department in Washington and I was sitting at my desk one day when all the sudden my back started to burn. It felt like acid was eating my spine and my muscles seized and threw me from my chair onto the floor. And it turned out that all of that was from a surgery I had recently when a doctor severed parts of my spinal cord, nerves in my spine. But reclining ended up being my dominant posture for almost 20 years. I wasn’t able to sit, stand or walk for most of that time. And I tried all kinds of treatments for about three years I tried integrative treatments, everything from acupuncture to biofeedback. I tried nerve ablations and even a repeat surgery to see if they could repair the damage. And the long and short of it was that nothing worked and so finally my doctor said to me listen you have to try opiates. They’re really all we have left. It wasn’t something I was inclined to do, I was worried about what I’d heard about addiction and stigma. But I did and the use of opioids under medical management with other integrative care really restored my function.

So I was able to continue to work. I still couldn’t sit or stand but I argued cases from a folding lawn chair in federal court and I drafted the current regulation under the ADA from bed and managed cases in U.S. attorneys offices all over the country. So opioids for me were incredible restorative. And I did finally improve and when the pain remitted I went off of opioids. I had to taper to avoid side effects but I really went off of them with no incident whatsoever. I had no trouble getting off of them; I used them only for pain control. So I started getting into this area largely because I observed what was happening in the current environment with our public policy response to opioid abuse. We started really limiting access for people in pain and I felt obligated as someone who had been a beneficiary of an earlier time when doctors were able and willing to describe opioids for chronic pain and when I could get my prescriptions filled to stand up and talk about this in my experience.

VALLAS: Now you have shared your own experience, which I’m going to guess, a lot of listeners might be surprised to hear. The stories that you hear in the media most of the time when people are talking about the opioid epidemic, the opioid crisis are about people dying because of misuse, dying because of abuse but you’re not arguing that there isn’t actually an opioid epidemic, help connect some of those dots and help us understand, what’s the difference between addiction and dependence?

NICHOLSON: Oh I certainly wouldn’t argue that there are no problems with an epidemic and really the answer to treating both sides to expand treatment. So there is a critical difference between someone who uses a medication for a medical condition in order to restore function and someone who uses a substance in a way that destroys function. That’s the classic definition of addiction is someone who continues to use a substance even though it is having a negative, destructive effect on their lives. So there’s a distinction there and certainly in the early 90s, doctors began to prescribe, for a variety of reasons, doctors began to prescribe opioids more broadly than they had in the past. A lot of that was the recognition of the under treatment of pain which was the right question to ask. It is undertreated. But medical school doesn’t really teach much about either the treatment of pain, ironically since it’s the number one reason people go to the doctor or addiction. So you had a broader prescribing and insurance companies not covering alternative treatments and a variety of reasons for opioids becoming a bigger part of, more accessible to people although the dominant story in the media is really of someone who goes to the doctor, is prescribed an opioid and becomes addicted and that’s actually, it happens because people are different genetically and have different addictive potential. It’s pretty rare. Studies show that somewhere between .07 and .08% of people with pain who are prescribed opioids actually go on to become addicted and if physicians screen for mental health issues and follow up with people as they are starting opioids the risks go down considerably.

What started to happen as opioids were prescribed more often is that they ended up in lots of medicine cabinets and people maybe used them for a short time, for a minor surgery or a broken arm and didn’t store them, didn’t lock them, didn’t dispose of them and they became accessible for misuse. A recent study on drug abuse showed, a national study showed that between 75% and 80% of the people who misuse opioids happened that way. They didn’t have a valid prescription for them, they got them from a medicine cabinet, they borrowed from family or friends or they bought on the streets. So there is a conflation of pain and addiction, even though there is some overlap, there are going to be some people who are vulnerable to misuse of any substance, it’s a fairly small one and much smaller certainly than the story we hear daily in the media.

VALLAS: Now in recent years in response to increased attention being paid to the opioid epidemic, states have stepped in and started to change the policy landscape when it comes to how we handle opioids in this country. Tell a little bit of that story. What have states been doing and what has that changed in terms of how people who need to access opioids for purposes of pain management as you’ve been describing are able to access what they need?

NICHOLSON: Well medical care is definitely in the hands of states but the change really happened initially on the federal level. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016 issued guidelines, these were not requirements, they were not the law but they were guidance that had the general animating principle that opioids should be prescribed at the lowest possible dose for the shortest period of time. And that makes sense, nobody disagrees with that. But in the course of these guidelines, they had a few recommendations that, one of them was to avoid this problem I was talking about with respect to acute care, the idea that people got prescribed too much medication and often there was leftover in their medicine cabinets. They recommended that for acute care opioids not be prescribed for more than 3 to 7 days. Now they also said of course there will be some situations in which more is necessary but they wanted doctors to then refill or to revisit and reevaluate after that point. They also made a recommendation about dosage, they recommended that doctors justify if they’re going to go over a certain dosage and they also finally said let’s evaluate the people who are currently taking opioids for their risk of misuse and see if the benefits are truly outweighing the risks. So all of these principles are guidance and they built in some flexibility. But what’s happened is they’ve become enacted in the states in a very rigid way.

So there are several states, almost half the states they have enacted the acute pain idea saying people can only get medication for 3 or 5 days, and that’s a real problem for long term care, even though a lot of the state laws accept long term care policies with insurance and pharmacies have made it so people who are long term pain patients really can’t get their prescriptions filled and the other part of it is this requirement to evaluate people who are currently taking pain [medication] has led to a number of situations where doctors are forcibly terminating people from their pain medication and the Department of Veteran Affairs on the federal level was one of the first organization to try to do this in a systematic way, they offered alternative treatments but they have recently issued an abstract saying that this did nothing to curtail overdose deaths but it did escalate suicide. So these public policies enacted in this blanket one side fits all way which really doesn’t work very well in a medical care setting when people have a huge variety of different conditions, different ideologies, different levels of severity and what’s happening is people just aren’t able to fill their pain medicine.

The other thing that’s happened is there’s been over a long period of time although it’s intensified lately a reaction to look at doctor prescribing practices that’s making it more and more difficult for doctors to be willing to prescribe opioids for people in pain. Some of the DEA practices right now are looking again at those simple numbers and using what’s called prescription drug monitoring programs that are in every state to see which doctors are prescribing more opioids and at what dosage and using that as a basis for initiating an investigation without considering the severity of the client base that they serve. So there are a lot of things that are coming together to really, really limit access for pain patients.

VALLAS: So opioids has in many ways become almost a four letter word that people hear and they think of the worst thing ever. Simultaneously, we’ve heard comments that are incredibly boneheaded and clueless coming from folks like Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General saying in response to the concerns of people struggling to manage chronic pain, eh take a few Bufferin or something and go to bed. Are there alternatives that are readily available that people could be turning to which is implied in that statement and if not, what is the conversation that you wish we were having nationally about a very real problem but that in many ways seems to be getting to the wrong solution?

NICHOLSON: Well there are a lot of things wrapped up in that. First as to Jeff Sessions’ comments, I think it shows a real misunderstanding of at least severe or intractable pain and there are, according to federal statistics, 50 million people with severe and present pain in America. While taking Bufferin or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory might work for certain types of chronic pain and certain types of pain they’re certainly not going to be adequate for very several pain. So it’s a real misunderstanding of illnesses that really have a quality of life index that are similar to late stage cancer. I do think that opioids are at the moment demonized, and the truth is they have two faces. They are our most powerful medication for treating pain and they are susceptible to misuse. And they really need to be managed in a healthcare setting and balance with individualized care.

I wish that we could look at least at the benefits as well as the drawbacks. One of the things that we’re starting to realize with the opioid epidemic is we’re looking at what’s happening today is that prescription opioids really are not the primary driving factor of overdose deaths. A huge percentage, the vast majority are related to heroin or illegal fentanyl. Opioid prescribing has been down every year since 2012 and is at a ten year low and the last five or six years are the years in which overdoses have really skyrocketed so there’s a sense in which our public policy really isn’t even matching what’s happening. The other thing that we’re discovering is that a lot of the deaths are actually from multiple substances. So the deaths we hear reported are considered as opioid related deaths.

We don’t know what’s caused the deaths and in many cases they are what we saw in the Tom Petty situation, someone who has heroin, fentanyl, alcohol, sometimes benzodiazepines and a prescription opioid in their system. So it’s not so simple as just looking at a prescription opioid. We still lose more people to alcohol misuse and cigarette misuse than we do to all overdose deaths combined so we’re not serving the ends of looking at addiction and what’s causing some of these practices by simply demonizing opioids. We’re not really helping people in pain and we’re not helping people who are addicted either. We need to have a more nuanced conversation and a more honest one because it’s a complex problem. I mean, opioids have two faces but we need to recognize where they’re useful and where they’re not. There’s even an argument that by chilling, by limited prescription opioids we’ve actually driven people to stronger drugs. We can’t make a causal claim there but there is an argument that there is a correlation and the deaths, that we’ve often seen patterns like that when we’ve used a prohibitory response to alcohol or drugs.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that I have with you, policymakers of all political stripes are running all over the place to tell us how much they care about the opioid epidemic, how much they want to do to stop it. Policies that are being suggested and promoted all over the place, I mean they are really all over the map. We’ve got President Trump saying he cares deeply about the opioid crisis and yet trying to slash Medicaid six ways from Sunday when that’s one of the major ways that people access treatment. On the flip side you have a bipartisan group of members of congress trying to advance something called the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act yet that legislation also includes a strict 3-day limit similar to what you were describing we’ve seen in the states. What do you think the real solutions are here and what are you hoping that policy makers seize on as they seek to advance something that could actually address this epidemic?

NICHOLSON: Well first I think it’s important to understand that policymakers are working in an environment of hysteria that the simple story is beneficial, it’s a good story for the media, it’s a good story for politicians in the sense that they can look hard on drugs from a conservative point of view or sympathetic from a more progressive point of view but those are all very simplistic narratives. I think that it’s important for politicians to step back and look at what’s worked in the past and if there is a common thread between both of these it’s in expanding treatment and expanding treatment for addiction and expanding treatment for pain are really going to be the most effective solutions. And even though there is a lot of concern expressed there really aren’t a lot of federal dollars being allocated to treatment on either side or to education. We really need to educate doctors, to change the medical curriculum. We need research for developing abuse proof drugs. Very little of the federal budget of NIH is allocated to pain, less than 1% of their research dollars even though a third of the population has some kind of chronic pain and 50 million, 1 in 6 have severe, persistent pain which is more than are effected by cancer or heart disease or diabetes or stroke. We haven’t really matched that up with our medical model or research model.

Finally I actually think, it sounds simple and it’s not sexy but I think that we could use a public health campaign about the danger of not properly disposing of any kind of controlled substance or psychoactive medications when you’re not using it or storing it and keeping it locked and not sharing with family and friends. I think to the extent that prescription medications are accessible still in today’s environment even though as I said heroin and illegal fentanyl are really the bigger drivers now, we need to take care of that side of it. So there are fairly straightforward ways that policymakers could choose to address this but it will cost dollars, it has to go beyond simply prohibitive actions and expressions of sympathy.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Kate Nicholson, she a former civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice who worked on enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. She is currently speaking and writing about pain and managing pain and you can find her op-ed in The Hill, “The Other Side of the Opioid Epidemic — We’re People in Severe Pain” at TheHill.com and also at our syllabus page at medium. Kate, thank you so much for your work on this to tell the other side of this story and thank you for taking the time to join the show.

NICHOLSON: Thank you Rebecca, my pleasure.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.