Last year, the conservative Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder and the Republican-dominated legislature passed legislation strengthening the governor’s power to take over financially troubled municipalities and school districts. Michigan has had emergency manager legislation since 1990, but the 2011 law, Public Act 4, gave the governor additional powers to suspend democracy.
Democratic groups are now challenging Public Act 4, which enhanced the ease with which Governor Snyder could suspend democracy by replacing elected officials with an emergency manager. When opponents of the law presented 226,000 signatures on petitions to put Public Act 4 on the ballot and get a public referendum, the state board charged with making a decision split along partisan lines. As matters now stand, the petitions were rejected because they were presented in the wrong font size!
Donald Weatherspoon, the emergency manager in Muskegon Heights, a small district of 1,400 students, has decided to turn its three schools over to a charter company. He fired all 158 teachers and told them they could re-apply for their jobs. He is essentially dissolving the school district and handing it off to a private corporation to manage. Apparently there will be a school board, which he will name.
Weatherspoon decided that public education is the problem. By turning the schools into a charter district or three charter schools–whatever the private corporation wants–he will solve some unspecified problem.
One problem that will not be solved is the district’s debt of $12-14 million. The debt remains with the defunct district, not the new charter management.
And of course, Weatherspoon will choose the charter management.
Thus, the privatization and destruction of public education move forward in one tiny district. Next in line: Detroit.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern here in Michigan and elsewhere. The strong arm of government is, ironically, being used to further the agenda of reducing the reach of government. Don’t be mistaken: it’s not all about profit – it’s about ideology, where government is by nature corrupt and inefficient and private firms making profits means they are doing something right.
The Muskegon Heights story is complex, and sadly gives just enough ammunition to the opponents of “government schools” to make their arguments plausible. As with many small- to mid-sized cities in Michigan, the local economy of the cities of Muskegon and neighboring Muskegon Heights were devastated over the past few decades as manufacturing industries of all kinds shut their gates. This economic pressure combined with latent race issues to transform cities like MH, and Detroit, from engines of opportunity attracting African American families into declining cities with tremendous white flight.
Since 1994, Michigan public schools have had their entire operating budget determined by their enrollment, with a level of per-pupil funding determined each year by the state legislature. As flight to suburban schools, and later charters, increased, and combined with the loss of population that resulted from the collapse of the manufacturing economy, public school enrollment dropped and state funding dropped with it. Muskegon Heights has lost nearly half its student population over the last 20 years, and today some 600 students travel to other local districts under “schools of choice” laws and another 220 who live in the MH district go to charters, while under 1600 remain in the MH district schools. Eighty seven percent of the students in the MH district qualify for Federal free lunch (about the same as neighboring Muskegon schools), while the suburban district next door, Mona Shores, has “only” 38% of its students qualifying for FRL.
There has been mismanagement and corruption, too: deficit budgets started in the early 1990s as the district’s reserve was wiped out, and several officials were investigated and in one case jailed for embezzlement and payroll fraud.
The problem, of course, is that the emergency manager law is focused solely on financial problems but it gives the EM total control over finances, contracts and even curriculum to accomplish the financial goals. Maintaining services is not necessarily at the top of the agenda. In this case, charter will pay the teachers less, but also be exempt from paying into the state public school employee retirement system.
As a state, we have gotten very good at convincing ourselves that it’s OK to do less with less. The economic collapse has conveniently hidden the growing income inequality and growing wealth in a narrow portion of the population. My hope is to convince my fellow citizens that it’s time to ask more of ourselves so that we can do right by our children.
Agreed. The biggest motivation for what is happening is not profit, but ideology. Ideology preceded the profit motive. Once the profit motive got unleashed, the combination became far more powerful than ideology alone. The outcome will not be good for democracy or for the children of MH or any other district handed off to private firms.
I think it’s difficult to separate the two. What’s key is the frame that profits earned by private charter managers are legitimate because they “compete” for students and their profits are the result of more “efficient” operations. In contrast, funding for locally-governed public schools is “stolen” from those who actually generated it in order to line the pockets of politicians, administrators and teachers’ unions – who are making use of government power to benefit “special interests” who would not survive in the competitive market.
How else to explain that the owner of private, for-profit CMO National Heritage Academies is, at the same time, both a major contributor to the current legislative majority party and to a PAC (Great Lakes Education Project) formed to push school vouchers and which later joined the broader “school choice” campaign. NHA, by the way, started out with a distinctly Christian theme, and it took threats of lawsuits to end things like mandatory prayer meetings at NHA charters. Where does the profit motive end and ideology begin?
To be fair, we should also note that state officials have not yet accepted this plan for Muskegon Heights. My hope is that some sanity will prevail. But I’m not holding my breath.
Fair enough, but I suspect that this is exactly what Governor Snyder wants to happen to Muskegon Heights. It represents an entrepreneurial opportunity.