Dale Hansen in the Detroit News explains in this blog post how Governor Rick Snyder has underfunded the public schools while claiming (falsely) to have increased funding.
By the way, the title of his article is: “Governor Rick Snyder Is Working to Destroy Public Education.”
He shows how the Governor is pushing teachers out of the pension system, contributing to its woes as there are fewer teachers to pay into it.
He shows how the Governor favors charter schools, and will continue to convert public schools into charter schools wherever and whenever possible.
More than 80% of the charters in Michigan are operated for-profit, meaning that taxpayers’ dollars are going to pay off investors and stockholders, not into the classroom where they belong.
Hansen writes:
Regardless of all of these potential problem areas, Rick Snyder and Michigan Republicans know that every school they deem failing will simply be converted to a charter school, which pulls more students out of traditional public schools. This means less teachers contributing to the public retirement fund and with fewer teachers contributing it requires the state to kick in more. The perception then becomes that greedy teachers are taking money out of the classroom and that public schools are expensive and inefficient.
This is the self-fulfilling prophecy Republicans hope will be the undoing of public schools. The Republican solution to inefficient and expensive public schools makes public schools more inefficient and expensive. It’s a win-win for Republicans. They make public schools look bad while simultaneously putting more kids on the charter school gravy train.
The question of money in education is important but when it comes to the Michigan governor’s race the better question should be, what do we want our education system to look like in the future? Do we want schools that are subject to local checks and balances or a couple massive corporations that make their money based on quantity, not quality? Because regardless of how much either candidate pledges to spend, their goals are profoundly different.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What further can one say beyond what has already been said.
When money supplants human needs in importance, society dies. Myopic vision. Greed.
At some time the public will awaken, perhaps already the beginning has begun. We MUST fight back and never give up. Our country, our children, our posterity demands no less. We send our military to fight and die for our freedom. Let us hope we do not have to die to perpetuate our freedoms. In the past, that was necessary. It happened. On so many fronts only with that kind of valor and sacrifice were freedoms, plural, given us – on the home front as well as overseas.
“We send our military to fight and die for our freedom.”
NO, that’s another BIG LIE by those who couln’t care less about human lives, but who thrive on profiting on death and destruction. We send our military to protect the oligarch’s “assets”.
Read Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy of books about American imperialism. From wiki: “He wrote numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. A former cold warrior, his fears for the US changed:
“A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.”[4]
Or read William Blum’s “Killing Hope” or any of his other works.
Or read/listen to Ray McGovern, Chris Hedges, or many others who have documented the appalling American death and destruction machine that is the Department of War and the military/industrial complex.
Measuring for profit and non profit charters on number of schools is deceptive.
It should be measured on number of students.
Here’s an example. Charter promoters in my state, Ohio, like to say that “only” 30% of Ohio charters are for profits.
Here’s the number that matters; students:
“Thirty percent of charter schools that were open during the 2010-11 school year were operated by for-profit management companies. These schools enrolled 54 percent of all charter school students and collected $373 million in state aid.”
The fact is, MOST charter students in Ohio attend a for-profit school. Using the “30% of schools” stat is misleading. This “school” stat is misleading nationally, too, because it ignores the huge commercial cybercharter chains.
The question should be: “how many charter students nationally attend a for profit charter school?” The answer in Ohio is “the majority”.
Chiara Duggan: what you point out is another example of how the charterites/privatizers play tricks with numbers in order to gain an unfair advantage.
When those in openly mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ want to look like a small but valiant minority, gamely struggling to achieve cage busting world-class results against those factories of failure called public schools, the edufrauds selectively deal from a rigged deck of percentages. They choose the percentage that is lower and makes more ₵ent¢ for their bottom line.
But the figure that undercuts their spin and hype and is much less misleading—is the 54% percentage of students enrolled in that 30% of for-profit charters.
It is irrelevant whether they are outright lying because the effect is to mislead, deflect and push eduproduct.
All courtesy of their numbers/stats people.
Any wonder why I call them accountabully underlings?
Thank you for your comments.
😎
P.S. And how about taking a 9th grade cohort that suffers attrition of 30%, 40% or 50% by the 12th grade, but only counting those in the cohort that make it to the end of 12th grade and then claiming a 100% graduation rate? That’s a pretty nifty bit of charterite/privatizer math too, don’t you think?
I never understand any argument that proffers charters as being more efficient than public schools.
If students are performing poorly, how thin will a corporation cut its profit margin to educate those children? Would any charter be willing to accept a LOSS in the short term in order to satisfy the long term needs of their students? Especially considering that the charter system builds in that they are temporary – why would they invest in long term infrastructure?
Would any charter EVER offer a cut in price to the state because they’re “more efficient”? How is free market competition supposed to work between charters when NONE of them need to compete against each other in price – just in students? And what does that mean if we see that competition is based more on segregation trends than the academic ability of the students?
The competition ploy is phony. It’s all a scam
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Please sign this petition against Snyder’s education policies and share!
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/tell-governor-snyder-4?source=c.tw&r_by=6309191
This is a great article. It is all true. I’d like to add that the charter expansion has taken more teachers out of the retirement system too. The charter money is going into a few pockets of CEOs and their families. The public is being completely ripped off.
This is an ill-informed, if not deliberately deceptive, article. Charters have brought improvement to Michigan education, in part because they are responsive to parents, not insulated from them by a self-serving bureaucracy. It remains true in Michigan as in other states- charter public schools that fail to educate close while failing traditional public school districts get more money.
More than 80% of charters in Michigan operate for profit. In my view, they rip off taxpayers. P.T. Barnum was right when he said there is a fool born every minute.
Please cite closure numbers for accountable charters. Then cite the number of charters who were able to be excused from any form of accountability. Next, cite how many public schools closed and the length of time from declared failure to closure, and the characteristics of the student populations in the year before they closed going into their last year.
You must be joking-responsive to parents. Ha! The charters have teacher turnover that would make your head spin. I’ve seen years when there were no certified foreign language teachers. I’ve seen 6 different science teachers in one classroom in a year. The CEO and family keep their jobs and make tons of money. They are a scam and have done nothing positive to education in Michigan. They have increased CEOs bank accounts with the taxpayer’s money. Shameful.
What a shame that this is being allowed to happen–privatizing education in the name of charter schools. Why can’t anybody walk the walk?
Considering Pearson and Microsoft just partnered up some more to create CC aligned curriculum that will place “individualized learning” on the computer for every child to enjoy. This “method of teaching” does not require teachers or even brick and mortar schools. If Bill Gates and Sir Michael Barber have their way, all schooling will be privatized for profit at taxpayer expense. Teaching will be a profession of the past. Unions will be a thing of the past as well. Pensions will not exist. Michigan is leading the way. Detroit is the model city…..gutted by Goldman Sachs and the looting banker thieves who want to be paid 100 pennies on the dollar when pensioners are asked to accept 10 cents on the dollar.
Charter schools are the true goal of the Common Core….the end of public education.
Defined benefit pensions SHOULD NOT exist, even for public service employees. The potential for abuse, i.e. promises and obligations beyond what a civic entity can afford, are too great. Public employees should be on the same kind of 401k plans the rest of us in the private sector are on.
Teaching has an unusual pay scale. You start out with a salary that would be laughable in any other profession with the idea that it will grow as you stay and become a better and better teacher. The pension is defined because to base it on your pay scale for the first 12 years of your working life would put you so far behind any other salaried person investing in a 401K. Also, teachers only get their full pensions if they remain teaching for 30 years. That is a tremendous commitment and should be compensated. There is nothing unfair about a defined benefit.