In a continuing series of articles about charter schools in Michigan the Detroit Free Press reports that the state’s weak charter legislation enables unscrupulous charter organizations to engage in self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
The article yesterday said that Michigan’s nearly 300 charter schools collect about $1 billion and have almost no accountability. The Michigan charters do no outperform the public schools.
The story about the weak law begins like this:
In September 2005, Emma Street Holdings bought property on Sibley Road in Huron Township for $375,000. Six days later, Emma Street sold the parcel to Summit Academy North, a charter school, for $425,000.
Who made the quick $50,000 at the school’s expense? The founders of Emma Street, two men with close ties to the school — one was president of Summit’s management company, the other was married to Summit’s top administrator.
The deal is emblematic of how friends, relatives and insiders can find ways to cash in on the nearly $1 billion a year state taxpayers spend on Michigan’s charter schools.
The law does not bar insider deals:
Boards are free to give contracts to friends and relatives of the school’s administrators and founders. Privately owned management companies that run charter schools don’t have to disclose whom they’ve hired as employees or vendors, so they are free to hire board members’ friends. School founders are not prohibited from running both a school and its management company.
The new law also does not bar a transaction such as the Summit land deal.
The article provides many examples of conflicts of interest that are legal in Michigan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They need to ask how much the public universities are making off the 3% authorizing fee they’re taking off the top.
What does Central Michigan University do to earn that 3% and do the authorizers have an incentive to replace public schools with charter schools?
I’d also like to know if the public universities are actually lobbying for more charter schools.
What did you think of the Columbus Dispatch story today about district misbehavior?
Given the considerable interest in corruption associated with education, I thought many readers might be interested in a major Ohio investigation reported in the July 25 Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch –
http://www.dispatch.com/content/topic/special-reports/2012/counting-kids-out.html
“But the state said yesterday that because the (Columbus) district and its schools manipulated data, report cards for at least two years are wrong and will be changed. They are being corrected now.”
“Districts’ grades dip after data-scrubbing scandal
Two Ohio school districts will have their state report-card grades publicly docked today because they “scrubbed” low-performing students from their rolls. The two districts – Northridge near Dayton, and Campbell near Youngstown – are among six that are getting new report cards today for the 2010-11 school year. The new report cards are the result of state investigations into student-data fraud that began in June 2012 when The Dispatch reported data tampering in Columbus City Schools.”
“The Method
School workers withdrew students they knew to be still enrolled, deleted their absences, and then re-enrolled them. The district is accused of choosing children with many absences or low test scores.
The Motive
By withdrawing and re-enrolling students, employees can break a student’s string of “continuous enrollment.” Only the test scores of students who have been enrolled nonstop from October through the time they take state tests in the spring are counted in a school’s overall test-passing rate.”
Joe, this manipulation of data does not surprise me. Administrators have been known to finagle test scores and individual teachers have succumbed to tinkering with results. The more the pressure, the greater the temptation. Not for all, but for some!
There are safeguards. Final exams kept under lock and key. Two teachers proctoring high stakes tests. Two to three teachers reviewing final test scores. Securing the exams for a number of years with the potential of state review whether or not there are any questions.
Purchasing study packages from the same company that creates the tests seems like cheating to me, as it gives some districts an advantage over others. By refusing to allow access to tests previously taken, this makes the above advantage even more of a way to affect outcomes (and isn’t that what cheating is all about?).
Here’s a link to the full web version>/a>.
Are other people seeing the comments show up on the full web version?
http://www.freep.com/comments/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/charter-school-law
There’s supposed to be over 120 comments but I don’t see any.
Try a different browser like Firefox
I also don’t understand why the school facilities are privately-owned. Do.people in Michigan know they’re pouring public money into an asset they don’t own?
Is it okay with us that we’re going from owners of public property to renters?
How much publicly-funded property is going to private ownership?
So if you have an area or district where they privatize 90% of the schools (the goal, according to Netflix guy) 90% of publicly-owned school facilities have now flipped to private ownership?
State and federal governments do not have the right to sell your children to private corporations.
But that is exactly what’s happening when politicians take kickbacks (“campaign contributions”) from charterbaggers.
The federal government is getting ready to build 500 charter schools a year. The Senator from Louisiana wants 500 a year. She didn’t mention in what states.
Who will own that property?
Would Arne Duncan put his own money into a building project where he doesn’t have an ownership interest?
Here’s a statement on the Free Press series from Dan Quisenberry, President of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies: “Simply put, the Free Press got it wrong in a big way. They’ve been working on this series for well over a year, and they still managed to get almost every single one of their conclusions wrong. We can’t let these gross errors go unchallenged. The people of Michigan deserve to know the truth about charter schools, and the truth is that Michigan’s laws governing charter schools are among the best in the country, and our state’s authorizers do an excellent job of oversight. For the Free Press to claim that Michigan ‘fails to hold charter schools accountable’ and that our charter schools ‘don’t follow’ state laws is insulting and flat-out wrong. Michigan’s charter schools follow every single state law, and charter schools are the most accountable of all public schools. I don’t know what agenda the Free Press is trying to satisfy with this report, but its readers – and the people of Michigan – deserve better.”
The Free Press relied on evidence.
MAPSA’s quote at this site, is opinion. MAPSA, having a dog in the race unlike the Free Press. has every reason to skew information to portray themselves, falsely.
The Detroit Free Press earned its title, with this series.
He’s relying on semantics. The Free Press argument is that the authorizers are not regulated. There isn’t enough law.
The charter school lobby are arguing they follow the laws that exist.
The real duty is with lawmakers. The have completely relinquished their duties to private boards, think tanks and lobbyists.
They are not doing the jobs they were hired to do.
How about this? We’ll turn Central Michigan University over to a private management company. I have no idea why I’m paying public universities to sell public schools.
It’s ridiculous that they’re lining up to take a 3% cut out of K-12 public schools.
Stop complaining. As long as you have the Detroit News, charter schools will get their twice weekly editorial that is little more than a shameless promotion.
Ingrid Jacques of the Detroit News has been lobbying for a job with MAPSA or a charter chain with every article she writes.
MAPSA has many friendly media voices. Good to see you on the defensive for a change. Defend your “success” instead of simply declaring it.
I had wondered about the conflict of interest. Our school board in the Buffalo Public Schools has a pro Charter School member who recently purchased a Catholic High School building after that school closed. It seems to me that his position on the board gives him an advantage if the board decides to create a new charter school on his property.
(As an aside, the school board elections this past May elected two pro charter members tipping the board to a 5-4 pro charter vote. The old superintendent resigned with a generous buy out rather than waiting to be fired. And the rest of us are waiting to see how quickly Buffalo becomes a charter Mecca.)
It is truly to be hoped that the Detroit Free Press expose will make a difference. I will not hold my breath waiting but at least one media source is doing its job, thankfully. Too few take their responsibilities seriously and journalism has suffered greatly because of it. Too often what has passed as journalism is merely corporate propaganda – ergo – the plight in which our country finds itself in, in so many areas.
Are the corporate funded charter-baggers still buying up all the advertising space surrounding the article as they did yesterday?
Yes
For Cynthia Weiss; here is your choice at work, you can choose the graft you want to give to, I’d rather hold my board accountable to my community to put the money into the classrooms, facility repairs, teachers, and materials.
Can we get a number on how much public universities have earned in authorizing fees?
Are they ashamed they’re skimming 3% from public school funding?
It’s funny that ed reformers dump all the deregulated garbage charters in MI, OH and IN.
We dont get the national media coverage of DC Boston or NYC so we are the flyover dumping ground for their free market experiments.
Thanks DC. REAL nice gift you gave the midwest there.
We read about how the Obama Administration is bailing out a for profit college.
This is a list of some of the big political players in for-profit education:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8589-bipartisan-political-elite-implicated-in-for-profit-education-fraud
I can’t find any information about this charter school situation on the Broad Foundation site.
They’re giving each other awards for excellence, yet no mention of Eli Broad’s home state.
I was told these foundations were very data-driven. How come no data that conflicts with the pro-charter focus makes the site?
They’re aware that people in Michigan are reading this, right? They can’t ignore reality forever!
I did an internet search for educator awards. Most of the top entries referenced the Milkens’ trophies. A convicted financier amassed enough power to buy a slice of public education and his brother had the hubris to claim the right to honor people in public service.
Shaking my head.
If we had a press that was not under the thumb of the very rich, these stories written in newspapers and told on TV would have already killed off this ‘chartering’ disease.
It remains for us all to use the internet ( now also under attack by the wealthy) to spread the word.