This article tells the story of Mary T. Wood, a woman in Michigan who has devoted nine years to tracking the spending and management of the state’s charter schools.
She is not a public official. No one pays her. She took on this mission when she enrolled her daughter in a charter school in 1999, which did not have approval of its building so spent the first month doing field trips and other outdoor activities. She began to wonder about the lack of oversight or supervision by the state. And she became a watchdog.
“For nearly a decade, the college-educated, stay-at-home, 54-year-old Warren mother of five has made it her life’s work to be a one-woman force of accountability for the state’s 230 charter schools, or “public school academies” as they’re officially called.
“And she’s forcing others to take note.
“The state board itself has taken a greater interest, really an interest, in looking at the details of charter school authorization and proliferation,” says Elizabeth Bauer, a member of the state board of education, who says she admires Wood. “She has definitely clarified those kinds of arrangements and brought them into a focus so people actually pay attention.”
“Michigan’s first 41 charter schools opened in 1995, and this fall there will be 232. About 6 percent of Michigan students attend a public school academy, which ranks Michigan fourth among states for the rate of charter school enrollment, according to the Michigan Department of Education.
Last year, enrollment topped 100,000, the Michigan Association of Public School Academies announced, with this year’s enrollment projected to grow.
“Michigan legislators this fall are expected to debate allowing a greater number of charters in Detroit as they refine laws related to schools.
“Test results are mixed, depending on varying interpretations of test scores. On the fall 2006 English and math MEAP for grades third through eighth, charter school students performed below the overall state average but better than the public school districts in which they were located.
According to state data, on the spring ACT this year, the average composite score for students at the 53 charter high schools throughout the state that reported them was 15.5, lower than the state average of 18.8 and a little higher than Detroit Public Schools’ average of 15.3. Just three of the 53 charter high schools outperformed Detroit’s top two high schools.
“But academic performance aside, Wood’s biggest concern about charter schools, in a nutshell, is that there is not enough oversight of the public money spent on these schools; there’s a general lack of accountability throughout the system.
“Unfortunately, this issue is politically based, and people are positioned in key places to permit improprieties to happen on a regular basis because I am certain that they believe nobody would know the difference,” she says.”
Nearly 20 years of experience with charter schools, which–according to the Detroit Free Press–collect $1 billion in public revenues, and the state still does not supervise them. Any attempt to do so is quickly stymied by lobbyists an campaign contributions to key legislators.
They’re called “public school academies.” What an abuse of language. Hey, why not call them public miracle schools or the schools that are so much better than traditional public schools, nah, nah, nah?
They do the same thing with vouchers. They call them “scholarships”. A “scholarship” is of course an inherently better thing than no scholarship at the local public school!
The marketing language in ed reform is really interesting. It’s so carefully crafted. It really jumps out at you if you’re familiar with the whole concept of marketing and then see it applied to a non-commercial sector.
“It’s so carefully crafted. It really jumps out at you if you’re familiar with the whole concept of marketing and then see it applied to a non-commercial sector.”
Yes.
I have family in the advertising business. If you know a bit about it (OK, spend copious amounts of time obsessing on it with said family member) it really does jump off the page.
And “carefully crafted” doesn’t begin to describe the army of psychologists (yes, lots of them, often industrial organizational PhD’s), designers, writers, artists who earn a living manipulating us. It is OK when it is clearly advertising, You know, “have a Coke and a smile”, type stuff, but gets creepy when applied to some other areas, IMHO.
Can we just admit the obvious? “Authorization” is NOT “regulation”. In fact, it’s a relinquishment of the regulators role to a private actor. That’s what “authorize” means. I give up my authority to someone else.
It also ridiculous to believe that thousands of local schools will be regulated from the state capitol. That isn’t going to happen. They don’t have the regulators and they never have and they never will have them, unless they hire hundreds of them.
Can we also admit that there may have been a reason we set up local school boards and local regulatory authority? This idea that is was solely to “monopolize” public schools is just ahistorical, wholly ideological and complete bunk.
They did it because it made sense. The oversight has to be close to the entity regulated.
We’ve just turned this over to volunteers? With all the money we’re pouring into this and the seemingly thousands of ed reform groups and paid advocates for charter schools the least they could do is pay this woman for doing the state’s job. Everyone else is getting paid, including the “authorizers” who are taking a 3% cut off the top of every dollar sent to charter school students.
Just to give you-all a head’s up, “credit recovery” will be the next ed reform scandal.
Maybe pushing the neediest kids into junk online “credit recovery” academies to juice graduation rates and claim the success of ed reform wasn’t the greatest idea in the history of ideas.
They could start the investigation in Ohio.
http://educationnext.org/credit-recovery-hits-mainstream/
Mobile County Public School System in Alabama has been using credit recovery for several years now, maybe longer. Also,sometime this month, they will be accepting applications for a new virtual 6th-12th grade school. Our neighbors in Baldwin County, Alabama opened a public virtual high school last year, so Mobile had to up the anti and include middle school.
Here is one example of of for-profit corruption in higher education. This posted on Politico today.
MISSED DEADLINE: Corinthian Colleges, Inc. and the Education Department failed to agree on a path forward for the for-profit company by last night’s midnight deadline. The goal was an operating agreement designed to wind down campuses and avoid an abrupt closure that would disrupt the education of about 72,000 students, who together receive $1.4 billion in federal financial aid each year. Where does the money go? Hom many years has this $1.4 billion PER YEAR scam been operating?
– “While we did not reach an agreement yet with Corinthian officials, we are optimistic that further conversations with the company will produce an acceptable plan in the next few days that protects the interests of students and taxpayers,” Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in a statement. Corinthian said in its own statement that the company “continues to work cooperatively” with the department.
Why are the Feds interested in “unwinding” Corinthian instead of just closing it? Perhaps because student loans will have to be forgiven if the college closes. No interest payments on those loans to Arne at the DOE.
Here is an interesting article about a Michigan charter school president who has resigned because he does not care for common core.
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2014/06/charter_school_board_president.html