I was tempted to call this post “the outrage of the day.” It is hard to read it without a sense of blood-boiling rage. It was written by Stacy Erwin Oakes, a Democratic legislator from Saginaw.
Governor Rick Snyder wants to eliminate public education. He wants a state where every family shops for an education provider. As this article shows, his latest gambit was an effort to dissolve the state’s school districts.
That would set in motion the free market of consumer choice he wants.
But he couldn’t convince even his own allies in the legislature. One by one, they said, “not my district.” In the end, only two luckless districts were marked for dissolution.
Read it and you will understand in part the ideology that is determined to privatize public education.
Read it and you will understand the importance of educating the public and getting involved in the political process. That is, throw the rascals out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The newest member of the NCTQ advisory board, Elie Gaines, runs a school selection consulting company in Arizona– where “open enrollment” is the privatization game:
http://www.arizonaschoolchoice.com/EDU_PSD.html
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Here is the link to Gaines’ company, All Schools Considered:
http://www.allschoolsconsidered.com/
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MI voters must surely, by now, understand that the majority of their elected officials represent something other than their local constituents. I don’t think it’s “someone” as much as it is “something,” and the “something” is the obvious but shadowed power of money-controlled candidates. Candidates are screened by the amount of money they can accept, long before the first primary is announced. A few big donors make all the difference in the hectic life of an ambitious “public servant.”
The life of our democratic republic depends on accountability to us, the people. If your representative answers, “The voters,” to the question, “Do you represent your voters or your donors?”, then make the follow-up, “OK, show me your donor list.”
Locally, every school district elector must understand the duty of the community to fund and support his or her own local school, regardless of the voter’s parental status. We all have this duty to support and oversee our elected local boards. When we forget this, as Michigan voters did for so many years (during the 1970s-onward, enhanced by multiple consolidations of small rural districts), then we have difficult work ahead to clean out the carpetbaggers who filled the vacuum. Hold them accountable!
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This is the most important battle Americans are fighting right now! Stand up for your right to PUBLIC education…after all you already paid for it!!! (or if you want the free market idea then insist that you get what you pay for and stop paying taxes for public schools! Lets see how much they like that idea.)
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Wow!! This is a Customer Beware aha moment!!! Could this be called consumer fraud? If the public has paid the bill year after year and is currently the owner can they put their taxes in an escrow account and demand to be listened to? Does this come under Due Process and create a class action lawsuit under Civil Rights Laws? Can the UCLA in concert with it’s affiliates in all our states represengt the argument that the public as the legal financer of the public school system is facing a systemic breach of contract by their state governments?
Somewhere in this mess is a breach of responsibility by government and media. The quiet is deafening as the cities burn and the crackling of the embers are drowned out by those who would fiddle
and dance in their safe private gated towers with well fed stomachs.
Is it that bad, I am beginning to believe it has gotten to that point.
Has the media figured out, for the most part, that they are the public and their children will inherit this fiasco? Or are they paid enough for the private schools their children will attend?
America has been bought and sold and now we, and the children, have become both the commodity and the buyer. Brilliant! But
immoral and wrong headed!! Follow the money!!!
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The bitter irony of this is that these districts have been pushed into insolvency because of the dramatic cut to education funding over many years, most notably under the Snyder Administration. In Buena Vista, the last straw was indeed a local financial mistake, but had they not been pushed to the edge already that one mistake would not have forced them to close the schools early.
Michigan does have a large number of very small districts, and whether they can continue to make it on their own is a legitimate issue. In rural areas, transportation over long distances is part of the problem. But the process of consolidation normally takes a popular vote of both communities and a great deal of public discussion and consensus-building. If done well, this can give the new districts a much better chance of success.
In contrast, the bills just passing the legislature are designed as punishment, not assistance. Lawmakers consistently acted as if everyone who worked in the district was responsible for the financial problems, even though the state bears the largest responsibility and a handful of administrators were in control of local finance.
The general push, here, is to show that “government” schools – that is, schools governed by the local community – are failing on both academic and financial fronts and should eventually be replaced by private management. Just about every challenge is used as leverage to undermine community-governed public education.
[In Michigan, as in most Great Lakes states, school districts are independent units of government with directly elected school boards and their own taxing authority, though that authority has been extremely limited since the introduction of a new centralized school finance system in 1994. They are not, as in other parts of the US, departments of municipal governments. So consolidation can involve schools which cover many different communities.)
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Well said! The end goal is to remove the “Public” from schools. It is being done one bill at a time, piece by piece, district by district, school by school.
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Here’s a worser outrage from Michigan:
http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2013/06/mix_school_choice_state_incent.html#incart_river
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his is an important point, Diane. I think it’s a well-thought through idea–to break up the political base that democracy rests on by destroying all local public institutions and spreading us out, in competition with each other. It’s not simply an unfortunate side-effect. They’re impressive that way–the deformers. On another score–sometime let’s discuss the issue of why choice makes sense and is compatible with community–depending on how it’s interpreted and implemented. Ditto for small schools. deb
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Deb, I think the goal is to make us all consumers with no sense of obligation to one another or to any community.
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He closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.
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