After the Michigan Department of Education ended its agreement to hand over low-performing schools to Governor Snyder’s controversial floundering Education Achievement Authority, Represenative Ellen Lipton called for stricter oversight of this entity.
She said:
““This is evidence of a governor, a state education department and an experimental educational entity flying off the rails,” Lipton said. “Why did Gov. Rick Snyder allow Superintendent Flanagan to give authority over school reform to an unproven entity – the EAA – managed by an individual with a track record of failure in his previous job in Kansas City? Why did Flanagan agree to give up his department’s authority for 15 years back in 2011? Why won’t Covington relinquish his control back to the state after being asked to do so by Flanagan? And why won’t the governor, through his control over the EAA Board of Directors that hired and can fire Covington, demand Covington to immediately return control to Flanagan or be removed from office?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s funny how one never hears about the ed reformer-run districts and cities that fail.
You won’t see Kansas City mentioned, nor will you see Cleveland or Philadelphia, although I think Cleveland has had 4 different market-based privatization plans over the last ten years.
The US Secretary of Education never mentions these places. All he talks about are DC and Tennessee. That isn’t a “public policy debate”, it’s marketing.
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Perhaps Ellen Lipton would be interested in learning that the Regents of the University of Michigan have, for at least the past several years, been committing millions of dollars to the Canyon-Agassi Charter School Fund. In 2011, the first year of the fund, the Regents approved a $15 million investment to the fund, and I believe such investments continue to this day. http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-02/agassi-forms-fund-to-build-charter-schools-with-canyon-capital.html
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It’s so incredibly irresponsible and reckless. There’s absolutely no thought given to the effects on existing schools.
I look forward to the rounds of “no one could have predicted!” when publicly-run schools are gone, and we’re left with a publicly-funded, privately-run system.
Anyone could have predicted, they’ve all just decided to be willfully blind. That public universities are funding Agassi’s chain of test prep franchises is just mind-boggling.
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I recall the description of history text books being relatively flat in their presentation of events (in DEATH AND LIFE. . .). But I would like to imagine what a typical 1989 history text book would have to say about this period of attack on public schools. How will it be framed and told in the history of the United States when history has some distance from it? I imagine people will read about the EAA with some consternation and surprise that this was really part of the American story.
I am reading MRS LINCOLN’S DRESSMAKER right now, a story of Lincoln’s election and the war from the point of view of a freed slave who made gowns for the wives of American leaders. What kinds of novels will be written within the context of the early twenty-first century war on public schools (because we are still in the infancy of this century—-another reason I find the term “21st Century skills” to be kind of silly).
Who are the characters that history will prove to be villains of America’s progress and principles in terms of public education?
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that they were described as relatively flat, not that Diane’s description was flat
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Another bought and paid for public official. Wonderful:
http://thenotebook.org/blog/146953/psp-used-lobbying-firm-promote-green-src-chair
If we’re wondering why public school aren’t faring too well in this brave new era of reform, we should probably look to the people we hire to run them. If they don’t value public schools, and they don’t, they probably aren’t going to take real good care of them.
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Might want to listen to this
http://wkar.org/post/lack-transparency-data-drive-opposition-eaa-expansion
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