After a year-long investigation, the Detroit Free Press published a scathing report on the state’s thriving charter sector.
Charter schools receive $1 billion in taxpayer funding with virtually no accountability.
They get worse results than traditional public schools.
140,000 children attend charter schools in Michigan.
Michigan has more for-profit charters than any other state. The for-profit organizations are secretive about their finances because they are private.
“In reviewing two decades of charter school records, the Free Press found:
“Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records. No state standards for who operates charter schools or how to oversee them.”
““People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”
“According to the Free Press’ review, 38% of charter schools that received state academic rankings during the 2012-13 school year fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all schools in the state performed better. Only 23% of traditional public schools fell below the 25th percentile.
“Advocates argue that charter schools have a much higher percentage of children in poverty compared with traditional schools. But traditional schools, on average, perform slightly better on standardized tests even when poverty levels are taken into account.”
Some examples of charter abuses of the public trust:
“Michigan’s laws are either nonexistent or so lenient that there are often no consequences for abuses or poor academics. Taxpayers and parents are left clueless about how charter schools spend the public’s money, and lawmakers have resisted measures to close schools down for poor academic performance year after year.
“The Free Press found that questionable decisions, excessive spending and misuse of taxpayer dollars run the gamut:
■ A Sault Ste. Marie charter school board gave its administrator a severance package worth $520,000 in taxpayer money.
■ A Bedford Township charter school spent more than $1 million on swampland.
■ A mostly online charter school in Charlotte spent $263,000 on a Dale Carnegie confidence-building class, $100,000 more than it spent on laptops and iPads.
■ Two board members who challenged their Romulus school’s management company over finances and transparency were ousted when the length of their terms was summarily reduced by Grand Valley State University.
■ National Heritage Academies, the state’s largest for-profit school management company, charges 14 of its Michigan schools $1 million or more in rent — which many real estate experts say is excessive.
■ A charter school in Pittsfield Township gave jobs and millions of dollars in business to multiple members of the founder’s family.
■ Charter authorizers have allowed management companies to open multiple schools without a proven track record of success.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It would be a good exercise to do a state by state index of corruption of the charter school industry. This reporter gives a start on how many points can be awarded for various forms of waste, fraud, abuse, low performance, and indifference by state officials. You can be sure EdWeek will not do this work because it is funded by foundation who are feeding this beast. They will, however, publish a huge supplement called Quality Counts with multiple indicators of the accountability measures for public schools.
I am heartened not only by the Free Press article, but also the comments on the site. In this and other articles, more people are speaking up about the lies told about public schools and charter schools.
I’m heartened by the comments, too.
When do we discuss the university role in all this, though?
Many of these authorizers in MI, OH and IN are public universities. In OH the authorizer is paid to (supposedly) provide some oversight.
Is this yet another instance where there’s an incentive to open more and more charter schools and undermine and weaken public school? If so, when does the university role get discussed?
To answer your last question, Chiara: Yes.
Central Michigan and Grand Valley are making a killing off this. They have no interest in closing charters. Whenever someone says, “Charters get closed due to performance”, they’re usually wrong.
In Michigan, charters close when they don’t generate profit or enough of it. I have friends who were teachers at two charter school in the Downriver area of Detroit. Both schools had performance metrics similar to their community schools. But both schools closed. That wasn’t academic failure. As my friends noted, the school didn’t make enough money.
There are charters that have been in the bottom five percent for years and are still open. (Hope Academy in Detroit.) So, why haven’t they closed?
The articles focused more on the transparency and financial activities of charters than it did on academic results. But it does reveal that charters are really just a parallel school system. There’s nothing truly innovative about the vast majority of charters. They get about the same results and have good and bad schools just like traditional publics. They are not laboratories of education.
Michigan’s for-profit sector was really touched upon in this section. (78% in MIchigan are for-profit. Far more than any other state. Even John Engler’s education hitman, Richard McLellan, noted that Engler never saw the for-profit domination. He believed it would be more community based schools. BUt here come the charter chains, ready to franchise in a building near you!) The Free Press also noted the huge amount of money that charters spend administratively compared to public schools.
Also, it is worth pointing out that charter advocates made the claim regarding lower scores and poverty. But, I thought they said poverty was NOT destiny. Hmmm.
By the way, NHA was the chain they focused on most. NHA generates so much cash off its rentals that nearly every real estate expert said it was bloated. NHA is also popping up in suburbs and specifically targeting demographic groups that are traditionally better at school. They’ll get good scores and claim excellence by trying to steal the best students and families. Since they can market aggressively, it’s hard to counter them.
It was an interesting section. The online comment dissenters could only say one thing: Choice and more choice. But as has been pointed out, options between schools that are generally alike isn’t really choice. Also, I want to point out that chains are growing fast here in Michigan. Pretty soon, that choice will be very limited to Walmart like chains doing this on the cheap.
Yeah, but WHY didn’t charter supporters anticipate the domination of the big chains?
It was inevitable. They already have national CMO’s.
How did they imagine this was going to turn out?
Of course small charters can’t compete.
They’re supposed to be such free market genuises. How could they not anticipate big player domination of a rigged market? They set up the market! They created it!
This “we had no IDEA how vadly it would turn out!” is malarkey.
What, specifically, are the authorizers doing to take 3% off the top as a fee?
They’re not running these schools. They’ve relinquished that to for profit operators (as have lawmakers).
How much are university authorizers making off opening charter schools and keeping them open?
Have you seen this report on Florida charters. https://twitter.com/SunSentinel/status/479661633175035904
Donna Shubert
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Just so there’s no confusion, Gary Miron from Western Michigan U has been exposing this for nearly a decade.
He has testified numerous times before lawmakers, produced studies, etc.
Charter school promoters have known about this for years.
They’ve done nothing. In fact, they lobby to deregulate further.
They are never going to regulate their own industry. Never. And our cowardly and bought and paid for lawmakers won’t either.
They just killed charter school regulation in OH. There was an expose, there was 2 weeks of outrage and the charter lobby rushed in and killed new regulations
This Sun-Sentinel article looks at charters in Broward and Palm Beach counties. The legislators who allowed the misuse of public school dollars by charter schools need to be held accountable.
“According to the Free Press’ review, 38% of charter schools that received state academic rankings during the 2012-13 school year fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all schools in the state performed better. Only 23% of traditional public schools fell below the 25th percentile.”
Of course almost all of Michigan’s charter schools are located in segregated inner cities and serve at-risk children; many of the children who attend them are likely zoned for one of those 23% traditional public schools.
A quick Google search of “detroit public schools corruption” reveals that fraud and waste are hardly limited to the charter sector. Still, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that for-profit charters are associated with a higher rate of abuse. Perhaps Michigan should re-visit its charter school laws.
“Of course almost all of Michigan’s charter schools are located in segregated inner cities and serve at-risk children; many of the children who attend them are likely zoned for one of those 23% traditional public schools.”
You wouldn’t be, um, making excuses, would you? 😉
I think it’s vitally important to always compare apples to apples, whether it’s pointing out that an individual charter school is not actually educating the same kids as the district school in the same building, or saying that it would probably make more sense to compare the performance of Michigan charter schools with their home districts rather than schools in Bloomfield Hills, East Grand Rapids, Barton Hills, and Norton Shores, among others.
NHA buys all of Detroit Free Press ad space: http://www.freep.com/
Might just be a very targeted DoubleClick program based on keywords.
As a blogger who’s written about Michigan charter school fraud (in the form of one particularly egregious “charter cheater”, federally-indicted con artist Steven J. Ingersoll), I’m pleased to see the Free Press series finally break.
From furtive, back room deals to toothless and impotent “oversight”, there seems to be a template that all these characters use.
This story was featured on this blog on June 5:
http://glisteningquiveringunderbelly.blogspot.com/2014/04/breaking-news-miss-fortune-discovers.html
I suppose this grand theft qualifies as “the unleashing of powerful market forces” that Bill Gates advocates. He had yet to produce any R and D (a term he uses, research and development) on the connection between this marker-force “unleashing” and virtually unregulated greed.
Corrected version:
I suppose this grand theft qualifies as “the unleashing of powerful market forces” that Bill Gates advocates. He has yet to produce any R and D (a term he uses, research and development) on the connection between this market-force “unleashing” and virtually unregulated greed.
As a Michigan parent of two kids in public ed I very much appreciate The Detroit Free Press reporting on Charter corruption. It is long overdue and represents a significant departure from traditional media’s cheerleading and co-option by assorted “ed reform” forces.
But, if you believe Diane Ravitch that public schools aren’t failing (although some cities and communities are) you should take a careful look at how this reporting is being set up to be used by MI Democrats and others.
What is being called for as part of this reporting is state oversight of charters — a new school system or partnership wherein the state works with charters as they once worked with public schools.
This can’t but compromise traditional public schools Districts that are geographically defined (per the constitution). The state system imagined in this reporting — where it is believed charters are great conceptually but need oversight — will further the erosion of public schools. Very few in the state, outside of educational administrations, consulting firms, etc., will vote to pay for a state “public” school system that oversees charters.
We knew this about charter schools LONG ago. Charters made poorer or at the minimum, nothing better than public schools, even with their criteria for success: test scores.
But press on, don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind has already been made up – most especially when I can make money from MY view.
It got even more interesting. National Heritage Academies is one of the worst offenders named in the Free Press article. So what does NHA do when the series starts? Why, it buys all the ad space on the front page of the Free Press: http://www.eclectablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NatlHeritageAcadDFP.png
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.”
SHAME!