Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, wrote a blistering article about the DeVos family’s purchase of the Republican members of the Michigan legislature in return for their abandonment of any oversight of Detroit’s woeful charter schools.
The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.
The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.
There’s nothing more difficult than proving quid pro quos in politics, the instances in which favor is returned for specific monetary support.
But look at the amounts involved, and consider the DeVos’ near-sole interest in the issue of school choice. It’s a fool’s errand to imagine a world in which the family’s deep pockets haven’t skewed the school debate to the favor of their highly financed lobby.
And in this case, it was all done to the detriment of children in the City of Detroit.
Deep pockets, long arms
Back in March, the Senate voted to place charter schools under the same authority as public schools in the city, for quality control and attention to population need and balance, in line with a plan that had been in the works for more than a year, endorsed and promoted by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.
But when the bills moved to the state House, lawmakers gutted that provision, returning a bill to the Senate that preserved the free-for-all charter environment that has locked Detroit in an educational morass for two decades. After less than a week of debate, the Senate caved.
Even then, several legislators complained that the influence of lobbyists, principally charter school lobbyists, was overwhelming substantive debate. The effort was intense, they said, and unrelenting.
Now we know what was at stake.
Five days later, several members of the DeVos family made the maximum allowable contributions to the Michigan Republican Party, a total of roughly $180,000.
The next day, DeVos family members made another $475,000 in contributions to the party.
It was the beginning of a spending spree that would swell to $1.45 million in contributions to the party and to individual candidates by the end of July, according to an analysis by the Michigan Campaign Finance Network…
The legislation the DeVos family bought preserves a unique-in-the-nation style of charter school experimentation in Detroit.
If I wanted to start a school next year, all I’d need to do is get the money, draw up a plan and meet a few perfunctory requirements.
I’d then be allowed to operate that school, at a profit if I liked, without, practically speaking, any accountability for results. As long as I met the minimal state code and inspection requirements, I could run an awful school, no better than the public alternatives, almost indefinitely.
That’s what has happened in Detroit since the DeVos family helped push the charter law into existence 20 years ago.
On average, the schools don’t perform on state and national tests much better than public schools. A few outliers have reached remarkable heights. A few have done much worse. And charter advocates have become crafty liars in the selling of their product.
They’ll crow, for instance, that nearly twice as many of their kids do as well on national math assessments as the public schools. What they don’t tout are the numbers, which show the public schools are 8%, and the charters at 15%.
Regardless of outcome, none of the charter school establishment has been subject of a formal oversight and review that would reward the best actors and improve the worst.
Education should always be about children. But in Michigan, children’s education has been squandered in the name of a reform “experiment,” driven by ideologies that put faith in markets, alone, as the best arbiters of quality, and so heavily financed by donors like the DeVos clan that nearly no other voices get heard in the educational conversation.
The Free Press actually started investigating ed reform about 4 years ago. Up to that point they had been cheerleaders.
They’ve done a good job since.
Remember too- the charters are only half the story. Most children in Michigan don’t attend charters.
The real damage was done to kids in Michigan PUBLIC schools, not charter schools.
Those kids are never mentioned at all.
The President and Congress could fix this, by the way. Charters get tons of federal funding. They could make federal funding conditioned on oversight and regulation.
They don’t want to.
All the nonsense about “high quality charters” is meaningless. This “movement” could have fixed this long ago. They don’t want to fix it.
“Waste, fraud and abuse” is a political tool they can use to attack programs where it doesn’t exist and something to ignore when it might actually lead to something tangible.
“Hi, we’re here to pull 20 billion in federal funding and close your government school”
Great! Thanks for coming by! Always a pleasure to meet with ed reformers.
It seems like it will be awkward for DeVos to visit US public schools.
How does that work? We’re supposed to welcome a federal employee who is on a mission to close our local public school and replace it with a politically-connected private contractor?
Why would we welcome that person? Would charter schools host a vehemently anti-charter political operative?
I worked at DPS so I’m not a casual observer and appreciate Mr. Henderson’s continued efforts to shine a light to where reform is needed. I’ve become of the opinion that the unequal education of our children is a civil rights issue, that the actions of the Devos blurs the separation of church and state and that we are witnessing an accelerating war on teachers. No good can come of this.
Also, it should be noted that Eli Broad ran the last Detroit charter initiative and Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee promoted it.
It’s weird how 2012 has disappeared from this story. “Liberal” ed reformers backed DeVos all the way.
From Paul Krugman’s Twitter page: Something I haven’t been seeing: Trump’s Education pick is married to Amway heir; in 2011 Amway paid $150 million to settle fraud charges
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
This is pathetic. It is shameful to think that this person will be the next Secretary of Education. Every educator in every state should write their senators and representatives and ask them to vote against her appointment.
I’ll add that Henderson can’t be called a “pro-public school” editorialist either. He sends his kids to a charter. So his frequent criticisms of the charter sector really are interesting.
A similar mindset which allowed the Flint water crisis.
I haven’t always agreed with Presidential pics but this is the worst. Betsy buys her way into everything and this appointment is so distressing because it hits at the core of public education and will really destroy an educational system that has stood for all our children.. She is basically for Charter Schools that are on the backs of the public