Nancy Flanagan is retired from a distinguished career as a teacher in Michigan. She sent the following comment accompanied by this article about how school choice has increased segregation in the public schools of Holland, Michigan.
Flanagan writes:
“This is the best, most accurate and representative piece on what the DeVos family–over 25 years–has done to public education in Michigan. Slowly, subtly, they have damaged the Holland public school system, trading on racism and fear to chip away at a once-highly respected and functional system. Please understand: Holland used to be an all-white, all-Christian, largely Dutch town. When diversity arrived, DeVos & Co. planted one of their first “innovative” charters there, Black River. Holland’s white enrollment has plummeted 60 percent. The linked article explains how DeVos used charters (because vouchers necessitated a change in state legislation, which they could not get through) as a strategy to bust integration and bust teachers unions, in the place where they had the most success: western Michigan.
“My best friend was a teacher for many years in Holland. As Hispanic (and it’s mostly Hispanic) families moved in, white families moved out. The dis-integration of a sturdy, well-run public district–the kind of district you wouldn’t expect to go under, because it once had considerable public support… This is not “low-hanging fruit”–a chronically stressed urban or rural district in poverty. This is the next phase…
Please read: http://bridgemi.com/2016/11/betsy-devos-and-the-segregation-of-school-choice/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the late 1970’s the Los Angeles Unified School District starting busing.
Anyone with enough money in wealthy neighborhoods fled to private schools.
And never looked back.
Causing segregated schools whether African American or Latino.
It has not changed.
This is a long term problem and will not change unless honest people get on the
LAUSD School Board.
I don’t think I’ll see that in my lifetime.
YES. A frightening reality for our current parasitic relationship with technocratic/curricula/testing educational invasions: this is not low-hanging fruit, this is the next phase.
As far as vouchers go,
https://www.google.com/search?q=equality+is+not+justice&biw=1183&bih=858&tbm=isch&imgil=moId3b_jrMKVfM%253A%253BfHthP5Gkc4r-aM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.nairaland.com%25252F1973900%25252Fequality-not-always-justice&source=iu&pf=m&fir=moId3b_jrMKVfM%253A%252CfHthP5Gkc4r-aM%252C_&usg=__fTwfmCPSyD49tuHw8hx2QtVAfhQ%3D&ved=0ahUKEwiRufTc0NPQAhVN7mMKHbFAATMQyjcIJA&ei=w2xAWNHLKs3cjwOxgYWYAw#imgrc=moId3b_jrMKVfM%3A
The US dept of ed’s role is to do more for those who have less.
The so-called “education reform” movement, of which charter schools are the biggest profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as a key agenda item. The fact that billionaires and hedge funds could pocket tens of millions of public tax dollars from this new kind of segregation was just a bonus. In fact, the first calls for “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU reveal the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and now the NAACP Board of Directors has ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students and students with disabilities.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
And now the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities and must (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
Come on man and please Diane publish my post this is not intended to be un politically correct but the state of Michigan is a complete disaster under the “Devos family” rule. First, they have single handily destroyed the school system in the state of MIchigan. The charter schools in the state have the worst statistics of anywhere in the country whether its compared to public or charter schools. Schools are in shambles with cracked ceilings and corroded floors to mold and mildew over whelmed to the point where teachers had to protest the working conditions!!! Second, Michigan has many towns now that practice sharia law and muslims rule the land. In Dearborn, Michigan christians were stoned to death by muslims because they held up christian signs as the town practices sharia law now. Dearborn MIchigan is also the first american city to practice sharia law. Where were the Devos’s money bags here? Do they not care that our American constitution was being stepped on by muslims taking over the state? You mean to tell me that the Devos family is more concerned about destroying public schools than to allow an entire city in Michigan go to sharia law?
Would you please supply some links to that sharia law and stonings to death!
Increased segregation via charter schools is no myth nor it is limited to Michigan.
The Growing Segmentation of the Charter School Sector in North Carolina
Abstract “A defining characteristic of charter schools is that they introduce a strong market element into public education. In this paper, we examine through the lens of a market model the evolution of the charter school sector in North Carolina between 1999 and 2012. …Our findings indicate that charter schools in North Carolina are increasingly serving the interests of relatively able white students in racially imbalanced schools and that despite improvements in the charter school sector over time, charter schools are still no more effective on average than traditional public schools.”
Helen F. Ladd, Charles T. Clotfelter, and John B. Holbein
Education Finance and Policy, Vol. 0, No. ja , Pages 1-48
(doi: 10.1162/EDFP_a_00226)