Detroit-based journalist Allie Gross tells the sad story here of the destruction of public education in Detroit by Betsy DeVos and her fellow “reformers” (i.e. privatizers) over the past two decades, abetted by the Obama administration. “Reformers” decided that public schools were obsolete. They promoted charters. As charters proliferated, the public schools lost students and revenue; the district’s deficit  soared. “Reformers” installed an emergency manager. The deficit soared more. The state created an “Educational Achievement Authority.”  It’s well-paid administrator created new deficit and left. The EAA was a monumental failure. The “reformers” had only one answer: more charters, more privatization.

Gross provides an excellent historical summary of the downward spiral of Detroit public schools as “reform” took hold.

“When charter schools first entered the national discourse, in the late 1980s, the conversations focused on goals of collaboration and partnership. Charter pioneers such as Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, supported these schools on the premise that they would have the flexibility to experiment with new teaching techniques that could ultimately be integrated back into the traditional public school setting.

“But by 1993, when Michigan lawmakers began to debate charter legislation and school reform, Shanker had renounced charters, calling them an anti-union “gimmick” — new supporters had capitalized on the charter promise of flexibility and begun arguing that teachers unions, with their clunky bureaucracy, would hinder innovation. This new face of charter school support was obvious in Michigan, where the movement’s biggest champions weren’t parents or educators but members of the business community and a cadre of billionaires with ties to the religious right. Among them were the DeVos family, heirs to the fortune amassed from marketing behemoth Amway, who since the 1970s have donated at least $200 million to conservative and Christian causes across the nation with a keen focus on education.

“Charters’ biggest champions in Michigan were members of the business community and a cadre of billionaires with ties to the religious right.
“John Engler, the state’s Republican governor, was in the middle of an education funding overhaul that would rely on sales taxes rather than property taxes and tie dollars to students rather than districts. This, he and backers including the Michigan Chamber of Commerce reasoned, would keep community taxes down but raise school quality overall as schools competed for the most kids and the most funding. “The schools that deliver will succeed. The schools that don’t will not,” Engler said in an October 1993 speech promoting the funding plan. No longer will there be a monopoly on mediocrity in this state.”

“Charter schools fit right into this paradigm, one way to save students from a stagnant and bureaucratic public school system. Reformers said opening districts up to competition would force schools to improve or be put out of business. Parents would get better options in a new education marketplace, free to choose among traditional public schools, state-funded charter schools, and eventually private and parochial schools paid for by state-funded vouchers.

“The goal of charter public schools was to provide choice and options for students and parents trapped in failing traditional public schools who didn’t have the means to move to the suburbs or pay private school tuition,” said Gary Naeyaert, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, a pro-charter advocacy group that DeVos founded and funds and where she sits on the board. “We’ve always had school choice for rich people, and charter schools provided choice for everyone else.”

“Engler signed a measure in January 1994 allowing charters to operate. The first charter schools opened in Detroit in the following year. In the beginning, they fit the original charter school mission: largely mom-and-pop operations that filled an unmet need in the city. Three-quarters of Detroiters were black, and two of those first charter schools were grounded in an Afrocentric curriculum.

“As charters attracted families with promises of smaller class sizes, increased technology, and minimized bureaucracy, Detroit’s traditional public schools lost students and hemorrhaged funds. Because the short-term costs of losing a student were far greater than the average cost of educating one, this set the public school district on a path toward insolvency. Last year, for example, there were more than 100,000 school-age students living in the city; fewer than 47,000 of them attended the public schools. Take the estimated per-pupil funding figure of $7,500 per kid, and that’s nearly $400 million in revenue missing from the district.

“Fixed overhead costs, such as heating a school building or paying teachers, didn’t suddenly drop because a child left the district. The result was a negative feedback loop. As students left, the district lost funds and had to make cuts. Maybe it nixed art, or got rid of a social worker. Maybe it crammed more kids into a classroom, or made the risky decision to get rid of on-site boiler operators. Maybe, if things were really tight, it shut down schools. These quick fixes in turn made the district less “competitive,” and so the kids who could leave eventually did. The district lost even more funding and sunk further into entropy. “It is akin to an arsonist adding an accelerant to a fire,” Peter Hammer, the director of the Damon Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State’s law school, wrote in a 2012 paper on the effects of competition in DPS….

“Michigan has one of the most lax charter school laws in the nation and is often called the “wild West” of school choice. Nearly 80 percent of the state’s charter schools are run by for-profit companies — the highest rate in the nation. Anyone can start a school, and charter authorizers include a wide range of public bodies such as traditional school districts, public universities, and community colleges.

“Charter advocates point to the poor performance of public schools to explain the need for alternatives. But Michigan students’ achievement has not improved in step with increased school competition, and now both public schools and charters are falling behind. The state is currently ranked 41st in the nation in fourth-grade reading, when it was 28th in 2003.

“Lack of regulation has meant charter operators with bad track records or no record at all have cropped up in Detroit and across the state. A 2014 Detroit Free Press investigation into mismanagement in the charter school sector found the state had spent nearly $1 billion on charter schools yet public accountability had plummeted and schools were floundering. A 2013 Stanford University study found that more than half of Detroit’s charter schools failed to perform “significantly better” in math and reading and in some cases performed worse than Detroit public schools. Overall, the report found that 84 percent of charter students in Michigan performed below the state average in math and 80 percent were below the state average in reading.

“Nearly 80 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit companies — the highest rate in the nation.
Through the Great Lakes Education Project, the DeVos family has played a major role in ensuring the education marketplace remains unregulated. In 2011, they successfully advocated to lift the charter school cap and killed a provision that would have stopped failing schools from replicating. A review last year found “an unreasonably high” 23 charter schools on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools and questioned why after two decades of the charter experiment “student outcomes are still just ‘comparable’ to traditional public schools.”

Gross follows a mother and her children as they try to find their way through the choice maze. They liked the neighborhood school best, but it was closed by the state’s emergency manager.

“Choice doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and it vanishes when the school down the street is abruptly closed. “It’s backwards,” Moore told me last month as we sat in her tidy, plant-filled living room. Chrishawana, now 14, and Tylyia, 7, were eating a spaghetti dinner before getting ready for bed. “You’re trying to build this image of ‘OK, you’re free to go wherever you want,’ but if I have two crappy schools close to me and you close the school that out of the three was the best one, how are you helping me? What’s the choice in that?…”

The moral of the story: Despite the failure of school choice in Detroit, Betsy DeVos is poised to do to the nation what she and her allies have done to Detroit.