In the debate about the appointment of Betsy DeVos, the failure of her brand of reform in Michigan has not gotten enough attention. Would you hire a plumber whose previous jobs were all failures? Would you trust your car to an auto mechanic who was known to be incompetent? Would you go to a doctor who lost his medical license for malpractice?
DeVos’s allies have been beating the drums about a Detroit miracle, but no one else can see it but them. Despite more than 20 years of charters, the Detroit school district is the lowest performing urban district on NAEP. As the Detroit Free Press has repeatedly written, many of the charters in Detroit are failing schools. DeVos fought off legislative efforts to impose accountability on charters.
Most recently, one of the boosters for privatization in Michigan published an article about the miracle of Muskegon Heights, a predominantly African American school district that was taken over by the state and given an emergency manager. The emergency manager turned the entire small district over to a charter operator. If you believe the DeVos PR, this was great for the children.
But Gary Rubinstein looked at the data and found that this charter flack was presenting “alternate facts.” Muskegon Heights is one of the lowest performing districts in the state of Michigan.
Before the takeover, Muskegon Heights had five schools. Now it has two.
Gary writes:
So one school is in the bottom 2% of all schools and the other is in the bottom 0%. Unless the second school once had a ranking with negative numbers, there is no way that being in the 0% can be an improvement over anything.
So this is yet another example of a lie to support the narrative that charter schools are superior to public schools. If this turnaround was supported by Betsy DeVos and it is any indication of her ability to devise real solutions to complex issues, I’m feeling pretty pessimistic about the direction education will take if and when she is confirmed as Secretary of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Has the DeVos family set an American record for spreading the most money to the most politicians? Just in the Senate, 19 senators, each, received more than $50,000.
If this was, the America, that so many have sacrificed so much for, the senators would recuse themselves. Sadly, the nation is an oligarchy.
Correction- not that it matters, since the average American, making under $50,000, can’t contribute tens of thousands of dollars to politicians, but some of the 19 senators, identified above, only topped $20K not, $50 K.
“Fast-forward to today and you’ll find that the Muskegon Heights Public School Academy has strong leadership, balanced books, and improving academics. It is on a glide path to pay off its old debt. All of its nearly 1,000 students attend by choice. No one is assigned. Like all Michigan charter schools, it’s prohibited by law from levying taxes. Because charters receive less money than districts, it provides taxpayers with a bigger bang for their buck.”
This is nonsense too. The charter operator didn’t fund the original asset, which was the property and facilities. They didn’t pay for it which is why it’s “cheaper”
School facilities don’t spring up like mushrooms. People pay for them. This one was paid for when they arrived.
The “choice” talking point is deceptive too. The “choice” in Muskegon Heights is attend one of these schools or go to a different town. That’s exactly how the public schools operated.
It’s almost insulting how little effort they put into this marketing. They must believe people are idiots.
Incidentally, all this cheerleading for DeVos just buttresses the notion the ed reform goal is to get rid of public schools. They can’t point to a single thing this person did for public schools other than privatize them. That’s the objection to DeVos- people are afraid she’ll destroy existing public schools. Telling us over and over how successful she was at privatizing schools means they are ignoring the objections. Again.
Ignoring or excluding all dissenters is a real problem in ed reform. They need to stop talking and listen for a while. There are lots of people in this country who support public schools. They should have a representative at the US Department of Education. They aren’t going away.
One of the ways charter operators in Ohio “save” money is by paying teachers thousands of dollars a year less. 10,000. 15,000. Huge amounts.
I bet those charter teachers are feeling real “empowered” by this “movement” making 15 dollars an hour. It’s a race to the bottom on wages in this state. They spend a couple of years at charters and then transfer to the public school, because it pays better. That’s the truth you won’t read on national ed reform sites which focus on NYC and Boston and DC. How charter teachers in the midwest make thousands of dollars less than public school teachers.
In fact, those “labor unions” charter supporters abhor? They’re holding up wages for every charter teacher. If ed reformers get their way they’ll ALL be making 15 dollars an hour. So if you’re a teacher in an Ohio charter who opposes unions? You should be thanking them. They’re the only thing standing between you and declining wages.
“If ed reformers get their way they’ll ALL be making 15 dollars an hour.”
Umm, no they won’t be making $15/hr. They’d be making minimum wage if the regressive right gets its way.
The US Department of Ed preference for charter and private schools over public schools will have bigger implications than ordinary K-12 ed. They’ll funnel funding to CTE and preschool programs operated by contractors.
When DeVos takes charge start adding it up. This isn’t limited to ordinary K-12. She can pull funding from the unfashionable and disfavored “public schools” in a myriad of ways.
They’re planning a big CTE push. None of that funding will go to public schools. There must be an absolute feeding frenzy of contractors in DC. They hit the jackpot. She can divert all kinds of funding with nothing even going thru Congress. You can bet public schools won’t be sharing in this funding frenzy. They won’t even be invited to bid.
CTE = ???
Although this isn’t it, chronic traumatic encephalopathy would also be appropriate.
Got so snarky that I forgot the point: Career and Technical Education
I’m looking forward to the US Department of Ed national tour opposing public schools.
Do we have to host these people in our schools when they arrive? Can we just politely decline serving as a photo op during the DeVos “public schools suck!” tour?
Is there some reason I want federal employees who oppose public schools IN my son’s school? Seems like we have the right to object to that. We are supposedly their employers, after all. We’re all paying them.
DeVos could take action today to reassure public school parents that someone in the US Department of Ed will be representing their schools.
She could hire a public school person from OUTSIDE the ed reform echo chamber.
If she doesn’t do that it’s all talk and meaningless. If this is all ed reform club members she’ll have told you a lot- you don’t matter in DC.
Hope you saw or can retrieve Rachael Maddow’s amazing coverage of Devos Friday night, jammed Congressional phones, Devos company selling unauthorized ADHA products/services at $2000, gofundme, opportunity for even more weekend protests because Republicans are in Florida meeting funders.
I usually watch Maddow but had friends over for dinner, so missed it. I will search for that segment.
ADHA = ???
Would you hire a plumber who…pays you thousands of dollars to mess up the pipes of someone else’s house…and you won’t get the blame…rather you’ll get praise for your generosity and outside the box thinking…and all blame goes to the homeowner whose pipes were ruined?
With the charter school industry that’s favored by nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos bleeding vital funds from the public’s schools, the thoughtful person will ask: “Why are hedge fund people the main backers of the private charter school industry? After all, hedge funds are not known for a selfless interest in educating children.”
Well, the answer, of course, is MONEY.
For example, look at DeVos’ home state of Michigan: There are 1.5 million children attending public elementary and secondary schools and the state annually spends about $11,000 per student which adds up to pot of about $17 billion that private charter school operators have their eyes on. If these private operators succeed in getting what DeVos wants to give them — the power to run all the schools — these private profiteers could make almost $6 billion in profit just by firing veteran teachers and replacing them with low-paid inexperienced teachers, which is what the real objective of so-called “Value-Added” evaluations of veteran teachers is all about.
But wait! There’s more!
In fact, there are many more ways that big profits are being made every day right now by the private charter school industry. Here are just some:
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 Supreme Court, the 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. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (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 PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
This is especially Ironic, since the new charter district was originally handed over to a for-profit management company, Mosaica. They bailed within a year, supposedly because of financial concerns but really (I am told by school admins from the region) because they knew they test scores they live by would be awful.
So much for the “breakthrough performance” charter lobbyists promised when they successfully pushed for the elimination of Michigan’s cap on charter schools.
The district was converted to a charter by the former emergency manager in order to manage the district’s debts to the state without looking like a “bailout.” Charters get 100% of their money from the state budget, while local districts are required to levy certain taxes to make up their local contribution. In this case, the full cost of operating the district (and paying Mosaica’s management fee) was transferred to the state while the local property tax levy remaining with the shell school district want to paying down the debt.
(The debt was incurred, as with many Michigan districts, when Muskegon Heights had to borrow from the state to cover operating deficits caused by enrollment decline and the associated funding loss. As students leave, funding falls faster than costs, triggering more enrollment declines and what we call the “death spiral.” A similar stratagem – creating a new charter district – was used in Highland Park Most recently the same technique was used on a much larger scale in the Detroit Public Schools, though without the charter conversion.)