Old Redford Academy high school, a charter school in Detroit, suddenly fired several staff members, some of whom were “veterans” (i.e., more than one year of experience), without explanation.
The orders came from corporate management, Advanced Educational Staffing. Students wondered how they would earn enough credits to graduate.
Advanced Educational Staffing is a for-profit charter operator. Many of those who have worked there give negative reviews to the corporation and say that the main focus is computer-based standardized testing.
The school, part of a chain, is a low-performing charter. Charters in Michigan do not have to meet accountability standards.
Turmoil, chaos, disruption. It is Michigan, after all, the wholly owned state of Betsy DeVos and her family.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is the best part:
“Members of the board Wednesday said their hands were tied. Board President Roy Levy Williams said they don’t make hiring and firing decisions, but contract these tasks out to a management company. In this case that’s Innovative Teaching Solutions (ITS), run by school founder Melvin Smith, which then subcontracts to AES, run by Melvin Smith’s wife, Karon, and her brothers Raymond and Scott.
The school’s authorizer, Central Michigan University, also said it couldn’t directly comment on the situation.
“Our relationship is with the board of directors,” Janelle Brzezinski, director of communications for the Governor John Engler Center for Charter Schools, wrote in an e-mail last week. “We have a charter contract with the board of directors that allows them to govern the school, including contracting with an educational service provider.”
No one is responsible, for anything. I guess parents and teachers will just have to contact AES- the private, for-profit business who is actually running this school.
It’s layers of contracts. First state to authorizer, then authorizer to board, then the board outsources the whole thing to a management company.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just admit the management companies are running this school instead of playing this game where it is somehow “public”?
Chiara: the same part leapt out at me too.
The whole set-up seems like a poster child for “diffused responsibility and accountability.”
Meaning, as a practical matter, openly and consciously organized to ensure irresponsibility and unaccountability.
For what end? To line the pockets and swell the egos of a few, but it comes at the expense of the many, i.e., parents, students, teachers and other school staff, and the community at large.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
We need to play a game of, let’s ask Betsy, afterall, this is her home state.
She’s director of communications for the Governor John Engler Center for Charter Schools and all she has to say is…nothing?
What does the board do if they outsource everything to a management company and what are we paying Central Michigan for?
C’mon drext727, you know what The Ditz’s answer(s) would be before starting: Choice!!!
I suppose it would be completely evil of me to say “good”, wouldn’t it? It’s just, the more these things happen, and the more students and teachers are “rattled”, the more they will wake up to what charters really are and the more they may avoid them, possibly? And if the demand goes away, so does the profit, and the faster the profits fall off, the faster these parasites will fail.
I do realize that a lot of teachers teach at charters because they need to put food on the table, not because they believe the hype, and I do have sympathy for them. But the more charters can become places of last resort to teach rather than places that dewy-eyed teachers are attracted to, again, the faster they’re going to fail.
The entire chain of command in Michigan’s for-profit cancer schools is designed to create a chain of no command, with the for-profit management company really making all of the decisions. The Michigan Department of Education has no control over any of this either. The school board is appointed, not elected, the authorizer is supposed to keep the school board in check, but their main concern is getting their cut of school funds for authorizing the charter. The only way to put an end to this is educate parents charter schools are not a real choice and pull their kids out of these failing schools.
“CynthiaNixon
More Cynthia Nixon Retweeted NowThis
Solidarity to teachers and public school families in Kentucky and Oklahoma today!”
I don’t live in NY so I can’t vote for her but it’s great that she remembered “public school families”
It’s funny that you should bring up Cynthia Nixon.
I occasionally pop over to those corporate ed. reform propaganda sites…
The 74 (Campbell Brown, Richard Whitmire, et al)
and
Education Post (Peter Cunningham, Erika Sanzi, et al).
It’s interesting to see which education related stores get covered, and which don’t, and of course, how those stories are covered.
Let’s look at a recent example.
After KIPP’s Founder and just-terminated Co-CEO Mike Feinberg went down in flames for molesting and harassing students and teacher staff — with one such predation resulting in an out-of-court settlement with the victim, and that settlement was hidden from KIPP parents and the public for over two decades — do you think that there might have been … oh … say …a great piece by Richard Whitmire reflecting on the meaning and impact of Feinberg’s demise?
No, not a word.
Regarding the Feinberg fiasco, do you think Peter Cunningham or someone else on EdPost’s paid staff might chime in with an op-ed to address what happened in KIPP-land?
Nope, again. Not a word.
If we ignore stuff like this, it’ll be just like it never happened. Don’t you know?
How about those state-wide teacher strikes: the recent successful one in West Virginia, and the ones about to happen in states such as Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky?
Nope again, not a word.
As with the rest of the corporate media and its plutocrat funders, they’re scared to death that hordes of middle / working class people — both teachers and non-teachers alike — will see what’s happening in those states, and then decide to follow those teachers’ example.
So let’s stay away from covering stuff like that.
So what DOES merit coverage on Campbell’s and Peter Cunningham’s websites?
Well, here’s a piece trashing Cynthia Nixon, of course, (which
actually turns out to be a dual trashing of Nixon and Diane
Ravitch.) and attempting to kneecap her nascent run for governor. The writer attempts to draw a specious parallel between Nixon’s lack of experience in politics, and TFA teachers lack of experience in teaching … Gotcha! You’re a hypocrite!
If posting trash like this doesn’t expose Campbell and Peter Cunningham and the rest as total corporate whores, then what will?
x x x x x x x x x x x x
PATRICK RICCARDS
(who, in his second paragraph, proudly admits to being “the leader of a state-based education reform organization” … i.e. he’s getting paid, and paid well to write this piece):
“As the anti-Cuomo, Nixon is largely being hyped as protector of all that is fair and good in education, while standing in opposition to the evils of charter schools, Common Core and those dreaded reformers who have long supported Cuomo.
“But at some point, don’t we need to just call out hypocrisy where we see it?
“Don’t get me wrong. Nixon may one day become an excellent politician. And as a New York voter, an advocate, and an active citizen, Ravitch has every right to advocate for any candidate she chooses, regardless of qualifications. As someone with a strong base of supporters, she almost has an obligation, as folks look to her to see who would be the best voice for the Ravitch agenda.
“But at some point, don’t we need to just call out hypocrisy where we see it?
“Ravitch and the disciples of Ravitch are quick to condemn Teach For America (TFA). TFA is portrayed as a band of dilettantes, individuals of privilege who are seeking to inject themselves in to the schools for a few years without proper preparation or without having paid their dues. To them, the TFA badge is thrown around as a brand of unpreparedness.
“Can’t the same be said of Nixon?
” … ”
“But we don’t need the Cuomo/Nixon debate to become some sort of proxy fight for education reform hyperbole. The education reform debates are often rhetoric at its ugliest. There is more than enough hypocrisy, and way too much ‘do as a I say, not as I do.’
“Personal passions get in the way of facts, and the push to win too often trumps what is best for the kids and the community. In many ways, education reform fights play to our basest fears and our worst intentions.
“New York politics is better than that. There is no need for Democratic politics in the Empire State to roll around in such rhetorical mud.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x
http://educationpost.org/cynthia-nixons-run-for-governor-is-looking-a-lot-more-like-hypocrisy-and-the-city/
What’s great about Cynthia running is that it totally flushes out exactly who’s behind the corporate ed reform agenda, and who’s buttering the bread of those corporate ed. reform proponents / propagandists, as evidenced by this idiotic and craven piece ABOVE — a screed desperately sucking up to their billionaire funders — shows us.
As one who grew up in Michigan, attending (what I later learned were) the wonderful public schools of (then prosperous) Flint, this kind of story would break my heart if it weren’t already broken by corporate abandonment (see Moore’s “Roger & Me”) and the Great Water Poisoning (see any news source) in Flint. God bless you and your work, Diane.
It is highly likely that the management for this corporate charter school placed/recruited spies in the school to find out who the teachers were that were complaining so they could get rid of them earlier than usual.
This happened to one middle public school where I taught for three years back in the 1980s and half the staff quit at the end of his first year (my third year at that school). I put in a transfer with two other teachers and moved to a high school in that district to escape this Trumpish, bullying, administrator. I stayed at that high school for the rest of my career as a union-represented classroom teacher.