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Stephen Henderson: Betsy DeVos Twists Facts to Advance Her Privatization Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
7

Stephen Henderson is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. He is not anti-charter; his own children attend a Detroit charter school. He is opposed to lies and propaganda. He has written that the charter movement has done nothing to lift the children of Detroit, and that there are as many bad charter schools as public schools. He has written critically of DeVos’s successful efforts to torpedo accountability and oversight of charter schools.

 

When it comes to data and research, he says, DeVos is not to be trusted.

 

He writes:

 

A true advocate for children would look at the statistics for charter versus traditional public schools in Michigan and suggest taking a pause, to see what’s working, what’s not, and how we might alter the course.

 

Instead, DeVos and her family have spent millions advocating for the state’s cap on charter schools to be lifted, so more operators can open and, if they choose, profit from more charters.

 

Someone focused on outcomes for Detroit students might have looked at the data and suggested better oversight and accountability.

 

But just this year, DeVos and her family heavily pressured lawmakers to dump a bipartisan-supported oversight commission for all schools in the city, and then showered the GOP majority who complied with more than $1 million dollars in campaign contributions.

 

The Department of Education needs a secretary who values data and research, and respects the relationship between outcomes and policy imperatives.

 

Nothing in Betsy DeVos’ history of lobbying to shield the charter industry from greater accountability suggests she understands that.

 

If she’s confirmed, it will be a dark day for the value of data and truth in education policy.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Research

A Wake-Up Call for Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2017 //
107

Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, wrote an uninformed opinion piece urging Trump to invite cities to become “laboratories of choice,” where every student could go to the school of his or her choice. He says this would be “the right kind of choice.” “Uninformed” is the polite term. I was tempted to say “absurd” or idiotic,” but decided to be polite.

 

He begins his article by reciting the specious claims of the right wingers that everyone exercises choice except the poor. I know these claims because I was part of three rightwing think tanks where they were repeated again and again. Some people choose parochial schools; some choose private schools; others choose safe suburbs and neighborhoods. Only the poor are “stuck” in “failing schools.”

 

The assumption behind these assertions is that choosing schools will improve education. But there is no evidence for this claim.

 

Here is some news for Mr. Hiatt.

 

We already have laboratories of choice. First, there is New Orleans, which has no public schools. The scores are up, but most of the charter schools continue to be low-performing, probably because they have the poor kids who were not accepted in the top-performing charters. The district as a whole is low-performing in relation to the state, which is one of the lowest-performing in the nation.

 

Then there is Milwaukee, which has had vouchers and charters for 25 years. Three sectors compete, and all are low-performing. How is that for a “laboratory of choice,” Mr. Hiatt?

 

Then there is Detroit, in Betsy DeVos’ home state of Michigan. Detroit is the lowest-performing urban district tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is overrun by charters, many of them operating for profit. Now there is another fine example of a failing “laboratory of choice.”

 

Mr. Hiatt, why don’t you take a look at other nations’ school system. The one that most people admire, Finland, has well-resourced schools, highly educated teachers, professional autonomy, a strong professional union, and excellent results. What it does not have is standardized testing, competition, or choice.

 

Please, Fred, read my last two books Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Read Samuel Abrams’ Education and the Commercial Mindset. Read Mercedes Schneider’s School Choice. Pay attention. Be informed before you write.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Don’t Let Betsy DeVos Do to the Nation What She did to Detroit

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2016 //
37

Mercedes Schneider reviews the ruination of public education in Detroit while under the thumb of Betsy DeVos. She relies on an article that appeared in Truthout by Joseph Natoli.

 

Natoli wrote:

 

“Privatization of all things public has slammed Detroit as gentrifying investors seek to put price tags on what was previously public domain. In predatory fashion, privatizers are targeting the city’s struggling students as a new frontier for profit.

 

“How weak and vulnerable is public education in Detroit? The Nation’s Report Card, published by an independent federal commission, named Detroit Public Schools the country’s “lowest-performing urban school district” in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. In 2011, a Republican state legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Snyder repealed a statewide cap on the number of Detroit charter schools. The floodgates were opened and privatizing predators rolled in.

 

“Bankruptcy following the collapse of the jobs that fueled the “Motor City” has exposed Detroit to the dynamics described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. A crisis, either arranged or accidental, precipitates a rush to recuperation. Lobbyists of wealthy investors petition a government that wealthy investors have put in place. A much-quoted “checks and balances” security shield for democratic governance is thus so easily disarmed.

 

“The more startling, dire and urgent the crisis, the greater the rush to a “saving” privatization. Low reading and math scores, shared by both charter and public schools, do not as dramatically make the case that crisis exists, as does a more observable infrastructure rot and decay. When statistics do not show charter schools to be better spaces for learning than public schools, privatizers instead focus on appearances. In the case of Detroit public schools, appearance alone makes the case of crisis and failure in the eyes of parents. And, similarly, coats and ties or uniforms in classrooms shiny with new computers make the case for achievement and success.

 

“Still, the state of physical decay of Detroit schools is alarming: “Black mold in school buildings. Classroom heating systems that fail during frigid Michigan winters. Leaky roofs, warped floors, and collapsed ceilings,” enumerates MLive.com writer Eli Savit. The crisis has, of course, been financially engineered. The collapse of physical infrastructure in Michigan schools is funded solely through property taxes, thus less revenue is garnered in Detroit, where the average home is $40,000. Meanwhile, the average home in nearby Bloomfield Hills is worth 10 times that.

 

“Weakening Strategies

 

“Weakening public education to the point that privatization looks like rescue is accomplished by funding that is decreased when tax funds are siphoned off to for-profit charter schools. It is also inequitably allocated within the wide divide between poverty and wealth that exists in the US. When you allocate based on property ownership, you are at once solidifying the gap between rich and poor and, most grievously, extending that gap into the future.”

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Detroit, Education Reform

Why Allie Gross Changed Her Mind

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2016 //
11

Allie Gross is a journalist in Detroit. She came to the city as a member of Teach for America and taught in a charter school. She thought she would change her students’ lives. But then she learned things about the charter school  and its leadership staff that disillusioned her. I posted her account of her transformation two years ago. Since then, I have posted other articles she wrote. The previous post is her latest. I was very taken with it, because Ali showed deep understanding of the damage that school choice does to communities. I wondered how someone who came through TFA had this perspective. Ali suggested I re-read the piece she had written in 2014.

 

Here it is. 

 

It is called “The Charter School Profiteers.”

 

I know what it means to become disillusioned and to change your mind. It’s not easy.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America TFA

Allie Gross: Betsy DeVos and the Gutting of Public Schools in Detroit

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2016 //
22

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Privatization

N.Y. Times: Betsy DeVos’ Vision for the Future of Education in America

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2016 //
10

Kate Zernike of the New York Times recently visited Detroit to learn about how school choice was working there. It wasn’t. Parents had many choices, but most were bad choices.

 

Now Zernike shows how Betsy DeVos personally  influenced the current chaotic situation of Detroit. Here is her vision: Let the market rule, with minimal or no regulation:

 

Few disagreed that schools in Detroit were a mess: a chaotic mix of charters and traditional public schools, the worst-performing in the nation.

 

So city leaders across the political spectrum agreed on a fix, with legislation to provide oversight and set standards on how to open schools and close bad ones.

 

But the bill died without even getting a final vote. And the person most influential in killing it is now President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to oversee the nation’s public schools, Betsy DeVos.

 

Her resistance to the legislation last spring is a window into Ms. DeVos’s philosophy and what she might bring to the fierce and often partisan debate about public education across the country, and in particular, the roles of choice and charter schools.

 

The bill’s proposals are common in many states and accepted by many supporters of school choice, like a provision to stop failing charter operators from creating new schools. But Ms. DeVos argued that this kind of oversight would create too much bureaucracy and limit choice. A believer in a freer market than even some free market economists would endorse, Ms. DeVos pushed back on any regulation as too much regulation. Charter schools should be allowed to operate as they wish; parents would judge with their feet.

 

Detroit Public Schools, she argued, should simply be shut down and the system turned over to charters, or the tax dollars given to parents in the form of vouchers to attend private schools.

 

“She is committed to an ideological stance that is solely about the free market, at the expense of practicality and the basic needs of students in the most destabilized environment in the country,” said Tonya Allen, the president of the Skillman Foundation, a nonprofit that works with Detroit children, and a co-chairwoman of the coalition that produced the report that became the basis for the legislation last spring.

 

“If she was showing herself present in places and learning from the practitioners, that’s a fine combination,” Ms. Allen said. “But Betsy never showed up in Detroit. She was very eager to impose experimentation on students that she has not spent time with and children that she does not have consequence for.”

 

The DeVos plan is simple: Get rid of public schools. Give every child a voucher and let parents choose to use them wherever they wish. If vouchers are not possible, open as many charter schools as possible, whether for-profit or not, and allow parents to choose at will, with no regulation or oversight.

 

She is the Darth Vader of school reform. She is Public Enemy #1 of public education.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers

Politico: Michigan is a Horrible Model for U.S. Education

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2016 //
19

Caitlin Emma, Benjamin Wermund, and Kimberly Hefling, staff writers at politico.com, took a close look at Michigan and answered the question, what hath Betsy DeVos’s obsession with choice done to the schools of Michigan?

 

Unless you are a choice fanatic like DeVos, the answer is not encouraging.

 

Despite two decades of charter-school growth, the state’s overall academic progress has failed to keep pace with other states: Michigan ranks near the bottom for fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading on a nationally representative test, nicknamed the “Nation’s Report Card.” Notably, the state’s charter schools scored worse on that test than their traditional public-school counterparts, according to an analysis of federal data.

 

Critics say Michigan’s laissez-faire attitude about charter-school regulation has led to marginal and, in some cases, terrible schools in the state’s poorest communities as part of a system dominated by for-profit operators. Charter-school growth has also weakened the finances and enrollment of traditional public-school districts like Detroit’s, at a time when many communities are still recovering from the economic downturn that hit Michigan’s auto industry particularly hard.

 

The results in Michigan are so disappointing that even some supporters of school choice are critical of the state’s policies.

 

“The bottom line should be, ‘Are kids achieving better or worse because of this expansion of choice?’” said Michigan State Board of Education President John Austin, a DeVos critic who also describes himself as a strong charter-school supporter. “It’s destroying learning outcomes … and the DeVoses were a principal agent of that.”

 

The links are in the article, as well as a puzzle. Check out the link to CREDO at Stanford (funded by the Walton Foundation), which issued a report on Michigan charters and praised them extensively. How does the CREDO finding make sense to Michigan’s low standing on the National Assessment of Education Progress? How does it make sense in light of the fact that Detroit is the worst-performing urban district tested by NAEP?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, NAEP, Privatization, Testing

Detroit Free Press: DeVos and Her War on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2016 //
12

 

Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press and a parent of children in a Detroit charter school, wrote a scathing critique of Betsy DeVos and her lack of qualifications to be Secretary of Education. He called his article “Betsy DeVos and the Twilight of Public Education.”

 

She is not an educator nor does she have relevant experience, he says. She is a lobbyist for school choice. The chaotic mess in Detroit is her handiwork. The city has many charter schools, and they are no better than public schools.

 

Thanks to her zealous lobbying, he says, Michigan tolerates more low-performing charters that just about any other state.

 

He writes:

 

“In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation’s largest urban network of charter schools.

 

“What remains in short supply is quality.

 

“In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

 

“On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance. Two years later, its charter was renewed.

 

“Or if you live downtown, you could try Woodward Academy, a charter that has limped along near the bottom of school achievement since 1998, while its operator has been allowed to expand into other communities.

 

“For students enrolled in schools of choice — that is, schools in nearby districts who have opened their doors to children who live outside district boundaries — it’s not much better. Kids who depend on Detroit’s problematic public transit are are too far away from the state’s top-performing school districts — and most of those districts don’t participate in the schools of choice program, anyway.

 

“This deeply dysfunctional educational landscape — where failure is rewarded with opportunities for expansion and “choice” means the opposite for tens of thousands of children — is no accident. It was created by an ideological lobby that has zealously championed free-market education reform for decades, with little regard for the outcome.

 

“And at the center of that lobby is Betsy DeVos, the west Michigan advocate whose family has contributed millions of dollars to the cause of school choice and unregulated charter expansion throughout Michigan….

 

“The results of this free-for-all have been tragic for Michigan children, and especially for those in Detroit, where 79% of the state’s charters are located…

 

“The most accurate assessment is that charter schools have simply created a second, privately managed failing system. Yes, there are high-performing outliers — a little more than 10% of the charter schools perform in the top tier. But in Detroit, the best schools are as likely to be traditional public schools.

 

“DeVos and her family have not been daunted by these outcomes. It’s as if the reams of data showing just incremental progress or abysmal failure don’t matter. Their belief in charter schools is unshakable, their resistance to systematic reforms that would improve both public and charter schools unyielding.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

EduShyster: A Brilliant Explanation of Betsy DeVos’ “Long Game” (Link Fixed!)

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
20

Jennifer Berkshire (aka EduShyster) is a funny, affable, charming person who often visits reformer gatherings, to learn more, get to understand the reformer ideas, and engage reformers face to face. Not in a hostile way, but as an interested observer who listens and learns.

 

In this remarkable post, she explains what Betsy DeVos wants. She first encountered Betsy DeVos at a Republican candidates’ parley in the summer of 2015. The candidates spoke, each outlining their bipartisan views on school choice, and DeVos spoke, and Berkshire wondered:

 

“Could the education reform coalition’s major selling point, its bipartisan-ness, really stretch to incorporate the extreme right-wing views of DeVos?”

 

Some reformers are less than thrilled with DeVos, says Berkshire, especially because of her personal role in torpedoing efforts to bring some order and accountability to the charters in Detroit. Other reformers did not appreciate the “outsized role she has played in shaping Detroit as an, um, education laboratory in which an out-of-control lab fire now burns.” Detroit is hardly an advertisement for educational reform via school choice.

 

For a brief moment in time, there was a genuinely broad-based coalition that wanted to save Detroit. It formed in 2014, and it seemed to be heading towards a hopeful conclusion. But the effort collapsed in the summer of 2016:

 

The feel-good story screeched to a halt last summer thanks to a wall of GOP opposition. Except that *wall* and *opposition* make it sound as though there were a whole bunch of people involved in the kneecapping that went down. There was a single family: Betsy and Dick DeVos. The bill that ultimately passed, with the DeVos’ blessing and with the aid of the lawmakers they bankroll, did virtually nothing to regulate Detroit’s *wild west* charter school sector, and will likely hasten the demise of the Detroit Public Schools. While Michigan’s burgeoning charter lobby was well represented in the final negotiations, elected representatives from Detroit were missing; in a clear violation of House rules, they weren’t even allowed to speak on the bill. And in a final twist of the shiv, the legislation that emerged lets uncertified teachers teach in Detroit, something not allowed anywhere else in Michigan. Oh, and don’t forget the new punishments for teachers who engage in *sick outs* to call attention to the appalling conditions in the city’s schools.

 

There is a queasy, racialized undertone to much of the education reform debate, with its constant implication that students of color fare best in schools over which their communities have little say. In Michigan, though, that argument has been taken by reform advocates, Betsy DeVos chief among them, to its extreme conclusion. The official message of DeVos’ organization, the Great Lakes Education Project, during last summer’s legislative battle was that dissolving the Detroit Public Schools would *protect kids and empower parents,* a cause that came with its own hashtag: #EndDPS. But what GLEP really meant was hard to miss. Detroit is a tax-hoovering abyss whose residents are too corrupt and incompetent to oversee their own schools.

 

After the GOP took control of Michigan in 2010, the charter cap was lifted, then eliminated. The state, once home to the nation’s industrial unions, became a right-to-work state. The legislature passed a law allowing “emergency managers” to take control of financially stressed districts, with unlimited powers. Voters passed a refendum eliminating the emergency managers, but the legislature revived it in a budget bill.

 

Guess whose districts and and schools were taken over by emergency managers and turned over to charter operators?

 

You’ve heard about Detroit, and Flint, with its poisoned water, but there are other less well known cases—like Benton Harbor, Muskegon, and Highland Park, which at last count was down to a single public school. Within a few years of Public Act IV’s enactment, half of Michigan’s Black population was living under some form of emergency management. *The municipalities and school districts that have been taken over are predominantly African American and poor,* David Arsen, an economist at Michigan State University, told me when I interviewed him last summer. *The optics are not good, especially in the context of the long civil rights struggle for voting rights.*

 

Berkshire realized that the real danger of the Trump era is that he is “moldable clay,” amenable to the plans of others.

 

The terrifying thing about the dawning of the Trumpian era isn’t just the specific awfulness of the President-elect’s policies. It’s that Trump is what the long gamers think of as *moldable clay,* receptive to whatever plots and plans they’ve spent years dreaming and scheming up. In Michigan, the long game has long been about making over the state’s schools: breaking up the government monopoly over education and getting rid of that pesky prohibition that keeps public monies from following kids to private schools, especially private schools of the religious variety. When Detroit-based writer Allie Gross set out this summer to document the long history of the efforts of the DeVos family and its allies to remake Detroit’s schools, she dug up an archival piece that a reporter at her paper, the Metro Times, wrote in 1995. Gross’ predecessor described a *relentless attack* on Michigan’s public education system, and a *Trojan horse* meant to blur the distinction between public and private schools en route to realizing the real goal: public funding for parochial schools.

 

Betsy DeVos is playing the long game, and she knows what she wants. What others want is irrelevant.

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Michigan, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

DeVos Fought to Keep Michigan Charters Unregulated and Unaccountable

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2016 //
22

The DeVos family has had an outsize influence in Michigan, by its charitable contributions and its political contributions.

After the Detroit Free Press published a scathing series of articles about the corrupt, unaccountable practices in charter schools in the state, the legislature was shamed into drafting a law that would provide oversight of the charter sector.

The DeVos family gave out $1.5 million in campaign contributions to make sure that charter schools continued to be unregulated and unaccountable.

80% of the charter schools in Michigan operate for profit. No other state has so many for-profit operators.

Detroit is overrun with charters. It is at the very bottom of all urban districts tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, despite all its choice and competition. Or because of them.

Michigan doesn’t have vouchers, because the people of Michigan voted them down in 2000 when the DeVos family proposed an initiative to permit public funds to flow to nonpublic schools. The measure lost overwhelmingly, by 69-31%. No county in the state voted for it.

Milwaukee has had both charters and vouchers for more than 20 years, and it is among the lowest scoring urban districts in the nation, but ahead of Detroit.

Read what the New York Times wrote about charters in Detroit last June. DeVos now owns this mess.

Why should anyone open a charter school, get public money, and be free of oversight? Why should taxpayer dollars flow to religious schools when every state referendum on vouchers has gone down to inglorious defeat by large majorities?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Vouchers
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