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Anita Senkowski to the New York Times: Please Look at Charter Rip-Offs in Northern Michigan

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2017 //
2

Anita Senkowski is a blogger in northern Michigan who has written numerous posts about a for-profit charter operator who ripped off taxpayers and is now serving a term in jail for his financial crimes. She read Mark Binelli’s piece in the New York Times about charter schools in Detroit and its surroundings and hopes that he will come to Northern Michigan to see how the fraudster mentality permeates the DeVos charter industry throughout the state.

She writes:

Binelli’s fine piece, focused primarily on districts south of Eight Mile Road, the northern border of Detroit made infamous by former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young in his 1973 inaugural address. Telling “rip-off artists and muggers” to “hit Eight Mile Road” and leave Detroit, Young made few friends in suburban Detroit, especially Oakland County.

As they say in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

And although Michigan gambled on charter schools and its children lost, there have been winners.

One, former optometrist Steven Ingersoll, (whose story I’ve beaten like a rented mule for three years), walked away with millions. Although he’s serving a 41-month federal prison term, no Michigan authority (state or local law enforcement) has expressed any interest in prosecuting Ingersoll for his admitted fraudulent conversion of approximately $5.0 million from the Grand Traverse Academy and another roughly $1.4 million from the Bay City Academy.

If Ingersoll had lived in Mississippi and not Michigan, John Grisham would have already written a not-very-fictitious-sounding novel about him.

In its theory of the case, the federal government asserted Ingersoll’s federal tax evasion case demonstrated the truth of the sayings that “money gives power” and “unchecked power corrupts”.

“Steven Ingersoll obtained control over millions of dollars by creating and running the public charter schools known as the Grand Traverse Academy. The power of that money enabled Steven Ingersoll to corrupt himself, his wife Deborah Ingersoll, his brother Gayle Ingersoll, Roy Bradley, Sr., and Tammy Bradley.

As the person who controlled the accounting books and public funds intended for the operation of the Grand Traverse Academy, Steven Ingersoll ignored his obligation to separate his personal finances from the finances of the Grand Traverse Academy.

Instead, Steven Ingersoll treated the tax dollars provided for public education as his personal piggy bank, ultimately diverting approximately $3.5 million from the Grand Traverse Academy to uses other than the operation of the Grand Traverse Academy.

Steven Ingersoll also manipulated the books of entities he controlled, including Smart Schools Management and Smart Schools Incorporated, to hide his diversion of the public money that had been entrusted to him.”

And Ingersoll, on who reported to FCI Duluth on February 2, 2017 to serve a 41 month sentence for his federal tax evasion and conspiracy convictions, filed a “pro se” motion to vacate on January 24, 2017, seeking “post-conviction relief” based on attorney Martin Crandall’s alleged “ineffective assistance of counsel” — an attorney who’d sued him for nonpayment of nearly $362,000 in outstanding legal fees.

Ingersoll’s motion was denied, and he’s sitting in stir until January 22, 2020 — ironic, since he was an optometrist.

Let’s hope Binelli takes a look back here in Michigan…about 250 miles north of Eight Mile Road.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Michigan, Privatization

How Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools and the Children Lost

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
9

More than any other state, Michigan placed its bets on charter schools. This article shows what happened. Republican Governor John Engler sold his party on the miracle of school choice. Betsy DeVos jumped on the Choice bandwagon and financed its grip on the legislature. Although the article doesn’t mention it, Betsy and her husband funded a voucher referendum in 2000 that was overwhelmingly defeated.

The author Mark Binelli describes the mess that choice and charters have made of the state’s education system. The state is overrun by unaccountable charters, most of which operate for profit.

The damage has fallen most heavily on black children, especially in Detroit and in the districts where the state installed emergency managers and gave the public schools to for-profit charter operators.

Rich districts still have public schools.

Binelli writes:

“Michigan’s aggressively free-market approach to schools has resulted in one of the most deregulated educational environments in the country, a laboratory in which consumer choice and a shifting landscape of supply and demand (and profit motive, in the case of many charters) were pitched as ways to improve life in the classroom for the state’s 1.5 million public-school students. But a Brookings Institution analysis done this year of national test scores ranked Michigan last among all states when it came to improvements in student proficiency. And a 2016 analysis by the Education Trust-Midwest, a nonpartisan education policy and research organization, found that 70 percent of Michigan charters were in the bottom half of the state’s rankings. Michigan has the most for-profit charter schools in the country and some of the least state oversight. Even staunch charter advocates have blanched at the Michigan model.

“The story of Carver is the story of Michigan’s grand educational experiment writ small. It spans more than two decades, three governors and, now, the United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whose relentless advocacy for unchecked “school choice” in her home state might soon, her critics fear, be going national. But it’s important to understand that what happened to Michigan’s schools isn’t solely, or even primarily, an education story: It’s a business story. Today in Michigan, hundreds of nonprofit public charters have become potential financial assets to outside entities, inevitably complicating their broader social missions. In the case of Carver, interested parties have included a for-profit educational management organization, or E.M.O., in Georgia; an Indian tribe in a remote section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and a financial firm in Minnesota. “That’s all it is now — it’s moneymaking,” Darrel Redrick, a charter-school proponent and an administrator at Carver at the time I visited, told me.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan

Mercedes Schneider: Students, Faculty, and Alumni at Michigan State Protest DeVos as Speaker at Research Center Her Family Paid For!

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2017 //
31

Mercedes Schneider reports on a developing story at Michigan State University.

Students, faculty, and alumni are signing a petition protesting the invitation to Betsy DeVos as keynote speaker at the opening of a research center that her family paid $10 million for. If their petition is ignored, expect a protest. DeVos is the most unpopular member of Trump’s abysmal cabinet. It’s hard to say if she’s the most incompetent, because there’s always Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, Rick Perry, Ryan Zinke, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Price, and so many others.

She writes:

“MSU PhD student, Sarah Kelly, has started a petition imploring MSU President Lou Anna Simon and MSU College of Human Medicine Dean, Norman Beauchamp, to rescind the invitation.

“The text of the petition, which appears to have been drafted on August 31, 2017– and which appears to rapidly be gaining signatures– is as follows:

“To:

“Dr. Lou Anna Simon, President, Michigan State University

“Dr. Norman Beauchamp, Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine

“We, the faculty, students, staff and alumni of Michigan State University, and other interested citizens, sincerely request that you rescind the invitation to Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary in the Trump Administration, to speak at the grand opening of the MSU Grand Rapids Research Center (GRRC) on September 20, 2017.

“Secretary DeVos’ past activities have included:

· Lobbying for the privatization of the US public education system under the guise of “school choice.”

· Support for political candidates in Michigan who worked to implement her privatization plans and in the process, have slashed millions from the public education budget.

“As Education Secretary, Secretary DeVos:

· Recommends a $9 billion cut in federal education funding, including cuts to higher education, training and after-school programs.

· Supports cutting financial aid to low-income college students making it easier for private loan servicers to prey on Michigan families. The MSU College of Human Medicine already has some of the highest per student debt in the nation.

· Rolled back regulations on for-profit colleges and has made it easier for low performing for-profit colleges to defraud students.

· Refuses to limit federal education funding for schools who actively discriminate against LGBTQ students.

“The undersigned believe that Secretary DeVos’ agenda is diametrically opposed to the education and inclusion mission of Michigan State University. While her father-in-law’s gift in support of the GRRC is welcomed and appreciated, giving Secretary DeVos an MSU-sponsored platform to speak sends a message to the public, alumni, faculty, staff, students and their families, that the compromising of MSU’s standards can be easily purchased.

“Further, the undersigned are very concerned that planned protests of Mrs. DeVos’ visit will disrupt the GRRC Ribbon Cutting and distract media focus away from the celebration of MSU’s newest state-of-the-art research facility in Grand Rapids.”

Congratulations to the intelligent, courageous and appropriately outraged members of the MSU community!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization

In Michigan, Few Want to Become Teachers: Thanks, Betsy DeVos, Rick Snyder, and Arne Duncan!

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2017 //
45

Alternet published an article about the dire condition of teachers and teaching in Michigan. Nancy Derringer describes the growing crisis over the future of the profession in a state that treats teachers like Kleenex.

The legislature has hacked away at teacher benefits, and would-be teachers have gotten the message.

The latest data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title II program, which supports teacher training and professional development, show enrollment in teacher prep at the college level is falling, sharply in some states. In Michigan, 11,099 students were enrolled in the state’s 39 teacher-prep programs in 2014-15, the most recent data available. That is a 3,273-student decline from just two years previous, in 2012-13. Since 2008, the total number of Michigan college students studying to become a teacher is down more than 50 percent.

Michigan State University saw its teacher-prep enrollment fall 45 percent between 2010 and 2014, from 1,659 to 911. Grand Valley State University’s tumbled by 67 percent, from 751 to 248 in the same period. Only the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Central Michigan University saw increases, of 39 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

Whether these numbers portend a coming teacher shortage is unclear. But it does reflect a trend that has been ongoing for some time, said Abbie Groff-Blaszak, director of the Office of Educator Talent with the state Department of Education. Not only are fewer aspiring teachers entering programs, but fewer are completing them, and there’s been a decrease in teaching certificates issued by the DOE.

The combination of Betsy DeVos, Rick Snyder, and Arne Duncan has been deadly for the teaching profession:

The push to improve student test scores, particularly among low-income students, has led to a number of changes that put more accountability on teachers. Groff-Blaszak said the decline in enrollment has tracked with Race to the Top reforms, which in addition to rewarding excellent educators, also provides for the removal of ineffective ones. Such reforms have not been universally embraced, for fear that they are a cover for sapping the power of unions, or holding teachers accountable, via testing, for factors they say they have little control over.

And before they even become teachers, teacher prep students must pass the state’s Professional Readiness Exam, which was toughened in recent years in an effort to raise teaching standards. In 2013-14, its first year, fewer than a third of students attempting it passed on their first try. At Western Michigan University, education students must pass the PRE and maintain a 3.0 average, said Marcia Fetters, the school’s associate dean and director of teacher education.

“When I entered teaching in 1982, there was no GPA requirement,” Fetters said, who described the current PRE, which tests math skills, reading and writing, as “infamous.”

“I don’t know how valid the test is to serve as a predictor of student performance in a teacher-ed program,” said Fetters. “On the one hand, we only want the qualified, but at the same time, if the test itself is not valid? We have had complaints.”

For charter school teachers, the situation is even more dire. They get little or no mentoring or support. Turnover among staff is high. And salaries are lower than in public schools.

Does anyone in Michigan care about educating the next generation of students? Apparently not.

Categories Michigan, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Michigan: Governor Rick Snyder Accepts No Responsibility for His Failed School Reforms

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2017 //
12

A reader sent a letter signed by Governor Rick Snyder and the State Superintendent Brian Whiston lamenting the poor performance of Michigan’s schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Please note that the Governor makes no reference to the failure of the state’s obsession with school choice over the past 15 years.

Nor does he say anything about the proliferation of charters, most of which operate for-profit, and most of which perform worse than the public schools.

Nor does he acknowledge that the state’s education agenda is a wholly owned enterprise of the DeVos family.

Nor does he mention the disaster of the Educational Achievement Authority, into which the state of Michigan poured millions of dollars and overpaid administrators sent by the Broad Academy, only to see the EAA collapse in failure.

This is a politician who does not know the meaning of the word accountability. He is accountable for nothing and responsible for nothing. He should be held accountable not only for the Flint Water Crisis but for the dismantling of what was once a great public school system in the state of Michigan.

For shame, Governor Snyder.

Sad. Very sad.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Michigan: State Takeover Effort Collapses, Schools Will Return to Detroit Public School District

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
11

Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority is closing down, and the low-performing schools put into the state-controlled district will be returned to the Detroit public schools.

The EAA was a disaster from the beginning. Its leaders had total control, and they used it to run experiments on the children, using technology. They ran up the bills and produced no academic improvements. The first leader was Robert Bobb, with Barbara Byrd-Bennett as chief academic officer (BBB is now sentenced to jail time for taking bribes in her role as superintendent of the Chicago public schools). Then there was Broad-trained John Covington, who increased the deficit, then moved on. At all times, Eli Broad was deeply involved in creating and staffing the EAA. This Friday is the last day for the EAA.

The EAA’s 15 schools will stay open, but they’ll be absorbed back into the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Sonya Mays, treasurer for the DPSCD school board, says the district is working with the EAA to make it a smooth transition for students.

The two districts are coordinating on transferring school records, communicating with families, and hiring administrators and teachers, among other things.

“And so it’s our hope, and we’ve tried to be very intentional about this, that students themselves will see very little disruption,” Mays said.

The EAA was created in 2011 to turn around Detroit’s lowest performing schools. But, according to Michigan State University education professor David Arsen, it fell far short of that goal.

“The EAA could fairly be regarded as a train wreck of educational policy,” Arsen said.

Arsen says a rushed policy process, plus a lack of state investment, meant the EAA had little chance of turning around Detroit’s failing schools.

In the state’s latest rankings, two-thirds of the EAA’s schools were in the bottom five percent.

Do you think maybe there is a lesson here for the low-performing Achievement School District in Tennessee and the copycat districts created in Nevada and elsewhere?

Categories Failure, Michigan, Turnaround Schools

Michigan: Charter School Closes Three Weeks Before School Year Ends

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2017 //
10

Charter schools are not public schools. They are private schools that contract with the state.

This week, a charter school in Southfield, Michigan, announced it was closing three weeks before the end of the school year. Staff and students were stunned.

http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/258195926-story

Taylor International Academy closed abruptly on Wednesday.

No doubt, Betsy DeVos would say that’s the way the free market works.

Categories Charter Schools, Michigan

Jennifer Berkshire: How Betsy DeVos Segregated the Public Schools in Her Hometown, Holland, Michigan

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2017 //
10

A few years back, I went to Michigan to speak to a large group of superintendents, whose schools collectively enrolled half the students in the state. I learned from them about the pernicious effects of school choice. The state wiped out all district lines for purposes of enrollment. Students can enroll in any public school without regard to district lines, and schools are paid by the state based on numbers enrolled. Consequently, every district commits a portion of its budget to poaching students away from the neighboring districts. Each district spends about $100,000 each year on advertising, in hopes of getting more students and the money attached to them.

All this is background to Jennifer Berkshire’s incisive piece about how school choice promotes segregation. Jennifer recently visited Betsy DeVos’s hometown, Holland, Michigan, and was there to view the Tulip Time parade. As she watched the high school marching bands pass by, she saw a vivid portrait of segregation on display.

She writes:

“First, some background. During the endless runup to DeVos’ confirmation hearing last year, it was the Wild West-style school choice she’d pushed in Detroit that garnered most of the attention. But DeVos was also behind Michigan’s inter-district choice policies that, starting in 2000, *disrupted* neighborhood attendance zones, just as the proposed Trump/DeVos education budget seeks to do. In Michigan, school choice has become the new white flight as white families have fled their resident districts for schools and districts that are less diverse. The most dramatic example of this may be in DeVos’ own home town of Holland.

“The choice to segregate

“Since Michigan adopted the school choice policies DeVos is now pushing across the country, Holland’s white enrollment has dropped by more than 60%, as students decamped for public schools or charters in whiter communities nearby. The students who remain in the Holland Public Schools are now majority Hispanic and overwhelmingly poor—twice the schools’ poverty rate when Michigan’s school choice experiment began. Many of these students are the children of migrant farm workers who came to this part of the state to pick fruit; school choice enabled Holland’s white families to pick not to attend school with them. One in three students in Holland no longer attends school there, and since the money follows the child in the Mitten State, yet another DeVos priority, white flight has eaten the district’s finances too.

“In 2000, Holland had fifteen schools. Now it has just eight. Of nine Holland schools that once served elementary students, half have closed. By 2009, even the elementary school where DeVos’ mother once taught had been shuttered. As students flee for schools in communities like Zeeland, the future of Holland’s public schools looks increasingly dire. Already there are mutterings in this wealthy, Dutch-dominated community that the school population *doesn’t represent* Holland. And as DeVos well understands, a community that has little stake in its schools is unlikely to shell out money to pay for them…

“The Trump/DeVos education budget was made public on the 63rd anniversary of Brown vs. Board. DeVos’ vision isn’t just a retreat from Brown—it embodies the spirit that animated its opponents to set up segregation academies in Brown’s wake. The budget that bears her imprint would encourage and even incentivize white flight. We don’t have to speculate about where all this leads. The outcome of the kind of school choice policies that DeVos has pushed for decades in her home state and now wants every state to embrace has been starkly measurable segregation. And even that is an understatement. What I witnessed in DeVos’ hometown last week was extreme sorting on the basis of race and class. That the top education official in the country thinks this is a good thing is appalling.”

Folks, our Secretary of Education is encouraging racial and social segregation. She won’t stand in its way. She doesn’t care, she won’t act to stop it, she wants to subsidize it.

Were he alive, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would denounce her actions. How dare she and Trump claim they are advancing “the civil rights issue of out time!” They are reversing the progress made since 1954 with “all deliberate speed.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Michigan, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Michigan: Officials Promise Investigation of Charter Board Decision Not to Seek Repayment of $5 Million from Convicted Director

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2017 //
8

Blogger Anita Senkowski has kept a close watch on the Grand Traverse Academy charter chain in northern Michigan. Two years ago, its founder was convicted of tax evasion, but apparently the board of directors did not require repayment of the $5 million that went missing. Now, due to Senkowski’s persistence, the state has promised an investigation. The founder of the charter chain, Steven Ingersoll, is an optometrist who claimed to have a unique way of teaching children through a method he called “integrated visual learning”; he recruited other optometrists to serve on the charter board.

Two years after Steven Ingersoll’s March 10, 2015 federal tax evasion and conspiracy convictions, Michigan authorities, including the office of its Attorney General, Bill Schuette, are finally investigating Ingersoll’s related-party financial transactions, the GTA’s debt write off process and its decision not to seek repayment of the money that may have been misappropriated by Ingersoll between 2007-2013, estimated at $5.0 million.

Kicked into action by a formal complaint I filed on March 31, 2017, the Michigan Department of Education confirmed to me in an April 4, 2017 that it is investigating the decision by the GTA’s Board of Directors to “write off” a $1.6 million debt owed to the school by Ingersoll, its calculation of the amount—and the three optometrists who looked at a charter school full of children and saw only a cash-rich “golden goose”: Steven Ingersoll, Mark Noss and Brad Habermehl.

After dithering publicly for months in 2014 about its “plan” to collect money owed to the Grand Traverse Academy (GTA) by its former manager, optometrist Steven Ingersoll of Smart Schools Management, Inc. (SSM), the Traverse City, Michigan, charter school’s annual fiscal audit revealed its board decided to just “write off” $1,623,000 to bad debt, and not pursue collection.

The GTA board included a $1,813,330 “repayment” by Ingersoll into its write off calculation — an amount credited against his debt, estimated in by Ingersoll at $3.58 million as of June 30, 2012.

Ingersoll began serving his 41-month prison sentence in February in Minnesota.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, Michigan, Privatization

Mitchell Robinson: The Danger of Silencing Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2017 //
25

Mitchell Robinson, professor of music education at Michigan State, writes a very sad story here about a dedicated teacher who was threatened with firing if she refused to name names.

“Rachel [a pseudonym] is one of those teachers who has devoted herself, personally and professionally, to her career. The kind of teacher who arrives at school early, leaves late, takes her work home with her at night, creates new projects over the weekend–and purchases the materials out of her own pocket, arranges field trips and brings in guest artists and speakers for her students, organizes birthday parties, and wedding showers, and baby showers for her colleagues, hosts student teachers from the local university, serves as a teacher leader in her school district, attends her students’ concerts, and soccer games, and piano recitals, and dance recitals, and graduation ceremonies, pursues professional development opportunities on the weekends, takes graduate classes and workshops over the summer, has little to no idea how much she makes in her yearly salary, and puts her students’ needs above her own.

“In short, a teacher.

“In addition to her job as a classroom teacher, Rachel had also volunteered to serve as her district’s compliance officer for the state’s review of their status as a PLA (Persistently Low Achieving) school district.”

Rachel mentioned to her principal that she had heard some opt out discussion and thought the staff needed a reminder that the school could be closed if it didn’t have a 95% participation rate. In short order, the superintendent called her in and demanded that she name names. She refused. She got legal counsel from the Michigan Education Association.

Nothing availed. It was her job or her integrity. Why should any teacher be forced to make that choice?

Categories Michigan, Opt Out, Resistance, Teachers
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