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Politico: The Powerful DeVos Family: God, America, and Free Enterprise

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2017 //
21

Just when I thought I had read everything I needed to know about the DeVos family, along comes this brilliant investigative article by Zack Stanton of Politico. Stanton shows how powerful the DeVos family is, how it works as a tightly coordinated unit, and how it uses its vast wealth to smash the union movement, force school privatization, control the Republican Party in Michigan, and extend its reach to Louisiana, Indiana, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states.

 

The DeVos family, along with the Koch brothers, are the epitome of dark money, the spawn of Citizens United, which removed limits on political spending, enabling billionaires to buy state legislatures.

 

Dick DeVos ran for the governorship and lost in 2006. The family learned that it was better to work behind the scenes.

 

“Thanks to the DeVoses, Michigan’s charter schools enjoy a virtually unregulated existence. Thanks to them, too, the center of the American automotive industry and birthplace of the modern labor movement is now a right-to-work state. They’ve funded campaigns to elect state legislators, established advocacy organizations to lobby them, buttressed their allies and primaried those they disagree with, spending at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years. “The DeVos family has been far more successful not having the governor’s seat than if they had won it,” says Richard Czuba, the owner of the Glengariff Group, a bipartisan polling firm in Michigan. “They have, to some degree, created a shadow state party. And it’s been pretty darn effective.”

 

“Buoyed by the success in Michigan, the DeVoses have exported a scaled-down version of that template into other states, funding an archipelago of local political action committees and advocacy organizations to ease the proliferation of charter schools in Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana, among others. At the same time, DeVos-backed PACs have transformed the nature of American political campaigns. By showing the success of independent PACs that answered to a few deep-pocketed donors rather than a broad number of stakeholders associated with a union or chamber of commerce, for instance, the DeVoses precipitated the monsoon of independent expenditures that has rained down upon politicians for the past decade. In the process, they’ve reshaped political campaigns as well as the policies that result from them.

 

“Ten years after she watched her husband give a concession speech, Betsy DeVos was unveiled as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education. Across the country, public-school advocates and teachers’ unions expressed almost unanimous horror: One of the most effective advocates for breaking down the rules and protections for public schools and teachers would soon be the nation’s most powerful education policymaker.

 

“But people who’ve been watching the DeVoses closely knew they were seeing something else as well: One of the nation’s most ambitious, disruptive and downright unusual political families finally had a seat in Washington….

 

“The DeVos family is Dutch, thoroughly so. All four of Richard DeVos’ grandparents emigrated from the Netherlands, and today, the family continues to observe the tenets of the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination. Calvinism believes that God has decided our souls’ fates before we are born, assigning them to heaven or hell. It is a duty of practitioners to show their faith in God’s plan by displaying self-confidence, as though they know they have been chosen for blessings in the afterlife. One way to display this confidence is through entrepreneurship (one of the bedrock texts of sociology, Max Weber’s 1905 Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is expressly about the link between Calvinism and economic success)….

 

“Across those efforts, one constant is the DeVos family’s devout Christian beliefs, and the indivisibility they see between Christian and Calvinistic notions and their conservative politics. “The real strength of America is its religious tradition,” Richard DeVos wrote in Believe!. “Too many people today are willing to act as if God had nothing whatsoever to do with it. … This country was built on a religious heritage, and we’d better get back to it. We had better start telling people that faith in God is the real strength of America!” In the mid-1970s, DeVos made major donations to the Christian Freedom Foundation and Third Century Publishers, an outlet that printed books and pamphlets designed to strengthen the ties between Christianity and free-market conservatism; among those products was a guidebook instructing conservative Christians how to win elections and help America become “as it was when first founded—a ‘Christian Republic.

 

“Though they aren’t quite as large or wealthy as the DeVoses, the Prince family—even further west, in Holland, Michigan—shares one big trait in common with their in-laws: the idea that patriotism and politics are inseparable from Christianity. Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy’s mother, donated $75,000 to the successful 2004 ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan; four years later, she gave $450,000 to an identical initiative in California. Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the military contractor that gained notoriety in 2007, when its employees fired into a crowd of Iraqi civilians, killing 17. (In 2009, two former Blackwater employees alleged in federal court that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader.”)

 

“Throughout his adult life, Betsy’s father, Ed, donated handsomely to two religious colleges in Michigan, Hope and Calvin, the latter being his wife’s beloved alma mater in Grand Rapids. But his most important contribution—one that has shaped much of the past three decades of conservative politics—came in 1988, when Prince donated millions in seed funding to launch the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group that became one of the most potent political forces on the religious right. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder,” Family Research Council President Gary Bauer wrote to supporters after Prince’s sudden death in 1995. “He was a Kingdom builder.”

 

“In the 1960s and ’70s, Ed and Elsa Prince advanced God’s Kingdom from the end of a cul-de-sac just a few miles from Lake Michigan. There, they taught their four children—Elisabeth (Betsy), Eileen, Emilie and Erik—a deeply religious, conservative, free-market view of the world, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and sending them to private schools that would reinforce the values they celebrated at home, small-government conservatism chief among them….

 

“When Dick and Betsy DeVos are asked why they’ve chosen to mount a personal crusade for education reform, they often cite their family’s charitable giving, which puts them into contact with scholarship applicants. For years, the DeVoses read reams of personal essays filled with wrenching stories of dire finances and an abiding hope in the transformative impact of education. Those stories, the DeVoses have said, made it clear that something had to change.

 

“But there’s another reason why Dick and Betsy DeVos want to change America’s schools. They see it as the literal battleground for making a more Christian, God-centered society.

 

“In 2001, Betsy DeVos spoke at “The Gathering,” an annual meeting of some of America’s wealthiest Christians. There, she told her fellow believers about the animating force behind her education-reform campaigning, referencing the biblical battlefield where the Israelites fought the Philistines: “It goes back to what I mentioned, the concept of really being active in the Shephelah of our culture—to impact our culture in ways that are not the traditional funding-the-Christian-organization route, but that really may have greater Kingdom gain in the long run by changing the way we approach things—in this case, the system of education in the country.”

 

“Dick DeVos, on stage with his wife, echoed her sentiments with a lament of his own. “The church—which ought to be, in our view, far more central to the life of the community—has been displaced by the public school,” Dick DeVos said. “We just can think of no better way to rebuild our families and our communities than to have that circle of church and school and family much more tightly focused and built on a consistent worldview.”

 

Folks, if Betsy DeVos is confirmed, which is likely, we will have a major battle on our hands to protect public education and to maintain a separation of church and state. She is not a normal candidate for Secretary of Education. She is a religious zealot and a radical extremist. She will speak of her admiration for all successful schools, including public schools, but don’t believe it. She is a determined foe of public education.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization, Religion

EduShyster: Betsy DeVos and the Destruction of Public Education in Michigan: A MUST READ

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2017 //
10

Jennifer Berkshire (aka EduShyster) recently raised money by crowd-sourcing so she could spend a week in Michigan learning about the DeVos family and its crusade to privatize public education.

 

Her article is brilliant. 

 

She describes Betsy DeVos as “The Red Queen.”

 

It begins like this:

 

By the measures that are supposed to matter, Betsy DeVos’ experiment in disrupting public education in Michigan has been a colossal failure. In its 2016 report on the state of the state’s schools, Education Trust Midwest painted a picture of an education system in freefall. “Michigan is witnessing systematic decline across the K-12 spectrum…White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income—it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live.” But as I heard repeatedly during the week I recently spent crisscrossing the state, speaking with dozens of Michiganders, including state and local officials, the radical experiment that’s playing out here has little to do with education, and even less to do with kids. The real goal of the DeVos family is to crush the state’s teachers unions as a means of undermining the Democratic party, weakening Michigan’s democratic structures along the way. And on this front, our likely next Secretary of Education has enjoyed measurable, even dazzling success….

 

A characteristic DeVos move in Lansing traces a familiar pattern. A piece of legislation suddenly appears courtesy of a family ally. It pops up late in the session, late at night, or better still, during lame duck, when the usual legislative horse trading shifts into overdrive. So it was with a controversial bill that popped up 2013, doubling the limits for campaign contributions—a limit that no one in Michigan was wealthy enough to hit. Well almost no one. The GOP jammed the measure through, Governor Snyder signed it, and it took effect immediately. “The DeVoses then got their whole clan together and held a check writing party,” recalls Jeff Irwin, a democratic state representative from Ann Arbor who was recently term limited out. “It was a love letter to the richest people in Michigan and they delivered with a huge thank you.”

 

I was captivated by the image of the extended DeVos clan gathered on New Year’s Eve 2013, writing check after check to Republican candidates and caucuses to the tune of more than $300,000, an exercise they would repeat just a few months later. Did they sip champagne as they signed? Did their hands grow weary? For the DeVoses, the ability to give even more money means that they can exert even more influence. “When you empower a billionaire family like that, you give them more power,” Michigan Campaign Finance Network director Craig Mauger told me when I stopped by to see him in Lansing. Just blocks from the Capital, his office is in a part of the city that teems with the lobbyists who hold so much sway here. His building is home to not one, but two different for-profit charter operators. “The DeVoses are tilting the field and changing the structures of politics in Michigan.”

 

To understand why the DeVoses exert so much influence, and more importantly, why their power has only increased in recent years, a quick session in civics is required. Today’s topic: term limits. Approved in 1992 by voters in a “throw out the bums” state of mind, term limits have radically reordered the state’s political landscape. Legislators here can serve no more than three two-year terms in the House, and two four-year terms in the state Senate—the strictest limits in the country. “They’re in office for such a short time that it doesn’t pay off for them to build a strong base of support in their own districts,” Steve Norton, the head of the public education advocacy group Michigan Parents for Schools, explained to me. Instead, legislators are highly dependent on the party machinery, down to being told which way to vote. “They salute and follow caucus orders,” says Norton. As both the funders of the GOP machine, and its de facto operators, that means that the DeVoses essentially control the legislature these days. “They are the 800 lb gorilla.”

 

In Michigan, no one says no to the DeVos family. They have bought the legislature. They defeat legislators who dare to say no. They own the state. Is that too strong a statement? Read this blistering, frightening article.

 

The DeVos family use their money strategically to achieve their goals. They are not just a threat to public education. They are a threat to our democracy.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Detroit, Michigan, School Choice, Vouchers

New York Times Editorial Warning on Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2017 //
24

For the past twenty years, the New York Times has fawned over charter schools. Not in its reporting but in its editorials.

 

In its editorial about the Senate’s rush to confirm Betsy DeVos, the Times acknowledges that charters are not a cure for education problems.

 

“Beyond erasing concerns about her many possible financial conflicts, Ms. DeVos also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.”

 

The Times has gone up a steep learning curve on this topic. Now if only the editorial writers can continue to understand that school choice is not a cure for low-performing students, not even a band-aid. As voters in Massachusetts showed last November, when they rejected a proposal to expand the number of charters, the main effect of charters is to drain resources from existing schools. Slicing up the education budget into multiple sectors impoverishes them all and enriches only the corporations that operate charters.

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Funding, Michigan, Vouchers

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

DeVos and the Charter Fraud in Michigan: $1 Billion Down the Drain

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
16

Michigan has one of the worst charter sectors in the nation, according to the Detroit Free Press, which conducted a year-long investigation of charters in the state. The people of Michigan pay $1 billion a year for a sector in which 80% of the charters operate for profit, in which there is neither accountability nor transparency, in which conflicts of interests don’t matter. Billionaire Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick and other members of the DeVos family control education issues in the Republican-dominated legislature with their generous campaign contributions. Governor Rick Snyder is DeVos’s personal puppet. And the state continues to waste public money on failing schools because they are privately run. No regulation needed!

 

This is Billionaire Betsy DeVos’s idea of how education should work!

 

The Detroit Free Press writes:

 

Michigan taxpayers pour nearly $1 billion a year into charter schools — but state laws regulating charters are among the nation’s weakest, and the state demands little accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent and how well children are educated.

 

A yearlong investigation by the Detroit Free Press reveals that Michigan’s lax oversight has enabled a range of abuses in a system now responsible for more than 140,000 Michigan children. That figure is growing as more parents try charter schools as an alternative to traditional districts.

 

In reviewing two decades of charter school records, the Free Press found:

 

Wasteful spending and double-dipping. Board members, school founders and employees steering lucrative deals to themselves or insiders. Schools allowed to operate for years despite poor academic records. No state standards for who operates charter schools or how to oversee them.

 

And a record number of charter schools run by for-profit companies that rake in taxpayer money and refuse to detail how they spend it, saying they’re private and not subject to disclosure laws. Michigan leads the nation in schools run by for-profits.

 

“People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”

 

According to the Free Press’ review, 38% of charter schools that received state academic rankings during the 2012-13 school year fell below the 25th percentile, meaning at least 75% of all schools in the state performed better. Only 23% of traditional public schools fell below the 25th percentile.

 

Advocates argue that charter schools have a much higher percentage of children in poverty compared with traditional schools. But traditional schools, on average, perform slightly better on standardized tests even when poverty levels are taken into account.

 

In late 2011, Michigan lawmakers removed limits on how many charters can operate here —opening the door to a slew of new management companies. In 2013-14, the state had 296 charters operating some 370 schools — in 61% of them, charter boards have enlisted a full-service, for-profit management company. Another 17% rely on for-profits for other services, mostly staffing and human resources, according to Free Press research.

 

Michigan far exceeds states like Florida, Ohio and Missouri, where only about one-third of charters were run by a full-service, for-profit management company in 2011-12, according to research by Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron, who has studied charters extensively.

 

While the Free Press found disclosure issues with both for-profit and nonprofit companies, the state’s failure to insist on more financial transparency by for-profits — teacher salaries, executive compensation, vendor payments and more — is particularly troubling to charter critics because the for-profit companies receive the bulk of the money that goes to charter schools. In some cases, even charter school board members don’t get detailed information.

 

Without that, experts say there is no way to determine if a school is getting the most for its money.

 

Authorizers in Michigan receive 3% of the state tuition money for every student who attends a charter school they authorize. That means millions of dollars flow to the authorizing groups, who have no responsibility or accountability. Anyone can open a charter school in Michigan. Charter schools can fail and be reauthorized. Charter operators can run failing schools and get to open new ones. Success is unimportant. Michigan is a free-for-all with public money.

 

State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants

 

In Michigan, anyone and everyone can apply to open a charter school. There are no state guidelines for screening applicants.

 

And in many cases, authorizers have given additional charters to schools managed by companies that haven’t demonstrated academic success with their existing schools.

 

Central Michigan University, for example, gave two additional charters to schools managed by the for-profit Hanley-Harper Group Inc. in Harper Woods, before its first school had any state ranking and despite test scores that showed it below statewide proficiency rates in reading and math. The school’s first ranking, released last year, put it in the 14th percentile, meaning that 86% of schools in Michigan did better academically.

 

“We have a product, yes, we are trying to sell and constantly working to make … better and better and better,” company founder Beata Chochla, who has run several small businesses, including janitorial and home health care, told the Free Press in an interview.

 

Ferris State University has authorized a fourth Hanley-Harper school, expected to open this fall in Oak Park.

 

“We were convinced they had a good plan,” Ferris State’s interim charter schools director Ronald Rizzo said, adding that critics who believe an operator should have a successful academic track record before adding schools are “welcome” to their views.

 

Authorizers also have been slow to close poor performers. Among the oldest and poorest performing schools in metro Detroit:

 

■ Hope Academy, founded in Detroit in 1998, ranked almost rock-bottom — in the first percentile — in 2012-13.

 

■ Commonwealth Community Development Academy, founded in Detroit in 1996, ranked in the third percentile.

 

Both schools are authorized by Eastern Michigan University, which said in a statement that it is not satisfied with either. Yet just last year, EMU renewed Hope Academy’s charter.

 

The article includes a list of recent charter scandals:

 

■ A Sault Ste. Marie charter school board gave its administrator a severance package worth $520,000 in taxpayer money.

 

■ A Bedford Township charter school spent more than $1 million on swampland.

 

■ A mostly online charter school in Charlotte spent $263,000 on a Dale Carnegie confidence-building class, $100,000 more than it spent on laptops and iPads.

 

■ Two board members who challenged their Romulus school’s management company over finances and transparency were ousted when the length of their terms was summarily reduced by Grand Valley State University.

 

■ National Heritage Academies, the state’s largest for-profit school management company, charges 14 of its Michigan schools $1 million or more in rent — which many real estate experts say is excessive.

 

■ A charter school in Pittsfield Township gave jobs and millions of dollars in business to multiple members of the founder’s family.

 

■ Charter authorizers have allowed management companies to open multiple schools without a proven track record of success.

 

Want to get rich quick? Move to Michigan and open a charter school.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

The Rotten State of Charter Schools in Michigan: A For-Profit Bonanza, Sponsored by the DeVos Family

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
16

The confirmation hearings for Billionaire Betsy are scheduled to begin on January 11. It is assumed that she will breeze through because the DeVos family gives so much money to Republican politicians. That is usually enough to get a wealthy donor given an ambassadorship, but it is not typically the case for cabinet positions. Members of the president’s cabinet are expected to have some experience in the department and sector where they will take charge of federal policy. Billionaire Betsy has none. Her only involvement in education is as a lobbyist for private school choice. Since some 85% of children in the U.S. attend public schools, this means that she is totally out of touch with public education, for which she has repeatedly demonstrated hostility and contempt.

 

If she had her druthers, every child in America would attend a religious school, preferably evangelical Christian, to further her religious goals.

 

She and her husband tried and failed in 2000 to change the state constitution in Michigan, which forbids spending public money on religious schools. Voters turned down the revision overwhelmingly, by 69-31%.

 

So Billionaire Betsy and her husband went all in for charter schools, the next best route to privatization. They stood firmly against any regulation of charter schools, and the result–according to a year-long investigation by the Detroit Free Press in 2014–is a sector that is dominated by for-profit charters, that has low quality and poor performance, and that wastes $1 billion of taxpayers’ dollars every year. (I will explain in the next post why I am not including a link to the DFP series about the incompetence and corruption of the state’s charter sector.)

 

Here is one of dozens of stories of charter school corruption.

 

A husband and wife team (the Cancilliaris) started multiple charter schools; she was a teacher, he was a contractor. They were charged with self-dealing and conflicts of interest for steering millions of dollars to their private, for-profit companies. But the law is so weak on conflict of interest that almost anything goes. He was paid $200,000 as facilities director; she was paid $250,000 as program director, while also running an off-site textbook company that she and her husband founded.

 

 

In 2008 and again in 2012, Central Michigan raised questions about insider dealings, mostly involving the Cancilliaris; Mike Witucki, the former Flat Rock schools superintendent whose company, Helicon Associates, was brought in to manage the Summit schools; and the schools’ lawyers. At issue:

 

■ Companies founded by Witucki and Dino Cancilliari received millions of dollars in school funds for janitorial and tutoring services.

 

■ Emma Street Holdings, another company founded by the two men, provided loans and sold real estate to the schools.

 

■ Lawyers for the schools’ boards incorporated several of the Dino Cancilliari and Witucki companies, but CMU said they failed to disclose those relationships to the boards.

 

■ A company owned by Dino Cancilliari and his brother got construction contracts worth millions of dollars.

 

■ Helicon Associates paid Alison Cancilliari for consulting work, even as the two schools, with her at the helm, paid Helicon fees for managing the schools.

 

An expert on ethics says she sees ‘conflicts of interest at every turn

 

John Austin, president of the Michigan Board of Education, which makes education policy and advises lawmakers, said “self-dealing and personal enrichment of one’s self and family members in operating a public school would not stand the light of day at a local school board meeting.”

 

Diane Swanson, a professor of management at Kansas State University who specializes in ethics, said she sees “conflicts of interest at every turn.”

 

Swanson said dealings like those at Summit “make it look like the chartered schools are set up to funnel money into private hands. … I have serious concerns whether the primary stakeholders are really being served: the children, parents and the state itself.”

 

Two years ago, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers rated charter laws and said that Michigan has one of the worst charter school laws in the nation. 

 

Of particular note, the report said Michigan’s standards for renewing a charter are too low, the law doesn’t provide for automatic closure if a school is academically failing and doesn’t include minimum quality standards for authorizers. It also said the law doesn’t require authorizers to produce an annual report on the academic performance of its schools.

 

In brief, a public school with low test scores may be closed and turned over to a charter operator. A charter schools with low test scores will never be closed.

 

That’s Billionaire Betsy’s idea of the way education should run. Anyone who steps up is eligible to get a charter. For-profit companies run 80% of the schools. With no accountability, no transparency, no oversight, no conflict of interest laws.

 

Call your Senator. Call his or her office in Washington. Call her/his office in your state and/or district. Say NO to DeVos.

 

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

Mitchell Robinson’s New Year’s Resolutions

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2017 //
1

Mitchell Robinson is a courageous truth teller in Michigan. He is a professor of music education and a fighter for public schools and teachers.

 

Here are his New Year’s resolutions. Most are wishes, not resolutions.

 

My wish is that Mitchell will continue to inform us about what’s happening in Michigan, where school choice reigns supreme.

Categories Michigan

Michigan: Schools Decline with Choice Policies

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2016 //
13

Politico reports that the proof of Betsy DeVos’s school choice policies can be found in Michigan. She claims that choice would “fundamentally improve education.”

 

But it hasn’t.

 

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.

 

So, let’s see, follow Betsy’s policies and the state opens bad charter schools and undercuts public schools. A disaster for everyone.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Failure, Michigan, School Choice

Michigan Charter Founder Sentenced to 41 Months in Prison

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2016 //
6

The founder of a small charter chain in Michigan has been sentenced to 41 months in prison. 

 

I have written about Ingersoll here and here.

 

Steven Ingersoll founded the Grand Traverse Academy in Michigan.

 

Blogger Anita Senkowski has followed this scandal from its beginnings. She writes about Ingersoll’s sentencing here.

 

In its December 15, 2016 sentencing memorandum, the government stated:

 

In general, the four purposes of sentencing are retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. In a tax case such as this, the sentencing purposes of retribution and deterrence are especially important. A sentence within the guideline range of 41 to 51 months is necessary to accomplish those purposes.

 

“When looking first at the need for retribution, Ingersoll has committed a serious offense, and his sentence should reflect it. His offense was not a one-time lapse in judgement, or a record-keeping mistake with purely civil tax consequences. His criminal tax-loss amount exceeds a million dollars. And he was convicted of tax evasion and fraud with respect to three years of false income tax returns.

 

Ingersoll has done nothing to repay the money that he owes. To the contrary, he has continued to violate the tax laws to this day by failing to file any personal income tax return since 2012.

 

The profit and loss statement that Ingersoll previously filed with the court shows that from 2012 to 2015, he earned over two million dollars in gross income. The only income tax payment he has made for those tax periods, however, was a $10,000 payment submitted when he applied for an extension to file his 2012 return.

 

Defendant’s repeated and significant criminal conduct warrants a lengthy sentence.”

 

 

Here is a quote from an earlier post linked above:

 

“This is one of the most curious, most convoluted charter scandals I have come across. Of course, it happened in Michigan, where about 80% of charters operate for-profit and where the state exercises minimal oversight of the charter sector.

 

“In 1999, an optometrist named Steven Ingersoll was among the first to see the potential in the charter industry. He developed his own pedagogy called Integrated Visual Learning and opened the first of four charters, Grand Traverse Academy. The board of directors were other optometrists who liked Ingersoll’s ideas. Certainly, optometrists would be drawn to a teaching method based on “visual learning.”

 

“There were chummy relationships among Ingersoll, the management company he hired, and board members:

 

“It was not until lawyers for the school began asking questions that the tangled financial relationship between Ingersoll’s management company and the charter he founded began to unravel, culminating in the most significant federal criminal case in the history of Michigan’s 20-year-old charter school industry. Ingersoll, who started Smart Schools Management, Inc., stands accused of illegally diverting construction loan money for another charter school to his private account, in part to pay back money he had taken from the Grand Traverse charter. His hand-picked members on the school board knew he had advanced himself money from Grand Traverse, but had no problem with the arrangement, school records show.
“Ingersoll will go on trial next month on seven criminal charges of bank fraud and tax evasion. The allegations of financial self-dealing and cozy relations between Ingersoll, his associates and board members could not come at a worse time for the Michigan charter movement. The state’s powerful, mostly for-profit charter school industry has found itself on the defensive since the Detroit Free Press published a devastating series last June chronicling how charters receive nearly $1 billion a year in state taxpayer money with little accountability or transparency on how that money is spent. The series detailed how board members at some charter schools were forced out when they pushed to learn more about finances from management companies, and how state law failed to prevent self-enrichment by those operating some low-performing charter schools.”

 

“One blogger, Anita Senkowski, doggedly followed the case of Steven Ingersoll and posted documents. Her blog is called “Glistening Quivering Underbelly,” where she calls herself Miss Fortune. She described Ingersoll as the poster boy for Michigan’s lack of charter oversight.”

 

Ingersoll was convicted and has been sentenced to 41 months in prison.

 

 

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

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
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