Archives for category: Michigan
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What Happened to the Man Who Poisoned Children in Flint, Michigan, to Save Money?

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2015 //
13

Yesterday, I posted about the lead poisoning of many children in Flint, Michigan, that resulted from shutting off the supply of safe water and replacing it with water from the polluted Flint River. Readers might wonder what happened to the man who made that decision. This reader responded: He is now Emergency Manager of the Detroit Public Schools. He was appointed to this position last January by Governor Rick Snyder.

 

She wrote:

 

 

And what is the current job description for former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley? He is governor-appointed Emergency Manger of Detroit Public Schools. One would think that even Rick Snyder would feel compelled to remove Earley from his position in Detroit after learning of the Flint water scandal, but one would be wrong… Earley has continued to wreak havoc on Detroit Public Schools, serving Detroit’s students the educational equivalent of contaminated water. I was surprised that Rachel Maddow didn’t include this information in her otherwise excellent piece on Flint.

Categories Accountability, Detroit, Michigan

Michigan Officials Lied about Lead Poisoning in Water

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2015 //
11

Earlier today, I posted news that the people of Flint, Michigan, lost access to safe drinking water because its “emergency manager,” appointed by Governor Rick Snyder, cut the budget for clean water. Consequently many young children suffered lead poisoning. The state said it made a mistake.

 

But it it was worse than a mistake. State officials were informed and dismissed the complaints. They lied and tried to cover their tracks.

 

Arthur Delaney of Huffington Post writes:

 
“Michigan state officials insisted that the water supply in Flint was safe even though they knew an unusual number of children had suffered lead poisoning, according to a scientist who helped blow the whistle on Flint’s water crisis.”

 

“Through a public records request, Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, uncovered a July 2015 memo warning of elevated lead levels in Flint kids’ blood.

 

“An internal report from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services warned that lead poisoning rates “were higher than usual for children under age 16 living in the City of Flint during the months of July, August and September, 2014.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Michigan

Outrage! Emergency Manager Poisons Children of Flint, Michigan

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2015 //
23

Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan should hang his head in shame. The emergency manager that he appointed to run the impoverished city of Flint, Michigan, saved money by switching to an unsafe water source, and now many children are suffering from lead poisoning.

 

 

Children in Flint, Michigan, have such high levels of lead in their blood that Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency on Monday, calling the situation a “manmade disaster.” The origins of the escalating situation in Flint go back to 2011, when Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency financial manager to balance Flint’s budget—largely by cutting costs on basic public services. Here’s what you need to know:
In April of 2014, Flint switched its water source from Detroit to the Flint River in an effort to save money. The decision, made by emergency manager Darnell Earley, was met with skepticism: Residents complained that the water was smelly and cloudy. Water tests have since shown high levels of lead, copper, and other bacteria, including E. coli. (GM started hauling in water to its remaining Flint plant last year after noticing that the Flint water was corroding engines.)

 

According to the Hurley Medical Center study…, the proportion of kids under five with elevated levels of lead in their blood has doubled since the switch to Flint River water, to roughly four percent. In some areas, that number has leapt up to more than six percent. “This damage to children is irreversible and can cause effects to a child’s IQ, which will result in learning disabilities and the need for special education and mental health services and an increase in the juvenile justice system,” wrote Weaver in the state of emergency declaration. In October, the city transitioned back to the Detroit water system, though lead levels still remain higher than the federal action level…..

 

Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley implemented steep budget cuts, including last year’s decision to save money by changing the city’s water source. In March, Earley nixed a city council vote to “do all things necessary” to switch back to the Detroit system in March, calling the decision “incomprehensible.” He stepped down the next month. The series of events has led to litigation: In November, Flint residents filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the contaminated water caused them to experience myriad health conditions, including skin lesions, hair loss, depression, vision loss, and memory loss. The same month, the ACLU and Natural Resources Defense Council sued the city, governor, and public officials, claiming that public officials have known for years that drinking Flint River water could result in contamination problems. Michael Steinberg, legal director for the ACLU of Michigan, said, “In their short-sighted effort to save a buck, the leaders who were supposed to be protecting Flints’s citizens instead left them exposed to dangerously high levels of lead contamination.”

 

How are residents getting by?

 

Those who can afford it are buying bottled water, but Flint is one of the poorest cities in the nation—41 percent of residents live in poverty. Many still use city water for bathing and cooking.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Michigan

Unbelievable: Eastern Michigan University Refuses to Close EAA

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
5

The Educational Achievement Authority, which is responsible for 15 schools in Detroit, is under the jurisdiction of Eastern Michigan University.

The board of EMU, 7 of whose 8 members are appointed by Governor Rick Snyder, refused to close it down, despite years of scandals and poor academic performance.

The children will continue to attend failing schools, under Governor Snyder’s control, because he has not a clue what to do. They are not his children. They are an abstraction to him.

Categories Detroit, Michigan

Breaking News: Michigan’s EAA in Disarray

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2015 //
9

Governor Rick Snyder had the solution, he thought, to fixing the deep problems of low test scores in Detroit, a city that has high poverty and segregation: Snyder created the Educational Achievement Authority and gathered the lowest scoring schools into it. Reformers like Snyder think that democracy is the real problem, and if they can consolidate control into the hands of one person, things will get better.

 

Blogger Eclectablog in Michigan reports that the EAA is going from the frying pan to the fire.

 

Scandals. Incompetence. Corruption. Millions squandered.

 

Was as it ever about the children? Or about ripping off taxpayers while the children were treated as Guinea pigs.

 

 

Categories Detroit, Education Reform, Michigan

Michigan: EAA Awards $1.7 Million to NYC Buddies

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2015 //
8

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Education Reform, Michigan

Michigan: How Far Will a Charter School Go to Prevent Teachers from Joining a Union?

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2015 //
15

This is the story of an enthusiastic young teacher who eagerly sought a position in a Michigan charter school, only to be disillusioned by the administration’s indifference to teachers and their views about their work.

When teachers in the charter school became frustrated by their powerlessness, they decided to form a union. Bad idea. The enthusiastic young teacher was out of a job and out of teaching.

The story is bigger than just one person, however. It is the story of how charters began with the sponsorship of the nation’s most important union leader, Albert Shanker, but is now vehemently opposed to unions.

Nationally, 93% of charter schools are non-union. Their teachers are at-will employees.

In Michigan, 79% of the charters operate for profit.

This was not what Shanker had in mind.

When reformers wonder why unions oppose charter schools, it is because the overwhelming majority of charter schools do not permit their teachers to join a union and to have a voice in their working conditions, in the curriculum, or discipline policies, or anything else.

The money behind the charter movement never wanted unions in their schools.

[Michigan’s] focus on free markets and privatization — 79 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit management companies— set a somewhat strained tone between the local unions and the charter movement. Nationally a similar phenomenon was occurring, resulting in the AFT and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions, taking national stances against charters as well. In 1993, one year after the first charter opened, Shanker himself renounced the idea, calling charters an anti-union “gimmick.”

As unions pushed against charter schools, the education reform movement shoved back with a narrative of schools in crisis, which largely blamed incompetent teachers, and the unions protecting them, for the achievement gap. Charter schools could do their part in this generation’s civil rights battle — education equality — by using their flexibility to get around unions and collective bargaining, and instead stand up for hiring-and-firing latitude.

While the Michigan Association of Public School Academies’ spokesperson Buddy Moorehouse says the coalition for charter school leaders “does not have an official stance on unions” (MT tried getting in touch with president Dan Quisenberry on several occasions but he would only speak through Moorehouse), their website indicates partiality explaining that most charter schools don’t have unions because they “prefer the ability to [be] innovative and remove the red tape element when a teacher is not performing.”

The Great Lakes Education Project, a Michigan-based charter advocacy group, more accurately highlights the dichotomy between unions and charter schools. Funded largely by the right-to-work, union adverse DeVos clan, the organization has been forthright in its declaration of union failures, stating on its website in 2004 that unions are “status quo forces looking to protect their cash cow.”

The entire article is worth reading to understand the politics of unions and charters. Unions are now trying to organize charter teachers, and they hail each school that they win as a big success, but the reality is that the charter movement is at heart a union-busting movement. Its leaders are hostile to unions, as they are to public audits and any other intrusion on their freedom to operate as they wish with public money.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Michigan, Unions

Why Michigan Lost $45 Million for New Charters

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2015 //
3

The Detroit Free-Press speculates about why Ichigan did not win $45 million to create new charter schools. Well, it could be because the stat does not exercise oversight of charter authorizers or charter schools. It could be because the state’s charter schools perform poorly. It could be because the Detroit Free Press ran a series about charters and their lack of accountability or transparency or quality.

But why did Ohio win $71 million for its equally poor charter industry?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Michigan, Ohio

Michigan: Reform and the School-to-Profit Pipeline

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2015 //
7

Last week, the Center for Media and Democracy released a detailed (though not complete) list of financial scandals in the charter industry.

In Michigan, the CMD identified 25 “ghost” charters that received $1.7 million in planning grants from the state (taxpayer dollars at work), but never opened.

One of the “ghost schools” was to be a boarding school called Detroit College Preparatory Academy. After failing to open the school, its proponent was then hired as the head of Michigan’s State School Reform/Redesign
Office which is responsible for fixing “Priority Schools,”schools in
the bottom 5% in terms of academic performance. This is often done with a
state takeover, leading to an Emergency Manager. Sometimes, they get turned over to charter companies.

Being a reformer means there will always be a rightwing governor or think tank to hire you.

Categories Charter Schools, Detroit, Michigan

Michigan Teacher: Why I Can’t Teach Anymore

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2015 //
47

Stephanie Keiles is (or was) a math teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She loves teaching. She loves her students. But the mandates and budget cuts finally got to her. I met Stephanie in Austin at the first Network for Public Education conference and again in Chicago at our second conference.

Here’s the piece:

I am sitting here in my lovely little backyard on a beautiful Michigan summer day, drinking a Fat Tire Amber Ale, and crying. I am in tears because today I made one of the hardest decisions of my life; I resigned from my job as a public school teacher. A job I didn’t want to leave — but I had to.

A little background. I didn’t figure out that I wanted to be a math teacher until I was 28. As a kid I was always told I was “too smart” to be a teacher, so I went to business school instead. I lasted one year in the financial world before I knew it was not for me. I read a quote from Millicent Fenwick, the (moderate) Republican Congresswoman from my home state of New Jersey, where she said that the secret to happiness was doing something you enjoyed so much that what was in your pay envelope was incidental. I quit my job as an analyst at a large accounting firm determined to find my passion. I floundered for a while, and then eventually got married and decided I would be a stay-at-home mom, but only until my kids were in school. Then I would need to find that passion.

I was pregnant with my oldest child, sitting on a sofa in Stockholm, Sweden, when I had my epiphany — I would be a math teacher. A middle school math teacher! I thought about it and it fit my criteria perfectly. No, I wasn’t thinking about the pension, or the “part-time” schedule, or any of the other gold-plated benefits that ignorant people think we go into the profession for. Two criteria: I would enjoy it, and I would be good at it. Nine years and four kids later, I enrolled in Eastern Michigan University’s Post-Baccalaureate teacher certification program, and first stepped into my own classroom at the age of 40. I was teaching high school, because that’s where I had my first offer, and I was given five classes of kids who were below grade-level in math. And I still loved it. I knew I had found my calling. After three years I switched districts to be closer to home and to teach middle school, where I belonged. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven! I was hired to teach in my district’s Talented and Gifted program, so I had two classes of 8th graders who were taking Honors Geometry, and three classes of general 8th grade math. This coming year I was scheduled to have five sections of Honors Geometry — all my students would be two, and sometimes three, years advanced in math. I was also scheduled to have my beloved first hour planning period, and I was excited to work with a new group of kids on Student Council. It was looking to be a great year — and I’m still walking away.

My friends, in real life and on Facebook, know what a huge supporter of public schools I am. I am a product of public schools, and my children are the products of public schools. Public education is the backbone of democracy, and we all know there is a corporatization and privatization movement trying to undermine it. I became an activist after Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican goons took over Michigan and declared war on teachers. I am part of a group called Save Michigan’s Public Schools; two years ago we put on a rally for public education at the Capitol steps that drew over 1,000 people from all over the state with just three weeks’ notice and during summer break. I have testified in front of the Michigan House Education Committee against lifting the cap on charter schools, and also against Common Core. I attended both NPE conferences to meet with other activists and bring back ideas to my compadres in Michigan. I have been fighting for public education for five years now, and will continue to do so.

But I just can’t work in public education anymore. Coming from the Republicans at the state level and the Democrats at the national level, I have been forced to comply with mandates that are NOT in the best interest of kids. I am tired of having to perform what I consider to be educational malpractice, in the name of “accountability”. The amount of time lost to standardized tests that are of no use to me as a classroom teacher is mind-boggling. And when you add in mandatory quarterly district-wide tests, which are used to collect data that nothing is ever done with, it’s beyond ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I live in a Kafka novel. Number one on my district’s list of how to close the achievement gap and increase learning? Making sure that all teachers have their learning goals posted every day in the form of an “I Can” statement. I don’t know how we ever got to be successful adults when we had no “I Can” statements on the wall.

In addition, due to a chronic, purposeful underfunding of public schools here in Michigan, my take-home pay has been frozen or decreased for the past five years, and I don’t see the situation getting any better in the near future. No, I did not go into teaching for the money, but I also did not go into teaching to barely scrape by, either. As a tenth-year teacher in my district, I would be making 16% less than a tenth-year was when I was hired in 2006. Plus I now have to pay for medical benefits, and 3% of my pay is taken out to fund current retiree health care, which has been found unconstitutional for all state employees except teachers. And I’m being asked to contribute more to my pension. Financial decisions were made based on anticipated future income that never materialized, for me and for thousands and thousands of other public school teachers. The thought of ANY teacher having to take a second job to support him/herself at ANY point in his/her career is disgusting to me, yet that’s what I was contemplating doing. At 53, with a master’s degree and twelve years of experience.

If I were poorly compensated but didn’t have to comply with asinine mandates and a lack of respect, that would be one thing. And if I were continuing my way up the pay scale but had to deal with asinine mandates, that would be one thing. But having to comply with asinine mandates AND watching my income, in the form of real dollars, decline every year? When I have the choice to teach where I will be better compensated and all educational decisions will be made by experienced educators? And I will be treated with respect? Bring it on.

So as of today I have officially resigned from my district, effective August 31st, which is when I will start my new job as a middle school math teacher at an independent school. I am looking forward to being treated like a professional, instead of a child, and I’m pretty sure I will never hear the words, “We can’t afford to give you a raise”, or worse (as in the past two years), “You’re going to have to take a pay cut.” I am looking forward to not having to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on classroom supplies. And the free lunch, catered by a local upscale market, will be pretty sweet, too.

I will miss my colleagues more than you could ever know, especially my math girls and my Green Hall buddies. It really breaks my heart to leave such a wonderful group of people. In fact, it’s pretty devastating. But I have to do what’s best for me in the long run, and the thought of making more money and teaching classes of 15 instead of 34, and especially not having to deal with all the BS, was too much to refuse.

I will always be there to fight for public education. I just can’t teach in it.

Stephanie

Categories Budget Cuts, Michigan, Teachers
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