According to Eclectablog, John Covington will leave Governor Rick Snyder’s controversial Educational Achievement Authority for another job. The story was reported by the Detroit News.
Covington, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, previously led the Kansas City district, which lost accreditation after his abrupt departure.
This is an astonishing story from Michigan. There, a persistent blogger named “Miss Fortune” discovered that a charter manager was indicted on multiple charges, including tax evasion and bank fraud. His wife and brother plus a local contractor and his wife diverted nearly $1 million of a $1.8 million construction loan to his personal bank accounts. Miss Fortune began digging, as persistent bloggers sometimes do, and found that the indictment said he had used some of the money to “repay an indebtedness to the Grand Traverse Academy for money he’s advanced himself.” GTA is one of the charters he manages. It seems he owed the charter school the tidy sum of $2,338,980. He planned to repay this loan by taking deductions from his management fee.
Miss Fortune broke the news on her blog.
The local media didn’t find any of this interesting. After all, don’t school superintendents borrow a million or two from their district’s bank accounts? Isn’t that, like, routine? Miss Fortune wrote a follow-up post about the events. She is betting that federal officials will follow up on this most curious set of arrangements. We shall see if anyone cares.
In Michigan, nearly 90% of charter schools are managed by an EMO (education management organization). for-profit EMOs operate 79% of charter schools, and nonprofit EMOs operate 10%. Only 11% of Michigan’s charter schools are without an EMO.
Legislators called for an investigation of the Educational Achievement Authority after the Detroit News revealed that Governor Rick Snyder’s favorite “reform” had piled up $240,000 on credit card debt.
“Among the findings: $178,000 was spent on hotel and airfare to 36 cities from April 2012 to February, while another $10,000 was spent on gas for Covington’s chauffeured car, $25,000 for IKEA furniture and $8,000 combined at Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Meijer, Home Depot and Lowe’s.”
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140512/SCHOOLS/305120108#ixzz31bK9Zdsz
A blogger named Democracy Tree reports that TFA is putting up recruitment posters in the toilets at the University of Michigan.
Probably it is to recruit teachers for the financially strapped Educational Achievement Authority, where 27% of the teachers are TFA.
The blogger reports:
“Yep, that’s Teach For America (TFA) hustling young adults while they pee — Geez, talk about lowbrow recruiting tactics. Surely it’s every graduate’s dream to say “I discovered my life’s calling in the third stall on the left in North Kedzie Hall”.
“What makes this so interesting in Michigan is that 27 percent of the teachers hired by the state’s controversial Education Achievement Authority (EAA) are from TFA. The EAA is a special school district, established by fiat, which took-over 15 academically failing schools from Detroit Public Schools. The new district lacks democratically elected leaders and is instead run by a “Chancellor” — John Covington, who readily admits that fully 51 percent of his teaching staff has less than three years experience in the classroom. Covington came to the EAA from Kansas City Public Schools where, under his watch as superintendent, the district lost its accreditation. As chancellor, he currently enjoys compensation to the tune of over $353,538.
“How does the EAA pay for that salary? In part, by hiring college graduates on the cheap. They receive a whopping five weeks of TFA training before being thrown into a classroom full of academically struggling students. Last year, Detroit-area Senator Bert Johnson (D-2) reported numerous problems with the schools — mostly due to inexperienced teachers, including one school where a dozen TFA recruits walked-off the job out of frustration.
“TFA recruits are not required to have a degree in education. In fact, the only education-related training they typically receive is the TFA summertime crash course immediately prior to their fulfilling a two-year teaching contract. Fewer than a third of them go on to pursue a career in education. With the soaring cost of higher education, and lack of jobs, TFA becomes an attractive short-term alternative to grads much in the same way as the military.”
It seems like only yesterday that Governor RickSnyder appointed an emergency manager for the public schools of Muskegon Heights, which were running a deficit.
The emergency manager turned the district over to Mosaica, a for-profit charter chain.
But Mosaica didn’t make a profit, instead they ran a deficit, and their contract has been canceled“.
“Muskegon Heights Public Schools Emergency Manager Gregory Weatherspoon said the separation came down to an issue of finances. Mosaica, a for-profit company, was running a deficit budget and not making a profit. School officials said the split is not the result of dissatisfaction with academic progress of students in the K-12 Muskegon Heights Public School Academy.
“Weatherspoon said both Mosaica and the charter district board agreed the separation agreement was necessary.
“They came here to do a service for the children,” Weatherspoon said. “They got the job done, but it didn’t fit their financial model… The profit just simply wasn’t there.”
“At the core of the financial problems were investments into the school buildings, which Mosaica leased from the public school district for $1, as well as higher-than-expected special education costs and lower-than-expected enrollment. As the first charter school district in the nation, school officials have acknowledged there was a lot of uncertainty about costs when Mosaica took on the management role two years ago.
“Mosaica recently has had cash flow troubles that resulted in it seeking emergency advances of state aid in order to make payroll, which had to be delayed earlier this month. The management company, based in Atlanta, fronted $761,000 so that staff could be paid, Weatherspoon said.
The company will be repaid that money with a portion of a $1.4 million emergency state loan that Muskegon Heights Public Schools expects to receive on Monday, he said.
“Mosaica’s contract calls for it to receive about a $1 million annual management fee. It was paid the fee the first year of the contract, but not this year. This year, the company will receive $84,000 split over the next three months, which will help cover administrators’ salaries for the rest of the year, said John Gretzinger, an attorney for the charter district.
What do you say? Job well done? No profits to be found? Try, try again? What next?
A few years ago, Michigan governor Rick Snyder decided that the best way to fix the financial problems of districts in deficit was to put them under the control of an emergency manager to straighten out their finances. Some districts, however, are so poor that they don’t have enough money to educate their children. It is the state’s duty to help them.
In 2011, an emergency manager decided to give the Muskegon Heights school district to a for-profit charter chain, called Mosaica. It has not been profitable, and the district’s deficit continues.
Mosaica just received an emergency bailout from the state because it couldn’t meet its payroll. The corporation ended its first year in deficit because of the cost of repairs.
Years of deferred maintenance required expenditures of $750,000 to bring the buildings up to code. Meanwhile revenues have shrunk as enrollment dropped from 1400 to 920.
Lingering question: why did the state allow this impoverished, largely African American school district to fall into such shabby condition? Will for-profits be more cautious in the future about taking over neglected districts? Or will they have a commitment from the state for subsidies that were not available to the school district when it had an elected board?
Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton has been one of the most outspoken critics of Governor Rick Snyder’s Education Achievement Authority.
The EAA was created to gather up the low-performing schools in the state and put them under a single leader, in this case, the Broad “trained” superintendent John Covington.
There have been numerous accounts by students and teachers of mistreatment and abuse, poor teaching, inoperable technology, etc.
Governor Snyder asked the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass HB 4369 to expand the EAA.
Before the bill passed, Representative Lipton gave the following speech. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where passage seems likely.
Representative Lipton said:
Microsoft Word – Ellen’s EAA Floor Speech.docx
I rise before you today with profound disappointment and regret, as this is a floor speech that I wished never to have to make.
But here we are, and I can’t help but ask myself ‐ how did we get here? So a little bit of history is in order.
I’d like to take you back to the fall of 2012 ‐ November 2012 to be exact ‐ when a bill was introduced to codify an idea borne of the ideological agenda often referred to as corporate education reform, but in reality de‐form.
And the idea which is being replicated in states all across this country generally goes something like this:
People all across this state said Whoa! Stop the train! Not so fast. And the bill didn’t pass and there was a collective sigh of relief.
But the corporate reformers are persistent ‐ I’ll give them that ‐ and the same old idea was tweaked and turned and re‐introduced and passed from this chamber in record time.
The process to create in statute a state takeover district has not been a smooth one, however, thanks to many Freedom of Information Act Requests, brave teachers and students who have come forward to tell their stories despite being silenced, persistent journalists and bloggers who continued to ask difficult questions to uncover the inconvenient truths, and all those in this chamber and out who bravely continue to speak truth to power. I thank all of you.
I thank the teacher who shared this story:
“The way that they’re treating the students is terrifying,” they said. “We’ve had multiple fights where no security has actually shown up. They’re not suspending students so I’ve been hit by a kid before and nothing has happened. Another teacher has been hit numerous times and nothing has happened to the child who did the hitting even though he was very clearly identified. He is still at school today.
“I’ve never felt this worried about going to school,” they continued. “I’m well aware that most of my kids would protect me and they have before, but they shouldn’t have to. That’s the role of discipline. But, at the same time, I afraid to report a kid because I’ve seen disciplinary officers hit them and I’ve reported it and nothing has happened from the state.
“I’m at my end where I can’t be part of this organization that is abusing children both educationally and physically.”
And another who shared this one:
“I’ve written the state about our highly illegal practices with special education students. I’ve seen exactly four IEPs this year.” And of course there were more than four students with special needs. The teacher explains, “I have at least 20% per class. And I have no paraprofessionals except for one hour a day. It’s horrendous. I have no idea how to modify my teaching plan if I haven’t seen their IEPs. For example, I might need to read the test to them or modify things for math only. I have no idea without seeing the IEP. So, of course these kids are doing poorly because I’m not able to modify my teaching in the way that their IEP specifies.
“Worse yet, if I don’t do it and they fail, they have to pass the kid because their teaching plan wasn’t modified as it should have been. But, I didn’t know! So, kids are being passed on.”
You know, it’s often been said that a society will be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens
And so, I’d like to thank the many children who have shared their stories with me, stories that are etched in my memory and seared in my heart.
The little boy who told me that he misses seeing books in his schools
The little girl with a hearing impairment who was told to try to learn by reading the teacher’s lips when she had always received a audio amplifying headset
The little boy with cerebral palsy whose IEP was never followed and was told not to finish out the school year because he was going to flunk anyway.
And finally the little girl who told me “I may be poor, but I’m not stupid”
The promise I make to all of you who have joined this fight is that we will not back down. We will not be silenced. We will bear witness.
Because we have no other choice. And because the stakes are far too high.
This is what John Dewey meant when he wrote “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all of the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”
A reader reports:
“Big win for Arne Duncan and Rick Snyder on Eli Broad’s EAA experiment in Detroit:
“Democratic lawmakers said the bill is an attempt to prop up Snyder’s struggling EAA, which has been dogged by declining enrollment, financial problems and teacher turnover during its two years of running schools formerly operated by Detroit Public Schools.
“This isn’t about helping schoolchildren. This is about a politically and ideologically driven agenda to destroy public education as we know it,” said House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills.”
“The EAA isn’t financially viable unless they keep packing in more kids. Now that they have 50 more Michigan (formerly) public schools, and the capacity to take over really as many as they want, they should be able to keep this failed experiment going for a while.
“Now it’s too big to fail, which of course was the point of expanding it.”
The Detroit Data and Democracy Project reports that the children of Detroit have seen deteriorating results since the state takeover of their public schools in 2009.
Dr. Thomas C. Pedroni of Wayne State University reported that the manipulation of statistics has been a defining characteristic of state control of the schools:
He writes:
One year ago this month I watched in disbelief as the Emergency Manager of the moment, Roy Roberts, declared on NBC’s nationally broadcast Education Nation Detroit Summit that Detroit Public Schools had surpassed the Michigan average in 14 of 18 MEAP categories. At the time I suspected that Snyder’s appointee, a former auto executive with no education background, had simply misspoken or just didn’t quite have his facts straight. What bothered me more was that none of his carefully selected co-panelists—including EAA Chancellor John Covington and Detroit Parent Network President/CEO Sharlonda Buckman—batted as much as an eye over Roberts’ jubilant mispronouncement. A clearly impressed Chelsea Clinton declared that when the day came she would gladly enroll her own children in the public schools of Detroit.
As I dug through the MEAP results on the Michigan Department of Education’s website that day—confirming that DPS students had scored behind the state average in all 18 tested categories, typically by 20 percentage points or more—I made a discovery I had not anticipated: in most categories, children in Detroit’s public elementary and middle schools had fallen even farther behind their state peers since 2009. That year (2009) was the year that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared Detroit “ground zero” for education reform, and the State once again took away local democratic control of Detroit’s schools.
I was particularly troubled that, since 2009, the youngest children taking the test—3rd, 4th, and 5th graders—had declined the most. Although already so far behind their statewide peers, Detroit’s youngest test-takers had somehow lost even more ground.
Read what happened when he tried to publish this story in the Detroit News.
The latest release of test scores in Detroit in 2014 show that the children continue to lose ground compared to their peers in the rest of the state.
Sadly, grievously—the new MEAP data, released February 28, reveal the further deepening of a devastating pattern. In both reading and math, Detroit’s children have fallen even further behind their state peers. Somehow, in 10 of the 12 grade-level math and reading MEAP tests, Detroit’s children under state control in DPS and the EAA have lost even more ground.
Fourth graders in Detroit’s state-managed schools actually progressed marginally in reading relative to their Michigan peers, bringing the proficiency gap down by 0.8 points to 29.5 percentage points. But in every other tested grade– third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth– they fell even further behind in reading. In math, Detroit’s sixth grade students in state-managed schools gained marginally on their Michigan peers (by 0.3 points) and are now only 27.7 percentage points behind. But they lost even more ground to their statewide peers in all the other tested grades– third, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth.
Pedroni says it is another lost year for the children of Detroit.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s pet project is the Educational Achievement Authority, where the lowest-performing districts are clustered in a single entity managed by Superintendent John Covington, a Broad Academy graduate. The EAA has been funded not only by taxpayers but by the Broad Foundation and many Detroit philanthropists.
For reasons documented amply by Eclectablog, the EAA has failed to help the state’s neediest children.
Now comes the state testing data, and the evidence is clear about the failure of the EAA.
How about research-based interventions, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services, the arts, medical care, and a sustained effort to reduce poverty and segregation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 