Over the past few days, I have posted some astonishing articles from Eclectablog, the Michigan blogger who has been following the story of Governor Rick Snyder’s misnamed “Education Achievement Authority.”

This is a special district set up for low-performing schools from across the state. The governor’s plan is to continue expanding the EAA under the leadership of John Covington, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy. In his previous job in Kansas City, the district lost accreditation shortly after Covington decamped to Michigan. Not a stellar record as a turnaround star. The Broad Foundation gave EAA $10 million to keep it afloat.

Eclectablog has printed the accounts of teachers who work for the EAA. All describe horrific conditions for teaching and learning. Neither students nor teachers are safe. The technology is ineffectual and experimental. The schools have no curriculum or discipline and poor leadership. They seem to be staffed mainly by inexperienced Teach for America recruits.

On February 13, the board of the EAA will meet to hear Covington explain and deny all that has been reported by Eclectablog.

Here is another disturbing account from a current teacher in one of the EAA schools. He or she is anonymous for obvious reasons.

One small part of that account:

Discipline and Safety at Henry Ford High School: It is a fact that the executive leadership of the EAA has dozens upon dozens of e-mails from Henry Ford staff outlining the serious problems at Ford. These include details of a complete lack of consistent discipline procedures since the beginning of last year, hallways jam-packed with up to a hundred kids in the middle of various afternoon class periods, and little to no consistent consequences for tardies, absences, etc. I can often look out into the hall during 5th, 6th, or 7th hour and see kids running everywhere however they please. There are no consistent procedures for clearing the hallways or disciplining truant / skipping students – sometimes a random hall sweep, sometimes suspensions, sometimes a brief trip to the office… But no student could tell you what the policy for being late or tardy is. It’s all random.

Discipline problems creep into the classrooms. I am cussed out by students literally every day. I don’t go to administrators much about it anymore because they never did anything about it when I did – the students would get a slap on the wrist and come back to class unpunished or, at the most, chewed out.

Last year, the smell of marijuana would regularly come into the classroom. Kids have openly smoke joints in the hallways. Prostitution, too, was a rampant issue in the school.

The EAA knows about all of this. It has repeatedly sent its executive leadership into our school in response to concerned e-mails from staff that date all the way back to September 2012.

The important point of this expose is that the EAA should not become part of the “reformer” narrative of “success” stories, which are all too common, where failed policies get dressed up in fancy clothes and sent out to the nation as models. Don’t believe the hype. The EAA is a model for failure.