Eclectablog of Michigan continues its invaluable reports on the stste’s disastrous so-called “Educational Achievement Authority.” This one contains the testimony of a special education teacher.
Governor Snyder has created a streamlined version of the school-to-prison pipeline.
It is hard to choose which state has done the most to undermine public education: Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin come to mind, but Michigan is right up there as a state whose Governor Rick Snyder is working hard to crush public education. There is the fact that some 80% of the charters in Michigan are run by for-profit operators. And note too that entire low-performing districts have been given to for-profit corporations.
But the worst of Snyder’s inventions is the deceptively-named Education Achievement Authority. Here the governor has gathered the state’s low-performing schools for special treatment.
Eclectablog, a Michigan blog, decided to go behind the claims of success and manufactured data, and instead to talk to teachers who work for the EAA. The stories are harrowing, including accounts of physical abuse, drugs in the schools, and an atmosphere of fear. Some teachers are afraid of violent teachers in schools where there is no discipline.
“Over the past couple of years, Republicans and the Snyder administration has attempted to resolve the problem of urban school districts that are failing to provide even the bare basics of a good education for their students by grouping them all together into a single “school district for misfit schools” called the Education Achievement Authority or EAA. As has been well-documented (see my interview with State Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton HERE), the EAA has been a catastrophic failure. Instead of providing these disadvantaged children with the resources and environment they so sorely lack, the EAA has attempted to educate them on the cheap. They have resorted to “teaching by computer” but, rather than providing the students with the cutting edge technology that you might expect a school district like this to have, instead there are too few computers for the students, the software was nonfunctional for much of the school year, and the system crashes regularly.
“Worse yet, special needs students are woefully neglected, very possibly in violation of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Special plans for these students, called Individualized Education Plans or IEPs, are frequently not provided to the teachers which prevents them from making the accommodations needed for these students, accommodations required by law.”
Conditions for teaching and learning are abysmal:
““It’s dangerous for kids to come to school,” one teacher at an EAA elementary school told me. “We’ve found drugs in the school. We’ve found weapons in the school. We have a metal detector that doesn’t even work, nobody checks anyone on the way in.”
“The security problems are exacerbated by ridiculously large classroom sizes, something that’s only getting worse due to teachers leaving in droves. According to one teacher I spoke with, the classroom they teach in is about to go to almost 50 students. This is despite the fact that a quarter of the students have left the EAA system, a dramatic drop that reflects the dissatisfaction of the students’ parents with the education their children are receiving.
“One of the things that really has pushed me to speak out is that I learned from another teacher recently that I’m about to get another ten students in my class which will take me to almost 50 kids,” the teacher said. “Another teacher quit and, instead of hiring someone to replace them, they are just redistributing their students to all the other teachers. So, it’s just me and all these kids with no help, no paraprofessionals. It’s just dangerous. Beyond being able to educate that many kids at once all by myself, I’m not confident I can keep them safe from each other. They don’t fit in the room, there aren’t enough chairs, it’s not okay. I have this knot in my stomach and I’m worried sick and stressed out because of it.”
“Alone in a class of nearly 50 students with no student teachers, no paraprofessionals, and little support from school administrators when children act out violently. And many of these teachers are in their early twenties. The ones from Teach for America — roughly a quarter of the teachers in the EAA — had a scant five weeks of training before they were assigned to a classroom full of kids.”
Constant turnover damages morale:
““The bottom line is that the EAA is really bad for teachers and, more importantly, it’s really bad for students. The way they treat the teachers is causing them to leave. I would leave if…I’m almost there, to tell you the truth. The turnover rate is horrible for the kids. Any educator worth their salt knows that a lot of what you do every day and the success of it is dependent on the depth of the relationships that you form with your students and parents. And, for a lot of these students, school is the most stable thing in their life, especially in these high-risk, urban areas.
“So, when they constantly have instability at home and also instability at school with this revolving door of teachers…they’re in and they’re out because the district is treating them like crap. That’s horrible for kids. Not to mention the fact that class sizes are huge, the things that they feed them in the cafeteria are not nutritious, they have very minimal security.”
Governor Snyder plans to expand the EAA.
State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton has bravely fought for public education and for the children of Michigan in a hostile environment, in a state where free-market fundamentalists control the governorship and the legislature.
She has been unable to hold back hostile legislation and anti-civic policies, but she has actively resisted those who encourage the plundering of precious taxpayer dollars for corporate benefit, to the detriment of children.
In this interview, conducted by Eclectablog, she describes how the legislature created the so-called Educational Achievement Authority and how she was stonewalled when she tried to get information about what was happening to children in the EAA. She filed a Freedom of Information Act to get the information the EAA refused, and after a long delay, it released nearly 2,000 pages. That is called a data dump, where they give you so much information that they hope you can’t figure it out.
The state boasts about the EAA, but what Rep. Lipton discovered was appalling. This is the way Eclectablog described EAA:
“What has become increasingly apparent is that the administration of the EAA is in complete disarray. They have incredible discipline issues, special education kids are being summarily removed from the program in violation of state and federal law, and they appear to be manipulating testing to both make their outcomes look better than they are and also to justify taking over schools. Instead of being a model for educating kids, classroom instruction is being handled by inadequately trained graduates from the Teach for America program which gives “teachers” five weeks of training before sending them into the classroom. Text books and other teaching methods appear to have been tossed aside in favor of software programs where the student interacts with a laptop computer rather than a teacher.”
The interviewer for Eclectablog writes:
“On the forefront of this effort to hold the EAA accountable and to make sure they are actually achieving the results they say they are before we take the system statewide is Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton (D-Huntington Woods). She has been repeatedly rebuffed by the administration of the EAA as well as the Department of Education, forcing her to pay several thousands of dollars out of her own pocket for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data that should have been provided to a three-time elected state legislator for the asking. She and Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood (D-Taylor) have, through their FOIA requests, been given over 2,000 pages of information in what amounts to a data dump intended to overwhelm them with so much documentation that they couldn’t find the information that they are looking for. They have, however, begun the process of organizing the documents and have them on a searchable website called InsideTheEAA.com.”
Then follows a fascinating conversation, and you realize that Rep. Lipton “gets it.” She sees that what is happening in Michigan is the same as what happened in Louisiana. she sees a national pattern. She sees that Broad, Walton, and Gates don’t like democracy. It is too messy. They like organizations where one person runs everything, and what he does fits their mold.
This is part of the interview:
Q. “He [a state senator] got something like 880 documents in mid-August. How many did you get, you got more than that, right?
A. “Yeah, I got about 1,700 pages.
Q. “It’s like drinking from a fire hose. I was on your site and it’s clear what they’ve done: they want to make it so that it’s impossible to analyze it, basically.
A. “Yeah, that’s sort of the game plan. But there are certain threads that you can definitely glean from the documents. One thread that is abundantly clear is that the Broad Foundation, and specifically Eli Broad, was and still is intimately involved in the creation as well as the carrying out of the EAA.
Q. “How are they doing this?
A. “The Broad Foundation, before the EAA opened, contributed something like $25 million and I believe they’ve made a subsequent grant to the EAA. It appears that he was instrumental in, if not the hiring of John Covington, he was certainly…
Q. “Who was a Broad Fellow, correct?
A. “That’s right, a graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy. There are some emails that suggest that the Broad Foundation put his name forward and there doesn’t seem to be any other names that you can find. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of extensive interview process. Some of the emails from that time are sort of, “This is the person that it’s going to be”.
Q. “What’s interesting is that, when you look at this in a broader context, in terms of what the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, to name a few, have done in other states, there are similarities. The money that they spend, it sort of follows a very interesting trend line. They will go into states with opportunities for state take over districts or where there is mayoral control. So, you’ll see the Broad Foundation in the Louisiana Recovery District, for example.
Q. “Challenged places, in other words.
A. “Mmm hmm. In Philadelphia, places like that. Instead of — and, again, this is my opinion — instead of using their money to fund initiatives that we know work, you have them spending an enormous amount of money to create an infrastructure like an EAA — in Louisiana you have the Louisiana Recovery District — that aggregates control in a single person.
Q. “You begin to wonder, “Why is that?” and then you begin to look at the broader context of corporate reform in education, you see that that seems to be the M.O. Why have to work through all of the messiness of this thing called ‘democracy’? Oh, my heavens! School boards can be so insufferable! I mean, we actually have to work with our community!
A. “You have this sense of this sort of disdain for the democratic process. Because, think about the local school board. That defines democracy for a lot of people, right? I mean, people will say to me, “I’m not political. I couldn’t care less about politics.” And I’ll ask them, “Do you care about your schools?” and they’ll say, “Why heavens yes, my children are in school.” “Do you go to school board meetings?” “Absolutely!”
Q. “So they are involved.
A. “Absolutely. And the concept that these corporate “reformers” loathe is that very concept. So, how do you get around that? Well, first of all, you convince people that the current system is rotten. And you spend a lot of money to do that. And they can, right? These are organizations…”
Q. “That are super-wealthy.”
I have posted several articles about Governor Rick Snyder’s all-out assault on public education, most recently, this one earlier today. Some 80% of charters operate for profit, fiscally troubled districts have been handed over to for-profit charter corporations (with poor track records) that extract as much in profit as the district’s deficit (this happens only in majority African-American districts), schools and districts are incentivized to poach students from each other to get the money they need to function (and waste millions of taxpayer dollars advertising for students from other districts). In addition, the governor created the ill-named Education Achievement Authority, a super district made up of the state’s lowest-performing schools and overseen by John Covington. Covington, trained in the unaccredited Broad Academy, previously was superintendent of Kansas City, which lost its accreditation under his leadership. Tomorrow, I will post an article containing interviews with teachers who work in the EAA and describe it as a dangerous environment, unsafe for teachers and students alike.
Governor Snyder is achieving his goal: dissolving public education as a civic obligation and turning it into a free-for-all marketplace.
In response to a post about Governor Snyder’s actions, the blog received this comment from the president of the elected Michigan State Board of Education. The state board is dominated by Democrats (like Austin) but seems unable to slow the governor’s wrecking ball. The most outspoken critic of the Snyder assault on public schools is State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton. In a few minutes, I will post an interview with Representative Lipton about the EAA.
John Austin writes:
John Austin, President of Michigan State Board of Education here. We do have an unfortunate proliferation in Michigan of new charter and cyber schools, both good, mediocre and truly bad at educating children. The legislature’s, and to date the Governor’s unwillingness to insist on quality control in new school creation, to ensure they educate kids, and the fueling of a wild-west free market of largely for-profit new school creation is doing damage both financially, and educationally to all our schools and children.
The EAA was an effort, well-intentioned, to create a functional and effective state turnaround district to improve performance in our worst schools. Unfortunately, it too was tied up in knots, when legislation to codify it was loaded up with ornaments of the unlimited new school creation policy being pushed last year. It also has had real growing pains, problems and transparency issues.
However, different from the account my friend Ellen Cogen Lipton seemed to suggest in the Electabog article, the State Board of Education twice asked Dr. Covington to come and discuss progress or lack thereof with us, and he certainly did so, and we had as recently as last September a useful and robust public discussion of all the issues– hopefully towards helping the EAA work better, and do better with the legitimate concerns raised by Rep Lipton and many others.
One of our readers brought this sad article to my attention.
Under Governor Rick Snyder, more school districts have collapsed into emergency status than during the time of any of his predecessors. Failing districts get taken over by the state and put into its Emergency Achievement District, an oxymoron. Once in the EAA, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy arranges to dissolve democratic control and turn the schools over to for-profit charter chaplains.
Snyder encourages charters and loves for-profit charters.
80% of Michigan’s charters operate for-profit.
What a racket!
How much longer will Michigan voters tolerate the plundering and sacking of public education?
Mercedes Schneider was invited to testify to a Michigan legislative committee about the alleged “New Orleans miracle,” which she explains is a mirage.
In addition to presenting her views in a five-minute video, she made a ten-minute video specifically directed to Michigan parents.
She explains what is happening in Louisiana, the data manipulation, the political games played with statistics to bolster privatization.
If you want to meet Mercedes Schneider, watch the videos.
Mercedes teaches high school English in Louisiana and she holds a Ph.D. in research methods.
She is also fearless, which is unusual these days.
Critics of Michigan’s letter-grades for schools denounced the system as a Trojan horse, designed to push schools with low grades into the state-created Educational Achievement Authority.
“Legislation creating a letter grading system for Michigan public schools is coming under scrutiny because it contains a provision that may speed the transfer of failing schools into the troubled Education Achievement Authority.
“The legislation mandates that schools with an “F” letter grade under the new system with low test scores twice in three years be placed under control of the state school reform office.
“That office has the contractual power to place failing schools under the control of the EAA, a fledgling school system that operates 15 schools formerly part of Detroit Public Schools under an agreement with DPS and Eastern Michigan University.
“Critics of the EAA say the letter grade legislation is a “Trojan horse” for expanding the EAA, which has seen its enrollment plummet by 24 percent after one year and faces questions about its long-term financial viability.
“The EAA’s operations have been heavily subsidized by private donations raised by supporters of Gov. Rick Snyder.”
The EAA is a transparent attempt by Governor Snyder to continue his effort to destroy public education in the state, picking off more schools each year.
“This is a back-door way of getting schools into the EAA without passing the EAA legislation,” said state Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton, D-Huntington Woods.
From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131206/SCHOOLS/312060025#ixzz2mlDVvc00
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the bond ratings of 53 school districts in Michigan.
Public schools are losing enrollment to charter schools, and losing the ability to balance their budgets.
More than 80% of the charter schools in Michigan are operated for-profit.
According to the linked article,
Justin Marlowe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about local government finance, said increased charter school competition and tight state budgets are squeezing the districts.
The “proliferation of charter schools and ongoing state budget problems have put more pressure on local school districts,” Marlowe said, adding there “don’t seem to be any immediate solutions unless we rethink how we finance school districts.”
According to the Moody’s report, 425 of the state’s 549 public school districts lost students between 2004 and 2012, with total enrollment slipping 13.2 percent.
But as overall enrollment was falling, charter schools were growing: They had 120,000 students in Michigan at the end of the last school year and the number of schools rose by 8 percent for this school year, to 298.
Michigan’s Electablog reports: “This is no accident. It’s a plan that’s been in place by those who wish to diminish the ability of teachers to bargain collectively for wages, benefits, and working conditions and to redirect tax dollars earmarked for educating our children into the coffers of for-profit charter school companies.”
In short, this is the culmination of efforts to privatize public education, remove any rights of teachers, and replace public education with profit-making businesses.
Is this the work of conservatives? No, conservatives don’t destroy traditional institutions. They don’t blow up the neighborhood public school so that someone can make a profit.
As Garrison Keillor said, “When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”
The vandals are inside the gates in Michigan, ransacking public education across the state.
One of our regular readers wrote as follows:
Eli Broad is from Michigan, and he writes editorials in that state insisting he is NOT destroying public education. Would someone in media ask him to defend what’s happening in Michigan? 80% of the charters are for-profit and they are destroying the public school system. The governor and the state legislature are captured by for-profit education lobbyists.
Michigan could LOSE their public school system. Will Broad have to answer for what he’s done here? How far does this have to go before someone in state or federal government intervenes? Will Michigan be the first state to go to a fully privatized system?
Thanks, ed reformers. Good job! Every public school kid in Michigan will now suffer as a result of your cavalier, reckless, “cage busting” approach. Every single kid in a public school will pay.
Chiara sends this good news from Michigan, where more than 80% of charters operate for profit and entire districts have been given to for-profit chains.
We will awaken the public, we will organize, the politicians will follow, and we will win.
Chair a writes:
“Challenger in Michigan governor’s race calls for transparency and accountability in charter schools:
He’s the first I’ve seen using this issue in a campaign. Michigan has a big for-profit K-12 industry at this point, they have whole districts that are completely privatized, so I’m not surprised it started there. It’s great to see that he’s talking about what they’re spending on advertising.
Should be interesting to see if this spreads to the neighboring big for-profit K-12 ed state, Ohio.”
This reader reports on the for-profit charter chain that took control of the students in Muskegon Height, Michigan:
“I have a close friend who works in this very charter school in Muskegon Heights.
“If Mosaica isn’t the worst charter operation in America, it’s in the top ten.
“A few observations from my friend:
“1. They instituted a homeroom period at the start of the day. Students were ASSIGNED to a classroom and were supposed to show up for assistance / tutoring. My friend said that one student showed up. Administration did nothing to address the fact that kids weren’t coming to school.
“2. His building administrator locked the office doors and told teachers that she would only speak to them via e-mail.
“3. In April of last year, he was told that he must purchase paper because the school would no longer provide any.
“4. When MLIVE (The Grand Rapids Press), reported that nearly a third of the teaching staff had quit halfway through the year, the school responded by calling all the teachers in for a meeting. At the meeting, they had the teachers write down areas of improvement / complaints they had about the way Mosaica was running the school. After collecting all of the complaints, they threw them in the garbage. They then berated the remaining teachers and told them to quit because they have “loads of qualified applicants” dying to teach there.
“I could go on and on and on. This despicable company has stolen millions of dollars from Michigan taxpayers. On top of that, they’ve eliminated 50+ middle class jobs (former public school employees) and have created more paycheck to paycheck, barely getting by jobs. My friend makes $31,000 a year. He is better paid than several other staff members because he had previous years of experience.
“I am a FORMER REPUBLICAN. I voted for GW Bush twice. Knowing what NCLB and Republican efforts have done to public schools and to public education (the narrowing of education, total focus on standardized tests, elimination of liberal arts programs, loss of rigor or accountability for students, destruction of the teaching profession), I have left the party and have helped convince many of my friends to leave as well. I’m also a married white male (the backbone of the GOP). Lose guys like me, and you’re screwed.”
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