Michigan charter school disaster

[Anonymous]

This is a heartbreaking article about how Michigan, via Republicans and Betsy De Vos, destroyed its public education system through the quest to turn it over to private, for-profit charter schools. This is shameful and a cautionary lesson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/magazine/michigan-gambled-on-charter-schools-its-children-lost.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Michigan’s K-12 system is among the weakest in the country and getting worse. In little more than a decade, Michigan has gone from being a fairly average state in elementary reading and math achievement to the bottom 10 states. It’s a devastating fall. Indeed, new national assessment data suggest Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum. White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live.

[A] 2017 Stanford University analysis found that increasing charter-school enrollment in a school district does little to improve achievement gaps. And in unregulated educational sectors like Michigan’s, there’s evidence that charters have actually increased inequality: A 2015 working paper by the Education Policy Center determined that Michigan’s school-choice policies “powerfully exacerbate the financial pressures of declining-enrollment districts” — and districts with high levels of charter-school penetration, the authors found, have fared worst of all.

Perhaps the most startling feature of Michigan’s system is its lack of centralized oversight. In most of the country, state governments play some role in determining who can open charter schools and monitor their progress. But [Gov.] Engler ceded nearly all control to dozens of groups throughout Michigan — universities and community colleges, as well as existing public-school districts — granting them the power to approve the charters of would-be schools and act as sole oversight bodies. A result has been an inconsistently regulated glut of schools, all fighting over the same pool of students and money, a situation that the authorizers, which receive up to 3 percent of their schools’ per-pupil funding, have little incentive to rein in.

Michigan does not mandate that its charter schools buy or lease property at fair-market prices, resulting — predictably — in wildly inflated real estate spending. ... At the same time, banks and hedge funds, Miron told me, profit greatly from the charter sector, thanks to large tax breaks dating back to the Clinton presidency that benefit investors in schools located in struggling “renewal communities.” And with so many eager lenders and bond underwriters lined up, E.M.O.s realized they, in turn, could make money from one of the largest expenses charter schools face. “A bunch of them thought, Wow, I can start a real estate division!” VanderWerp said. “We’ve run into this all over the place”: E.M.O.s buy buildings “for a couple hundred thousand bucks, lease them to the school for a couple of years and then sell them” to the school “for a few million.” In Michigan, 80 percent of charters are currently operated by for-profit E.M.O.s. The state’s largest E.M.O., the Grand Rapids-based National Heritage Academies, operates 84 charters in nine states and has been criticized for charging wildly above-market annual rents to its schools: A Detroit Free Press investigation found that 14 National Heritage schools in Michigan pay the company $1 million or more.

Last year, before her Department of Education nomination, Betsy Devos wrote an op-ed in The Detroit News calling for the wholesale dissolution of Detroit’s public-school district in order to “liberate all students.” But more than half of Detroit students already attend charter schools, and studies have found these schools, on average, to be either as poorly performing or only marginally better than the public schools long called a national disgrace. The Detroit charter Hamilton Academy is one school cited in a class-action lawsuit claiming a “persistent, systemic and deliberate failure” by the state of Michigan to provide Detroit schoolchildren “their constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right of access to literacy.” According to the lawsuit, when a math teacher at Hamilton abruptly quit, the highest-performing eighth-grade math student taught seventh- and eighth-grade math for a month; the lawsuit also asserts that during the first week of the 2016-17 school year “temperatures of over 100 degrees caused students and teachers to vomit and pass out.”

Last year, State Senator Goeff Hansen, a Republican from the tiny city of Hart, tried to rein things in. Setting his sights on Detroit, Hansen sponsored a bipartisan bill that would have increased oversight of charters in the city, creating a seven-member Detroit Education Commission with mayoral appointees and a mandate to determine where new charter schools could open and whether existing schools would expand or be closed. The bill passed the Senate with the support of Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, and Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, but it was derailed in the 11th hour by Republicans in the State Legislature — thanks, in large part, to the lobbying efforts of the DeVos family, which, The Detroit Free Press reports, showered the state Republican Party with “near-unprecedented amounts of money” during the campaign cycle.

[Anonymous]

But she is bringing that Michigan Innovation and prayer to public school systems nationwide.

MAGA

[Anonymous]

The most damning thing about charters is that they have a built-in advantage. The families who apply for the lottery are more engaged and concerned about educational quality. The results should be better based on that fact alone, but the numbers don't show it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The most damning thing about charters is that they have a built-in advantage. The families who apply for the lottery are more engaged and concerned about educational quality. The results should be better based on that fact alone, but the numbers don't show it.

Yeah. So if they perform on par with a low-rated public next door...that actually suggests they are providing a worse experience.

I think there is room for Charters to provide alternative approaches to education, but as with all things in the US the capitalist nose for smelling out an opportunity to make money drowns good intention. There is a non-profit charter near me that offers Montessori education through HS. I'm very interested in it for my kids...but it's run as a stand-alone non-profit with heavy community involvement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most damning thing about charters is that they have a built-in advantage. The families who apply for the lottery are more engaged and concerned about educational quality. The results should be better based on that fact alone, but the numbers don't show it.

Yeah. So if they perform on par with a low-rated public next door...that actually suggests they are providing a worse experience.

I think there is room for Charters to provide alternative approaches to education, but as with all things in the US the capitalist nose for smelling out an opportunity to make money drowns good intention. There is a non-profit charter near me that offers Montessori education through HS. I'm very interested in it for my kids...but it's run as a stand-alone non-profit with heavy community involvement.

Which is not what Betsy DeVos wants. Because no $$$ for her cronies.

[Anonymous]

This is apparently what people wanted. Change, whether good or bad. Change our public school systems which serve some students well and some poorly. Unfortunately, change doesn't seem to help the poorly served students, otherwise more people would be for it.

[Anonymous]

What a shame using "market principles" to educate children. It's too late to just choose a "better" school when you discover your child's charter school was sub-par years later. Too late by then. Children should also not be subject to CEO and shareholder worries about profitability.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most damning thing about charters is that they have a built-in advantage. The families who apply for the lottery are more engaged and concerned about educational quality. The results should be better based on that fact alone, but the numbers don't show it.

Yeah. So if they perform on par with a low-rated public next door...that actually suggests they are providing a worse experience.

I think there is room for Charters to provide alternative approaches to education, but as with all things in the US the capitalist nose for smelling out an opportunity to make money drowns good intention. There is a non-profit charter near me that offers Montessori education through HS. I'm very interested in it for my kids...but it's run as a stand-alone non-profit with heavy community involvement.

Yup. We have an excellent non-profit charter school in my district that's offering a unique opportunity for kids and also alleviating some overcrowding in the home schools. (The non-profit specifically located the school where the district asked it to help address over crowding)

These for-profit market place charter schools do so much damage to the regular public schools as well as to some of the really innovative non-profit, education-driven charter schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What a shame using "market principles" to educate children. It's too late to just choose a "better" school when you discover your child's charter school was sub-par years later. Too late by then. Children should also not be subject to CEO and shareholder worries about profitability.

I am more concerned that the free market does not provide enough commitment. Public schools are accountable forever. A private company can try some things, fail, and just fold. I suppose after 100 years or so of schools failing, maybe you are left with good ones with a lot of history. Maybe. Then again they can get bought out and be ruined.

[Anonymous]

The GOP is so short-sighted. We used to have a great public school system but the miserly GOP/Baby Boomers slowly dismantled it for the sake of a tax break at the State/Local level. I constantly hear about the Teachers' Union and school administrators being overpaid.... which is so strange because it doesn't seem like they're all living lux lives, right?! I missed that popular show, Real Educators of Beverly Hills.

WTF America!? When did you lose trust in our institutions and our citizens? When did it become a personal money grab?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What a shame using "market principles" to educate children. It's too late to just choose a "better" school when you discover your child's charter school was sub-par years later. Too late by then. Children should also not be subject to CEO and shareholder worries about profitability.

I am more concerned that the free market does not provide enough commitment. Public schools are accountable forever. A private company can try some things, fail, and just fold. I suppose after 100 years or so of schools failing, maybe you are left with good ones with a lot of history. Maybe. Then again they can get bought out and be ruined.

Right! If it doesn't turn a profit, they just close up shop and leave. F* Y* kids.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, Michigans education system was stellar before...

She's been in charge for a few months at most. Let's see how this really affects the system instead of automatic reaction because ots Trump.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What a shame using "market principles" to educate children. It's too late to just choose a "better" school when you discover your child's charter school was sub-par years later. Too late by then. Children should also not be subject to CEO and shareholder worries about profitability.

I am more concerned that the free market does not provide enough commitment. Public schools are accountable forever. A private company can try some things, fail, and just fold. I suppose after 100 years or so of schools failing, maybe you are left with good ones with a lot of history. Maybe. Then again they can get bought out and be ruined.

Public schools aren't accountable, that's the problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah, Michigans education system was stellar before...

She's been in charge for a few months at most. Let's see how this really affects the system instead of automatic reaction because ots Trump.

She was "in charge" of Detroit schools for longer than a few months.

And no, DeVos isn't getting the automatic Trump-pushback. From the day her name was announced, she herself has gotten pushback as being both crazy and awful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What a shame using "market principles" to educate children. It's too late to just choose a "better" school when you discover your child's charter school was sub-par years later. Too late by then. Children should also not be subject to CEO and shareholder worries about profitability.

I am more concerned that the free market does not provide enough commitment. Public schools are accountable forever. A private company can try some things, fail, and just fold. I suppose after 100 years or so of schools failing, maybe you are left with good ones with a lot of history. Maybe. Then again they can get bought out and be ruined.

Public schools aren't accountable, that's the problem.

It depends on your definition of accountable. Public schools are accountable to parents. Poor performing public schools can be closed, but often it's the parents who are in favor of keeping them open.