Sunday, June 30, 2019
Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost.
Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost.
By Mark Binelli
Sept. 5, 2017
Toss a dart at a map of Detroit, and the bull’s-eye, more or less, would be a tiny city called Highland Park. Only three square miles, Highland Park is surrounded by Detroit on nearly all sides, but it remains its own sovereign municipality thanks largely to Henry Ford, who started building Model Ts there in 1910. Ford didn’t care for the idea of paying Detroit taxes, so he pressured Highland Park to resist annexation by the larger city.
By the end of the decade, his Albert Kahn-designed factory had revolutionized mass production. Five years later, Walter Chrysler started his own car company a few blocks away.
Sylvia Brown lives in the suburbs now, but she still proudly calls herself a Parker, the local term for a Highland Park native. When Brown was a kid, she’d tell people she lived in the capital of Detroit. Her father worked for the city, and her mother taught at the public elementary school. In high school, Brown played on the volleyball and tennis teams and won a scholarship her junior year to study abroad in Japan. She fretted about traveling such a long distance — she never expected the judges to pick a black girl from Highland Park — but her guidance counselor encouraged her not to be afraid to cross 8 Mile Road, the famous divide between city and suburbs.
So when the offer came last summer to take a job as the superintendent of George Washington Carver Academy, a pre-K-8 charter school in Highland Park, Brown thrilled at the chance to come home.
She also had no illusions about what she was signing up for.
In 1992, Brown’s sophomore year at Highland Park High, Chrysler’s corporate headquarters decamped to exurban Auburn Hills, a departure that cost Highland Park a quarter of its tax base and 50 percent of its annual budget.
Today the city is staring down the same problems as much of Detroit: crime, abandonment, disinvestment.
(A local pastor once described Highland Park to me as “Detroit writ small.”) The public library closed in 2002. In 2011, the local power utility dug up two-thirds of the city’s streetlights in response to $4 million of unpaid bills; the mayor-elect advised citizens to leave on their porch lights instead.
A major victim of the city’s borderline insolvency was its public-school system, which had been under state control since 2012. (Six different state-appointed emergency managers have run the district since then.) Plummeting enrollment, legacy costs and financial mismanagement had left the school system with a projected deficit of $10 million. The state’s solution that year was to “charterize” the entire district: void the teacher’s union contract, fire all employees and turn over control of the schools to a private, for-profit charter operator. But enrollment at Highland Park High continued to decline, so the state closed the school in 2015. Highland Park now has no high school, either public or charter. Families send their children to high schools in Detroit or the suburbs, where they have no electoral influence over local officials or school boards.
The Carver Academy sits a block from the defunct Model T plant, now used primarily as a storage facility. The school building is an old Farmer Jack grocery store that has been converted into classrooms, with an added wing and a handful of trailers. On my first visit, in January, I met with Brown in her office. She had curly hair and a casually stylish work look: black skirt, matching sweater, pearls on her wrists and neck. Brown had been having a rough couple of weeks. Only a few days earlier, Michigan’s Department of Education released its annual Top-to-Bottom List of every school in the state, and Carver wound up in the lowest fifth percentile. Brown wasn’t surprised by the ranking: “It’s not like I was hoodwinked and thought I was coming into a top-performing school,” she said. But she also bristled at the “scarlet letter” Carver, and by extension its students, had been branded with. The Top-to-Bottom List, she pointed out, largely reflects the results of a single standardized test, the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP), and the latest rankings are based on testing data from the two years before she arrived.
The George Washington Carver Academy in Highland Park, Mich.
Jonno Rattman for The New York Times
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Even setting aside standardized test scores, which are debatable as measures of “success” or “failure,” Carver probably isn’t the sort of institution where most school-choice proponents would send their own children. In past years, headlines involving Carver included a 2008 cheating scandal (in which teachers were caught improperly coaching fourth and fifth graders on the answers to standardized tests) and a 2011 felony embezzlement conviction (of the school’s treasurer, who used $25,000 earmarked for textbooks to buy herself a house). Today, the school still lacks needed funds. The roof leaks: On rainy days, buckets are placed in classrooms and teachers cover their electronic blackboards with garbage bags so they don’t short-circuit. At various points during the winter, children had to be moved to different wings of the building when the heat in their homerooms died. Security doors and cameras need replacing. The neighborhood isn’t safe: After a man in an overgrown lot tried to grab a student on her way to school one morning, parents began their own patrols, flashing headlights at kids to let them know everything was O.K.
Charter proponents will point out, correctly, that you could work up a similar indictment of any number of public schools in struggling cities like Detroit. But in theory, at least, public-school districts have superintendents tasked with evaluating teachers and facilities. Carver, on the other hand, is accountable to more ambiguous entities — like, for example, Oak Ridge Financial, the Minnesota-based financial-services firm that sent a team of former educators to visit the school. They had come not in service of the children but on behalf of shareholders expecting a thorough vetting of a long-term investment: Brown was in negotiations with Oak Ridge about refinancing the school’s debt in order to make much-needed repairs, and the firm was performing the sort of oversight normally handled by a school district. Michigan schools remaining in the bottom fifth percentile for three years running must close, which, in the case of Carver, would leave Oak Ridge on the hook for a 13-year loan.
The crisis at Carver Academy was not unfolding in isolation. Michigan’s aggressively free-market approach to schools has resulted in one of the most deregulated educational environments in the country, a laboratory in which consumer choice and a shifting landscape of supply and demand (and profit motive, in the case of many charters) were pitched as ways to improve life in the classroom for the state’s 1.5 million public-school students. But a Brookings Institution analysis done this year of national test scores ranked Michigan last among all states when it came to improvements in student proficiency. And a 2016 analysis by the Education Trust-Midwest, a nonpartisan education policy and research organization, found that 70 percent of Michigan charters were in the bottom half of the state’s rankings. Michigan has the most for-profit charter schools in the country and some of the least state oversight. Even staunch charter advocates have blanched at the Michigan model.
The story of Carver is the story of Michigan’s grand educational experiment writ small. It spans more than two decades, three governors and, now, the United States Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whose relentless advocacy for unchecked “school choice” in her home state might soon, her critics fear, be going national. But it’s important to understand that what happened to Michigan’s schools isn’t solely, or even primarily, an education story: It’s a business story. Today in Michigan, hundreds of nonprofit public charters have become potential financial assets to outside entities, inevitably complicating their broader social missions. In the case of Carver, interested parties have included a for-profit educational management organization, or E.M.O., in Georgia; an Indian tribe in a remote section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and a financial firm in Minnesota. “That’s all it is now — it’s moneymaking,” Darrel Redrick, a charter-school proponent and an administrator at Carver at the time I visited, told me.
Redrick can pinpoint the precise moment he experienced this revelation: “One of my former principals — this is like 10 years ago, at another school — he said: ‘Redrick, I can tell you why we don’t kick kids out. This child right here represents $6,700.’ ” The principal was referring to the per-pupil state funding at the time. “And if you put out 10 kids, Red,” the principal went on, “that’s about $70,000. And where are we going to get that money?”
To understand Michigan’s educational system, it’s crucial to consider the decades-long ideological battle waged by groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. In 2013, the Michigan-based conservative think tank released a celebratory analysis of the privatization of the Highland Park school system, noting that charterizing an entire district was “unprecedented at the time.” A 13-minute video released with the report, titled “The Highland Park Transformation,” opened with slow-panning, verité-horror-film footage of derelict public school buildings, including a shot of a filthy toilet. Bill Coats, chief executive of Leona Group, the for-profit charter operator that took over the district, told the filmmakers that Highland Park’s public schools “had the resources, all right? They just blew them.”
Over the last 30 years, the Mackinac Center, which was founded in 1987 by, among others, John Engler, a Republican state senator, has become a model for state-level conservative policy shops around the country. When Engler was elected governor in 1990, the intellectual foundation of his signature policy issue — education reform — came via a Mackinac Center white paper that pushed school choice as a means of breaking up the “bureaucratic monopoly” of a public-education system smothering risk-taking and entrepreneurial moxie. The author of the study, Lawrence W. Reed — then the center’s president — argued that it was time “to put our faith in the virtues that made America great in all areas where they have been tried: competition, private initiative and, of course, consumer choice.” He cited private-school vouchers as a possible model and also gave a nod to an experiment taking place in Minnesota, where they were testing “independently run public schools, known as ‘chartered schools.’ ”
The Minnesota charter experiment, which began with two schools in 1992, quickly spread to other states — first California and then, in 1994, to Michigan, at Engler’s behest. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and a triumphalist faith in the free market was bleeding into spheres like education. Engler referred to Michigan’s public-school system as an “educational gulag,” and during a 1993 speech in which he pitched state legislators on the idea of charters, he hoisted a sawed-off 20-gauge shotgun as a prop. (The weapon, he said, had been confiscated from a student.) A year later, in his State of the State address, Engler celebrated the passage of “the nation’s most far-reaching charter-school legislation,” predicting a “renaissance.”
Betsy DeVos, a wealthy, deeply religious conservative willing to spend millions of dollars lobbying for a radical redefinition of public education, and her husband, Dick, the heir to the Amway fortune, provided significant financial backing to the Mackinac Center, as well as to pro-charter lobbying groups like Teach Michigan and their own Great Lakes Education Project. To further set the stage for school choice, Engler backed a 1994 ballot measure described that year by The New York Times as “the nation’s most dramatic shift in a century in the way public schools are financed”: Rather than funding local schools based on property taxes, Michigan would shift to a per-pupil funding model, in which the money would come from state sales taxes. Each district would receive a baseline amount of $4,200 per student, which would rise over time; districts already spending more money per student — like the wealthy Detroit suburb Bloomfield Hills, which spent $10,400 per student — would not be subject to cuts, and municipalities could still supplement the state money with bonds and local taxes.
In theory, poorer districts with lower property-tax bases would ultimately benefit, but per-pupil spending increases, bound to the economy of a state facing its own fiscal challenges, were lagging and inconsistent, and the gap between rich and poor districts never closed. A 2016 review commissioned by the National Education Policy Center found that Michigan’s per-pupil spending, compared with that of neighboring Midwestern states, had fallen “from the middle of the pack to near the bottom.” To Gary Miron, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Western Michigan University who has long studied the state’s charter movement, per-pupil funding represented a “long game,” a means of paying lip service to greater equality while creating “a more efficient, market-oriented system where money follows students.”
The lack of regulation had the desired effect: Michigan became a boom state for a growing new education sector. By 2000, Michigan had 184 charter schools, by Miron’s count, more than any state but Arizona and California. In a 2002 book that Miron wrote with Christopher Nelson called “What’s Public About Charter Schools?” the authors consider two different charter models deployed by states: competitive and collaborative. While the collaborative approach encouraged the public and private sectors to “share innovations,” Michigan favored the other approach: “Engler wanted to lift public schools,” Miron told me, “but he believed in getting as much competition as quickly as possible. It became the Wild West state: Push, push, push.” While other states — Miron cited Ohio, Texas and Arizona — also emerged as exemplars of the “competitive” model, most have since reintroduced some regulation. “Michigan is still an outlier,” Miron said. “No state comes near us when it comes to privatization.”
The results have been stark. The 2016 report by the Education Trust-Midwest noted:
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. ...
Charters continue to be sold in Michigan as a means of unwinding the inequality of a public-school system in which districts across the state, overwhelmingly African-American — Detroit, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Muskegon Heights, Flint — grapple with steep population declines, towering financial obligations, deindustrialization and the legacy of segregation. By allowing experimentation, proponents argue, and by breaking the power of teachers’ unions, districts will somehow be able to innovate their way past the crushing underfunding that afflicts majority-minority school districts all around the country. In reality, however, 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. Today, all but seven states have some version of a charter law, though few have adopted a model as extreme as Michigan’s. Twenty-one states have a charter cap, 31 require charters to submit annual reports and 33 have statewide authorizing bodies. Michigan, abiding by none of those rules, has allowed 80 percent of its own charters to be operated by for-profit E.M.Os. Only 16 percent of charters nationwide are run by for-profit companies.
Nationally, the pro-charter tent is large and unwieldy enough to include education-reform wonks, hedge-fund managers, billionaire philanthropists and politicians from both parties, and Trump’s tapping of DeVos has placed the movement in a complex situation. Despite the policy ignorance displayed in her confirmation hearing, she’s an ally, and one whose influence on the 2018 Trump administration budget is already evident: Amid huge cuts to overall education spending, there’s a $517 million increase in funding for charters and private-school vouchers and an additional $1 billion worth of grants set aside for local districts willing to implement “open enrollment” programs (allowing students to attend any area public schools, charters included, and take allotted state and federal funds with them). Eighteen Republican governors sent the Senate’s education committee a letter in strong support of DeVos and what they called her promise to “streamline the federal education bureaucracy” and “return authority back to state and local school boards.”
But even many charter proponents are troubled by the Michigan model that DeVos had such a crucial role in creating. In a column in Education Week published in March, Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, corrected “friends and neighbors” who assumed he must be happy about the new education secretary, explaining that he rejected a “free-market approach to charter schooling” that “embraces the principles of choice and autonomy while gutting accountability” and insisting that “true supporters of charter schools will not abide by this co-optation of what it means to be a charter school.” With DeVos and her ideas ascendant in Washington, Michigan has become a symbol — and, for some, a cautionary tale — of a movement gone astray.
Before Carver Academy could move ahead on the loan refinancing, the school had to obtain permission from its “authorizer,” Bay Mills Community College. 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 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.
There are no geographical rules governing authorizers and their schools, and inconveniently for Sylvia Brown, the campus of B.M.C.C. is 338 miles north of Highland Park, on the shore of Lake Superior. Her appearance in February before the Board of Regents involved a flight to Marquette and a morning drive through a white-out blizzard. More stressful than her journey, though, was the unwelcome news that Carver’s low ranking on the Top-to-Bottom List had prompted Oak Ridge Financial to temporarily rescind the refinancing offer. The bank ultimately reconsidered, but it hadn’t left Brown and her team much time to prepare for the presentation.
B.M.C.C. is owned and operated by the Bay Mills Indian Community, an Ojibwa tribe with over 2,000 members and 5.5 square miles of reservation land. For years, Indians living on the reservation attended public school in the nearby town of Brimley, but they had a high dropout rate and often felt discriminated against. Bryan Newland, a board member and tribal judge who graduated from Brimley High School in 1999, told me: “I remember in world-history class — this is a very vivid memory — our textbook was divided up into units, and we skipped over ‘The Americas Before 1492.’ And I raised my hand and asked the teacher, ‘Why are we not studying this unit?’ And the teacher said, ‘We’re only studying the things that matter to world history.’ ” In 2003, the tribe started its own K-8 charter, which would offer classes devoted to Ojibwa language and culture. In addition to serving as authorizer for the tribal school, Bay Mills Community College began authorizing other schools around the state. Today, with 42 schools in locations as far-flung as Flint, Benton Harbor and Detroit, B.M.C.C. is the third-largest charter authorizer in Michigan.
The board meeting took place in a gray-carpeted classroom with a portrait of Chief Pontiac hanging on the wall. Brown looked anxious as she stood before the 12 board members, seated behind long tables, and talked about the importance of Carver to the children of Highland Park. “We provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for our students,” Brown said. “When we’re not in session, we’re often sending them to a worse environment.” The refinancing would lower monthly debt payments, she noted, freeing up an extra $63,000 a year to spend on the kids.
The B.M.C.C. president, Mickey Parish, nodded sympathetically as Brown spoke. A jowly, avuncular presence, Parish was the first member of the tribe, 37 years earlier, to earn a law degree. He told Brown the charter office would have to look over the school’s test scores and financials before making a decision. He also asked about Carver’s maximum occupancy. Brown said 650. The school currently had about 550 students, but the other K-8 in Highland Park had only one year left in its contract, and if the school closed, enrollment at Carver would likely increase. “Highland Parkers are loyal,” Brown said. “They’ll come to us.”
Labels:
Betsy DeVos,
charter schools,
Detroit,
HIGHLAND PARK,
Michigan,
PROFIT,
public education,
regulations
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