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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Update: Michigan For Sale - Progress Michigan

Michigan For Sale - Progress Michigan:




Who is Richard McLellan? As a longtime Lansing attorney, McLellan has spent decades helping big corporations cash in on all Michigan’s most precious assets.
The Mackinac Center was started in 1987 with funding from the little-known Cornerstone Foundation, created by McLellan, then an attorney with Dykema Gossett. Its initial effort was toprivatize the Michigan Accident Fund, a state agency selling workers’ compensation coverage to businesses. The Accident Fund was privatized in 1994 under Gov. John Engler, and Dykema Gossett was awarded a $250,000 contract to guide the sale.
McLellan was also active in a 2000 statewide ballot initiative to legalize tax giveaways to private schools through vouchers. This was primarily funded (to the tune of nearly $6 million) by the DeVos family and Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater. The proposal was 



Governor Rick Snyder’s Plan

Governor Snyder’s plan for education in Michigan sounds just like Romney’s and Bobby Jindal’s.
The money should follow the student anywhere and everywhere, to any vendor of education services, regardless of who owns it or manages it.
So, students may take their money to private schools, to hawkers of services, to online courses, whatever. Welcome to anyone who wants to start a school and collect public money.
That is a plan to undermine public education, and the rightwing knows it. That’s their goal.
Education costs won’t go down without increasing class sizes, and the way that will happen is by shifting more