Detroit Free Press Publishes Weeklong, Blockbuster Investigation of Michigan Charters | janresseger

Detroit Free Press Publishes Weeklong, Blockbuster Investigation of Michigan Charters | janresseger:

Detroit Free Press Publishes Weeklong, Blockbuster Investigation of Michigan Charters

Posted on June 25, 2014 by janresseger

The huge investigation of Michigan’s charter schools, a series of stories, graphics, and interviews being published this week by the Detroit Free Press, includes a lot more information than you want to know if you live in Oregon or Illinois or Kentucky or Nebraska or Massachusetts or Georgia.  But it is so important you should take a look at it no matter where you live, because it speaks to a phenomenon that is unprecedented.  Although the federal government has been creating huge incentives for states to expand rapidly the number of charter schools—by making the removal of statutory caps on the authorization of new charters a condition for a state even to submit an application for a Race to the Top grant and by making available additional federal grants to expand charters, the federal government has left the oversight and regulation of charters up to the fifty state legislatures.  While I have personally heard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proclaim, “Good charters are part of the solution; bad charters are part of the problem,” I have never heard him suggest that the federal government itself should address the challenge of public oversight of the tax dollars being siphoned away by charters.

And many newspapers, beholden to the business community and chamber of commerce, have too often failed to investigate what is in many states the egregious theft of tax dollars from meager state education budgets.  Last week I was delighted to hear the wife of a prominent retired Ohio politician name what she called “grand larceny” by the on-line charters in our own state, but news coverage has until recently been primarily by the Akron Beacon Journal,although the Columbus Dispatch and even the Plain Dealer are expanding coverage of failed Detroit Free Press Publishes Weeklong, Blockbuster Investigation of Michigan Charters | janresseger: