Incomplete: Michgan’s grade on charter school reform
One of my favorite stories about the lunacy that Michigan indulges with regard to charter schools comes, of course, from Detroit. It’s where the spectacular lack of oversight and standards over the past 20 years has created a sprawling, scattered system of privately operated public schools that produce mixed results and inspire a fair amount of chaos.
To wit: The Aisha Shule/W.E.B. Dubois Preparatory Academy welcomed students in September 2013 as the new year began. But the school shut down because of a lack of funding just six weeks later, sending its students, some just beginning their senior years, to the winds.
And I always hold this detail back until the end of the tale, for dramatic effect: The school’s authorizer? Detroit Public Schools.
Even the city’s established public school district was unable to suss out the false promise of a well-meaning, but poorly managed charter under Michigan’s charter system.
There are Aisha Shules dotting the historical landscape of the charter movement in Michigan. Schools that open and close willy nilly, that hit high academic marks or fail, with no mechanism to hold them accountable or even to find successes and grow or expand them.
A year ago, the Free Press published an eight-day series that documented the tragic missed opportunities of Michigan’s charter experiment. Charter schools began with the promise that privately operated public schools would provide quality options for parents in cities where education was failing, as well as pressure public schools to be better in order to compete. But Michigan’s charter schools have never lived up to their promises.
Yes, there have been spotty successes — not least of which has been my own experience, having enrolled my own kids in one of the few high-performing charters in the city.
But overall, charters don’t perform much better than the public schools in their districts. They have countenanced myriad conflicts of interest among board members and operators. They have not found a good way to accommodate children with special needs, whose educations cost more than other kids’. And they have siphoned just enough children and money from public schools to leave districts like Detroit looking like half-deflated balloons: There’s still a lot of structure there, but nowhere near the support to keep them solid.
The aim of the Free Press’ series on charters wasn’t to halt Michigan’s charter Incomplete: Michgan’s grade on charter school reform: