Bringing failing charter schools to heel
Gov. Rick Snyder and would-be education reformers in both parties talk ad nauseum about holding all Michigan’s schools accountable. But charter schools, which now serve 145,000 K-12 students in Michigan and vacuum up more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds, remain maddeningly insulated from public scrutiny.
When state legislators opened the floodgates to charter schools a generation ago, the charter movement’s champions pledged that nonprofit and for-profit operators freed from the yoke of teachers unions and meddling bureaucrats would dramatically improve educational outcomes for students, especially in impoverished cities, such as Detroit and Flint, where the failure of traditional public schools was manifest in low academic achievement and high dropout rates.
In some states — notably Massachusetts, where demanding standards and strict oversight have fostered charters that regularly out-perform that state’s exemplary public schools — the charter movement has been as good as its word.
But in Michigan, many charters cannot even clear the low bar set by the state’s most challenged traditional schools. In a survey conducted by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, eight in 10 Michigan charter schools reported academic achievement metrics below the state average in reading and math.
In its second annual report card assessing the performance of Michigan’s burgeoning charter sector, Education Trust — Midwest sees some evidence that increased scrutiny by the media and nonprofit community has yielded modest improvements in the performance of 16 charter authorizers whose schools serve 95% of the state’s charter students. Eastern Michigan University and Oakland University, which ranked near the bottom in ETM’s initial assessment a year ago, were among authorizers who Bringing failing charter schools to heel:
