Each morning, 10-year-old Christian Holly gets dropped off in front of Rutherford Winans Academy, a nonprofit charter school in Detroit, Mich., eager for the day to begin. “I’m good in math and I have a wonderful teacher who teaches me higher-level subjects,” he says. Christian’s mother, Marlita Craft, is active in the school’s parent teacher organization and praises the dedication of a faculty and administration serving a school in which all of its students receive free or reduced lunch — meaning their families earn no more than 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or $24,600 for a family of four. “The good they are able to produce in the face of whatever home environment the kids come out of…whatever they have to do to give kids the best chance possible to succeed, I’ve seen them do it,” she says.
Advocates for greater charter school expansion in Michigan point to experiences like Christian’s as a reason that families flock to district-school alternatives. And expansion proponents have no bigger champion than U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who brings to Washington, D.C., a decades-long record of financial and political support for school choice in her home state. A strong advocate of religious schools, DeVos led a 2001 campaign for a statewide school voucher program in Michigan in which taxpayer dollars could be diverted from public schools to private parochial institutions. While that measure was rejected overwhelmingly by voters, DeVos has found much more success promoting her formula for public education reform: free-market competition via charter schools, coupled with minimal oversight of taxpayers’ education dollars.
But in Michigan, two decades of charter expansion has led to an exodus of white and higher-income families from traditional public schools with devastating results for those who stay — underfunded and racially segregated district schools comprised largely of low-income students. And throughout the state, and particularly in urban centers like Flint and Detroit, there’s scant evidence that the promise is being kept of meaningfully higher academic achievement for charter-school students.
The question among both school choice opponents and proponents is whether a DeVos-led education department will attempt to mirror Michigan’s shift of resources away from district schools in favor of charter alternatives, or go even further by seeking to expand public voucher programs for private education. In an unmistakeable show of support for school choice initiatives, President Trump, accompanied by DeVos, made his first school visit to a Florida Catholic school, highlighting its use of the state’s tax credit-funded voucher program.
A look at the outsized influence she has wielded in her home state of Michigan gives a clear view of the new secretary’s education priorities and their likely outcomes for public school families.
DDeVos and her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos, gave more than $5 million to charter schools between 1999 and 2014, according to an analysis by Mother Jones, with another $8.6 million going to private religious schools. In 2001 the DeVoses started the Great Lakes Education Project, a PAC focused exclusively on education reform that wields enough statewide clout to have seen 49 of the 53 candidates it supported win seats in Michigan’s House of Representatives last November. Through GLEP, DeVos played a prominent role in the passage of 2011 legislation that removed the state’s cap on the number of charters without requiring additional oversight that even some charter school advocates felt was necessary for accountability.
Today, Michigan is home to more than 300 charter schools. While that’s fewer than those found in more populous states like California and Florida, Michigan stands out with roughly 80 percent of its charter schools being run by for-profit education management companies, more than double the share found in any other state. One of the country’s largest for-profit management companies, National Heritage Academies, operates 48 charter schools in Michigan alone. The company declined to be interviewed for this story.
Even though a charter is a public school, the for-profit company that runs it — receiving taxpayer dollars on a per-student basis — is not required by state law to open its books to the public. Critics express concern about this lack of transparency when public education dollars are diverted to private companies.
“Ultimately the goal is to educate kids and there is a place for charters,” said State Sen. Morris W. Hood III, D-Detroit, whose district includes the northwest portion of the city. “But when you have a for-profit company looking to make money from a school, we can’t even look into their finances to see where the money is actually spent.”
Hood also points to a cruel irony for Detroit families. While the city is home to a greater number of charter schools than anywhere else in the state, many are clustered in specific areas, leaving school deserts. “If you’re a for-profit you’re going to locate your school in areas that you think are going to be most profitable,” he said, adding, “where I live, the nearest high school is seven miles away. How does a family get their child to school if they don’t have a car and city buses don’t show up on time? We lack the oversight to say that you should put schools in areas where there are none.”
There is little evidence to suggest that students in Detroit’s charter schools (non- or for-profit) are faring any better on statewide English and math standards than their peers who attend traditional public schools in the same district. And some charter operators acknowledge the difficulties in closing the achievement gap in under-resourced communities. Mark Ornstein, CEO of the nonprofit Detroit 90/90 that runs seven “University Prep” schools in the city, says, “You’re not only trying to educate students, which is a difficult job, you’re trying to program for things that are happening in their lives, whether it’s homelessness, transportation issues or not having a good meal. Poverty in itself is a huge challenge. And we as a country are grossly underfunding education.”
Educators in district schools have been saying the same thing for decades, and while the absence of meaningful performance gains in charter schools has the potential to highlight the need for increased education resources, the proliferation of charter schools throughout the state has had severe consequences for traditional public schools.
IIn Holland, the western Michigan shore-front city where Betsy DeVos was raised, District Superintendent Brian Davis is confronted on a daily basis with what he sees as a direct consequence of the statewide push for charter schools. “We’ve moved back to 1954,” he said, referring to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision on school desegregation. “Our schools are more segregated now than in 1996 when the school choice movement began.” Davis cites white flight as parents pulled their children out of district schools in favor of charters, lured in part by the lower student-teacher ratios that are possible because charters are allowed to cap enrollment, something district schools are forbidden to do. Enrollment in Holland’s district schools has plummeted by 40 percent since 2000, according to Davis, leaving him with fewer students but also fewer buildings to place them in and fewer teachers to instruct them. “I used to have 13 elementary schools,” he said. “Now I have only five.”
The families who’ve left are overwhelmingly whiter and wealthier than those who’ve stayed. Davis notes that a decade ago, 30 percent of students in his district qualified for free- and reduced-lunch programs. Today that number is 80 percent. And during that time the district’s student population has become majority Latino.
With students no longer attending schools alongside their neighbors, Davis laments a loss to all involved.
“Whether you’re for school choice or not, you lose a strong sense of community if you’re not walking to the same schools together, not going to the high school musicals or a sports game. When school choice was implemented I don’t think anyone thought about the unintended consequences. And they’re devastating.”
AA DeVos-led education department has both school choice advocates and opponents wondering about possible changes at the federal level in the coming years. Former GLEP executive director Gary Naeyaert (he resigned March 6), acknowledging Michigan’s challenges in reforming K-12 education, says that while “Michigan is more an example to learn from than a model to emulate nationwide, we actually hope to see a push for more school choice than we have here,” pointing to initiatives like President Trump’s call for federal support of school vouchers that Naeyaert sees as a crucial and missing piece of the school-choice puzzle, one that offers parents an even wider range of district-school alternatives.
The federal government exerts its greatest control over K-12 education in the form of Title I funding, $15 billion (as of 2016) in annual grants distributed to local school districts, earmarked for low-income students. Public school advocates worry that under a Trump administration some or all of those funds could be converted into vouchers that will bypass school districts, following individual students even if they enroll in a private school.
But education policy experts like Elena Silva, of the nonpartisan think tank New America, based in Washington, D.C., see the prospect of mass movement of Title I money as one of the least likely outcomes. “The idea of unlocking Title I money so it ‘follows the child’ sounds simple and appealing,” she said. “The problem is that it’s very complicated to do and doesn’t have the broad base of support you’d need to do it. I anticipate that it will be pushed as a proposal. But it’s such a huge pot of money that it will garner a lot of attention.”
Much more likely, Silva says, is a move to expand DC Opportunity, the only federally funded voucher program in existence, and limited to Washington, D.C. families. Noting that the program also comes with federal evaluation requirements that mandate consistent monitoring of results, a feature lacking in many state-level voucher programs, Silva says the resulting data could provide the most accurate assessment to date of whether voucher programs actually accomplish what they promise. Expansion of existing 529 college savings accounts to cover K-12 education is another area, along with a push for federal tax credits for contributions aiding private school scholarships, that Silva sees as possible under a DeVos/Trump administration. “These are smaller programs that will attract less debate. And,” she concludes, “you can’t discount the president’s bully pulpit which can embolden efforts at the state level.”
Whatever the outcome on a national level, Christian Holly’s mother Marlita Craft is glad that charter schools are an option for her own children, but worries about those families who aren’t able to leave a district school system that is being further drained of badly needed resources. “We see those children really falling behind,” she says. “We all know what kind of shape the [district] schools are in with overcrowded classrooms and lack of parent participation. But it shouldn’t be an every-man-for-himself mentality. When the children in our community suffer, the community itself suffers. We can’t let these children fall by the wayside.”
