I have been following public education issues in Michigan almost daily for the last two years.
The initial reason I started doing so was that I saw a potential threat to the education of my two young children even in my fortunate public school setting -- Bloomfield Hills, MI -- where I first noticed education reform language (kids first, choice, academy, etc.) popping up during a contentious bond issue and a subsequent school board election. One thing that concerned me was the first version of the EAA expansion bill (HB6004). This version would have allowed the state to inventory and seize unused school properties for entities like the EAA.
Remember that, pols, when considering state wide codification.
My District has had to close schools and combine elementary with middle schools, etc., not unlike Saginaw did last week.The reasons, of course, are sickeningly close. In the housing bubble of the 90s and early 2000s Bloomfield literally had priced itself out of the reach of young families and enrollment and enrollment predictions plummeted. The savvy Superintendent who saw this coming and did the closing before the housing bust was, of course, condemned.
Et in Arcadia Ego as they said in the Renaissance. Death, ugliness, and sheer stupidity come to paradise, too. I have a T-shirt that says, "My son loves his Focus School, and so do I!"
Correspondingly, I have spent considerable time watching and critiquing the words and actions of elected Republicans, both in my own area and across the state. This is because the main threat to public education in Michigan comes from Governor Snyder's acceptance of the long held beliefs of the Devos family and close political advisors Richard McClellan, Dick Posthumus, and John Engler.
This nexus has believed since the early 90s that "public" education should involve a bare bones system for those at the very bottom of the economic ladder and that privatization is the key to academic and political success. Perversely and paradoxically, they have come closest to meeting their "free market" goals by having the state reach further and further in to local Districts and by convincing almost everyone that "state" takeovers of public education are the only solution to struggling schools.
That nothing they have done has worked well is anymore relevant than the fact that this now 15 year old process runs counter to their deepest political beliefs. Detroit Public Schools has been under Emergency Management since Jon Engler and 1999.
But perhaps the most disturbing words I have heard on public education came not from Devos or Governor Snyder, but the Michigan Department Education.
Let me explain.
Last week, amidst an ongoing political debate about the state wide expansion of the Educational Achievement Authority (HB4369) that the state has been trying to pass in some form since Dec. 2012, State Superintendent Mike Flanagan seemed to end the state's relationship with this failed "experiment."
Parents and teachers in Detroit celebrated! Twitter and Facebook was buzzing much more than the EAA's preferred software: Buzz.
It quickly became clear, though, that Mr. Flanagan only was trying to facilitate the passage of HB4369 so that he would have "options" -- including the EAA -- to help troubled Districts. One blogger had to tell the state to "sober up": http://www.democracy-tree.com/eaa-gone-hydra-beast-heads/ More troubling, Mr. Flanagan never paused to say the state has YET to help a troubled District other than by closing it. That is, he simply assumes that his institution -- that is losing public trust every day -- can do something it has never done.
The line that sent me spinning, however, came from the MDE spokesperson Martin Ackley: “Now, this is in no way a statement or an indication of a lack of confidence in the EAA or its academic strategies. This is just an action that needed to be taken in order to provide flexibility and to provide options other than the EAA in which to place these most struggling schools.”http://michiganradio.org/post/how-will-michigan-help-failing-schools-without-eaa
According to Michigan Public Radio, even regular Lansing reporters can't figure out what the hell is going on.
Parents, teachers, citizens, university faculty....everybody needs to ponder this statement from the MDE. The Michigan Department of Education, having heard everything it has heard about the EAA from teachers risking livelihoods on www.eclectablog.com,www.eclectablog.com and presumably having done some of their own investigating, supports the "academic strategies" of the EAA. Read that again: They support public education that relies on 40+ kids in a classroom working on computer modules only (w/one assigned and never tested software) staffed by TFA and and inexperienced administrators. And they not only want to still consider it as "option" to expand statewide but they want to continue it as an "experiment" in Detroit.
As brave university faculty and others have been arguing, it is simply wrong to see Detroit public school kids as lab rats. But this is virtually the policy and public relations stance of the MDE.
Why, in the world, if this is what our Michigan Department of Education wants, do we have a Michigan Department of Education?
That is, for the moment, I have stopped worrying so much about Devos, et. al., but have started worrying more about the bureaucrats who are in over their heads in this age of education "reform" and have absorbed only the language and thoughts of their masters.
I have called for State Superintendent Mike Flanagan to resign before: http://bloomfield-mi.patch.com/groups/ken-jacksons-blog/p/shame-on-mike-flanaganit-is-time-to-step-down_2225359f
If nothing else, his resignation would call greater attention to this growing statewide nightmare: the loss of public education as most have known it.
I first grew suspicious when he took over the "skunks works" debacle to help the Governor save face. But what we have here is not just incompetence, but a political willingness -- in the case of the choreographed release of the false notion that the state was closing the EAA -- to actively deceive parents and children. At best, Mr. Flanagan's gesture was the ugly sort of equivocation we expect from elected politicians. As Michigan Public Radio reports, they can't tell if the timing of the EAA was a "coincidence" or not. They can't tell how it is connected to the HB4369 legislation, but they think it must be somehow.
Perhaps Mr. Flanagan believes he is acting as a statesman, cutting some kind of deal.
Yet his job is to advocate for public education first. And he is not doing that. He is only at the moment interested in creating "options" for the state to takeover Districts. "Options", strangely, has taken the place of "choice" as the Lansing buzzword. You don't get to choose when there is no adequately funded and supported public system to choose from and you don't get an "option" for being taken over by the state.
In a digital media age with everyone watching it is way too late to save face for a bad (EAA) decision.
Public education advocates need to stop looking just at Republicans for the threat to public education, but to their own institutions, who are as dizzy with "reformee" jargon and thought as any 21 year old Teach for America catch. This is a group, folks, is not career ready for the 21st century global economy.
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