If the EAA or Educational Achievement Authority is codified this week in state legislature it will fundamentally change public education in Michigan for years to come.
The statute will not only create a statewide District for the "lowest 5%" of schools, it will utterly redefine legally and philosophically what public education means -- for all.
Despite all the troubles of public education in Michigan and elsewhere the governing idea for a publicly funded school is still, fortunately, the same as it has been for decades: a locally controlled institution that provides comprehensive education -- including gym, art, music, recess -- with trained teachers and a set of governing rules that makes the school accountable to the public and parents.
EAA codification changes that completely, and redefines at a fundamental level ("bottom" as in fundament) the "school" as 40 or 50 to a classroom using computer modules without trained teachers and without public oversight. That change won't hit affluent Districts immediately, of course, but it will over the next 3 to 4 years. You can't have a public school system with two fundamentally different ideas or models of what "school" means.
A state -- or educational system -- divided against itself can not stand.
This fundamental change has been difficult to grasp -- even for parents and advocates like myself -- because the EAA seemed when it first appeared (2011) simply another iteration of the string of "emergency managers" in Detroit Public Schools that began in 1999. John Covington, the Broad Foundation trained "Chancellor" of the EAA, seemed to fit in line with the DPS emergency managers: Frank Burnley, Robert Bobb, etc.
From outside Detroit, all these folks started to look more or less, as they say, a like.
There is, in short, to use what is probably a perverse oxymoron, a form of "indifferent or dispassionate racism" allowing this process of "reforming" education to take hold in Michigan via Detroit.
Indeed, in the fall of 2012 when a number of pieces of legislation came up that would have -- in long time anti-public education Republican advisor Richard McClellan's words -- changed public education as we know it, the EAA (HB6004) seemed to many (including me) the least of our concerns.
Many were all too ready to bite on the notion that "things aren't going well in Detroit anyway so we might as well try..."
When some Bloomfield parents met with Senator John Pappageorge ostensibly to talk about concerns related to their schools we were a bit surprised when he wanted to talk only about what he had done to limit the EAA expansion (capped at 50 schools, etc., could no longer seize available property.). We didn't quite see the connection or the significance of the EAA.
Why did this seem so important to him I remember thinking.
After the sweeping education legislative package scripted by the Oxford Foundation was defeated in lame duck 2012, then, it came as a surprise at the well attended (500+) Bridge Magazine education conference in Winter 2013 that Snyder spokesperson Bill Rustem pounded the table ONLY about the EAA to start things off -- and then left for the day.
Weird, I thought -- and then let it go.
Ok, many seemed to think. The EAA was still a marginal issue. Needless to say, this wasn't a Detroit heavy crowd.
Similarly, in March, when the House approved a refurbished EAA bill nobody really blinked. Oakland County seemed willing to deal on almost anything to keep Pontiac open.
But then things came gradually in to focus. The skunks works scandal broke in April and it became clear the Governor and McClellan were committed to some kind of public system that would cost only 5k a student, a bare minimum system they could sell as "public education." Something like the EAA just in case they could not get the EAA. This has been the dream of the Devos/Engler/Posthumus nexus since the early 90s.
This stalled the EAA a bit, as did Rep. Lipton and Senator Hopgood's heroic attempts to get information. The state started closing Districts, Saginaw Buena Vista and Inkster,
After all this bad press, though, the Governor insisted on bringing the EAA back! Why? What was so critical about it that he would risk losing votes in an election? Devos gives more money than Broad.
But now I get it. What is so critical is that the EAA redefines public education for the next 30 years. This not another Emergency Manager. When you build something you start at the foundation, the bottom, the fundamentals. This fundamental change, changes everything, for everyone. Get the EAA in to statute and it is game over.
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