Wasteful spending and poor academic performance in Michigan鈥檚 charter school sector revealed in this week鈥檚 are not unique to Michigan, but these issues aren鈥檛 rampant across every state in the country, the paper says.
The special report, which is the culmination of a year-long investigation by the newspaper, points to innovative and high-performing charters in Michigan, but it also says lax oversight is breeding significant abuses within the sector.
State charter school laws and cultures vary widely across the country. One major way Michigan differs from other states is in the number of its charter schools run by for-profit companies鈥擬ichigan has the most in the country, :
Many states have tougher charter laws than Michigan and half a dozen states鈥攆rom Washington to New York鈥� prohibit full-service, for-profit companies from running their schools. The Mississippi Legislature passed a new charter law in 2013 that bars for-profits from providing comprehensive management services. Three years earlier, the New York State Assembly banned for-profit management companies from opening new schools but allowed them to continue operating their existing schools."
The investigation of Michigan charter school operators enriching themselves through a system where doesn鈥檛 entirely prohibit insider dealing. And, because many schools are run by private companies, there is little transparency into how taxpayer money is spent.
鈥淢ichigan is an outlier in the number of authorizers and the involvement of the for-profit sector which I think increases the risk rather than makes it inevitable that there will be problems,鈥� said Jeffrey Henig, chair of the Education Policy and Social Analysis Department at New York City-based Columbia University鈥檚 Teachers College, in an interview with 91直播.
Both Henig and the Detroit Free Press hold Massachusetts and Minnesota up as examples of states that heavily scrutinize their charter schools and authorizers. In Michigan, there are no state guidelines for screening charter school applicants or shutting down poorly performing ones.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a split even within the charter movement between those who believe that chartering needs to be done in the context of good government oversight and accountability [...] and the notion that the key characteristic of charters is that they be liberated from government oversight,鈥� Henig said. 鈥淢ichigan is a state that very early on adopted the practices of the second group [...] along with places like Arizona.鈥�
The Detroit Free Press series runs through Sunday, June 29.