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It was a chilly afternoon in April 2013 when Roy Roberts, a former GM executive now charged with righting the struggling Detroit Public Schools, appeared in the auditorium of Oakman Elementary/Orthopedic, a school on the city’s northwest side. Roberts had arrived with an entourage of district officials and he didn’t waste any time with small talk. “We’ll be closing Northwestern,” he announced.
About a dozen parents were there, among them Aliya Moore, the president of the parents’ organization. Moore’s older daughter, Chrishawana, was in fifth grade and her final year at the school, where she’d been since kindergarten. Her youngest, Tylyia, just a toddler at the time, had become a fixture on the campus, often seen coloring in the back of one of the kindergarten classrooms. Moore wasn’t sure what to make of the robocall she’d received the night before summoning her to the meeting, but she knew she had to be there.
Now she and the other parents looked at Roberts, perplexed. Northwestern was a high school a 10-minute drive south on Grand Blvd., close to where Berry Gordy molded a bunch of DPS kids into Motown idols in the ’60s and ’70s. What did this possibly have to do with Oakman?
“Oakman! Oakman! I mean Oakman Elementary, we’ll be closing you,” Roberts corrected himself. He had a list of six schools to close that year, adding to the nearly 100 schools that had been shuttered since 2009, when the state took over the district in an attempt to fix its growing debt. Perhaps he could be forgiven for the mixup. Still, it stung. Amid the district’s constant chaos, Oakman, with its tight-knit community and accommodations for special-needs students, had never seemed in danger.
Rushing through a slideshow, Roberts said that the school had to close for two reasons: low enrollment and a need for $900,000 in repairs. He told the parents that their kids could attend Noble Elementary (1.2 miles away) or Henderson Elementary (2.4 miles away) the following year. Even though more than half of Oakman’s kids were special-needs, neither of these schools was handicap-accessible. Neither would provide bussing for the general education students. Both were on the state’s priority list, falling within the bottom 5 percent of schools in academic performance.
The gutting of Detroit’s public schools is the result of an experiment started 23 years ago, when education reformers including Betsy DeVos, now Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, got Michigan to bet big on charters and school choice. The Obama administration has promoted competition, but DeVos looks set to take free-market education policy to new heights. She has made clear her goal is to use charters to eventually get public dollars to private and religious schools, but the consequences of her school choice policy in Detroit leave gaping questions about how she will also care for America’s public schools.
Lack of regulation has meant charter operators with bad track records or no record at all have cropped up in Detroit and across the state. A 2014 Detroit Free Press investigation into mismanagement in the charter school sector found the state had spent nearly $1 billion on charter schools yet public accountability had plummeted and schools were floundering. A 2013 Stanford University study found that more than half of Detroit’s charter schools failed to perform “significantly better” in math and reading and in some cases performed worse than Detroit public schools. Overall, the report found that 84 percent of charter students in Michigan performed below the state average in math and 80 percent were below the state average in reading.
Through the Great Lakes Education Project, the DeVos family has played a major role in ensuring the education marketplace remains unregulated. In 2011, they successfully advocated to lift the charter school cap and killed a provision that would have stopped failing schools from replicating. A review last year found“an unreasonably high” 23 charter schools on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools and questioned why after two decades of the charter experiment “student outcomes are still just ‘comparable’ to traditional public schools.”
Moore had followed another Oakman teacher to the school, but she wasn’t sure about keeping Tylyia there for kindergarten. When picking up her daughter one day, Moore noticed that a bunch of kindergartners were waiting in a single-file line, with their arms crossed, to go to the bathroom. Each child was allotted one square of tissue paper. Moore watched the entire procession bug-eyed. When she went to the front office to ask the principal why this was happening, she was told kids would sometimes play around in the bathroom and waste the tissue paper. They needed to think about the budget. A year later, it was revealed that the school owed more than $60,000 to the city of Detroit for unpaid light bills.
Starting in June, the state can close all schools that fall in the bottom 5 percent of academic performance for three years in a row. GLEP calls this a win for accountability, but it still allows subpar schools and operators, just not the very worst, to thrive. Dozens of Detroit public schools, starved of funds through competition and austerity, fall into this category. Four months after the debt was addressed, it felt like the state, intentionally or not, was setting up the district for its final act.
Among some parents, education experts, and especially the teachers, who have found themselves in a near-constant battle with the state, there’s a feeling that rather than encourage real competition or invest in the existing system, Michigan has stacked the deck against its own schools in a bid to unburden itself of the public education project entirely. Even as charters proliferate, areas of the city are now education deserts. In Brightmoor, a neighborhood a few miles north of Moore’s, there are 7,000 school-age kids and just five K-8 schools and one high school, a charter that this year was fined $144,000 for flouting a state law requiring administrators to be certified.
Students in metro Detroit’s wealthier, and whiter, suburbs — like those in communities across the country — depend on strong neighborhood schools; they are not asked to sift through a sea of failing options in the hope of finding the least-bad choice. Kids in Detroit, like Chrishawana and Tylyia, remain on the defensive, forced to prove their local schools, their voices, their futures, their heritage and place in the city, have value. With DeVos bringing her education policy to the national stage, what’s at stake is no longer just an education for Moore’s two girls, or the hundred thousand other kids in Detroit. We face a bigger question about what public schools should be.
“You can’t overstate how devastating charter schools and DeVos’s political influence has been for Detroit and the state of Michigan,” Hammer said. “So if the nation is going to experience what Michigan has experienced, it’s frightening.”
“The perverse thing about the charter movement, and they’ve been very self-conscious in their political tactics, is to exploit the desperation of parents in inner cities,” he continued. “Everyone knows we don’t have the silver bullet for how to provide effective public education. But rather than treating that as a collective obligation for us to figure out, there is the privatization of the public school system. Trying to run a traditional model, where schools are a public good and require a certain amount of public support and public resources, in parallel with a charter system is a death by a thousand cuts. It’s a way that will guarantee the destruction of the traditional public schools but not place anything effective as an alternative.”
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