Personal Opinion Paper:  Public Education Is Being Taken Over by Private Entrepreneurs in Michigan! Do You Know What Is Happening in Your State?

Mary Wood
Michigan "stay at home mom"
Advocate for Charter School Accountability
  
For the past seven years I have been an advocate for Charter School accountability in Michigan.  My story is about Michigan but what has been happening in your state around the charter school issue?  Do you understand how your tax dollars are being allocated?  If people continue to take no active interest in the movement against public schools, they may wake up one morning and realize that a charter school has invaded their neighborhood.  As citizens of your state I urge you to become informed.  As educators you know the power of knowledge.  Depending what state you live in, charters may be an asset or a threat.  It all depends on who is in the driver’s seat.
 
In 1999 I thought that the new charter school opening close to my home was a godsend for my daughter, Rachel. Having been involved with my neighborhood public school system for 15 years while raising my five children, I had a good understanding of required mandates and education practices.  I thought that I was pretty intelligent and informed on issues, but charter schools were a brand new subject that had some specific rules of their own. I soon realized that the charter wasn’t being designed as much for children as it was to be marketed to parents.  I didn’t realize it at the time that I was at the start of a new journey to becoming the “voice” for the children and for parents, just like me, who trusted our system.  Parents need to be vigilant and do their research before taking advantage of these alternative options. 

With 41 states having passed charter school legislation, changes are occurring across the nation.  Each state has its own unique charter laws.  For example, I know of no state other than Michigan that permits for-profit management companies to apply for charters. Our largest state authorizer, Central Michigan University, boasts about being the “gold standard” for charter school authorizers but I will show you below that they do not walk their talk.  Some events I will describe to you happened as long as seven years ago, but others have happened in the last year.  Changes have been made, yes, but I believe much of this has occurred only because I have stayed vigilant in bringing the issues that I have researched forward in public testimony—approximately 65 times—before the Michigan State Board of Education. 

"Oversight" and "Accountability" are key words used in describing the monitoring of these schools. I have made it my role to “oversee” the work of the authorizers and demand “accountability.”  I have made it my role to “oversee” the work of the Michigan Department of Education and demand “accountability.”  I have shared my research with anybody who might take an interest.  I have networked with legislators in local districts where charter schools have been created as well as those on the education and appropriations committees.  I have made phone calls to the local school districts when I heard of a charter planning to open in their area.  I have spoken to groups of citizens informing them of how their tax dollars were being spent.  I believe the lack of information is always the biggest problem when charters are introduced to a community.  I further believe those forging ahead with the charter movement would rather have others be in the dark to what they are doing.  If you do not have transparency there needs to be strong oversight, but what happens when the ones who are supposed to be providing this oversight are the ones that are not being transparent? I have found that there are ways of finding out if you know what it is you are looking for. 

Children, as well as teachers, have found themselves in charter schools that were far from the quality they were led to believe would be present.  Because of this, one of the most creditable ways that I get my leads is from other people who also have their own inside story.  It is my desire to create a public forum so that these stories can be shared. 

When a vacancy occurs in a charter and a child is welcomed in, sometimes the parent doesn’t realize this has happened because another parent has decided to take their child out.  There have been big turnovers of teachers and children in many of the Michigan charter schools.  The enrollment figures do not reflect this.  Some parents may think these schools are better just because they have the word “academy” associated with their name and base their child’s enrollment on nothing more than this perception.
 
I have always made it clear that I am not opposed to charter schools.  I am not trying to abolish the charter law.   At one time I was glad to have the option of a charter school available to me.  I am about people acting responsibly in following the laws that we do have.  I believe many of Michigan charters would never have opened if they had to adhere to the law.  It is my hope to further my personal advocacy work in conjunction with others who are willing to take a stand to see that charters obey the laws.  Toward that end, I am in the process of creating a nonprofit organization called Michigan Alliance for Charter School Reform.  I have some basic things put together on a website that you can view at www.charterschoolreform.org. 

The Michigan charter story is one that few are telling but many have been party too.  I will take you through the opening of one Michigan charter school, pointing out the numerous irresponsible and often what I believe to be illegal actions by people from the bottom all the way to the top of our system.  Having lived this story myself in 1999, I found that I could not sit idly on my hands and do nothing.  I first believed that all I needed to do was expose the happenings of this event, and immediate intervention would take place by people within the system who were supposed to be responsible when they had the facts.  To have nobody be held accountable for what happened to the 344 children who had registered at Conner Creek Academy in Warren, Michigan, and their families, was totally unacceptable.  Not only am I still fighting for those children today, but also for every child in the state of Michigan who has had their district financially impacted by the loss of state aid because of students moving to these illegal charter schools.  While the local districts have to cut their gifted programs and increase class sizes as teachers have to be laid off, the profits of the for-profit companies that run these schools keep getting bigger.  These companies are paid their fees whether the school is academically successful or not.  Michigan authorizers have closed few schools for poor achievement even though there are many out there today who have been open for 6, 8, and even 10 years, doing poorly on our state assessment test.  It is only when other problems surface, such as the mishandling of funds, the authorizers step in and take action. 

On the following pages, you will read about Michigan charter schools the way I have studied them.  I have tried to write in some kind of a linear form but I do interject information into the text that I did not always have the privilege of knowing at the time I was living it.  Consequently, you will see some deviation of my discussion as I give more data for clarity.  In the 65, 180-mile round trips that I have made to the State Board of Education meetings to testify, I have run into only a couple of people who have brought any charter school concerns forward.  People just don’t know how the system works and that there is a platform for them to speak.  Even if they did, though, a major obstacle is the expense and the time.  I often remind myself that I’m doing this for the children.

What we have here in Michigan is not what the charter movement had intended. We took an early lead in 1993, passing one of the first charter laws and came out strong from the starting gate.  This initiative was strongly supported by our three-term (1990-2002) Republican Governor.  He made sure supporters were in key places to make things happen.  In fact, it was the governor’s desire to have 200 charter schools opened by the end of 1995. (This didn’t happen until the year of 2000.)   The then state school superintendent disapproved of several contracts that had been forwarded to him, leading to several court cases. Soon after that he unexpectedly resigned.  This raised my curiosity.  I checked with a state board member from that time only to find out the superintendent had been repositioned in a pseudo job and he collected his last year’s salary.  Obviously there was more to this resignation than met the eye.  The interim replacement, recommended by the governor, was the former president of Central Michigan University which is located in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, the governor’s home district.  The Republican majority state board approved this man as a permanent replacement with the strong encouragement from the governor.  Following this appointment, the governor made several decisions that greatly impacted the Department of Education.  The department’s budget was slashed, forcing the streamlining of staff from 2,500 employees to 300.  Also the majority of duties that fell under the jurisdiction of the state board were transferred to the state superintendent by Executive Order.  It appeared a new line of oversight was being created.

Fortunately, due to a legislative cap imposed in 1999, state universities could authorize only 150 charters. That meant that new schools opening have been those approved by community colleges and intermediate and local districts, the only other entities in Michigan with the power to grant charters.  They are only allowed to approve schools that will open within their own geographic boundaries.  Yet there was one exception to the rule.  Bay Mills Community College, which is in the far north of Michigan in our upper peninsula, is federally funded as a Native American Tribal College servicing all Michigan students. It is said that our governor himself invited the college to become an authorizer since their “boundaries” include the entire state.  Since 2001, Bay Mills has become the 2nd largest Michigan authorizer behind Central Michigan University.  They have approved 32 schools behind CMU’s 58 schools.

The charter concept is supposed to put power in the hands of educators and local communities who would like to break free of the bureaucracy of the traditional system and demonstrate that they have a better way of educating children. These schools would be subject to performance-based accountability and could be closed if they did not meet the standards written in their contracts.  They were supposed to stimulate innovative teaching methods that could be shared with the traditional public schools and, thus, all schools could rise up by implementing these concepts. Instead it appears that the real innovation comes in the form of school governance, that is, who is in control of these schools.  If you look beyond the surface you often see that the appointed board of directors of each academy is really just a front.  The body who is really in control of the school is the for-profit management company who most often was the applicant and hand-picked the board members for appointment.  As a taxpayer, I object to this.  This is happening because some people within the system have taken this opportunity to sidestep the law for their own desired intent of destroying public education by having it taken over by private enterprise.

Michigan has become the breeding ground for for-profit management companies that have monopolized the right to be in control of these alternative options. Their actions have not always been in the best interests of the children.  I have seen evidence that unless a management company is lined up at the time of the application submitted to the Bay Mills authorizing group, even before a board is appointed to make this decision, the charter application will not be considered.  Under duress, one applicant had to pick the best company they could find, to finally be approved for a contract, even though they had originally planned to “self manage.”  Within a year, the school’s design had turned into more of the company’s image instead of the original applicant’s and when the applicant and several others protested they found themselves forced to resign from the academy board by Bay Mills.

This is where my personal story with charter schools begins.  First a little background information.  When I started my family almost 28 years ago, my husband and I mutually agreed that it would be important to have me be at home with the children instead of having somebody else care for them during those impressionable years.  I had already completed my bachelor degree and was working on my master’s while having my first three children, but my heart was not in doing anything professionally. My goal was fulfilling my deep desire in being the best mom I could be to my kids.  Still, with the pressures of society as they were, we felt it would probably be difficult to give our kids all that we wanted on just one income, so it was agreed that I would take on employment once the last one was out of kindergarten.

Unfortunately with the birth of our fifth child, Rachel, I came down with a medical condition that incapacitated me well into her elementary years.  Rachel had started school as the youngest of all my children with a late October birthday.  With my illness, she did not get all the attention she needed at home to do well in school.  Her fourth-grade teacher had little tolerance for anything less than perfection.  With a class of 29 boys and 7 girls, discipline became a major problem.  As parents we disagreed with the teacher’s discipline techniques and classroom management.   I saw my child’s light for learning get snuffed out that year.  She hated school and hated her teacher.  Change was necessary for her to feel safe and to be nurtured back to an excitement for learning.  As the school year came to a close we started looking at our options for her.

Private school was out of our budget.  School of Choice was offered in our district but we had missed the deadline.  Then we heard news of the soon to open charter school within 5 minutes of our home.  A Parent Information Meeting in July told us everything a parent would want to hear about the school’s program.  In addition there was no tuition because it was a public school.  There was a board of directors for this one school and Central Michigan University would be monitoring their activities as its authorizer.  It was emphasized that this was oversight and accountability that could not be found in any traditional public school district.

As a mother wanting something better for her child, I trusted this new concept without question.  After all I thought, tax dollars were supporting this endeavor and this would not be happening if people were not watching over the use of this money. 

In reality I was feeling from my heart instead of thinking with my head.  It was my husband who questioned the expense of the physical building and its needed repair.  He asked the questions from a business standpoint knowing that the school would be operating with no additional funding for facilities like the local districts with millages approved by the local residents had.  I wanted to believe that this was a godsend for our daughter, so I assured him that there was nothing to worry about.  We agreed to try it for Rachel’s 5th-grade year.  If the program turned out to be as good as it was promoted, Rachel could stay there through 8th-grade, and then we would move her back to the local high school.  If it didn’t turn out to be a success, we would move Rachel to the Middle School in our local district for 6th-grade.
 
I didn’t realize how naïve I was being, but I soon was made aware of that fact.  Starting a new school from scratch is a major undertaking.  It takes years of planning and is based on something that has already proven successful.  We quickly found out that everything was not as we were led to believe when the school doors could not officially open on the proposed opening day because the building had yet to be approved by the Office of Fire Safety.  With 344 children registered for a school without a building, the next month turned into utter chaos.

Parents started questioning “Where is the oversight?”  The school’s Board of Directors was nowhere to be found.  Central Michigan University was nowhere to be found.  Parents were calling all over, even trying to get the governor to fly in to see what a mess we were in. The only people we could talk too were the staff of the for-profit management company who were overseeing this endeavor.  Supposedly, this company was hired by the Board of Directors but in reality it was this very company that had applied for the school’s charter, which required the submitting of names of people to sit on the academy board who then could decide who would manage the school.  I had discovered my very first conflict of interest.
 
In the panic of having children ready to start the new school year and no place to house them, people were in a frenzy for many reasons.  I was still a stay-at-home mom so I was available on a daily basis to assist in getting whatever needed done.   Working parents needed to make child care arrangements after arriving at the school and finding out the children could not be left.  Some parents feared losing their jobs for having to take days off at the last minute.  I witnessed the CEO of the management company and his staff, which included the school principal, scurrying around like they were chickens with their heads cut off while the parents were on the phones trying to come up with a temporary alternative location to move the children to until the building could pass inspection.  What we didn’t know at the time was that even the preliminary work had not been done in submitting paperwork to be reviewed by the Office of Fire Safety.  We were told building blueprints had to be drafted since the building was so old. Why had these things not been taken care of earlier?  This was not the first school this company had opened.  They had occupancy of the building from the 1st of July that year.

I came to find out that the charter had not been signed with the authorizer and the academy until August 24, just a week before school was to open.  The management company was also in the process of opening three other charter schools, all under different authorizers.  Certainly they would not want to invest any upfront money into an endeavor that did not yet have an approved charter. Actually, I suspect the company just didn’t have enough financial resources to go around.
 
If the application had been approved in March, why did it take 6 months to draft and sign the charter? A copy of the signed contract had to be sent to the state school superintendent within 10 days of signing.  Before this happens, officially the Department of Education knows nothing of any new up and coming charter schools.  Since any of our state universities may authorize a new charter school to open anywhere in the state, the local districts are kept totally in the dark that a charter may be opening right in their backyard.  I believe this is done intentionally.  People may have seen a building being renovated with a sign identifying it as a charter but this may not happen until June or July when students are being recruited via mailings and newspaper advertisements. The local districts are well underway of approving their budgets for the coming year.   Parents are drawn to these schools just because they are charters, without knowing any of these particulars.  

During the months following the application acceptance, the authorizer-appointed academy board of directors are holding their first “public board meetings” making decisions that involve lease or purchase agreements of the facility, legal counsel contract, contract with a management company if that is what they want, text book and technology review for the curriculum, approval of a budget, etc.  Since no academy contract has been signed yet, nobody knows that this public board exists and is holding public meetings.  This means all decisions are basically being made in private.  In cases where there is yet to be a physical site acquired at which to post the meeting notices, the Michigan Open Meetings Act is being violated.  Since, in most cases, the people appointed to these boards know little about school law and the business of operating a school, they ask for the opinion of the management company who has its own self- interest.  Instead of each school being unique in itself, they become cookie-cutter schools based on the design of the management companies.  If a school started out with something unique, it would eventually lose that concept because it didn’t fit into the programming of the company that was hired to carry out the design.  If any of the board members make a fuss, they may find themselves removed from their positions by the authorizers.

Now, back to my daughter’s academy.  I was describing the application process.  This is where much of the problems for the opening of the school originated.  The information that was submitted in the application did not meet the criteria of the law.  The application must contain the address and physical description of the proposed site.  There had been a selection of sites listed in Phase I, all in the city of Detroit.  The application was accepted and proceeded to Phase II requiring additional and more detailed information.  The original possible sites for the school were now replaced with several new possibilities, also in Detroit.  At the time of application approval by the CMU Board of Trustees on March 19th, there was no specific site determined, yet this is a requirement of the application.

Later upon reviewing a copy of the contract, I found a management company agreement, signed but undated.  In the section, Obligations of the Board, it states that the board would assist the company in finding a location for the academy in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit.  So it appears that this was drafted sometime after the application had been approved.  The actual Warren school site was found in late June with the lease commencing on August 1.  In an August 18th letter from the academy’s attorney addressed to CMU, which followed this agreement, he stated that he had reviewed the management agreement as approved at an academy meeting on August 16 in the unexecuted form.  He also stated he had reviewed the academy contract and several other documents as well, giving the nod of approval for the academy to enter into such agreement.  This formality is part of CMU’s Management Agreement Approval Policy.  The next step would be to have CMU approve this agreement itself.  I question why would language about finding a location in Warren be included in this agreement two months after the location was found?  More importantly, why was the management company taking such an active role in the start-up of the school without having a signed agreement with the board, which needed to be approved also by the authorizer?
 
The first week of school was filled with day-to-day uncertainty.  To compensate for the lack of a building, two field trips were planned for 400 people including students, staff ,and parents.  The academy rented eight motor coaches and paid all admissions for the Detroit Zoo and Greenfield Village.  That sure did put a dent in the budget. The remaining class days that week were cancelled.  Parents were getting stressed.  To keep the 344 registered kids from leaving, the staff called a parent meeting the following Monday which they used as a pep rally.  We were forging ahead to a new frontier in education just like the pioneers who were looking for something better for their families.  Anything new took time and hard work but we would get past this. Festival canopy tents were going to be erected in the morning on the school grounds so classes could start.  Classroom grades would be put together with two teachers teaching the 50 children per grade.  Supposedly repairs were going to be made to prepare the building for the necessary fire inspection.  We were assured this was acceptable with the Office of Fire Safety.  By the end of the week it felt like our kids were part of a three-ring circus that just went on and on.  Teachers were pushing materials out of the school building on carts made to look like covered wagons.  Cold and rain was predicted for the next week.  Out of desperation I called the Office of Fire Safety to see what other arrangements we could make to get the kids out of those tents.  They were utterly surprised to hear what was going on.  They had been told that tents were going to be erected to take attendance and move the kids offsite for field trips. I was not happy at hearing this.
 
On Friday, as we were picking up our kids, the tents were already being taken down.  A note that came home said that the holdup at this point was the Office of Fire Safety that could not get there until Tuesday A.M. to inspect the building.  If all went well the kids could be in their classroom seats Tuesday afternoon just in time for the state head count day on Wednesday.  It was not acceptable to me having the kids miss any more days of school.  I got on the phone with our state senator to see what strings he could pull to get the inspection done Monday.  My previous calls to the senator had proven futile as charter schools were a political fireball and as a Democrat it appeared he did not want it to be shown that he was lending any support.  This time, with my pleading insistence, his staff was able to get the Office of Fire Safety to allocate overtime so this one more inspection could happen at the end of Monday.  When I arrived at the school Monday afternoon to exclaim, “They are coming today!”  the school staff’s looks were of total shock and horror. 

Word spread quickly and even the news cameras were waiting for the OFS inspector who finally showed up at 6:30 pm.  It was my oldest child’s 21st birthday and we were supposed to take her out for dinner.  My youngest child had yet to start school on September 20 and I was most anxious to see that the building problems had finally been resolved.  I had to beg my daughter’s forgiveness and ask if we could make it a late dinner.  I didn’t realize the inspection would take three hours.  When it was done there was a laundry list of things that needed to be fixed.  A good number of the interior rooms could not be used because of inadequate exits.  There would be no school on Tuesday.  It was uncertain when the school building could be used.
 
I had been spending the evening in the office answering the phones so parents would not have to hear a voice message.  Plans were in the works to do an outdoor activity with the kids in the morning before bringing them into their classrooms later.  So we were telling parents that school would be held Tuesday.  Now plans had to change fast.  It was the parents who seemed to be telling the company what to do.  We would draft a flyer asking for all kinds of help, donated, of course.  Parents could do the manual tasks to save time and money.  I witnessed the company CEO and his assistant pull out the Yellow Pages book and flip through it like they had no idea what to look for.  I knew right then that we had been lied to.  While our children were in the tents, repairs were supposed to have been taking place in the school.  We thought it was odd that we never saw any kind of repair trucks parked outside.

The next morning some of the parents were there bright and early, passing out flyers and recruiting help.  It became evident that some parents were taking their children out because they refused to deal with any more days without school.  Many were there willing to help but not having any idea where to start.  Finally the CEO showed up at 11:00 am without the building blueprints or the repair list from the inspection.  A mom volunteered to drive 10 miles to his office to get them while everybody stood around waiting.  At this point I made my exit.  My husband and I had some serious talking to do.  We were running out of faith that this school would ever open.
 
We spent the afternoon making calls to our local district to see what other options we had at this point.  We needed an alternative to the charter school.  Now isn’t this a switch!  We had always had a good relationship with our local district.  In fact, my husband and I both graduated from it and decided to remain in the area to have our children attend the same schools.  We liked the idea of the small district size.  We were able to know what was happening throughout the district because it was of manageable size.  Everybody knew everybody.  In fact, the district superintendent was my husband’s former high school business teacher.  We had three older children currently attending the district schools.  Our oldest child had already graduated.
 
I had found out earlier in the summer from a district board member that the superintendent was quite surprised to hear that we were one of the families who moved our child to the charter.  When he inquired, “Why?” our friend explained that we were unhappy with how the problems in our daughter’s 4th-grade class had been handled.  We had been opposed to the method of how our daughter’s teacher had been disciplining the students.  After further explanation to brief him on the situation, he exclaimed “I had ordered that to be stopped.”  When this conversation had been relayed to me I was quite surprised.  I had taken the issue through the building principal and then to the assistant superintendent.  I kept waiting for those people to take responsible actions to tend to the matter of classroom size and discipline methods.  The class was supposed to move to a bigger room over Thanksgiving.  That didn’t happen.  Extra classroom help would be assigned.  It was minimal.  By the time Christmas break came I had grown tired and became distracted.  I let the issue slide dealing with my own health and the stress of the holidays.  I failed to pick up the pace when school resumed.  Now I was hearing that the superintendent had ordered the teacher’s activities to be stopped.  If I had only gone to him next when I was unhappy with the response I had gotten.  If I had heard this from him myself, I would have made sure it was stopped.  Apparently the assistant superintendent felt differently and he never relayed the superintendent’s directives down. 

I was mad at myself for falling short on doing what I should have done to right the wrong that was affecting my child.  I failed in protecting her.  I didn’t realize at the time that this would be a lesson that I would have another chance to learn. 

Going back to our home school took a lot of courage.  The charter experience was disastrous.  It had backfired on us but I was determined to hold my head up high.  There were lessons to be learned by the district.  They needed to be totally responsive to all students needs'.  When we contacted them to find out our options, they were very accommodating.  The superintendent spoke with us personally.  They would offer Rachel a place in two of the districts other elementary schools if we didn’t want to put her back in her old one.  The situation at her old school was different this time.  The class was smaller with a whole 5th-grade classroom of 22 students and a 4/5 split room.  The 5th-grade teacher was very well liked.  We decided to go with our neighborhood school.  We had her registered again in time to be in her seat for the 4th Wednesday state head count day.  Wanting to be responsible citizens, we felt it was absolutely important to have her in the school building where she would spend the year, so that school would get the state aid credit for her education.
 
So Rachel started fifth grade one month after the year had started. Her new teacher gave her extra time to get caught up.  This teacher became one of Rachel’s favorites.  The kids were excited to see Rachel again and picked up their relationships were they had left off.  Rachel was feeling much more secure and happy being back in a familiar place after all the confusion the previous month had brought.  I, though, needed to understand what that confusion was all about.  I began to seek answers to my questions.  This time I wasn’t going to quit until I got some kind of satisfaction.  What had happened to us and those other families should not have happened if there was all the oversight the Department of Education had talked about.  People needed to be held accountable.

The authorizer-appointed academy board of directors is the responsible party for the charter school.  From our first contact with the school at the beginning of July until the middle of September, we never saw any board member or heard of any meetings being held.  I do not even recall any of the board members being in attendance at a family picnic the school sponsored at the end of August.  Even when invitations were sent out for the picnic, no board meetings  that were being held in the middle and end of August were shared with the parents.  The first evidence of their existence came when a flyer was posted on the school doors canceling the regular September meeting on the third Monday.  Instead of making themselves available to tend to the urgent matters of the school yet to be opened, they went into hiding.
 
I wanted to know more about these people who were supposedly responsible for this endeavor while I was still at the academy, so I asked the administrator for their information and made personal calls to several of them.  At this time I did not know all that I was to learn later, so the calls were more of concern for resolution to the current building problems.  They assured me they were doing everything possible.  I didn’t have a clue what they were doing as I witnessed very little activity going on inside the school.  I did find out that none of the people lived in the area or had any children who would be attending the school.  I found this disturbing.

Later, when I did review the contract, I became aware of another serious omission to the process.  Central Michigan University’s Board of Trustees own resolution states that the academy board of directors shall have a minimum of five people.  Only four people had been appointed and one of those resigned in July to become the administrator of one of the other charter schools that the company was starting.  In reality, the board did not meet the criteria of CMU’s own resolution and I question if it was a legal board during the first year.  A requirement of the application is to submit names of people for the board according to the authorizer resolution.  This certainly was not done, but the application was approved anyway.  The academy did not get its fifth member until March of the first school year, one year after the application approval. 

I had many unanswered questions about what had happened, even after taking our daughter from the school.  I needed to know what I should have known, but didn’t think I needed to ask because I trusted the system.  By the early part of October I had talked with different staff from CMU and my state legislator several times.  One of the first things I got was a copy of the school code pertaining to charters from the Attorney General’s Office.  The attorney I talked to had asked me “Why would you put your child in a charter school?”  I asked him “Why wouldn’t I.”  He said “Don’t you know that it is buyer beware?”  I was taken aback.  Apparently he knew something I didn’t know.  When I got a copy of the law, which was only about 6 pages, I had even more questions.  I found out the contract was a public document. I wanted a copy.  I posed the question to my state representative, “How can I get a copy of that contract?” 

After the first call that I had, talking to CMU’s Charter School Office Director, Jim Goenner, I was shocked.  I did not like his evasiveness in answering my questions.  When I hung up, I asked myself “Who is his boss?”  I called the president of CMU.  I was referred to a provost who said he would look into it and get back with me.  An associate director, Dr. Ross, of the charter school office contacted me as a follow-up.  He was much more cordial than Mr. Goenner but when I got off the phone with him I realized I still did not have the answers.  After a series of follow-up calls, it was decided that a personal meeting would be arranged.  I guess they could see that I was not going to go away easily.  We met at a restaurant not far from my home.  Dr. Ross was accompanied by another gentleman.  I was glad I had asked my husband to come with me. When I asked questions about Conner Creek Academy, Dr. Ross spoke off the top of his head, often not able to answer me specifically.  I asked him if he brought the academy contract with him.  He told me “No! It was a hefty document, not something that could be carried around easily.”  I was totally frustrated with all my attempts and was still not getting proper information.
 
The interesting thing is that Dr. Ross knew that a copy of the academy contract was on its way to me.  It was delivered a couple of days later in a three-ring binder not quite three inches thick.  This was the document that was too hefty for Dr. Ross to carry in from his car. I also later found out that the gentleman with Dr. Ross was CMU’s “troubleshooter”.  It was not the only time that this man and I would meet.

When I was able to review the contract, I found out that it was issued as “conditional” with the final approval to be given solely by the university president by August 30, after submission of more in depth-start-up financial documentation.  This never happened.  I realized then that all actions pertaining to the opening of this school should have been stopped by the CMU charter school office.  What happened to those 344 children and their families should have been avoided.
 
I later came to find out that in the copy of the contract at the Michigan Department of Education was a letter dated the middle of October from CMU to the academy lifting the “conditional” status.  This was at the same time that they were preparing a copy of the contract for me.  It was signed by Jim Goenner, the Director of the CMU Charter School Office, not the university president.
 
Spending hours reading the contract page by page and comparing it against the charter law, I realized that not all was in place.  The law defined requirements of the application and of the contract.  All matters of the application were to be included in the contract.  Some very basic items were nowhere to be found.  Some of the references that I made above about Conner Creek’s application were taken from a separate package that I later obtained via the Freedom of Information Act since it appeared that the application itself was not included in the contract.  The contract document that was sent to me and forwarded to the Michigan Department of Education, was missing required information.  Nowhere was it stated who the applicant was.  It is in the application that it is disclosed that the applicant is a for-profit management company that has the intention of managing the school themselves.  In fact this is very clearly stated in the application in numerous places.  I believe the exclusion of the application from the contract was intentional.

I still wasn’t getting satisfactory cooperation from Central Michigan University, so my neighbor suggested that I contact the Michigan State Board of Education. A friend of hers had recently been appointed to fill a vacancy.  This was a logical move since the state board was next in line to oversee the authorizers.  As a mom outside of the education system, I really didn’t understand what transpired beyond the local and intermediate school districts.  I was soon to get a bigger picture.

In February of 2000, I made my first public testimony at the state board meeting, 90 miles from my home.  I was mystified by the basic lack of reaction that I received about the start of Conner Creek Academy. Unbeknownst to me, I was speaking before the Republican-majority board and the same superintendent recommended by our Republican Governor.  I was speaking about the actions of Central Michigan University, the very institution at which the superintendent had formerly been president.  I would have to come back again.  Five minutes is not very much time to give all the facts. 

Through some Internet research at home, I found various charter articles in the two major Detroit newspapers.  I also became familiar with the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA).  This organization was put together under the leadership of the governor to help support charter schools.  Reviewing their website, I started to see a connection in the names.  A staff member of the management company for Conner Creek Academy was a board member of MAPSA.  Her name was listed right along with Jim Goenner, the then current director of the CMU Charter School Office.  Mr. Goenner had been the original president of MAPSA but stepped down to a board position in 1998 when he took the directorship at CMU.  Other board positions were being held by other management company representatives as well as by board members of charter schools.  These companies were currently submitting applications to CMU and many of the charter contracts were up for review and renewal with CMU.  I believe this is an outright conflict of interest.
 
I was interested in doing some comparisons of other charter schools and checking to see if what I saw with Conner Creek Academy was commonplace.  I found out that in the Michigan Department of Education, the same building that I had testified in, copies of all the contracts were available for me to view.  I made my trips to speak before the Board of Education worth my while by arranging to look through contracts on each of my monthly visits.  It became intriguing.  What I saw in other charter contracts was very similar to Conner Creek’s contract. I created a draft checklist of required items. In many files, applications were missing as well as many other items, but with each contract was a letter from the superintendent stating that all was in order and the paperwork would be filed for the processing of the state aid.  I was appalled.  I went before the state board and asked how such inferior documents could be approved by their own staff.  I pointed out that a simple checklist like the one I designed easily identified required items missing.
 
Nothing was done at the MDE to address the missing items until after the MDE was audited in 2001.  When the audit pointed out contracts had missing required items, the MDE needed to respond.  It was then that they created their own 3-page checklist to be used in the review of all the current contracts on file.  Authorizers were requested to submit any missing.  This process should have been done before any state aid was approved.  I believe it was intentional lack of “oversight” by the MDE.  I raised the issue of the 180 copies of contracts that were still incomplete without the application with the Michigan Department of Education.  I asked them if they would be requesting the authorizers to forward the missing applications.   I was told that this would not be done.  They told me they were certain that the new contracts coming in all had the application material included but nobody was reviewing the applications to see if they met the criteria of the law. To me, this is lack of accountability at the highest level. 

I came across the 1998 state performance audit that had been done on Central Michigan University, documenting numerous flaws in their handling of their office’s responsibility.  Numerous items sited in the audit had happened with the opening of Conner Creek Academy a year later.  I contacted the Auditor General’s office to see when a follow-up audit would be expected.  They claimed that it was overdue because when they had contacted the Michigan Department of Education earlier to start the audit, the department asked if it could be postponed because of their recent department staff changes.  The Auditor General’s Office encouraged me to forward them any of my concerns and they would look at them as part of their upcoming review.  I was hopeful that this would eventually get documented and the truth would be exposed.  I visited the agency often with any new information I uncovered prior to and during their investigation.  After about 18 months, the first of two reviews were made public. 

In June 2002, the Auditor General published the first thorough performance audit on the Office of Education Options in the Michigan Department of Education.  This is the unit that handles charter schools.  The 94-page report documented many of the infractions I had pointed out, but the finger pointing here went to the MDE for not providing the proper oversight to prevent these things from happening.  At this point, the superintendent of the previous 6 years had been replaced with a new superintendent appointed by the now Democratic-majority state board.  His written comments gave me satisfaction that somebody did see things my way.  He stated that the program had been under the prior administration for the majority of the audit period.  The prior administration defined the role of the charter staff as maintaining the status quo, not to provide oversight, monitoring, or accountability.  The current superintendent did take responsibility for the MDE’s irresponsible actions by hiring a person to respond to the issues raised in the audit.  At this time though, the chief MDE charter school office staff person had retired and there had yet to be a replacement appointed.

My response to this audit was to point out the fact that the law had originally given the oversight role of the authorizer to the state board.  Later the governor transferred this to his buddy, the new superintendent.  That person was now gone and his replacement, a Democrat, now had this responsibility.  I had wanted the new superintendent to pull the skeletons out of the closet and lay the responsibility were it was deserved.  Unfortunately, we still had a Republican-majority state House and Senate and they had made several serious attempts to lift the cap imposed in 1999.  These were defeated by a close margin only because a few Republicans did not vote along party lines. (I lobbied strongly against this also.)   It was obvious that Republicans would play mean and dirty and there was an air of fear that the education budget could be compromised if anybody tried to buck the existing system.  I pleaded at several public testimonies for the superintendent to suspend authorizers who showed lack of responsible actions in approving and monitoring their charter schools, as the law permitted.  If the authorizers had acted responsibly, the audit report would not have had so many infractions to note.  To date, no authorizer has ever been sanctioned.
 
CMU’s performance audit was published two months later.  This publication was somewhat overshadowed by the earlier Department of Education results.  Interpretation of the results vary with the reader.  CMU congratulated themselves with having done a good job at addressing the earlier shortcomings of their office.  For the amount of time that had passed from the original audit and the amount of staff and funds that their office had, I saw the audit as less than respectable.

It was not for a lack of funds or staff that such inferior work came from the authorizers.  In Michigan, the law permits the authorizers to charge an oversight fee up to 3 percent each year, to be taken from the state aid of the charters for which they are responsible.  Notice that I said UP TO 3 percent.  It has been customary for the authorizers to charge the entire 3 percent even though this is way more than is needed to do an adequate job.  It is literally taking money out of the classrooms.  In Michigan the charters are paid the same per student as the traditional schools.  Today it is roughly $7000 per student.  The one difference in school funding is that the local districts may tax the residents with additional millages, which often cover needed expenses for buildings.

The authorizer’s 3 percent oversight fee is equal to $210 per student.  For a 300 student school this comes to $63,000.  This is enough to pay a full-time staff person to monitor this one school on site on a daily basis.  This would be obviously unnecessary.  In fact, a CMU staff person is assigned multiple schools at one time.  This would allow the hiring of 5-6 other people to do other tasks in the charter office just by authorizing 6-7 schools.   Many of Michigan charters are much larger.  With 92,000 students enrolled in 225 charter schools the average is 408 students equaling $86,000 in oversight fee for each school.  Thirty-two of the schools have been opened and managed by National Heritages Academies.  Their school size capacity is 680 students at a cost of $143,000 in authorizer fees.  Several schools have enrollments over 1,200 paying one quarter of a million dollars and the K-12 school enrolling 2,300 students pays nearly one half million dollars per year to the authorizer.  My argument is one person can monitor a 300 student school just as easily as a 1,000 student school.  The paperwork is no more.  Only the numbers on the paper get bigger.  This money could be better spent at the school level in the classroom. 

In the ten years of Michigan’s charter movement, I have yet to see a financial audit of how the authorizer oversight fee is being spent.  Legally it cannot be used for anything other than oversight since that is why the fee is being collected.  In the early years, CMU created a magazine-type publication that included all the news clippings of charters opening throughout the state.  The next year they produced a publication that devoted up to three pages to each individual charter school they authorized and it was called “Miracles.”  These had nothing to do with oversight. CMU also pays $30,000 per year to the Michigan Association of Public School Academies for its membership fee.  The CMU Charter School Director sits on many other panels and boards across the country.  Any travel expenses that he accumulates should not be paid from the oversight fee.  Several years ago, Central Michigan University was bringing in nearly $6 million in authorizer oversight fees with a staff of 40 people for their 58 charter schools.

The increase of charter school size is a plus for both the authorizer and the management company that takes anywhere from 10-20 percent per student.  The authorizers often permit schools to expand regardless of the education program being poor or if the schools house students in portable units. More students mean more money for both parties.  The legislative cap has done little to slow down the influx of charter schools in Michigan.  Elementary schools open second campuses to expand to include middle-school grades.  K-8 schools divided in half on two campuses so they could double the existing school size.  A high school focused on auto mechanics training had declining enrollment for three years dwindling from 150 students to 50 students.  Instead of the authorizer shutting the school down, it permitted the school to add on another campus across town starting an elementary school. (The one program had nothing to do with the other.)  Eventually two more campuses completed the K-12 school with a new enrollment of over 900 students.  The children attending the grade school most likely will not even be attending the school’s own high school if auto mechanics is not their focus.  The high school has just now been classified as an alternative school so it does not have to meet the new high school reform curriculum that was just passed by our legislators.  A recent news article highlighted that the high school program had just moved to its newly renovated location in another city with state of the art automotive bays. That would be the high school’s fourth move since 1995.  Interviews with students indicated that some career-focused kids were using this program to gain some job skills before going on to college for engineering or architecture degrees.  I would be concerned how successful they would be in college since only 9 out of 62 students passed math and 18 out of 62 passed reading on the state’s high school course assessment exam.

I believe the relocation of a charter school to a new site or the expansion to additional sites is illegal.  The law requires that the address of the physical site be listed in the application.  Further it says that all matters of the application shall be included in the contract.  Contracts are to be issued on a competitive basis, using the application information.  The practice has been that once a charter is granted it is a green light for the academy to do whatever it needs to facilitate its operation.  In other words, what works out best for the management company to make a profit.  I consider this “bait and switch.”  I acquired the Attorney General’s Opinion on this in 2003.  That was a major undertaking in itself.  Michigan’s Attorney General Mike Cox was very clear to point out that a school may operate different grades in different locations as long as those locations were listed in the application.  Victory!  I thought so but a staff attorney from the AG Office, whom the Michigan Department of Education relies on for legal advice, told me that contracts can be amended for these new locations.  I replied that these new locations would not have been stated in the application which is not in alignment with the Attorney General’s Opinion.  The staff attorney’s opinion appears to override the Attorney General himself.  Even though the issuing of new contracts has been minimized, I believe many expanded charters are operating their expanded sites illegally.  In reality they are individual new schools operating without a contract.  Where is the accountability?

This has not been an all-inclusive list of problems.  I would like you to understand that I do this work on my time clock and at my personal expense.  I do it because our children deserve the best that we can provide for them and that is not happening with our charter movement here in Michigan.  What is happening is that the control of tax dollars is now in the hands of private enterprise with their own agenda to make a profit, while they appear to be putting the children as their main priority.  Maybe the management company’s fee should be based on results for I can tell you that many of the companies who have a good business plan are indeed making a profit, but the children are not always getting any better of an education than what the neighborhood districts are providing.  Unfortunately, parents continue to keep their children in failing charter schools.  All I can believe is that people must be withholding information from them so that they don’t know any different.

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