DeVos doesn’t speak for responsible charter schools

By Tashaune Harden

Policy experts warn that Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos and her decades of advocacy for school vouchers and school-of-choice policies pose a serious threat to public education. I agree with this analysis, but I’ve arrived at my conclusions from on-the-ground experience as an educator working in charter schools.

My perspective comes from working in the local charter landscape in Detroit — the landscape that has been engineered by DeVos’ money. I am a career educator with 13 years of experience in the classroom. I teach science at César Chávez Academy, hold a master’s degree in educational leadership, and also serve as vice president of the Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Michigan ACTS), the union representing employees at my school and several other charter schools in Detroit. I know the wonderful students and communities served by charter schools in Detroit — and for me, the nomination of Betsy DeVos is a personal affront.

I am an advocate for charter schools in which teachers have a voice and have their professionalism respected. I think that charter schools should be run by school boards that are truly accountable to the communities they serve, instead of being handpicked by management companies. I think that the charter sector should be governed with the public interest, not private profit, as the primary focus.

These are conditions in which children can thrive in charter schools — and these conditions do not exist for the vast majority of charter students in Michigan because our charter sector is overwhelmingly driven by for-profit private management companies. Betsy DeVos has spent her career, and her substantial personal wealth, fighting the reforms that would help students in charter schools. Children are being denied education as a result.

As a member of the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren, I worked with charter school management companies, local nonprofits, elected officials, business owners, labor leaders and local CEOs to provide policy recommendations for charter sector oversight. Last spring, our recommendations were adopted as a truly bipartisan package of legislation by the Michigan Senate. This kind of broad consensus took months of meaningful deliberation, and it resulted in a policy package that provided real hope for consistency and accountability in Detroit’s charter sector.

For me, the nomination of Betsy DeVos is a personal affront.

Instead of respecting the community-based bipartisan agreement to promote a healthy charter sector in Detroit, DeVos killed our policy package with a flurry of unprecedented contributions to Michigan Republicans. In June and July of 2016 alone, $1.45 million was contributed to Michigan Republicans. The contributions began in earnest on June 13, five days after Republican members of the state Senate revoked their support for our bipartisan charter oversight legislation.

With DeVos at the helm, it’s not just our schools that are run by for-profit charter management companies; apparently, it’s our state government too.

Betsy DeVos has no history as an educator, nor did she send her children to public schools. She has no history in the communities subjected to the policies she promotes. Instead, she has a history of using her wealth to attack public schools in Michigan, contrary to the will of citizens. Just as she used her money to kill the charter school oversight package in 2016, she also used her money to push a school voucher system in the Michigan Legislature after it had been voted down directly as a ballot measure.

I’m a classroom professional who understands it’s not helpful to oversimplify the debate and pit charter schools against public schools. Students and communities suffer as for-profit charter schools open and close abruptly, and funding fluctuates. In an effort to keep costs down, special education services in charter schools are often watered down, or nonexistent, under the guise of inclusion. This places additional pressures on general education teachers, burning them out at extremely high rates. Even if a charter school provides stability in the community, which is often not the case, teacher turnover presents a huge problem that will not be solved by the DeVos-backed approach to charter management. Further, charter administrators are hired with little to no experience or credentials in educational leadership. They usually lack the skills to adequately address challenges inherent in schools — from the professional development of teachers to student achievement and community engagement.

Today, profit is the top priority for too many charter schools in Michigan. Everything else is secondary. A plethora of school choice lines the pockets of management companies, but does little to help students and communities. Under DeVos, we can expect more schools, but not better schools.

Tashaune Harden is a science teacher at Detroit’s César Chávez Academy and a vice president of the Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff.