Up North Progressive

Today the Michigan Department of Education listed 11 charter school authorizers who have not met expectations for providing oversight with the charter school management companies they issued charters to open schools. If they do not improve, they face suspension and will no longer be able to issue charters.

Of the list of 11 authorizers, Lake Superior State University is on the list. This is the authorizing body that granted Dr. Steve Ingersoll’s Smart Schools management company charters to open Grand Traverse Academy and Bay City Academy. Ingersoll is currently indicted for federal felony fraud charges for depositing most of a loan issued by Chemical Bank into his personal account at 5/3 Bank. Chemical Bank provided Ingersoll with the loan to renovate a church for Bay City Academy.

Grand Traverse Academy faces financial problems thanks to Ingersoll extracting prepayments from GTA’s budget for management fees. He also charged the school money for custodial services, then made cleaning the school part of the “character education” curriculum all of his schools include in his education model. To see details about Smart Schools and GTA’s financials, Miss Fortune over at Glistening Quivering Underbelly has blogged about this exhaustively.

Muskegon Heights School District is another school district facing financial problems thanks to its former management company, Mosaica, going $2 million into debt. The state had to bail them out twice during the 2013-2014 school year to cover payroll. Muskegon Heights School District was assigned an emergency manager, Gregory Weatherspoon, by Governor Snyder in 2013. Weatherspoon fired the staff for the Muskegon Heights district without notice and opened management of a new charter school to companies interested in bidding. Grand Valley State University is also on the list of 11 authorizers who must improve or suspend operations.

This is only two cases well-known to the public about charter schools in Northern Michigan taking tax dollars from the state as if they’re withdrawing money from a bank account, then leaving the school millions in debt. Since the Detroit Free Press expose in June showing that charter schools are not providing school choice but rather for-profit schemes to fleece money from the state, Mike Flanagan and the Michigan Department of Education now insist they’re going to do something about the problem. The problem is a simple one to fix: Put the charter school cap back, suspend all charter school authorizers and put the authority to educate Michigan’s children back where it belongs – in public school districts. Michigan’s charter school fiasco is another case of where non-education professionals make education decisions and educating children will never be their priority.. Michigan’s children deserve the best education the state can provide, and that will never happen with corporate capitalists pretending to be educators.