Up North Progressive

Detroit Free Press investigative reporter Jennifer Dixon this week was honored as Michigan’s first Journalist of the year for her excellent eight-part series on for-profit charter schools in the state. She highly deserves this recognition, especially with her continued dedication to expose corporate reform of our public schools. Dixon this week reported on someone who’s been written about extensively at Up North Progressive, Dr. Steve Ingersoll. Her article is spot on and gets into the meat of the problem with for-profit charter schools and the fraud so many of them perpetuate. To say that corporate ed reform puts kids first in education is abusive.

Ingersoll’s getting much-deserved press thanks to his federal felony fraud trial starting on Tuesday, February 10, 2015 in Bay City, Michigan. Miss Fortune promises to provide frequent reports of all of the grisly details, just the way we like it. It might be a good idea to bookmark her blog right now.

Plenty of pre-trial shenanigans have gone on leading up to the big day. Roy Bradley was found guilty on four counts of removing asbestos from a church being converted into a school building. He hired a lawyer he said he couldn’t afford, which is why he had a court-appointed lawyer, and had Gayle Ingersoll ambush witnesses leaving the courthouse with subpoenas from the lawyer who wasn’t even the attorney representing the defense at the trial. The judge told Ingersoll, his brother and Bradley to leave the witnesses for the prosecution alone, But Ingersoll said he couldn’t do that because those witnesses were his friends and business associates. The judge told him to he would just have to do that anyway. Or else.

And the trial hasn’t even started yet.

Keep an eye on Miss Fortune’s excellent blog. Up North Progressive will also post updates.