This week not only marked the start of the new school year in Detroit. It also brought an escalation of the city’s ongoing charter school wars.
Charter supporters were fuming over a New York Times Magazine takedown that asserted “children lost” when Michigan “gambled on charter schools.”
And as one charter school leader knocked Nikolai Vitti, Detroit’s new superintendent, for refusing to work collaboratively with the city’s privately managed schools, Vitti created a panic among supporters of a new charter that wants to buy a former district building.
Scroll down for more on these stories and the rest of the week’s Detroit education news. Also, please mark your calendars for this event Wednesday night where I’ll be joining Vitti and the Citizens Research Council for a salon-style dialogue about Detroit schools.
Charter wars
- Vitti’s decision to block a charter school from buying the former Joyce Elementary School building could mean it remains vacant while the district loses the $75,000 it stood to make from the sale.
- One charter leader challenged Vitti with an op/ed calling for an end to the “charter school versus non-charter school rhetoric.”
- The 7,000-word Times Magazine story explores the financial and academic challenges of a Highland Park charter school and blames the state’s free market charter school laws.
- The state’s charter school association issued a rebuttal and blasted the author. Leaders of a free-market think tank wrote that the story contains “major errors.”
- The rebuttal cites a study that finds that Detroit’s charter school students slightly outperform their district counterparts. That study is often cited by both sides of the debate. Read it here.
- Or read this story about the role U.S Education Secretary Betsy DeVos played in shaping the state’s charter school laws and the resulting educational conditions in Detroit.
- DeVos was the subject this week of a story on public radio’s This American Life. The piece looked at her volunteer work at a public school in Grand Rapids to provide a window into her views on education. (I’ve done some work on This American Life too. Check it out).
- A day after blasting the Times story, the state charter school association highlighted its analysis that found that nine of the state’s highest performing schools on the 2017 M-STEP were charters. [Friday, the association sent an update alerting reporters that the initial analysis had been wrong. In fact, just the four highest-performing schools had been charters].
- The number of charter schools in Michigan is down this year for the first time in the 23-year history of the state’s charter school law.
Back to school
- As Detroit kids returned to class this week, Vitti said he was disappointed that 250 teaching positions in the district remained unfilled. He saw the effects of that shortage as he toured schools Tuesday.
- Many of the vacancies were left by teachers who worked for the state-run recovery district until its dissolution in June. Teachers reported they weren’t given credit for their years of experience. That meant steep pay cuts.
- If the 55,000 kids who’ve signed up to attend schools in the main district actually enroll, it would represent the first significant increase in years. Just 36,000 kids were in class Tuesday but Vitti said first-day attendance rates are typically around 70 percent.
- Among kids who’ve enrolled in district schools: Vitti’s four children.
- In a back-to-school Q&A that covered a number of issues, Vitti said the district could eventually decide to close some schools but has no plans to do so this year.
- Absences are not just high on the first day of school. A News columnist notes that 60 percent of district students were chronically absent in a recent year.
- The chronic absence rate across the state was 30 percent.
- The Free Press put together a list of ten things to know about the new school year.
- The state superintendent — who recorded this “welcome back message” for students — says he plans to make Michigan a top ten state by 2026.
State of our schools
- A top state lawmaker is pushing for an A-F grading system for schools.
- State lawmakers are reviewing test options as they consider replacing the M-STEP in the 2018-19 school year.
- Michigan could be holding back nearly half of its third graders by 2020.
- A website has created a list of the state’s top elementary schools.
- The Detroit News has tapped a veteran education reformer to curate a series of commentaries about education that will be published throughout the school year.
- The first piece in the News’ series looks at the state’s education crisis by the numbers.
- A Free Press columnist expresses alarm at low reading scores across the state and writes that we’re no closer to a solution today “than we were four, eight or 20 years ago.”
In other news
- Here’s the story of how a California-based nonprofit law firm catapulted seven Detroit schoolchildren into a civil rights suit in federal court.
- The number of Detroit graduates enrolling at Wayne State University has plummeted over the last decade.
- A Detroit teacher has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the main district and the city’s mayor saying she was retaliated against after blowing the whistle on tainted water in her school.
- A former DPS principal is on her way to prison.