James Muffett, a “nationally recognized spokesperson for biblical values” who heads the Foundation for Traditional Values and is also the founder and head of the Student Statesmanship Institute, brings the program into Christian schools. “We just hope that God will give us the grace to see this program expand in the schools all throughout the state of Michigan and beyond,” he says.34 He also appears from time to time on the homeschooling conference circuit. At such events, public schools—or “government schools,” as they are frequently referred to—are ritually maligned. Some of those conferences include screenings of the 2011 film IndoctriNation, which casts public schools as “a masterful design that sought to replace God’s recipe for training up the next generation with a humanistic, man-centered program that fragmented the family and undermined the influence of the Church and its Great Commission.”35
By the late 1990s, Betsy and Dick DeVos had thrown their weight behind the voucher movement. They helped build and lead national organizations that funded voucher interests in states across the country. These initiatives took the form of both nonprofit work and campaign finance work that helped elect pro-voucher politicians. As these efforts expanded, the DeVoses and their allies partnered with existing conservative and “free market” think tanks, including the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Acton Institute in Michigan, both DeVos-backed.
Soon those think tanks began to publish screeds denouncing the “command and control mentality” of the “government school,” which “robs teachers and administrators of the joy and professionalism of their important work.”36 In an Acton Institute review of the book Public Education: An Autopsy by the libertarian author Myron Lieberman, William B. Allen praised the author’s prescription for replacing public education with a for-profit model. “As public education fails and dies, it carries along the ghosts of natural abilities atrophied in young children who could not escape in time,” Allen wrote. The solutions to America’s educational challenges, he asserted, “must derive from the ‘death of public education.’ ”37
At the heart of their voucher ambitions, the royals of Holland had a theocratic vision. In 2001, speaking at “The Gathering,” an annual meeting of prosperous Christian philanthropists that has been associated with The Fellowship Foundation or “The Family,” Betsy DeVos singled out education reform as a way to “advance God’s Kingdom.”38 In an interview, she and her husband lamented that public schools had “displaced” churches as centers of the community, and said that school choice would lead to “greater Kingdom gain.”
To put the DeVoses’ contempt for public schools in a religious context, a helpful point of reference is the 2003 report from the synod, or general assembly, of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. At a five-day gathering, the Grand Rapids–based organization put out a report warning that “government schools” have “become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last forty years.” Public schools, the report claims, are engaged in “a deliberate program of de-Christianization” that is at odds with Christian morality. “Not only does there exist a climate of hostility toward the Christian faith,” the report continues, but “the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multi-culturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities such as the deification of mother earth (Gaia) and to promote social causes such as environmentalism.” The report goes on to champion “choice” and decry the efforts of “powerful lobbying groups” to resist “alternatives to public education such as charter schools and vouchers.”39
In the 2000 election cycle, the DeVoses decided to place a huge bet on a Michigan ballot referendum in support of vouchers. The idea was to turn the state into an Ayn Randian paradise of privatized education in which public schools would wither as the field was turned over to entrepreneurs. The family and its allies poured millions of dollars into the campaign. Voters rejected the initiative by a two-to-one margin. But by then the DeVoses had begun to back charter organizations as part of their effort. Even after the ballot failure, the conflation of charters and vouchers would become a common feature of their tactics.
As the campaign-financing arm of the movement grew, so did the nonprofit arm. By 2009, Betsy DeVos had become chair of the major sister organizations of national pro-voucher nonprofits, Alliance for School Choice and Advocates for School Choice. As recently as July 2016, DeVos chaired the board of directors of the American Federation for Children, which works alongside the American Legislative Exchange Council to craft and support model “school choice” legislation.
One of the DeVoses’ initiatives, a network of political action committees under the name All Children Matter, came under fire for violations of campaign finance rules, which included funneling $870,000 from its Virginia PAC to its affiliate in Ohio, skirting a $10,000 limit on contributions.40 The group was issued a fine by the Ohio Elections Commission of over $5 million. In 2013 Ohio attorney general Mike DeWine obtained a court judgment to enforce the fine. But by that point, All Children Matter had closed down, and had no assets left to collect.41
By now the voucher movement had begun to shed its limited claims to respectability. The historian, education policy analyst, and former U.S. assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch, an early proponent of vouchers, reversed her position, asserting that they were ineffective in dealing with persistent gaps in racial and economic equity.42
Numerous academic studies added to the doubts on vouchers’ effectiveness. A 2007 study of Milwaukee schools by professors from three universities showed poor to mixed results for vouchers in that city. A study of Indiana’s voucher program, substantially expanded by the state’s then governor Mike Pence, found no change among student reading scores and achievement losses in mathematics. A 2016 study funded by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation and conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded that students who use vouchers tend to fare worse academically than closely matched peers who attend public schools. A 2017 Century Foundation report concluded that vouchers intensify racial and religious segregation. Another report, from the Economic Policy Institute, asserted that the loss of community-based schools makes it harder for poor families to access wraparound services, such as job training, health care, and academic support, that can help lift them out of poverty. “All of these yield much higher returns than the minor, if any, gains that have been estimated for voucher students,” wrote Martin Carnoy, a professor of education and economics at Stanford University, who authored the report.43
These setbacks did little to diminish the DeVos family’s determination to take American education out of the dead hands of government. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2002, Dick DeVos outlined new strategies for the movement, emphasizing the need to spend available funding on a system of “rewards and consequences” for state legislators.44 He also drew attention to a critical insight that had emerged from the campaign: The idea of vouchers scared off many voters because it sounded like—indeed it was—a way of privatizing the school system. The DeVoses were slowly coming to the realization that charter schools might be the way to advance their aims.
In public confusion about the nature of charters, the DeVos family and their allies saw opportunity. A lightly regulated charter school industry, they realized, could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or even religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received. Democrats, centrists, and secular education reformers who opposed voucher schemes were often favorably disposed to charters, which they saw as one of many tools available to public school systems.
In the aftermath of the 2000 voucher referendum failure, Betsy DeVos and her allies decided to shift their tactics and went all in on the charter movement. Many of the policy groups they funded followed suit. All became evangelists for “school choice,” a label that conveniently blu
rs the distinction between charter schools and voucher programs—and between publicly accountable, well-regulated charters and those operating with minimal oversight. They also understood quite clearly that secrecy would be necessary. Dick DeVos advised a Heritage Foundation audience in 2002 that “we need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities.”45 The cause, he noted, “will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done—one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy.”
A number of the most active boosters of DeVos’s voucher movement rapidly joined the upper ranks of the new charter industry. J. C. Huizenga, a friend of the DeVos family from the yacht club scene at Castle Rock and a longtime voucher advocate whose name also appears in the leaked directory of the Council for National Policy, established National Heritage Academies, a Grand Rapids–based for-profit charter network that now has approximately ninety schools in nine states, making it the third-largest public charter operator in the country, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Clark Durant, another voucher booster, opened his own chain of charters, the Cornerstone Education Group. Prince-backed Hillsdale College created a subsidiary, Barney Charter School Initiative, to move into the charter business. And longtime DeVos ally Foster Friess (a past president of the Council for National Policy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,46 and the billionaire funder of other right-wing causes) joined the effort in promoting “charter schools, school choice, and innovative private sector solutions.”
The DeVos vision for the charter industry, not surprisingly, had little room for government involvement. While many charter operators appreciate that sensible regulation and oversight are essential to a healthy charter sector, DeVos and her allies consistently undermined efforts to establish those safeguards. Through the Great Lakes Education Project, DeVos lobbied the Republicans in the Michigan legislature not just to expand charters but also to gut meaningful regulation.47
With DeVos money flooding the arteries of the state’s political system, Michigan soon became a paradise for for-profit charter operators, most of them concentrated in urban areas. More than half of Detroit’s children now attend charters—second in the nation only to New Orleans (and possibly Flint, Michigan)—and 80 percent of these are for-profit. The charter lobby not only secured the rights to massive expansion but also scored some lucrative tax breaks. Charter operators who own the property that they lease to their own schools demanded—and received—a tax exemption on that property, an arrangement that has become increasingly common around the country.48
The key to the charter boom was deregulation on a scale that would have made any devotee of Milton Friedman proud. “Michigan’s laws are either nonexistent or so lenient that there are often no consequences for abuses or poor academics,” concluded a 2014 article, the culmination of a yearlong investigation into Michigan charters, which was published in the Detroit Free Press. “Taxpayers and parents are left clueless about how charter schools spend the public’s money, and lawmakers have resisted measures to close schools down for poor academic performance year after year.”49
Meanwhile, in regions lacking in charter regulation and oversight, the sector has been a boon for profiteers. In Arizona, for example, with the approval of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, state representative Eddie Farnsworth reaped nearly $14 million in profit selling his four-school charter group to a nonprofit run by some of his pals. Glenn Way, founder of Arizona’s American Leadership Academy, scored over $18 million in profit with no-bid contracts to build charters, paid for largely with public money. In Arizona, all of this is perfectly legal.50
The charter boom has also been, not coincidentally, a terrific development for theologically motivated charter operators. When Clark Durant founded Cornerstone in 1991, he intended to create private, religious schools with a clear dedicated mission of “lifting up a Christ-centered culture.” As Allie Gross of Chalkbeat’s Detroit office reported in 2017, principal Candace Brockman declared on the Cornerstone website that she “considers it a blessing to be able to educate children in a learning environment that places Jesus Christ first.”51 In a privately funded, faith-based educational setting, such goals would be appropriate. But four of Cornerstone’s five schools are now publicly funded charters. When Gross toured one of the newly “de-converted” schools, she found religious posters on the wall and other markers of sectarianism.
“Pinpointing where the religious school ended and the charter school began was difficult,” Gross wrote. “The school is also in the process of re-thinking how they can make sure influential texts, such as the Bible, are still, legally, underscoring lessons.”52
Over at Hillsdale College’s Barney Charter School Initiative, one doesn’t have to peel back many layers to arrive at the ideological agenda. At the top of their web page is a link to Imprimis, a publication promoting a conservative political and religious agenda, with articles on “The Left’s War on Free Speech” and “A More American Conservatism,” and a piece titled “How to Think about Vladimir Putin.” The latter defends the Russian dictator and assures readers that he is “not the president of a feminist NGO,” “a transgender-rights activist,” or “an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy.”53 The Barney Charter Initiative’s former mission statement, which has since been taken down, declared that its goal was to “redeem” American public education and “recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism.”54
Reporter Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent alleged that the Golden View Classical Academy, a charter school in Golden, Colorado, with “strong ties to billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch’s conservative political network” as well as links to the Barney Charter School Initiative, was offering students a religion-based curriculum. Such schools, she wrote, “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”55
The bonanza for the charter operators proved to be a catastrophe for both the children of Michigan and the state’s taxpayers. A 2017 NAACP task force report on the efficacy and impact of charters quoted a teacher in Detroit: “It’s sad when you walk in a classroom here and you don’t even know it’s a biology classroom. We don’t have the materials, we don’t have the resources.”56 Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Romney, a board member of the civic and social justice organization New Detroit, said that the “point was to raise all schools” but instead “we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”57 A yearlong investigation into two decades of Detroit charters by the Detroit Free Press uncovered grotesque levels of financial mismanagement. At some schools, operators were putting family and friends on the payrolls. A record number of for-profit charters refused to declare how they spend taxpayer money. School closures in Michigan have disrupted the education of nearly 25,000 students, 87 percent of whom are Black.58
For DeVos and her allies in the school choice movement, however, the disastrous consequences of deregulation of Michigan education were all the more reason to try harder next time. The plan now was to subject the rest of the nation to the same treatment.
As I traveled around the country in the course of my research, I began to notice a pattern. In the rural byways outside of Greenville, the strip malls of Phoenix, and the city blocks of Detroit, buildings that had once been solely intended for use as churches now housed charter schools, too. Some of the church-schools were led by pastors aiming to improve academic offerings for local youth. Others seemed to arise from a desire, on behalf of their leaders, for a fresh income stream. Still others seemed to be headed by religion-minded entrepreneurs from out of state. Several people told me the schools in their neighborhoods were utilizing academic workbooks from Abeka and other religious publishers, indoctrinating students in libertarian economics, or teaching Christian nationalist versions of American history. I went from supposing that these religion- and ideolo
gy-infused schools were quirky components of America’s diverse education ecosystem to recognizing them as part of a larger trend.
I reached out to Vanessa Descalzi, a representative with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which bills itself as “the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the public charter school movement,” for a list of the top twenty largest charter networks in the nation. I was curious to see if any of these networks were run by people with religious, partisan, or ideological agendas. The number that were surprised me.
Charter Schools USA, a Florida-based network of close to eighty charter schools operating in six states, is the fourth-largest charter operator in the country, right after DeVos buddy J. C. Huizenga’s National Heritage Academies. Charter Schools USA founder Jonathan Hage, a former staffer at the Heritage Foundation, has a pattern of political giving to Republican politicians. He was rewarded by Florida governor Rick Scott with a seat on Scott’s education transition team; from his perch, Hage reportedly influenced changes to state law intended to make it easier for charter chains to open new schools. Charter Schools USA recently expanded into North Carolina, aided by such pro-charter politicians as the state’s two Republican U.S. senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, both of whom have been recipients of DeVos’s political donations.
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