There was a good plan, but the money won out

By Wytrice Harris

As a parent of a child in Detroit Public Schools, I was involved with the education committee of a community organization. There is a day in Michigan called “count day,” where schools are allotted money for every child that is physically in the building on that day. A charter school in our neighborhood closed suddenly right after count day. So that school received all the monetary value from the kids, and the kids had to scramble to figure out where they were going to go to school. I thought why isn’t someone overseeing this?

Other parents and I started a group called 482Forward (because all our zip codes in Detroit begin with 482), and we began to look at the disparities across the city. In the northeast neighborhoods of Detroit, we have 6,000 high school kids but only two high schools. We have a thriving new, gorgeous downtown area, where there are a few thousand student and 11 high schools. You can see what’s happening, right? The charter schools are cherry-picking places with more prosperity.

When I went to school, if you didn’t like the education where you were, you fought and you made that school what it should be. Now when parents don’t like the school, they’ll just find another choice. I know someone with four kids in school. Between the four of them, they’ve gone to 27 different schools!

“It felt like an underhanded deal, a back-room deal in the middle of the night. Money was more important than the people’s voice.”

If you ask parents, they will say they want a quality school in their neighborhood that their kids can walk to. Schools have to be part of our bigger community. But I would say most people chartering schools in Detroit have never been to our city. We have 12 authorizers of charter schools in Detroit, some that are eight hours away, with very different demographics than the students they’re opening schools for. These authorizers are making choices for us. When they open up a school, they don’t ask us what we want or what our kids need.

We came together two years ago to form the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren, which was comprised uniquely of business people, educators and politicians from both parties. We decided to fight for the Detroit Education Commission, which would have oversight over school openings and closings and look at the landscape of what’s best for the city and the children in the city. The state Senate came up with a bill that was bipartisan, and it was looking really good for us.

Then the Senate bill was sent to the House, and DeVos and her family started wielding their money to squash it.The House threw that bill to the side and drafted their own that was very punitive to teachers and did not include the Detroit Education Commission at all. There were millions of dollars spent in campaign contributions just in the month of June, and the money won.

The House bill passed at 4:30 in the morning. It felt like an underhanded deal, a back-room deal in the middle of the night. Money was more important than the people’s voice. All in the name of choice for people who didn’t get to choose.

Wytrice Harris is the parent of two Detroit Public School students and the communications lead at 482Forward, a citywide education organizing network in Detroit.