Editorial

Detroit School Boss: Charter Schools Are ‘Disastrous’

While his own district is nation’s worst, charter students do measurably better

Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of Detroit’s school district, recently said that conventional public schools are the best place for a child to be educated, and charter schools have been “disastrous” for communities.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has rated the Detroit Public Schools Community District as the worst urban school system in the country in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015. The NAEP test is given every two years.

ForTheRecord says: Imagine a city in America where there was an NFL football team so poorly run, it had only won one playoff game dating back to 1957. While other teams win playoff games and even make the Super Bowl, this NFL team is generally regarded as the worst franchise in the league.

But then, another football franchise comes to this city and the new team is more successful. It takes disgruntled fans away from the older laughingstock franchise that continues to perform worse than the new team in town. But the owner of the failed franchise claims that this is “disastrous” for the league, when in fact, it’s only disastrous for its own troubled situation.

The NFL, of course, will not let another football team play in the city of Detroit other than the Lions.

But public charter schools are in Detroit, along with the district. And Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has put a number on how they stack up against the district. Charter school students in Detroit, it said in 2015, learned the equivalent of a few weeks to as much as several months of extra instruction in reading and math compared to their peers in the city’s conventional public schools. CREDO said the charter schools in Detroit should serve as a model for other communities in the U.S.

Who you gonna believe?

Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.

Commentary

Unions Admit Forcing People to Pay Dues is Political

U.S. Supreme Court considers right-to-work for all

The U.S. Supreme Court recently announced that it will hear the case of Janus v. AFSCME. The decision will determine whether millions of government workers around the nation can be forced to pay money to unions or whether they will be able to stop, essentially guaranteeing right-to-work for all public sector workers in the country.

This is a big deal. Currently, unions are able to force people to pay dues and in turn spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on political activities. This forced funding is an unconstitutional infringement, since the government is requiring people to pay for political speech they don’t want to pay for — violating the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Unions say, at least in court, that this money is actually about people paying their “fair share” because they are collectively bargaining on behalf of all workers.

But bargaining is, in fact, about politics. Even unions admit that. Consider the case against Janus from Eric A. Gordon, a writer and union supporter:

When right to work was imposed in Wisconsin a few years back, only one-tenth of the then unionized public employees in the state stayed on as dues-paying members. The other ninety percent, now “free” of the burden of paying dues and ignoring the invaluable union protection they were giving up, deserted the movement. … Without those resources, the union movement was unable to mount a winning campaign for the Democratic candidate for president in Wisconsin.

When the SEIU bankrolled a ballot proposal to continue the “dues skim” from home caregivers in Michigan, the president of the union said at the Democratic National Convention that it needed the forced dues “because unions are effective, we make sure Democrats get (into office) and we're going to make sure Obama gets in.”

Unions often sell themselves to prospective members by admitting that everything they do is political in nature. The Montana Education Association, for example, states on its website: “It’s a fact of life: every decision that affects public services is a political decision.” The Virginia Education Association tells teachers, “For better — and sometimes for worse — politics affect nearly every facet of public education.” And consider the Michigan Education Association: “Every education decision is a political decision.”

Private associations are a good thing; forced political speech is not. Just as no business should be required to pay money to the local chamber of Commerce, neither should public employees be forced to pay money to a union. The Supreme Court has a chance to ensure that for good.

Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.