MI: DeVos and Far Right Team Up To Crush Public Ed (And Voting, And A Few Other Things)

Michigan's right wing has a problem, and she's living in the governor's mansion. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has vetoed many favorite proposals, including bills aimed at tax cuts, limiting voting rights, and vouchering education.

So they've developed a new plan--just do a complete end run around Michigan's elected leaders and get their wish list mandated. Michigan allows something called a citizen initiative, by which citizens can petition for a law and send it straight to the legislature. It takes just 8% of the voters from the last gubernatorial race to send a bill to the legislature where it can be voted up or down, with no option for a veto. 

The Let MI Kids Learn petitions bill themselves as a "scholarship" because "voucher," "taxpayer funding for private schools," and "tax dodge" aren't popular branding. The website for the initiative announces itself as aimed at taking power away from The Evil Union (though Michigan is a Right To Work state, apparently the Evil Union still exerts tool much power). The proposal is thin on details, but it appears to be a combination of a tax credit scholarship (instead of paying your taxes, contribute to your favorite private school) and education savings accounts (get some free money to spend at the educational-flavored product vendor of your choice). 

Of course, you know which Michigan resident loves this whole thing. Betsy DeVos and her family have donated a big ole ton of money ($400K just last December)  to supporting the initiative, as well as lending her face and voice to the effort. You may recall that Betsy DeVos resigned because she found the Trumpian rhetoric and January 6 insurrection just too much, but she seems to have set aside her aversion to far right misbehavior; according to Kathryn Joyce at Salon, this big initiative finds DeVos allying herself with folks like Stand Up Michigan, a "patriot" group whose protests have drawn the same kind of crowd that plotted to kidnap the governor.

DeVos has been promoting the initiative with familiar half-truths. She has argued that this is a chance "for parents to take control of education in Michigan," but vouchers don't give a parent the ability to enroll their children in schools that won't accept them. These vouchers, like all vouchers, mostly allow the state to say, "Hey, we gave you a small check. Your child's education is now nobody's problem but yours. We wash our hands of you." Nowhere on the website does it talk about protections for parents and students, or oversight and accountability for the businesses that will be hoovering up those sweet, sweet tax dollars. 

Or as Casandra Ulbrich, chairman of the State Board of Education explains

Michigan’s public schools are not for sale. We have an abundance of choice. This isn’t about choice. This is about privatizing education. This is about taking public education dollars and turning them over to private institutions that are not accountable to taxpayers, do not have to report anything to anybody, and can use that money in any way they want.

Ulbrich is part of For MI Kids, For Our Schools, a group mounting a counter-offensive against the attempted dismantling of public education in Michigan. They are attempting to counter the misinformation and just-plain-lying being used to collect signatures for the voucher plan. They are pointing out the lack of accountability in the new system, and the lack of choice for parents who do not have "desirable" student to enroll. 

Just because you have a voucher does not mean you can send your child to the school of your choice, because private schools retain the right to accept or reject as they please. Meanwhile, a voucher system knocks another hole in the public school funding bucket, and in Michigan, that bucket has already taken a beating--thanks, of course, to DeVos money.

DeVos's intentions have never been particularly secret. The government should not be in charge of education; the church should. Unions are just a way for lessers to exert power they don't deserve; lessers (like teachers) should know their place. Schools should not be for elevating everyone, but for sorting people into their proper place (kind of like the free market separates poor lessers from their rich betters), and so everyone should find a school that is the "right fit." DeVos isn't particularly big on democracy and its trappings (those unruly mobs); she's more of a Christianist plutocrat, and as such would prefer an education system that allows folks to make money implementing God's Kingdom, and not a system that takes money from betters in order to fund public schools for lessers. 

In other words, using a weird trick to do an end run around actual democratic institutions is just fine if it helps dismantle just a little more of the public education system. I sure hope that folks in Michigan are paying attention and not getting snookered into further dismantling public schools. And they'd better keep an eye on those other initiatives aimed at voter suppression and (of course) tying the government's hands in case of a health crisis. God luck.