Ellis Kempf is an 18-year-old high school student at Royal Oak High School. He’s a three-letter varsity sports player, and is captain of the Royal Oak High School wrestling team. He’s also deaf. WDIV-TV’s Mara MacDonald reported last night that Kempf and his parents are suing the Michigan High School Athletic Association because they refused to allow him to have […]

The teaching profession is steadily being transformed into a “gig job” on the model of Uber, Lyft and AirBnB wherein customers are paired with independent providers via Smart Phone apps. The model grew out of human desperation during the bleakest days of the Great Recession. As teacher shortages roll out across the nation we can count on Republican legislatures to […]

Some terrific reporting by John Wisely and Ann Zaniewski of the Detroit Free Press shows that Gov. Snyder’s failed experiment on Detroit school children, the Education Achievement Authority, is still a place where corruption is still a big problem. After former EAA Chancellor John Covington left under a cloud of scandal and corruption, Veronica Conforme was brought in to set […]

You have to give the group headed up by rabid tea partier Pasquale Battaglia credit; they are persistent. After having their request to charter their tea party charter school denied by Brighton Public Schools, they have turned their attention now to Whitmore Lake Public Schools. The WLPS voted on October 26th to put out a call soliciting a cyber charter […]

The following essay was written by Mitchell Robinson and was originally published on his most-excellent blog at MitchellRobinson.net. Robinson is associate professor and chair of music education, and coordinator of the music student teaching program at Michigan State University. His essay is reposted here with permission. The Great Lakes Education Project is a Michigan advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the […]

Steve Ingersoll has become the face of charter school operators scamming Michigan taxpayers by siphoning tax dollars intended for education into their own personal bank accounts. Ingersoll founded and operated the Bay City Academy in Bay City and the Grand Traverse Academy in Grand Traverse County. Last spring he was convicted on three counts of criminal tax fraud connected to […]

Yesterday I wrote about a report from the Center for Media and Democracy that showed how 25 proposed charter schools in Michigan received $1.7 million in tax dollars but never actually opened. It turns out that one of those schools was the Detroit College Preparatory Academy, the brainchild or “dream” of a woman named Natasha Baker. Here’s what Baker’s dream […]

This week, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a scathing report on charter schools in 12 states which have received federal funding. The report, titled Charter School Black Hole shows that Michigan charter schools received $34,997,658 between 2010-2015 under the federal Charter School Program (CSP). 139 of the 297 charters (as of 2014, the number is up to […]

The following guest post is by Mitchell Robinson and was first posted at his education-focused blog MitchellRobinson.net. He offered it up to me to share with the readers of Eclectablog and I immediately took him up on it having already read his beautiful prose. Robinson is associate professor and chair of music education at Michigan State University. He has held […]

In 1999, the Detroit Public School system had a positive fund balance of $246,300,000 according to a ten-year summary in their 2008 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (pages 91-92). That was the same year that the DPS was taken over by the State of Michigan under Republican John Engler. The school district was placed under the control of an Emergency Financial […]

Look out, Indiana! It’s coming right for you! After having been beta tested in Michigan, the Emergency Manager model of “saving” “failing” municipalities from their own corruption, malfeasance, and ineptitude – or as is more often the case, the implosion of their manufacturing base and disinvestment – is being rolled out in the states of Indiana and New Jersey. In […]