When I later spoke to Newland, pointing out the cultural and geographical chasm between B.M.C.C. and the downstate, urban neighborhoods so many of their charters served, he shot back that Indians knew poverty as well anyone. “It’s a different stage for the same play,” he told me. “I think we understand it very well.” Were he “designing an education system from scratch,” Newland continued, he’d make funding levels the same for every district and pay teachers “like the white-collar professionals that they are.” But he wasn’t, so he supported charter schools. Unlike Parish, Newland was willing to discuss DeVos. “I learned at a relatively young age not to ascribe malice to people as a motivation,” he said. “I think when she says, ‘I care about having our kids learn,’ I believe that.” But, Newland went on: “She didn’t go to public school. Her kids didn’t go. My guess is she doesn’t hang out with a lot of people who know what it’s like going to a school with 50 percent people of color. And I haven’t seen evidence that she’s taken the time to learn.”

When Brown took over at Carver Academy, one of the many problems she inherited was enormous real estate debt. The problem is not uncommon: Michigan does not mandate that its charter schools buy or lease property at fair-market prices, resulting — predictably — in wildly inflated real estate spending. In Carver’s case, the situation was especially frustrating because the debt was a legacy from yet another for-profit entity. Though the school was founded in 1999 by Birdlene Esselman, a beloved local educator (she was Brown’s elementary-school principal), it contracted with a for-profit E.M.O. called Mosaica Education. After only a year of operation, Carver, still run by Mosaica, signed a mortgage agreement to buy and upgrade the school property for $7.1 million — the loan Brown found herself facing down 17 years later.

When she began talks with Scott VanderWerp, who runs the public-finance group at Oak Ridge Financial, Brown mainly hoped to lower the school’s annual interest payments. But VanderWerp told her to write up a wish list of capital improvements. After he performed a refinancing analysis on Carver’s outstanding debt, he told her he could deliver nearly $900,000 in savings over the remaining 13 years of the 30-year loan. A team of educators and financial auditors contracted by Oak Ridge made a two-day visit to the school and, in Brown’s words, “attacked the building,” observing classrooms and interviewing everyone: teachers, administrators, security guards. Three weeks later they returned and did it again, analyzing strengths and weaknesses to determine, Brown said, “if we are an investment that is going to make it or not.”

Before joining Oak Ridge in 2015, VanderWerp spent nearly three decades in the bond market, often trading riskier, high-yield credits, and became an expert in municipal debt. “Our basic function is to find funding solutions for public and charter schools, private schools, small community hospitals, not-for-profit senior living facilities,” VanderWerp told me. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, he said, Oak Ridge was the No. 1 issuer, by total schools, of charter-school debt in Michigan.

Carver’s debt made no sense to VanderWerp: $6.5 million of debt on a building that’s surrounded by public-housing complexes, in a place where 49 percent of people live under the poverty rate. “The crime rates are high, there are vacant buildings everywhere,” VanderWerp said. “I think you’d readily agree that that building and land isn’t worth $5- or $6 million. Quite candidly, it’s probably worth $500,000 or $600,000.” He said charters often entered bad deals because authorizers and school boards, which must approve loans, lacked a basic understanding of bond finance. “The vast majority of Michigan authorizers don’t have anybody in-house who understands bond financing or researches it, even to the point of becoming a novice,” he said. “And in my experience, they rarely say no.” (Carver’s authorizer was Central Michigan University at the time of the building purchase.)

At the same time, banks and hedge funds, Miron told me, profit greatly from the charter sector, thanks to large tax breaks dating back to the Clinton presidency that benefit investors in schools located in struggling “renewal communities.” And with so many eager lenders and bond underwriters lined up, E.M.O.s realized they, in turn, could make money from one of the largest expenses charter schools face. “A bunch of them thought, Wow, I can start a real estate division!” VanderWerp said. “We’ve run into this all over the place”: E.M.O.s buy buildings “for a couple hundred thousand bucks, lease them to the school for a couple of years and then sell them” to the school “for a few million.” In Michigan, 80 percent of charters are currently operated by for-profit E.M.O.s. The state’s largest E.M.O., the Grand Rapids-based National Heritage Academies, operates 84 charters in nine states and has been criticized for charging wildly above-market annual rents to its schools: A Detroit Free Press investigation found that 14 National Heritage schools in Michigan pay the company $1 million or more.

VanderWerp is pro-charter school: “I love to see people compete to teach kids and shake up the norm,” he says. But he finds the Michigan model deeply flawed. In Minnesota, he points out, a school must wait five years before purchasing a building, in order to demonstrate a proven track record. Michigan has no such rule, which was why Carver was able to purchase its building after a single year of operation. According to a 2015 study, Michigan was the state leader in charter-school bond defaults, responsible for more than a third of the nationwide total. In his own practice, VanderWerp makes sure the buildings being financed have intrinsic value, so they can be converted into offices or apartments if the charter school fails. “It’s a real estate investment,” he says, not “an investment in a business that has to stay afloat to pay a real estate loan.”