Stephen Henderson

Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor

MACKINAC ISLAND — We really ought to round up the lawmakers who took money to protect and perpetuate the failing charter-school experiment in Detroit, sew them into burlap sacks with rabid animals, and toss them into the Straits of Mackinac.

That’s harsh. Maybe.

But isn’t that what the Romans or Greeks or some other early practitioners of democracy used to do with solicitous and unprincipled public officials?

And this legislation that passed the state House of Representatives Thursday night, the one that bows to the thoroughly debunked theory that a free-for-all, market-based approach to public schooling will produce quality choices for Detroit parents?

It is garbage.

Mackinac Policy Conference

It is bought-and-paid-for work product from a legislative body whose leader, the maladroit thinker Kevin Cotter, has sold his caucus’ political soul to the high-bidding DeVos family and other charter advocates and told himself it’s about belief, not money.

In the most crass terms, the House of Representatives is telling parents in Detroit that the best we deserve is what we have now. Public schools that have been underfunded and torn asunder by depopulation and corruption. Charters opening and closing willy-nilly, many to profit off the traditioal public schools’ misery, but offering alternatives in name only to the public schools they claim to outperform. The bragging that charter advocates do about the sliver of daylight between the outcomes of charters and traditional public schools would be roll-on-the-floor funny if it weren’t so condescending, and it it didn't heartily embrace the idea of calcified inequality.

It is every bit deserving of an old-school retributive response.

A sack. An animal. A lake.

No lover of actual democracy could weep at that outcome.

In more practical terms, this ought to be resisted by Lansing’s more reasonable lawmakers.

The Senate’s version of Detroit schools legislation includes a Detroit Education Commission, an authority to manage both public and charter school sitings and openings, and to bring at least a measure of performance accountability to the city schools landscape. It’s a watered-down version of what a broad-based coalition for Detroit schools recommended last year, but it’s an important step toward rationality.

The House version guts that idea, relegating the DEC to an advisory role. Why? Because charter advocates fear the accountability it would bring to their operations. For 26 years, they’ve operated in Detroit essentially without performance-based oversight, and they’ve delivered, as a whole, on none of their promise. There are a few standout examples, but charter schools, collectively, have moved the needle an inch on a scale that is many feet long. Their outcomes are a smidgen better than the traditional public schools’ much-decried academic struggles.

The Senate should insist the DEC go back into the bills.

And if the Senate caves — charter advocates fill a lot of GOP pockets in that chamber, too — then Gov. Rick Snyder, an early supporter of the DEC concept, ought to veto the legislation.

I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but it’s worth repeating.

House leaders said this week they only passed their version because they’ve won enough support in the Senate to make it law.

Snyder said Friday on Mackinac Island that the DEC remains a priority, and that he will continue to push for it to be part of the outcome.

But he also seems poised to pivot away from a passionate defense of the commission, which he has previously said would be a key part of Detroit school reform. Now, Snyder says he thinks eliminating the DEC shouldn’t be a deal-breaker because of the legislation’s other merits — the debt repayment, the return of an elected school board, the start-up money for a new district.

But really, there’s no reasonable basis for the House’s version of this legislation to prevail.

It passed with a bare majority, and only after Cotter held the floor open for 13 hours trying to corral enough votes.

So it represents an expressly minority view on this, even in Lansing. The Senate’s legislation got bipartisan support, and the governor has been on board with that version for some time. A coalition of Detroit stakeholders also favors this version.

This is not about helping Detroit kids.

This is about money and its influence over policy in Lansing. This is about legislators abandoning common sense for well-financed but unproven ideology. This is about dooming children in the state’s largest city to continued chaos and mediocrity, on the strength of empty rhetoric and false promises.

Cotter has led the House this way on a host of issues (like road funding) where his caucus proffers an insane solution, digs in its heels and cows the Senate and governor into capitulating for fear that the alternative will be nothing.

But that’s like letting a tantrumming child get the lolly he so desperately wants. And it’s a rotten way to make policy.

If the Senate and governor can’t find the political fortitude, or the moral certitude, to turn back the House’s aggressive advance, then they are no better than Cotter and his band of bought miscreants.

And the saddest part of this? The DEC was only the first step toward actually creating the high-quality school options Detroit parents so desperately need. A meager one, too.

We’ve got no shot at the tougher steps — design, funding, implementation of world-class public and charter schools across the city — if we can’t get lawmakers to embrace something this simple, and common-sense.

Hope is nowhere to be found in what the House did here — only craven, warped politicking.

I know we deserve better.