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Billionaire Betsy DeVos, former U.S. secretary of education.
Public school advocates are mounting a campaign to defeat two ballot initiatives funded by the billionaire DeVos family that opponents say would cost the public school system hundreds of millions of dollars while providing tax breaks for wealthy people.
The Let MI Kids Learn initiatives, which are funded by dark money groups, would create so-called “opportunity scholarships” to enable donors to get tax breaks for donating to nonpublic education. The donations would allow students to attend private school.
Private school attendees would be able to receive up to 90% of the state’s minimum base per-pupil funding, which is roughly $7,830 a year.
Opponents say the initiatives are nothing more than a thinly veiled “voucher scheme” that violates the state’s constitutional ban on public assistance for private schools.
“Betsy DeVos and her allies have spent decades trying to dismantle the promise of public education and replace it with a system of for-profit and privatized schools that can pick and choose the students they want and are not accountable to anyone,” Cassandra Ulbrich, spokeswoman for the opposition, For MI Kids, said at a news conference Wednesday. “And now comes the latest attempt to defund neighborhood schools in favor of a voucher scheme that will take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Michigan School Aid Fund and ultimately can cost the state a billion dollars in revenue, impacting the needs of 90% of Michigan students who attend public schools while helping wealthy individuals and corporations avoid their fair share of taxes.”
Arlyssa Heard, a parent of a public special education student, said she enrolled her child in a private school in Detroit, but he was removed from the school because it didn’t have the resources to educate a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
“This ballot initiative would take hundreds of millions of dollars away from already under-resourced public schools and put it in the hands of private schools under the notion of ‘the grass is greener on the other sides,’” Heard said. “Private schools does not mean education paradise.”
She added, “Allowing rich people like the DeVos family to dictate the funding of our schools has not served any of our schools well.”
Tawanda Bailey, a retired teacher from Detroit’s public schools, said public education is already struggling with inadequate funding and would further deteriorate if money was diverted to private schools.
“I’ve seen a drastic change from the time I first started teaching up until last year when I retired,” Bailey said. “Students were more bubbly, they were excited about coming to school because we had activities, we had programs in place for them to enjoy, and they just enjoyed coming to school. As the years went by, these programs were taken away from us. We no longer had any funding for them.”
Andrew Brodie, superintendent of Flat Rock Community Schools, said the DeVos initiatives would create more inequality.
“This threat is real,” Brodie said. “We don’t need a voucher system that is going to further divide the haves and have nots in this state and funnel money to for-profit schools at the expense of our students. This isn’t going to make education in Michigan any better.”
Opponents of the initiatives contend supporters are deceiving Michigan voters to get signatures, saying the goal is not to put the issue on the ballot. A peculiarity in Michigan’s constitution allows the GOP-led Legislature to circumvent a veto using a voter-driven ballot initiative.
If more than 340,000 voters — or at least 8% of the total number of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election — sign the private school petitions, Republican legislators can bypass Whitmer and approve the law. That can happen even if the initiatives never reach the ballot.
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