What Does DeVos’s Charter School Expansion Hold? Look to Minnesota

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On September 28, the U.S. Department of Education announced plans to shower a whopping $253 million in grants to expand charter schools in a handful of states, buoying the nation’s “school choice” market.

Such announcements are often accompanied by cheerful talk of innovation and individual liberty. The new federal funding, beamed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is all about “seeing how we can continue to work with states to help ensure more students can learn in an environment that works for them.”

But if we follow the money to Minnesota, set to receive a huge chunk of this federal jackpot, we see how it is dangerous to our students, our schools, and the future of public education for all.

Announcing the grants, DeVos made mention of Minnesota, where the nation’s first charter school was authorized in 1991. With this new influx of federal money, Minnesota’s burgeoning school choice market will receive a $22 million shot in the arm. And $1 million of it will go directly to the Minneapolis-based Hiawatha Academies charter school chain.

Minnesota has an increasingly racially segregated school landscape and an exodus of money and students to non-unionized charter schools.

This is a perfect example of how funding school choice pits privately managed, publicly (and privately) funded charter schools against public school districts—especially when the charter schools are allowed to serve racially and economically isolated populations. As a result, Minnesota has an increasingly racially segregated school landscape and an exodus of money and students from larger, union-staffed districts to mostly non-unionized charter schools. Much of this was by design, as charter schools in Minnesota have not historically been held to the same integration mandates as traditional public schools.

Funding such schools is less about innovation and more about grabbing market share from the Minneapolis Public Schools. Hiawatha Academies’ expansion plan makes this clear: “Our goal is that by 2024, more than 2,000 scholars—5 percent of all Minneapolis school children—will attend a Hiawatha Academies school.” This path to expansion has been paved through unnaturally segregated schools and loads of outside money—including extensive financial support from the Walmart fueled Walton Family Foundation—and now, an injection of $1 million from the federal Department of Education.

Hiawatha Academies serves an almost exclusively Latino student population. Public records show that ninety-three percent of students at Hiawatha Academies’ Morris Park elementary school are Latino, even though the neighborhood is seventy-seven percent white.

The chain has several other schools in the southern half of Minneapolis, and is slated to open a big, brand-new high school in 2018. This school, Hiawatha Collegiate High School, will be funded in part by private investors (including several corporations) who will benefit from a New Market Tax Credit. This credit, established during the Clinton Administration and geared toward “underserved” areas, has provided a “gravy train to fat city” for charter school investors, as Forbes magazine writer Addison Wiggin put it in a 2013 article. Wiggin calls the charter school market “booming,” thanks to investments from “bankers, hedge fund types and private equity investors” eager to cash in on this credit.

All told, this adds up to a very juicy incentive package when it comes to the proliferation of charter schools in urban areas. Investors in Hiawatha Academies’ new high school have put up $5 million in funding through the New Market Tax Credit program. In order to rake in enough per-pupil funds to make this project sustainable over time, the school must rapidly grow its enrollment to the projected capacity of nearly 800 students. Tellingly, its new Collegiate High School will be located just down the street from two Minneapolis public elementary schools.

The corporate and government-sponsored expansion of charter schools is less about student success and more about pushing privatized, market forces onto public institutions to make a buck.

A recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article documented the drain charter schools are imposing on the city’s increasingly cash-strapped and underfunded public school district. Wrote reporters Beena Raghavendran and MaryJo Webster, “Minneapolis Public Schools is the biggest loser in Minnesota’s robust school-choice environment, surrendering more kids to charter schools and other public school options than any other district.”

The state education department’s website includes a list of charter schools deemed “high quality and worthy of replication. Among them are highly segregated schools like Twin Cities International Elementary School.

According to publicly available data, this “international” school, which serves Minneapolis’s large Somali community, has a student population that is 100 percent black/African-American (18 percent of the city’s overall population identifies as black, according to recent census data). And only two percent of its students require special education services, far less than the district-wide rate of 15 percent. (Special education remains an expensive, underfunded proposition for districts, like Minneapolis, that serve a larger percentage of students with special needs.)

Segregated schools often remain separate and unequal for students of color.

Research tells us that segregated schools often remain separate and unequal for students of color. In the Twin Cities, an increase in segregated schools has also meant that white students are being educated in public and charter schools with abnormally high percentages of white, wealthier students.

Meanwhile, the Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are struggling to keep up, especially in a time when public funding for education has dwindled significantly in Minnesota. Some might call this disaster capitalism, with public entities being weakened over time to create an opportunity to reconstruct the education landscape in favor of privatized, niche (segregated) charter schools that sometimes attract wealthy investors, but often fail to provide a better education for marginalized students.

This doesn’t seem to bother Betsy DeVos, either in her home state of Michigan, where she pushed for accountability-free charter schools, or in her new role as federal education secretary. One of the Trump Administration’s first action items for the Department of Education, under DeVos, was to cancel an Obama-era program designed to promote school integration. With this latest announcement, states like Minnesota are being pushed further into a market-based, privatized education system.