...has been years in the making. To understand this, look no further than former Metro Times reporter Curt Guyette's June 1996 cover story (scanned and re-republished below), "Born Again Schools: The Right's Vision for Public Education in Michigan."
In this exhaustively researched and dare we say prophetic piece, Guyette zeroes in on Gov. John Engler's 1993 introduction of charter schools and the billionaires funding this "school reform" movement. Not surprisingly, many of the names we recognize today as big backers of today's legislation (ahem, the DeVos family) were big financial supporters of the charter movement in the 1990s.
Why would these billionaires be so intent on charter school expansion? As Guyette explains it, the four main financial backers of Michigan's charter school movement (the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation, the Prince Foundation, the Orville and Ruth Merillat Foundation, and the Cook Charitable Foundation) are also supporters of a series of religious issues and groups that advocate for the "christianizing" of American politics. In short, charter schools were a step towards these individuals' ultimate goal of getting public funding for parochial schools.
"To reach that goal, the groups promoting 'school reform' have mounted a relentless attack on the state's education system," Guyette wrote, later adding, "But that alone wouldn't be enough. To galvanize Michigan parents and taxpayers behind the idea of school choice, the reformers needed a Trojan horse that could effectively blur the lines between public and private education: charter schools."