One Of Michigan’s Oldest Charter Schools Is Failing And May Be Closing

Like so many charter schools across the country, Barack Obama Leadership Academy in Detroit, Michigan, may soon be closing for the same reasons charter schools fail and close every week (declining enrollment, financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and/or low academic performance).

Timbuktu Academy, which has been open since 1997, became Barack Obama Leadership Academy in 2019—ten years after Barack Obama became president of the United States.

Let’s first glance at some facts about Barack Obama Leadership Academy from a March 27, 2026, news article titled The future of one of Michigan’s oldest charter schools is uncertain:

·        The charter’s current contract ends June 30, 2026.

·        The school enrolls about 300 students in grades K-5.

·        The Obama charter has long struggled academically.

·        In the 2024-25 school year, only 10.4% of students at the charter met benchmarks on state tests for reading and writing. In math, 2.8% met benchmarks.

The news article also informs us that at a recent meeting, “administrators from the Detroit Public Schools Community District [DPSCD] recommended that the school board approve a one-year contract for the school, which would allow it to either make plans to close or find a new authorizer. But board members, who are frustrated with the charter’s struggling academic performance, said the school had not shown enough improvement to continue through the 2026-27 school year.” One board member said that, “The improvement is sad…. [Moving] from an F to a D – that’s not an improvement.” Students in the DPSCD performed better than students at Barack Obama Leadership Academy.

When all was said and done, “The four board members who were present at the end of the committee meeting decided not to put a vote on the charter’s contract renewal on the agenda of the April board meeting – a move that signaled the body will not allow the district to authorize another year of operation.”

The bigger and real story here is not this or that failing charter school but rather the broad failure of “free market” education. Far from solving anything, commodifying education leads to many intractable problems. Individualism, competition, consumerism, and opportunism undermine the type of education arrangements needed for a modern society and economy. Competition, for example, does not automatically ensure excellence, quality, or equity. Turning parents and students into consumers has also proven counterproductive.

Coercing everyone to fend-for-themselves in the 21^st century is an outdated way of doing things in a complex society. All these ideologies and practices undermine community.

The vast majority of what charter school advocates have promised for the past 35 years has never materialized. Privatization and deregulation have exacerbated everything.

Persistently low enrollment numbers in many charter schools, endless charter school failures and closures nationwide, never-ending propaganda and disinformation about charter schools, widespread corruption, increased segregation, lots of profiteering, trampling on democratic arrangements, numerous scandals, failing to be innovative, rampant low academic performance, excluding many different students, siphoning billions of dollars a year from public schools, opposing unions, treating teachers as “at will” employees, hiring lots of uncertified teachers, and not offering pensions or retirement packages to teachers in many charter schools are not ways to improve education or promote social progress. These are ways to wreck both.

People from all walks of life are suffering from the privatization of many spheres and sectors, not just the privatization of education. The need is for more socially-produced wealth to stay in public hands and be used solely for public purposes. No collectively-produced wealth must be funneled to private interests who have much different aims and agendas than the public. Working people have first claim to the wealth they produce together.

The outsourcing of schools to private operators is extremely harmful because pro-privatization fanatics embrace the profit motive and reject social responsibility and democracy. They are not interested in quality or what students, parents, teachers, and society really need. Upholding the public interest means preventing narrow private interests from further usurping state power to carry out their antisocial offensive in all spheres and sectors.

Shawgi Tell (PhD) is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu