That Moment In The Story When The Hero Finds Proof of The Villain’s Evil Plan: Richard D. McLellan’s 1990 Notes On School Choice

Monday , 23, March 2015 7 Comments

In Michigan, one of the first instances of school choice happened in the 1970s when Jack Hoekstra, president of the Kalamazoo School Board, tried to stop desegregation of Kalamazoo Public Schools by allowing parents to choose the school they wanted their kids to attend with the condition they were responsible for transportation. School choice has been championed by others in the state over the years, but there is one name that has become synonymous with the Michigan education reform movement – Richard D. McLellan.

When Michigan drafted their charter school law, Richard D. McLellan was there. When Michigan tried to set up a voucher system in 2002 that failed, Richard D. McLellan was there. When EMU chancellors were approached about getting behind the EAA in 2011, Richard D. McLellan was there. Skunkworks? You bet, he was there too. Richard D. McLellan was part of the school choice movement in Michigan before it actually became a movement. How do we know? He took notes.

In 1990 before “school choice,” “education reform movement,” or “the civil rights movement of our time” uttered by conservatives like Rand Paul were common phrases, Richard D. McLellan jotted down a plan to fundamentally change Michigan’s schools. In this page of scribbled notes leaked recently is the proof  McLellan already planned the demise of Michigan’s public schools 25 years ago.

The RDM in the upper right-hand corner is his initials. The list of names seems to be associated with “Michigan Citizens for Choice.”

McLellan knew that the majority of Michigan citizens wouldn’t want public schools to be taken over by churches, so here he jots down a note that it’s important to mainstream the “school choice” message, and separate it from the nonpublic schools that most people were familiar with at the time – parochial schools.

Every school reformer from GLEP director/DeVos yes man Gary Naeyaert to presidential hopeful Rand Paul have been quoted saying that school choice is the “civil rights issue of our time.” 25 years ago you can see one of the goals of McLellan’s was to use the phrase “civil rights issue of the 90’s” to get blacks and Hispanics on board supporting it. School choice is a dog whistle for segregation.

Here’s another goal of McLellan’s to make sure minorities not only get on board but take leadership roles in supporting school choice. He also lists businesses and taxpayers as people who need to help with the cause.

It’s really hard to convince people they need to stop sending their kids to public schools if they think their public schools are doing a good job. 25 years ago Richard D. McLellan wrote down as part of his plan for promoting school choice was the need to discredit public schools. He also linked this goal to making sure fewer revenues went to Detroit. Now, why would McLellan see that as a necessary goal for school choice?

“What’s In It For Me” is another way of getting people to support something by making them think what they have isn’t good enough. This “matrix” as McLellan calls it is a very common method used by politicians to push an agenda onto people.

And finally, the last goal of McLellan’s listed on this page is the importance of selling the idea that this is not a plan to switch public school for parochial schools, but an “education reform movement” that will appear on the outside as something to make public schools better, while you’re actually starving them of funds and dismantling them at the same time.

Here in Richard McLellan’s own chicken scratching is a plan that most of us today recognize as reality. 25 years ago Richard D. McLellan wrote down a list of goals to change Michigan’s public schools, not to better educate our kids, but to eradicate public education. This is what our new superintendent is up against, will he fight for our public schools? Or go along with the plan McLelland penned a quarter of a century ago.

7 thoughts on “ : That Moment In The Story When The Hero Finds Proof of The Villain’s Evil Plan: Richard D. McLellan’s 1990 Notes On School Choice”
  • […] because they haven’t had the privilege of being exposed to her not-so-subtle racism. is the term civil rights has been hijacked by the school choice agenda as a way to get black people on board and promote […]

  • […] Center, the state’s political machine that champions anti-labor and anti-public education’s causes. DeVos money funded the recent Detroit ‘bailout’ passed by the Michigan legislation designed to […]

  • […] a for-profit charter school without competing with real public schools, because that’s the whole purpose of charter schools in Michigan. Another reason G2S will need more student enrollment is stated by […]

  • […] schools into for-profit corporations “for the children.” Thanks to Richard McLellan and his scribbled notes from 25 years ago, we now know the destruction of public schools in Detroit has been calculated and […]

  • WilBrem says:

    DeWeese ran TEACH Michigan at the time (while running for a state House seat), a corporate-backed group backing the removal of the Michigan Constitution’s ban on private school vouchers. This lead to Proposal 1, which crashed so bad that the Mackinac Center now calls them “universal tuition tax credits.” But they amount to the same thing.

    These notes are no surprise except that they became public. How did that happen? The article would have even more impact if it explained how we know these are McLellan’s notes.

  • Glenn Ikens says:

    Tremendous story. It is not a conspiracy. It is a reality. The ant-government, pro-choice movement is unapologetically anti social justice, anti public services and anti public institutions. In the mind of the masterminds (who exploit the disenfranchised, the uninformed, the poor, the powerless) there is no good but their own narrow good, only their private good… no such thing as public good.

    • Up North Progressive says:

      You know they’re doing it, but it’s always different when you finally see concrete proof of their intentions.

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