The results have been stark. The 2016 report by the Education Trust-Midwest noted:

Michigan’s K-12 system is among the weakest in the country and getting worse. In little more than a decade, Michigan has gone from being a fairly average state in elementary reading and math achievement to the bottom 10 states. It’s a devastating fall. Indeed, new national assessment data suggest Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum. White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live. ...

Charters continue to be sold in Michigan as a means of unwinding the inequality of a public-school system in which districts across the state, overwhelmingly African-American — Detroit, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Muskegon Heights, Flint — grapple with steep population declines, towering financial obligations, deindustrialization and the legacy of segregation. By allowing experimentation, proponents argue, and by breaking the power of teachers’ unions, districts will somehow be able to innovate their way past the crushing underfunding that afflicts majority-minority school districts all around the country. In reality, however, a 2017 Stanford University analysis found that increasing charter-school enrollment in a school district does little to improve achievement gaps. And in unregulated educational sectors like Michigan’s, there’s evidence that charters have actually increased inequality: A 2015 working paper by the Education Policy Center determined that Michigan’s school-choice policies “powerfully exacerbate the financial pressures of declining-enrollment districts” — and districts with high levels of charter-school penetration, the authors found, have fared worst of all. Today, all but seven states have some version of a charter law, though few have adopted a model as extreme as Michigan’s. Twenty-one states have a charter cap, 31 require charters to submit annual reports and 33 have statewide authorizing bodies. Michigan, abiding by none of those rules, has allowed 80 percent of its own charters to be operated by for-profit E.M.Os. Only 16 percent of charters nationwide are run by for-profit companies.

Nationally, the pro-charter tent is large and unwieldy enough to include education-reform wonks, hedge-fund managers, billionaire philanthropists and politicians from both parties, and Trump’s tapping of DeVos has placed the movement in a complex situation. Despite the policy ignorance displayed in her confirmation hearing, she’s an ally, and one whose influence on the 2018 Trump administration budget is already evident: Amid huge cuts to overall education spending, there’s a $517 million increase in funding for charters and private-school vouchers and an additional $1 billion worth of grants set aside for local districts willing to implement “open enrollment” programs (allowing students to attend any area public schools, charters included, and take allotted state and federal funds with them). Eighteen Republican governors sent the Senate’s education committee a letter in strong support of DeVos and what they called her promise to “streamline the federal education bureaucracy” and “return authority back to state and local school boards.”

But even many charter proponents are troubled by the Michigan model that DeVos had such a crucial role in creating. In a column in Education Week published in March, Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, corrected “friends and neighbors” who assumed he must be happy about the new education secretary, explaining that he rejected a “free-market approach to charter schooling” that “embraces the principles of choice and autonomy while gutting accountability” and insisting that “true supporters of charter schools will not abide by this co-optation of what it means to be a charter school.” With DeVos and her ideas ascendant in Washington, Michigan has become a symbol — and, for some, a cautionary tale — of a movement gone astray.

Before Carver Academy could move ahead on the loan refinancing, the school had to obtain permission from its “authorizer,” Bay Mills Community College. Perhaps the most startling feature of Michigan’s system is its lack of centralized oversight. In most of the country, state governments play some role in determining who can open charter schools and monitor their progress. But Engler ceded nearly all control to dozens of groups throughout Michigan — universities and community colleges, as well as existing public-school districts — granting them the power to approve the charters of would-be schools and act as sole oversight bodies. A result has been an inconsistently regulated glut of schools, all fighting over the same pool of students and money, a situation that the authorizers, which receive up to 3 percent of their schools’ per-pupil funding, have little incentive to rein in.

There are no geographical rules governing authorizers and their schools, and inconveniently for Sylvia Brown, the campus of B.M.C.C. is 338 miles north of Highland Park, on the shore of Lake Superior. Her appearance in February before the Board of Regents involved a flight to Marquette and a morning drive through a white-out blizzard. More stressful than her journey, though, was the unwelcome news that Carver’s low ranking on the Top-to-Bottom List had prompted Oak Ridge Financial to temporarily rescind the refinancing offer. The bank ultimately reconsidered, but it hadn’t left Brown and her team much time to prepare for the presentation.

B.M.C.C. is owned and operated by the Bay Mills Indian Community, an Ojibwa tribe with over 2,000 members and 5.5 square miles of reservation land. For years, Indians living on the reservation attended public school in the nearby town of Brimley, but they had a high dropout rate and often felt discriminated against. Bryan Newland, a board member and tribal judge who graduated from Brimley High School in 1999, told me: “I remember in world-history class — this is a very vivid memory — our textbook was divided up into units, and we skipped over ‘The Americas Before 1492.’ And I raised my hand and asked the teacher, ‘Why are we not studying this unit?’ And the teacher said, ‘We’re only studying the things that matter to world history.’ ” In 2003, the tribe started its own K-8 charter, which would offer classes devoted to Ojibwa language and culture. In addition to serving as authorizer for the tribal school, Bay Mills Community College began authorizing other schools around the state. Today, with 42 schools in locations as far-flung as Flint, Benton Harbor and Detroit, B.M.C.C. is the third-largest charter authorizer in Michigan.