Perhaps you remember, back in 2020, when Donald Trump invited the MI Senate Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey (R) and the Speaker of the MI House, Lee Chatfield (R) to Washington, D.C.?

It was a couple weeks after the election, and their pictures were everywhere, including two-story projections on the front of Trump’s hotel, with the text ‘Voters Decided—the World is Watching.’ Chatfield and Shirkey were evasive about the actual purpose of this little rendezvous—but hey! When Trump says jump…

It’s also likely this was just one of So Many Stories about Trump’s desperate behavior, post-election, that it has been eclipsed in the national memory, but on November 20, 2020, lots of Michiganders were pretty sure that Shirkey and Chatfield weren’t sitting in the hotel bar discussing truth and justice.

So–the former MI Speaker, Lee Chatfield, has found himself in a bit of a pickle lately.

A police investigation for allegedly sexually assaulting a young teenager, for starters. The story is appallingly greasy: Chatfield groomed and abused a teenager from a ‘broken home’ when he was a teacher in a private Christian Academy founded by his father. Later, she (urged on by Chatfield and his father, ‘Pastor Rusty’) married Chatfield’s younger brother, Aaron. Who later became Chatfield’s driver on trips to Detroit to sow sexual wild oats.

As I said—greasy.

Chatfield became Speaker of the House at age 30, and was term-limited out in 2020. He is now 33. He is married to his HS sweetheart, with five children. He claims his relationship with the victim (which began when she was 14 or 15) was ‘consensual.’ In MI, the age of consent is 16—18 if the older person is an educator.

Lots of hand-wringing by his fellow Repubs, of course. And disgust from people who have always perceived Chatfield as a hard-right lightweight, not worthy of the responsibility of making policy for almost 10 million citizens in Michigan.

What interests me in this story, however, is not the salacious details (and there are way more than the summary, above). It’s the fact that Chatfield was– it pains me to say this—a teacher. Not in any sense a conventional teacher (certified, licensed, prepared, ethical)– but a teacher nonetheless (and, every story reminds us, also a coach and the Athletic Director).

In fact, Lee Chatfield is kind of the poster child for why we have laws in education—why public schools must have elected boards, qualified and vetted staff, new-teacher mentoring and supervision, ongoing professional learning, teacher evaluation, and so on.

At the private, K-12 Christian school where he ‘taught’—a young man in his early twenties, who attended an unaccredited Bible College—the administrator was his father, and the curriculum was unabashedly Bible-based (check it out). Parents at the school must sign an affidavit promising not to engage in destructive criticism of the school and its staff in the presence of their children. It’s cheap, too—you can send all six of your kids there for about what MI gives public schools for one child.

Sounds like a great place, exactly the kind of home-grown school that Betsy DeVos wanted to favor with vouchers. You have to wonder what they’re paying their teachers (and for that matter, their ‘Athletic Director’).  

Chatfield’s district is not far from where I live—and I know that a small K-12 Christian school in the rural woods of northern Michigan might be appealing to parents looking for ‘choice’ and made fearful by the media-fed blabber about how their white children would be made to feel guilty in public schools.

They wouldn’t be terribly concerned about vetting the teachers—they’re Christians, right?—or investigating the curriculum.

(In fact, even though we had a curriculum night every year, wherever I was teaching, parents seldom struck me as being deeply concerned about finer point of disciplinary benchmarks and content outlines. They came to see the face and hear the voice of the person in front of the classroom. Which makes the whole anti-CRT crapola inexplicable, except as a politically motivated and funded scam.)

Sometimes, the person in front of the classroom is an entitled, over-confident predator.  

There are plenty of lessons for policy-makers here, ironically, beginning with a reminder that almost everything we do in public education is controlled by well-worn laws and policies.

Genuinely ethical practice protects and nurtures children. And he who makes his own rules can’t be trusted.