When Proposal A was passed in 1994, the New York Times sent me to Bloomfield Hills, to interview the principal of one of the area’s best public high schools. I asked what he thought about it. “I’m putting in for early retirement,” he told me.
“The people who live here will pay to appropriate whatever millage we need, and I’ve been able to stay competitive with private schools.” But since the new law put limits on how much money any community could raise, regardless of the wishes of the voters, he said his schools were bound to lose ground, and he didn’t want to stick around for their slow decline.
“This will be good for the Kalkaskas of this state for the next ten years,” he told me, meaning the poorest, mainly rural districts. But he added that eventually all public education would go slowly downhill. His timing may have been a little off, but he was right.
The size of the yearly per-pupil “foundation grant,” the money given to districts based on how many students they have, has varied not by educational need, but by budgetary priorities.
Meanwhile, charter schools have eaten at the foundations of public education like termites. Say I start a charter school across from your traditional public one, and enroll maybe a hundred kids. That’s $763,000 dollars that the public school suddenly doesn’t have.
Yes, I know charter schools are technically public. But they operate mainly without the rules, experience, and foresight traditional public school systems have.
Not to mention, regulation. When a single parent with a limited education has to survey the schools near her home to decide where to enroll her child, making the right choice isn’t easy.
But our lawmakers have been making even worse choices about schools. They’ve been treating them as though they were just another budgetary expense. They are, in fact, the future, not only our children’s futures but our own. We need to invest in it, as heavily as needed, to give our state and our children a chance to be competitive.
Some of us who are older grew up in a world where, if you bombed out in school, you could still get a factory or warehouse and make a decent living, even with minimal or no skills.
Those days are gone forever. Proposal A became law in a world where the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and there were relatively few charter schools. It attempted to create a statewide solution for solving education funding, and that was a good thing,
Yet it not only failed to solve it, it intentionally prevented local districts from raising more money to improve their schools beyond a certain level. Proposal A means citizens can no longer decide to vote to pay extra taxes to make their schools better.
According to Bridge Magazine, we are the only state in the nation that does this. Consequently, the conservative Republican administration of John Engler led us to impose on public education one of the worst weaknesses of Soviet-style socialism — enforced mediocrity.
We have to fix this. I don’t pretend to know what the ideal school funding model should be, but I know we need to design one, and wrap our minds around the idea that it is our duty to try and give our kids a chance at a better future.
Otherwise, they, and we, and Michigan are finished.
