You may not have noticed this, but our education system in Michigan is failing and getting worse. Third and eighth-grade reading and math scores are terrible.
Our students are doing worse than kids in the vast majority of other states. Last year, there wasn’t a single category at any grade level where even half the kids were proficient.
The funding model, “Proposal A” is broken too. When it was passed in March 1994 by voters eager for property tax relief, I went to see a principal in Bloomfield Hills. “This will be terrible for good schools like ours,” he told me. That’s because it severely limited how much communities could tax themselves to make sure the schools were good.
“We have been able to compete with private schools until now, because our citizens are willing to pay, but now they won’t be able to,” he said. “This will be good for the Kalkaskas of this state for about ten years, but then it will stop working for them too,” he said, adding that because of this, he had decided to take early retirement. That was a quarter-century ago.
And he was so right. We need to overhaul our school funding mechanism, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer is probably fully aware of it, as well as being aware that doing so would take a lot of heavy lifting and a state constitutional amendment.
Her proposed budget, which few people have read, does recommend spending more than half a billion dollars on Michigan public schools, and in an interesting way. While every district would get some increase it its per-pupil funding from the state, more money would be spent on students that need it more – especially economically disadvantaged and at-risk students.
There would also be more for career and technical education and for special education services, all of which make sense. My only quibble is I think we should be spending even more than she wants to on technical education. But I have no idea whether any of this will actually happen. Republicans still control both houses of the legislature, thanks to gerrymandering.
And almost nobody is even talking about education funding these days, and here’s why. The governor and legislature are currently fighting over two other issues – car insurance and fixing the damn roads. Actually, Republicans really aren’t doing anything to fix the roads.
They are pretending that it will be possible to fix the roads without raising taxes somehow to produce an extra $2 billion or more a year. The governor sensibly proposed doing this by gradually raising the cost of gasoline over the next year by 45 cents a gallon.
That would raise enough, and there’s sort of a rough justice to this; those who drive the most would pay the most. But Republicans wouldn’t hear of it. Michigan has the highest car insurance rates in the nation, and for the first time, each house has passed a bill aimed at reducing them. But they would do so mostly by reducing coverage without requiring insurance companies to reduce their rates, which the governor correctly opposes.
Meanwhile, the roads and the schools aren’t getting fixed. But that’s apparently fine with Republicans, as long as they prevent Whitmer from looking good, and prevent any tax increases on the very richest among us. Some people still think divided government is good.
They think it helps keep the politicians honest, and forces them to work together for the good of us all. I would sure like to visit that planet. But for now, this is the one we’re stuck with.
It couldn’t hurt to let your legislators know how you feel, and that you intend to vote.
