DEARBORN, MI – Casandra Ulbrich knows how important education, particularly public education, can be. Forty years ago she was a small child in rural Yale, Michigan, in a single-parent home with little money. No one in her family had ever gone to college.
Today, she not only has a Ph.D and an important job with the University of Michigan, she is president of the Michigan State Board of Education. For the next two days, that is; after serving 16 years on the board, she didn’t run for reelection last year.
“It was just time for a new challenge,” she said; at 48, Ulbrich has spent one-third of her life on the board. That doesn’t mean, however, that she has lost any interest in education: “This should be the most important thing we as a society do,” she said, since it is about the future of, well, all of us.
Now that she is stepping down, she is willing to look back and reflect on the challenges she, and education, have faced. It hasn’t been an easy time; education, like everything else, has become highly politicized. “When I got here, the chances are you could ask any one of us about an issue, and you couldn’t tell whether you were talking to a Republican or a Democrat,” she said.
“That’s not true anymore.” Ulbrich is a Democrat, and Democrats have a solid, 6-2 majority on the publicly elected board. But instead of being dominated by debates over funding and educational assessment, these days, that too often gets lost in squabbles over whether supposedly “woke” agendas, drag queens reading the kids stories, and myths about transgender students.
The outgoing board president thinks the current turmoil is not an accident. Not too many years ago, “people by and large had a lot of trust in their schools. Someone along the way decided public schools and public school administrators needed to be made villains as a way of getting the public to doubt their institutions.”
Some of this motivation was clearly financial. Michigan spends more than $12 billion a year on education, and “people figured they could make a lot of money,” if they could get state funding for private or so-called “public” charter schools, which get the same per-pupil funding from the state, but aren’t held to the same regulations and standards or to public disclosure laws.
Currently, around 10 percent of Michigan students are in charter schools, which together them got about $1.4 billion in state funds this year. “There’s no evidence they provide better education,” the board president said, and many are far worse. She hopes that the new legislature, controlled by Democrats for the first time since 1983, will take steps to make them accountable.
Not being able to do that has been frustrating, as have been many parts of service on the Michigan Board of Education. In 1999, then-Gov. John Engler took much of the board’s policy-making ability away with a series of executive orders. The Detroit Free Press, which opposed the move, said the effect had been “to leave the elected Board of Education with very little to do but think deep thoughts.”
That’s not quite true; the board chooses the state superintendent of public instruction, currently former Kalamazoo superintendent Michael Rice, and sets overall policies for education in the state, though there is no requirement for them to be followed.
The board and the superintendent, as she sees it, clearly need more power. “For example, the state superintendent is supposed to have authority over charter school authorizers (mainly universities), but there’s no actual rule for what that looks like.”
Nor does the superintendent have any authority to refuse to authorize a new charter school, even if one seems clearly not to be needed. “It doesn’t make sense that they are opening all these new schools when the number of students has been steadily declining,” from 1.5 to 1.3 million students in recent years, largely due to Michigan’s stagnant and aging population, plus the pandemic.
Still, she looks back with satisfaction that an ultra-conservative attempt to change school curriculum standards was soundly rejected by the public. “They were so bad I said, ‘put them out there for public comment,’” she said. That worked.
Casandra Ulbrich wants to see the board move on from squabbles over drag queens to figuring out how to improve education. Michigan, once one of the nation’s top-performing states, now is worse by almost every measure than most. Michigan spends a considerably higher percentage of its budget on education than Illinois, Wisconsin or the national average, but graduation rates and test scores lag behind all three.
Worse, “Michigan had the smallest number of students who scored at or above (expected proficiency) in math and reading, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia.
Ulbrich believes that putting more money in the classroom would make a difference, and she also wants to see the state’s school funding mechanism revamped to include infrastructure needs.
I wondered if she is sorry that she’s leaving, now that her party will control both the governorship and the legislature for the first time in decades. She confessed she did have a few twinges of regret — but when a protestor showed up dressed as Wonder Woman at her last board meeting, she realized it was time to go.
What advice would she give whoever replaces her as board president? “Don’t waste your time arguing with irrational people about irrational things,” she said. For now, she plans to spend her time raising funds for the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
But knowing what she knows, I hope she also has a future as a high-powered consultant for state school systems that really want to improve. There may be few things more crucial in today’s world.
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