HUNTINGTON WOODS, MI — The days when someone could leave high school, get a job in a factory, and make enough to achieve a middle-class lifestyle are long over.
Sadly, so are the baby boomer days when the average student could graduate, get a few scholarships, work summers, and emerge from college essentially debt-free and ready to start a career.
Higher education is more expensive and more necessary than ever. But how can those who need it the most afford it?
Michigan has come up with one intriguing solution: Promise zones. This all started in 2005, with a stunning announcement from Kalamazoo: An anonymous donor would provide full tuition scholarships to all graduates of the city’s public schools to attend any state university or community college in Michigan.
The idea was not only to help the students, but to help the city’s economy, and that’s exactly what has happened. Enrollment in the public schools has increased for the first time in decades, the city’s economy has improved, and so have property values.
Unfortunately, not every community has a local billionaire ready to help, Ellen Cogen Lipton, a former legislator and current member of Michigan’s State Board of Education, said wryly.
But the concept was so compelling that in 2008 the legislature passed an act that was designed to help create more promise zones by using something called “tax capture.” When a Promise Zone Authority is approved by the state, it is allowed to automatically “capture” half the yearly growth in the State Education Tax in its area.
Each zone has an 11-member board which decides how their program will work, said Lipton, who helped found the Michigan Promise Zone Association and was its president for four years. “In most cases, we can afford to pay for an associate’s (two year) degree, but we also help those who want to go farther,” she said.
Lipton herself has an unusual story. Born in Philadelphia in 1967, her father became a professor in Alabama. “We never had a lot of money, but there was never any question that we would all go to college,” she said. She loved science, got a degree in chemistry, and became a science advisor to two congressmen.
They persuaded her she should go to Harvard Law School, and she did, becoming a successful patent lawyer. She married another patent lawyer from Michigan, and moved to the Detroit suburbs.
Then, concerned that science wasn’t sufficiently understood and that embryonic stem cell research was prohibited, she entered politics, winning a seat in the legislature in 2008. “But when I got there, I found that the most urgent issue was education.”
She was incensed that education funding was being slashed, and led an investigation that revealed that Gov. Rick Snyder’s creation of a new district for Detroit’s disadvantaged students, the Education Achievement Authority, was doing more harm than good.
It was soon abolished, but term limits meant Lipton had to leave the legislature. After failing in a Democratic primary bid for Congress, she threw herself into the promise zone movement.
“What we found, what they found is giving them a scholarship was only a piece of the puzzle. These students needed mentoring. They needed someone to check in with them, to reassure them, to make sure things are going okay,” she said.
As a result, they hired “success coaches.” Initially, the legislature authorized 10 statewide promise zones, a figure raised to 15 after the Flint lead poisoning crisis.
Currently, there are 13, including school districts in most of Michigan’s larger cities, such as Detroit, Lansing, Flint and Grand Rapids, but also smaller places like Newaygo and Baldwin.
These are economically disadvantaged areas where going to college isn’t something most families even think about, and where there are few support structures to keep them there.
Lipton has gotten especially involved in Hazel Park, an older blue-collar suburb. “I call them eggshell students, because they are so vulnerable to things happening in life. One brilliant and enthusiastic student called her up one day and said she was dropping out. “Ms. Ellen, my boyfriend broke up with me. My life is over.”
“Oh no, you’re not,” she told her. Today, that student is a teacher. Another with a similar crisis is in law school.
What most of the promise programs do is provide tuition for two years at a community or four-year college. The problem, however, is often what Lipton calls “the cost of attendance,” finding transportation for students without cars; the Detroit area has notoriously bad bus systems. Somehow, they usually work it out.
But while Ellen Lipton thinks promise zones are vitally important, they aren’t enough.
Simply put, she said, if Michigan wants to have a future in this information age, the state needs to spend a lot more on education.
“They say, oh, you just want to throw more money at the problem. Well, guess what. It takes money! The politicians’ mindset is to make the trains run on time. Education is a different beast entirely. It’s about investing in the future. Paying teachers to do what they are trained to do. There are no quick fixes.
“Good education costs money,” she said emphatically.
What is clear is that states with a better-educated workforce are thriving and prospering, and those that lag behind are fading.
In the last half-century, Michigan and Ohio, states where education levels are lagging, have between them lost 15 seats in Congress and have watched their economies, once among the nation’s strongest, fail to keep pace.
Finding ways to get more students the post-high school education they need to prosper is not only crucial. In fact, it’s hard to see what could be more important.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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