At Michigan Parents for Schools, Steve Norton highlights the return of the same old message of alleged school failure.
Hang on to your hats, folks: the drumbeat of messaging on school failure has started up again. Unfortunately, this round of political focus on public education – on display at the Mackinac Policy Conference – mostly offers the same distorted critiques and questionable solutions that Michiganders have seen in the past. Do Michigan’s children desperately need stronger public education? Absolutely. Will these hackneyed critiques and prescriptions get us there? Probably not. Would this serve as a convenient distraction from the political chaos in Washington? Almost certainly.
Just in time for the late-May Mackinac Policy Conference, former Republican state House Speaker Jase Bolger penned an op-ed in the Detroit News advising leaders attending the conference to “skip the happy talk” and deal with what he claims is the deterioration of the state under Democratic control. (Bolger conveniently ignores the huge cuts to K-12 education enacted during his tenure as Speaker.) Bolger calls, predictably, for more school choice and more test-based accountability. On the topic of spending, he writes:
…despite massive increases in K-12 education funding, performance is failing our kids with over 60% of 4th graders not proficient in reading and Michigan ranking in the worst 10 states based on the 2024 NAEP. It’s being proven in Michigan that more money won’t fix education…..
If only there had been “massive increases in education funding.” In fact, state spending on K-12 schools has represented a falling share of the state economy for decades, and the actual amount which reaches the classroom hasn’t kept up with inflation.2
At the Mackinac conference itself, Detroit mayor and gubernatorial hopeful Mike Duggan announced a dramatic, but vague, plan to spend $4.5 billion more on schools but hold school and district leaders accountable. Also citing low 4th grade reading scores from the NAEP, he opined: “If we’re going to pour $4.5 billion into our schools, the people who run the schools need to have some skin in the game.” He did not explain where that $4.5 billion (spread over five years) would come from, nor what his new “school grading plan” would look like.
Other talks at the conference also featured education, including panels with district superintendents and state Senators. After the moderator started the superintendents’ panel by discussing Michigan’s NAEP results, Detroit superintendent Nikolai Vitti said Michigan schools “have an accountability problem.” On the other hand, Grand Rapids super Brandy Mitchell argued that the rules couldn’t keep changing with each legislative session, and that teachers needed greater support rather than threats in an accountability system. Vitti also argued for coherent policies which remained stable. Huntington Bank chair Gary Torgow, the odd man out on the education panel, took up the perennial argument that schools would be better if only the education department answered solely to the governor and legislature rather than to an elected state board. While he agreed that more resources were needed, Torgow argued that the people who supply the money should be in charge (the legislature and governor set the school aid budget) and it was worth having a constitutional amendment to assure that. But it’s not at all clear that eliminating the only state elected body completely focused on education would make the situation better rather than worse.
Finally, Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley wrote up a summary of all the education talk at the Mackinac conference and featured an announcement by former Gov. Rick Snyder that he was planning to spend up to $30 million in a campaign to “make 2026 the education election.” Armed with the same oft-quoted statistics, Snyder says he intends to “[pound] the failure statistics into the brains of every voter, repeating them until they create the anxiety and anger necessary to jerk the electorate out of its complacency.”