"Michigan was once an education powerhouse, with a public school system whose results were the envy of the nation," Stephen Henderson writes at the start of a Free Press column decrying "the state’s longtime disinvestment — financially and intellectually — in our schools."
Henderson, the paper's editorial page editor, uses a yearly report from an interest group called EdTrust Midwest as a launchpad for blasts at Lansing policymakers -- starting at the top.
Gov. Rick Snyder is pushing hard to expand school choice and charters, and flirting with other fundamental changes to the traditional structure of public schools. But he has done so to the detriment of shoring up the standards and rigor and funding that are needed to bring rank-and-file public schools back to acceptable performance levels. . . .
Michigan is lousy — at least compared with other states — at holding schools accountable for performance, and even worse at identifying success and growing it.
Henderson, who notes that Michigan allocates nearly $11 billion for public education his year, feels "too much of our education spending goes to administrative, overhead and legacy costs (pensions and health care), leaving classrooms with less than they need." He highlights a pproposal from the nonprofit group's new study:
Edtrust suggests rethinking the school funding formula in a big way, focusing on getting more money to successful programs, and weighting funding to provide more resources, not fewer, to schools that serve at-risk kids.
