I read with interest the Forum on Education published in the latest Crain's Detroit Business (“Amid ‘staggering’ K-12 enrollment decline, Michigan has decisions to make,” Julie Mack, January 23, 2025) with interest. https://www.crainsdetroit.com/crains-forum-education/shrinking-k-12-enrollment-michigan-forces-big-decisions The analysis misses the mark in several very important ways.
First, there is almost no discussion of why parents have pulled their children from traditional public schools. No less than a third of parents demonstrate, through the not-inconsequential decision of changing schools, that their home district does not meet their needs. That number is growing, and has grown substantially since COVID.
Why? Parents were given a newly-online look at their children’s classes, and didn’t like what they saw. From politically-correct nonsense, to pseudo-science, to simply a lack of rigorous content, parents were aghast enough to send their children elsewhere. Any reform that doesn’t address this primary issue is bailing water from a sinking ship.
Superintendent Rice blames lack of funding, but adjusting the curriculum to provide additional rigor is cost-free. If he wants an example of how the educational bureaucracy hampers improvement, he need only look at the actions of his Board of Education, who, with a 6-2 Democratic majority, approved such resolutions as opposing Native American mascots, changing the minimum wage, and, of course, masking kids and keeping them out of school. None of those help educate students, and many of them drove parents away.
He also blames the presence of choice, as if somehow parents and children “belong” to their home district. That is untrue, harmful to education, and un-American. In fact, parents who have chosen alternatives should be celebrated, as each of those decisions come with substantial costs. If the product is so bad that parents will pay more to leave, is it the fault of the parents, or the product?
Because they fail to address the problems with the educational delivery, proposed solutions are also wildly inconsistent. The School Finance Research Collaborative report is cited as evidence of the need for additional funding, while the concept of consolidating school districts is given as an additional solution. But the report did not call for additional funding for the one group that can impact educational outcomes: teachers. The report’s purview was almost entirely school support personnel. Do we need more of them, or less? The answer is neither, as both miss the primary problem. Pay teachers more to teach, lower class sizes, measure and expect better outcomes. That is how education will improve.
Finally, the discussion misses the $35,000,000,000 elephant in the room—the underfunded MPSERS pension fund. Hundreds of millions of dollars annually has to be scraped from the School Aid Fund to fill that hole, created over decades. That funding could be used to pay teachers more, lower class sizes, increase educational outcomes, and advance student learning. Instead, in the 2023-24 budget signed by Gretchen Whitmer, the school foundation allowance was given a $0 increase, while games were played with MPSERS contributions to exacerbate that hole. Thankfully, House Bill 6060, which would have made the problem even worse, died in lame duck. The fate of modifications of PA 152, which would sock districts with more costs, is still up in the air. No discussion of school funding is complete or even reasonable without addressing that issue.
It is a good day when politicians are willing to focus on their failures. The system doesn’t work for an increasingly large percentage of parents. Will their be meaningful changes that help teachers teach and help students learn any time soon? Like a child throwing a tantrum, I can’t hold my breath that long.
Sincerely,
Matthew J. Wilk, President
Get Kids Back to School, Inc.
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