Mackinac Island ― Nowhere has the quest for common ground been more elusive than in how to reform Michigan’s failing schools.
For decades, the answers offered at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference and other forums have centered on governance. The certainty was that children would flourish if they could be freed from public schools dominated by teacher unions.
School choice was supposed to allow parents to find just the right places for their kids to learn, particularly in urban districts.
It hasn’t worked. Thirty-three years after charter schools were first approved in Michigan, just 7% of state students are enrolled in them.
And instead of becoming education innovation factories as originally intended, shackles placed on charters by the regulators have made what goes on inside the charter school classrooms pretty much indistinguishable from traditional public schools.
Meanwhile, Michigan schools have plummeted to near worst-in-the-nation performance.
A proposal laid out at last week’s policy conference would end the turf war and focus on how children are taught rather than who teaches them.
Former Gov. Rick Snyder and education reformer Doug Ross unveiled a proposal to create innovation districts that would break the 120-year-old model of sitting kids in classrooms in front of a teacher and pounding facts and figures into them all day long.
Schools that choose the new approach would be free to try different learning techniques and technology.
“The best way to learn geometry might be to close the textbook and bring them up here to study an actual bridge,” says Snyder, pointing to the Mackinac span in the distance.
This is the rare proposal that would strengthen public schools, rather than weaken them. Students ― and the foundation grant dollars that follow them ― would stay in place.
Before a school could adopt the innovation model, all stakeholders, including parents and teachers, would have to approve.
Notably, Michigan Education Association President Chandra Madafferi was on the stage with Snyder and Ross when the plan, which needs legislative approval, was presented to the conference.
“It’s refreshing, because since teachers are going to be the ones who are doing the the work, it’s great that we are part of the conversation to help build it out,” Madafferi says. “It’s leveling the playing field so all students have this opportunity.”
Ross agreed, saying teachers will be critical to the plan’s success.
“Nothing works unless teachers buy-in,” he says.
I’ve been watching education reform plans come and go for a quarter century in Michigan. Most failed because they tried to force change on educators rather than asking them to help craft the solutions.
This approach could work.
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Another excellent idea floated on the island would greatly expand the program that allows students to earn college credits while still in high school.
Michigan has among the lowest dual enrollment rates in the country, at between seven and nine percent. School districts have to pay the tuition for their students who attend both college and high school simultaneously. So dual enrollment is not pushed as aggressively as it should be.
The program, which allows high schoolers to earn a full year of college credits, cuts the cost of a college education and moves much-needed talent into the workforce more quickly.
Brandy Johnson, president of the Michigan Community College Association says $60 million from the Legislature would allow Michigan to get closer to the national average of a 20% dual enrollment rate.
Perhaps lawmakers could find the money by ending free lunches for middle class and wealthy students.
Nolan Finley’s columns appear in The Detroit News. Reach him at nfinley@detroitnews.com and follow him on X @NolanFinleyDN.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Finley: Plan would end public/charter school war in Michigan
Reporting by Nolan Finley, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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