Nothing new under the sun

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.

2026 as the “education election,” in Michigan, anyway

Let’s start, unfortunately, with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s February State of the State address. While Gov. Whitmer has been a critical ally in improving education funding and policy in our state, she called out some misleading data to highlight her concern about the state of public education in Michigan:

• Citing test score data from the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, sometimes called the “nation’s report card”), she asserted that “Just 24% of 4th graders can read proficiently, [and] the same percentage of 8th graders are proficient in math.”
• Acknowledging that most states were struggling in the post-Covid period, the governor also asserted that “the reality is that we invest more per-pupil than most states and achieve bottom 10 results.”

Except “proficient” on the NAEP means “advanced” for almost everyone else, and Michigan is in the middle of the pack on spending if you count everything carefully (more below).

Then, in mid-May, MLive published a story featuring a report from the education advocacy group EdTrust-Midwest that also highlighted the state’s test score declines, under the headline “Michigan 44th in 4th-grade reading.” (Everybody likes a good ranking, even when it’s not meaningful.) The article reported Michigan’s ranking on various NAEP scores, as well as the state’s poor showing on the “Educational Recovery Scorecard,” a university-based project which claims to track post-Covid learning recovery across districts and states. But a close look at the data behind that scorecard shows that they make some heroic and opaque assumptions linking state test scores to NAEP scores to grade level in their effort to offer up data comparable across the US.¹

Education ‘spontaneously’ bubbles up on Mackinac Island

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.” We are told, you see, that when most voters think their local schools are fine while all the rest are failing, they are in fact being fooled. Our betters know the truth, and they are willing to spend heavily to make us see it.

The irony of Snyder leading a campaign to focus on education is impossible to overstate. Beginning with a huge cut to school aid to help pay for his business tax cuts, he went on to endorse the creation of Detroit’s disastrous Education Achievement Authority, worked to take that awful experiment statewide, and facilitate back-room discussions like the Oxford Foundation report and the “skunk works” proposals for cheap, tech heavy, public education that worked like ordering off a menu with a personal school aid debit card. Snyder was not alone in these efforts, and in fact it was clear that the policy initiatives were crafted by advisors with close ties to Dick and Betsy DeVos, Michigan’s GOP power couple and fierce advocates of school choice. Does history repeat? It strains credibility that Snyder’s announcement is unrelated to the near simultaneous announcement of a DeVos-backed group, led by GOP figures including former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and the aforementioned Jase Bolger, to raise “tens of millions” of dollars to ensure a GOP sweep in 2026 state elections.

Real concerns, misleading data

Regardless of their eventual policy goal (better public schools, vouchers without public schools, etc), all these state and educational leaders led off their arguments by pointing to Michigan’s “dire” test score results. There are a couple of problems with this. First off, as education historian and former NAEP governor Diane Ravitch often argues, the NAEP’s “proficient” level doesn’t mean “on grade level” but high or “A-level” performance. In fact, careful analysis shows that most states’ grade level standards, including Michigan’s, are squarely in the middle of the NAEP’s “Basic” range. A more accurate statement would be that 55% of Michigan 4th graders are at or above the basic level of performance in reading and 74% score at the same level in mathematics (and are thus near or above grade level). While these numbers are disappointing, and need to be addressed, they lack the “panic factor” that many education reform advocates (such as Snyder) want to convey.

And always with the rankings - Michigan is “44th in fourth grade reading” or among “the worst 10 states on the 2024 NAEP.” Unfortunately for the alarmists, the differences between states are smaller than the range of performance inside states. Just like opinion polls, the NAEP rankings come with a “margin of error” that nearly everyone ignores. So, in a list of states ranked by 4th grade reading test scores, Michigan does come in at number 44. On the other hand, Michigan is statistically tied with 17 other states for 31st place, once you account for the margin of error. In terms of scale scores, Michgian is only 7 points out of 500 behind #13, Rhode Island (and 16 points behind #1, Massachusetts). The same is true for 4th grade math scores: Michigan may rank 34th but we are statistically tied with 30 other states for 15th place. What do these differences mean in practice? Is this the measuring stick we should be using? We definitely want and need to do better in educational quality, but we also need a clear view of the reality on the ground and not massaged statistics for headlines.

Secondly, Michigan does not truly invest more per pupil than most states - or at least not anymore. When we did, until the mid-2000s, we also had NAEP scores well above the national average. Comparing education spending can be tricky - states account for expenses in different budgets. Michigan’s looks high because the entire cost of maintaining the state public school retirement system (and making up for declines in its investment portfolio) is carried by the education budget, with the vast majority coming out of district per pupil funding. Other states account for that separately. According to the latest available data from the US Department of Education, in fiscal 2022 Michigan ranked 25th (dead center) in per pupil K-12 education spending once everything was included for all states. We ranked even lower - 29th - in the middle of Gov. Snyder’s second term. (We’ll delve into this in an upcoming article.)

Note well: in that same year (2022) where we ranked 25th in spending, Michigan ranked 13th in the number of young people living in poverty. The need was increasing, and until recently we were cutting our commitment to funding Michigan schools.

The drumbeat of failure

While I’m sure most (if not all) of those pointing to Michigan’s poor test score performance truly want to improve education for our children, it is clear that they have very different policy agendas. Rick Snyder was at least honest that the intention here is to raise the panic level so that voters will be more willing to support whatever dramatic educational reform is on offer. But panic seldom results in good policy, and sensible improvements to public education in Michigan cannot be based on distorted data or hidden agendas. Our state needs to have an honest conversation about what we want our schools to do, and how much it will cost to make that happen. Continuing to have education policy held hostage to the needs of election cycles and campaigning - or used as a distraction from national political disorder - will only erode our children’s future.