Politicians discuss how to fund education
By Erin Bozek-Jarvis, 17 and Eric Wagner, 17.

“Every single kid in Michigan deserves a first-rate education,” RaeAnn Loy, a teacher for the Negaunee Public Schools, recently said at an event held in Marquette.

Organized by the Democratic leadership in the Michigan House of Representatives, the event was attended by local teachers and school officials who, like Loy, wanted to discuss concerns about school budgets and funding. While politicians agree with Loy’s statement, they disagree on how to achieve it. During the event, held in the courtyard of the Graveraet School, the Democratic representatives voiced their concerns about the current state of education funding.

“Unless we make a radical shift in the way we collect money…we will continue to diminish Michigan education,” said Representative Maureen Stapleton of Detroit, describing what she believes is an ideological divide in the government.

“Some us believe the government as a role in helping young people succeed and that’s through the collection of tax dollars and dedicated money to schools, some of us believe that it’s better off in businesses’ hands.”

She was alluding to Governor Rick Snyder’s state budget that was approved in June that reforms the state’s tax code, including a business tax cut, but provided fewer dollars for the School Aid Fund. Governor Rick Snyder, during a recent stop in Marquette, acknowledged the difficult financial situation.

“ We had to do some difficult things because we had a big budget deficit to deal with, but when we did the budget we actually did a second year budget,” he said. “One benefits of doing a more than one year budget was to really allow us to look to the longer term, to show that we’d gone through the toughest times and now we can be more positive hopefully.”

Governor Snyder believes that changing the tax structure to foster business growth will lead to better educational funding.

“ We’ve been in a shrinking pie economy for a long time and that’s caused a lot of these issues with needing to make cuts,” he said. “The long-term solution is to create more jobs, more economic activity and you do that by actually having businesses grow.”

This, he said, drives the economy and increasing the amount of tax dollars available to invest in education.

“ Then the cycle goes on,” he said. “Because then you have better employees that can be more successful in business and grow more jobs and create a positive cycle there.”

Representative Steve Lindberg of Marquette does not share the Governor’s view that the new budgets may eventually be beneficial to funding education.

“ I’m hoping that we’re going to see perhaps the error of our ways and at least take the money that was originally designated, under Proposal A, to go for public school funding, to go back and be fully utilized for school funding,” he said. “ The way we’ve changed the tax structure, there are going to be certain income revenue streams that are going away [from education] and we may have to look at how we are going to replace those revenue streams.”

Many of the teachers at the Marquette event voiced concerns regarding the current job market in education and its inability to attract new and passionate teachers.

“ Why would anyone want to go into that profession when they can work downtown and make the same money as a waitress or a bartender?” Negaunee teacher Mark Churchill asked during the event. Churchill sited relatively low starting salaries and required payments towards healthcare plan as some of the potential reasons potential teachers are moving on to a different career.

Representative Vicki Barnett of Farmington Hills agreed with Churchill.

“ We’re not just losing gifted people who are teachers, but we’re leaving children in the dust,” she said.

Representative Barnett went on to share a personal example of her daughter who gave up being a special education teacher in favor of earning a Masters of Business Administration because she could not work in an environment where morale was so bad.

Snyder hopes that his proposed Master Teacher program will help to better the situation for potential and current teachers who excel in the classroom.

“ It’s really to recognize how valuable teachers are,” Snyder said in regards to the program. Snyder hopes that this program will help to prevent the current situations where teachers who want to further their careers stop teaching to become higher-level administrators.

“ By creating the master teacher category we’re actually going to create another career path so that they can continue to be a teacher, but also as part of that teach other teachers and really create an opportunity for them to do better financially, but also get more satisfaction by keeping their teaching skills going and actually spread that to other teachers,” he said.
As another school year begins, debates on the funding of education will certainly continue. However, all parties say they have the motivation of providing each Michigan student a top rate education.

An interview with Governor Snyder:

8-18 Media: In your recent address to the Economic Club of Marquette County you called the education system in Michigan broken. What, specifically, in your opinion is wrong with it and what can be done to fix it?
Snyder: It is broken. So what we’re going to do is create more systems to reward the best teachers and administrators to ask what are you doing to help each, individual child get a great year’s education each and every year. The broken system we’ve had was far too much focused on people simply asking for money and more money and spending money. So we need to move from a money-center system to student-centered system.

8-18 Media: How do you feel that your Education Improvement Authority Board will improve the performance of some Michigan Schools?
Snyder: The Educational Achievement System is really set up to deal with failing schools and you’re talking about maybe five percent of our schools that truly are failing. It’s not just about the school district, but instead to focus on the school itself and empower the people in those schools to take more responsibility for how they run their schools.

8-18 Media: How do you feel that teacher tenure affects the learning experiences of student?
Snyder: One of the things we just signed into law was a reform to teach tenure to actually make more accountability about really focusing on teacher effectiveness as opposed to just seniority. Because one of the things we really want to do with our educational system is put much more focus on student growth and achievement. And that had been missing too much. Too much of it was just based on adults and how they wanted to do things and we didn’t have enough emphasis on the kids themselves and making sure they’re doing well and we’re putting that in place.

8-18 Media: What is a good way to continue to measure student growth? Should we use any new methods?
Snyder: Part of it is standardized testing but it’s more than that, it’s actually an opportunity to look at a portfolio of the work that each student does, because that’s the way I view it, it shouldn’t just be standardized tests, what I would hope over time is that each student would travel with a portfolio of their work, the papers, some of the more interesting projects they’ve worked with that they can carry with them that people can open up and review. It’s really a way to highlight the breadth and depth of students.

8-18 Media: Why do you feel that having and, in some areas, expanding charter schools is important in preparing students for the future?
Snyder: Charter schools can actually be created by public schools so they’re not mutually exclusive. There can be many types of charter schools and what I’ve said is we should potentially allow more charters in failing school districts, in areas where the schools are not working to provide more options for the kids because my view is the most important thing is to get the kids a great education, not spend all the time arguing about what school they went to to get that great education.