A Better Plan for K-12 Education

Far too many students in Michigan are leaving school without the skills they need to succeed in life. Remedial classes are becoming the norm for college freshmen, and young adults are forced to start lifelong careers without any training or experience. The disconnect starts early, with three out of five third graders in Michigan unable to read at a proficient level and seven out of 10 sixth graders struggling with math. It’s clear that the current approach isn’t working.

But the state’s current response to this challenge has been pathetic. Education policy over the past two years under a Democrat majority has failed to solve any of these issues and has instead moved Michigan backward. Recently passed education policies include lowering reading standards, taking information away from parents, raiding the teacher pension fund, denying schools their annual funding increase, and gutting school safety programs and personnel in the latest state budget. Even worse, many proposals that could help have been held up and buried in committee. Michigan families deserve better.

House Republicans are stepping up to fill this critical need. We are putting forward a real plan to make sure our schools are safe, our lesson plans match our students’ needs, our parents are empowered, and our teachers are given the tools they need to get the job done. Michigan must do better meeting the needs of the modern economy and modern higher education network with a modern school system. This plan will deliver the pathways to success our children need and the results Michigan parents expect.

Our children need better skills that they’ll use for their entire lives. Right now, they’re graduating without those skills and starting from scratch in college and on the job. Our plan updates the outdated curriculum requirements that control the courses every student takes in school. Instead of being forced to take classes they’ll never need, students can now pick the courses that will best prepare them for the rest of their lives. Here’s how these bills will help students:

Michigan parents want to know their children are going to be prepared with the skills they need once they graduate, and they want to know their children are safe while they’re in school. But recent legislation has cut back on school safety and taken critical information away from parents, effectively cutting them out of the process. Our plan empowers parents and gives them a much bigger say in their children’s education. More parental involvement will lead to better outcomes for students and more peace of mind for local families.

1. Restoring more than $300 million in school safety and mental health funding that was cut in the most recent state budget. Those disastrous budget cuts will cost many districts millions of dollars they needed for important safety programs, and many school leaders have spoken out saying they will soon be forced to lay off counselors and school resource offices. Our plan restores that funding and allows schools to move forward with security upgrades and mental health programs.

2. Creating a brand-new report on teacher-to-student ratios statewide. Class sizes continue to grow as schools spend more and more of their limited funding on high-ranking administrators and overhead instead of hiring more teachers. This report will give us the first ever look at how schools are doing in managing classroom sizes, allow parents to compare their schools to the best performers, and give everyone the right models to follow. This will give us the information we need to identify best practices and show every school the best way to cut down on class sizes.

3. Hiring local experts to teach specific classes, like asking software engineers to offer courses in computer science and bringing in retired statisticians to teach statistics. Michigan schools are suffering from critical teacher shortages in key subject areas. This is one way to fill critical vacancies and offer a full complement of options to every student.

4. Changing the broken Board of Education election process, so board members are nominated at the local level to represent their communities. Our state board of education has become a political quagmire that spends more time posturing on the latest culture war instead of working together to make our schools better. Part of the problem is that the board members are all statewide candidates just like other politicians and their elections follow other statewide political swings. That sometimes benefits Republicans and sometimes benefits Democrats, but it always benefits politicians looking to use the board’s position to push their own agenda. This plan changes the election process, so board members represent their area of the state and their specific needs instead of wider and more partisan political concerns.

5. Giving parents more information and making it easier to understand. Parents deserve to know how their school is doing and how it compares to other schools in key areas. Michigan makes all of that information public, but it is currently buried on a website no one knows about and that everyone finds difficult to decipher. This plan makes that data easy-to-understand, allows comparisons between districts, and sends it right to families.

Our local teachers work hard every day to help our children learn and grow. They put in long hours, and they invest deeply in our next generation. We need to do everything we can to support them and give them the tools they need to succeed. The House Republican plan gives teachers new guidance, new tools, and new funding to help them do their job and do it well.

1. Giving teachers the latest proven tools and training for teaching core skills like reading and math. If Michigan’s teacher training programs aren’t preparing our educators, it is unfair to hold our struggling performance against them. We need to give our teachers every tool available to get our kids up to speed.

2. Creating and publishing a list of recommended curriculum options and resources for teachers, giving educators access to a vast array of resources in line with the highest state and national standards. In 2022 alone, elementary teachers used 444 different language arts curriculum resources statewide. Teachers deserve help picking through all of these options to find the best, research-backed material for their classes.

3. Eliminating hundreds of dollars in fees for teachers, on everything from teaching certificate applications and renewals to new endorsements and permits. In an age where schools are struggling to keep our best teachers on the job, nickel and diming our educators every year can no longer be an option. We need to make it as easy as possible to start a career in education and stop punishing teachers for staying in that important job for the long-term.

4. Making the State Superintendent an appointee of the governor, which will create a more unified and clearer direction for schools across the state. All too often, the state superintendent publicly opposes the governor and creates a confusing split in guidance for schools. Gov. Whitmer went as far as creating a competing state agency that only confused schools and teachers more. It is time to end the turf war and give the state one direction to follow.

5. Allowing teachers to fill critical vacancies when they have subject area expertise. Many schools that can’t fill specific areas will wait until next year to hire someone, and teachers who want to teach a new subject often have to go through a lengthy process instead of simply adding a new subject area endorsement to their license. If a social studies teacher has a background in literature and wants to step in and teach English, they should be able to do so when it makes sense.

6. Boosting teacher pay and hiring more teachers by helping schools spend less on overhead. Allowing schools to work together and share everything from highly paid superintendents to transportation services will give our local districts more funding to shrink class sizes, update textbooks, and offer new courses that gives students and parents even more options.