Voting

By Emma Delahanty and Ikroop Singh

Public health advocate Malaak Elhage was volunteering for an organization in her parents’ hometown of Ghazieh, Lebanon, when the conflict in Gaza started last October. It brought her painful memories of bombings her family escaped in the same city almost 20 years ago, when she was 6 years old. Now a resident of Dearborn, MI, she’s unhappy with how President Joe Biden is handling the war, and she voted uncommitted in the primaries.

How will she vote in November? “I have no idea,” she said.

More than half of the nearly 110,000 residents of Dearborn are of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Michigan has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Both communities were mostly united in opposing President Biden’s response to the Israeli military action in Gaza, following the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, as were many young voters. They created the Listen to Michigan campaign, garnering 100,000 uncommitted votes in the Michigan Democratic primary election. The movement spread nationwide, including to New York, Hawaii, Colorado and Illinois.

Muslim voters are an important voting block, particularly in the swing state of Michigan. There were 200,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan in 2020 and President Biden won the state by 154,000 votes. But as those who voted uncommitted struggle with how to vote in November — or whether to vote at all — some fear that the movement might backfire and disengage voters altogether.

Emgage, an organization that helps mobilize and educate Muslim voters, got one million Muslims to vote in the U.S. elections in 2020. But Hira Khan, Emgage’s executive director for Michigan, said there is still a lot of voter apathy and she doesn’t believe that Michigan’s Arab and Muslim voter turnout will match the level of 2020. “If even 145,000 Muslims come out and vote again, I think that is even a challenge,” she said.

Michigan elected officials argue the best way to engage voters is to motivate them to show up on election day. “We know that if you vote in the primary, you are something like 95 percent likely to vote in the general election,” said State Representative Joey Andrews, who represents parts of Allegan, Berrien and Van Buren counties.

Berrien County Commissioner Chokwe Pitchford said he supports protests, but argued that this is not the moment for a protest vote with the elevated risk to American democracy if Donald Trump wins. On the other hand, he explained, if people protest vote and Biden still wins, “you completely dismantled your entire movement,” Pitchford said.

Many in Dearborn are refugees or children of refugee immigrants, and they are deeply affected by the conflict.

“What the war in Gaza has done, it has created PTSD for people,” said Assad Turfe, deputy executive of Wayne County, explaining that many local residents are traumatized by war because they’ve lost many family members over the years.

Turfe’s parents immigrated from Lebanon and he grew up in Dearborn, but both his grandmothers died as a result of conflicts. “They didn’t die of old age, they died of Israeli bombs,” he said. Turfe is a life-long Democrat who says he will never support Trump. But he wouldn’t say whether he will vote for President Biden either.

Ted Widmer, the former chief foreign policy speechwriter to President Clinton and a Macaulay Honors College professor teaching a course in the fall that will closely follow the 2024 election, understands why many people voted uncommitted. However, he said that he “can’t imagine that most people who voted uncommitted would prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden.”

One of the reasons for that, he said, is that many pro-Palestinian voters believe the best way to resolve the conflict in Gaza is with a two-state solution. “Biden and his team have been talking a lot about a two-state solution, Trump never talks about a two-state solution,” said Widmer.

Current polls are showing a different story. As of May 22, Trump was leading Biden by about 5 points in Michigan.

Rami Al-Kabra, deputy mayor of Bothell, WA, and the first immigrant Muslim American elected to Bothell City Council, believes things need to change immediately. “President Biden needs to hear our call: We cannot commit to you until your policies reflect what is moral and just,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Seattle Times.

The Youth Vote

Michigan’s college students are just as upset about the conflict as Muslim and Arab Americans, but according to Dante Chinni, a research specialist at Michigan State University, youth voters may not abandon the Democratic party as much as the primary vote suggests. Chinni believes that three key issues will decide whether voters aged 18-29 will turn up to the polls: Gaza, abortion and the fact that Trump is back on the ballot.

Chinni made one point clear about the influence of the Gaza conflict on this year’s election: “It’s still May,” she said. In the months leading up to November, a ceasefire may come about and different issues may take the media spotlight. Younger voters “are more sensitive to the climate around the election,” he said.

Chinni believes that the driving factor on election night will be similar to what it was in 2022, when the youth-vote turnout was 37 percent in Michigan, well above the national average of 23 percent, with much of it driven by abortion rights. The record turnout made it possible for the Democratic party to establish the first “Democratic trifecta” in Michigan in almost 40 years, with control of the governor’s office, the local Senate and House of Representatives.

Emgage is a bipartisan organization and it is still trying to figure out which presidential candidate to endorse. For Congress, it is endorsing Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent. In the meantime, Emgage is trying to motivate people to vote on other issues. “When you fill out a ballot, maybe you don’t have to fill out the whole, entire ballot,” Khan said.

That might be a hard sell. In presidential election years, when about 50 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, one third or more vote only for the top of the ticket, and ignore the bottom entirely.

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Patricia Prado contributed reporting.

By Judah Duke

Michigan lawmakers have a strategy for decarbonizing the state’s economy that has placed it among the nation’s front-runners. However, a potential ballot measure could get in the way.

The MI Healthy Climate Plan set the goal of achieving 100 percent carbon neutrality by 2050, but then Senate Democrats introduced a package accelerating the timeline to 2040. It was passed as the Clean Energy and Jobs Act last November.

The Act included a major shift: The ultimate approval for large-scale renewable energy projects will move from local municipalities to the state. The law goes into effect on Nov. 29.

The law gives developers interested in building large-scale renewable energy projects a way to get new project proposals reviewed by the state if a community’s zoning laws hinder it. 

“There are areas of the state where communities are just flat out saying ‘no’ to any sort” of renewable energy development, said Liesl Clark, former director of Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, who worked on the plan. “It’s an opportunity to create another path forward.”

Clark said the bill will allow the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to supersede only those local ordinances that are more restrictive than those specified by the commission’s own regulations.

But the new law is facing a lot of opposition. 

“The unifying point is that we have to make applicable land use choices,” said Roger Johnson, who is opposed to the legislation. “It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s renewables or industrial or if it’s residential — local circumstances need to be taken into account.”

Johnson sits on the ballot committee for Citizens for Local Choice, a bipartisan coalition formed for the sole purpose of challenging the law’s renewable energy siting stipulation with a ballot measure campaign. If it receives enough signatures, it would give voters a chance to repeal the law in November.

The Michigan Townships Association, the Michigan Association of Counties and the Michigan Farm Bureau have all backed Citizens for Local Choice.

Michigan State Representative Jennifer Conlin, who supported the bill, said her constituents in the 48th House District, which includes Ann Arbor and several rural communities, asked her not to. 

“All of my townships, all nine of them, did not want me to vote on this because they wanted local control,” Conlin said. 

Conlin was one representative who fought for amendments that ensured developers worked with local ordinances for four months before they could appeal to the state commission, she said, but the requirements did little to satisfy those in opposition.

“You really can’t come to the MPSC until everything has been tried,” she said. But the townships still opposed the bill “because they don’t want the MPSC to be able to come in under any circumstances.”

The petition by Citizens for Local Choice requires 356,958 valid signatures by May 29 to appear on the ballot in November, according to Ballotpedia. Johnson said the current number of signatures is not publicly available.

But the ballot initiative has faced scrutiny of its own, with some activists warning that the organization has ties to the fossil fuel industry. A report from the Energy and Policy Institute found that the administrators and moderators for the original organization’s Facebook group — established before Citizens for Local Choice was created for the ballot measure, and named Our Home, Our Voice — were on the payroll of a public relations firm, which represents a pipeline subsidiary partially owned by Mobil Pipe Line Co. and Sunoco Pipeline L.P.

In addition, the organization is accused of violating the Michigan Campaign Finance Act by sending money from Our Home, Our Voice to Citizens for Local Choice, according to a campaign finance complaint.

“This is a frivolous compliant [sic] with no merit, designed to distract the media, the campaign, and our volunteers from the overwhelming support we are receiving to restore the rights of local governments to zone large-scale wind and solar projects,” Citizens for Local Choice said in a statement Johnson shared. 

Those opposed to giving the state the authority to decide where, and how, to site new renewable energy projects through the MPSC make up 87 percent of voters, according to the coalition. They contend that not only do locals know what’s best for their communities, but that Michigan has made excellent progress toward clean energy by keeping land use decision-making localized.

“It’s our position that the status quo has served Michigan well in the development of renewables,” Johnson said.

Michigan has made some progress in renewable energy generation. In 2022, about 12 percent of Michigan’s electricity came from renewable resources, with wind energy accounting for about two-thirds. Michigan ranks 16th among states in the amount of electricity generated by wind energy, yet it ranks among the top five states in residential-sector petroleum use and first in residential-sector consumption of propane.

According to the most recent data available from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, carbon dioxide emissions from the generation of electric power by all fuels in Michigan fell 20 percent, to 53 million metric tons in 2021 from about 65 million metric tons in 2011. 

There are several constituencies that have much to gain from the legislation, not just developers, who can receive 30 percent back on their investment, before 2033, through the Federal Solar Investment Tax Credit. For landowners, Michigan also offers a property tax exemption for solar, which means that increasing a homes value by installing solar panels will not result in increased property taxes.

Nate Lada started a farm with his wife Jill in 2021 in the Ann Arbor area and now is part of Green Things Farm Collective, which runs on solar power. The array powering the farm is much smaller than the large-scale projects the law would allow, but Lada sees the law as a necessary step.

“I support green infrastructure, and I think that we should all be investing more heavily in renewable energy sources,” he said. “The ability to do that, or at least to have a secondary review beyond the township level, feels appropriate, especially given our experience with township politics.”

Not to mention that Michigan is experiencing significant climate shifts. 

According to the EPA, temperatures in Michigan have risen two to three degrees Fahrenheit in the last century. The state has experienced increasingly heavy rainstorms and more extremely hot days that could impact public health in cities, and corn production in rural areas. The weather changes are driven by a rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that have warmed the planet’s surface and atmosphere over the past 50 years.

Currently, it remains unclear if the complaint against Citizens for Local Choice was resolved, but as of May 16, the organization continues to collect signatures in a race to meet the May 29 deadline for getting on the November ballot, as reported by ABC 12 News.

By Kyla Forde

Chokwe Pitchford was still a teenager when he was approached outside a movie theater and asked if he wanted to work for now-state Representative Joey Andrews’s campaign. He had never been into politics, and said, he took the job knocking on doors just for the pay. 

Four years later, at 25, Pitchford is a county commissioner in Berrien County, Michigan, and the youngest member on the board.

Pitchford is a rising star in Berrien County politics. He was elected to be commissioner as a young Black man in a predominantly conservative area, where only 14 percent of the population is African American. He is one of just three Democrats; the board has nine Republicans. 

“Whatever he wants to be, he can be; he’s brilliant,” said Andrews, who was the first to encourage Pitchford to run for state representative in 2021 – a race that he lost – and has remained his mentor and friend ever since.

As commissioner, Pitchford represents three townships: Hagar, Sodus and Benton Charter. County commissioners oversee the county’s budget and other issues, including housing, public safety and economic development. Pitchford’s priorities include building more affordable homes and supporting an initiative that would give community leaders and nonprofits resources to combat gun violence. “I believe the root of gun violence is poverty,” he said. “I don’t think a person that commits crime, that shoots someone, was inherently born bad.”

Pitchford is also the executive director of nonprofit organization Berrien Forward, which aims to help local candidates run for office and promotes voter knowledge on progressive issues. He said one of the reasons he decided to run was because he wanted to be a role model for young Black boys in the Benton Harbor community.

Several local voters approve of Pitchford’s performance, and are confident about his future prospects. “I can see him being the president one day,” said LaToya Turner, a program director at the Boys and Girls Club of Benton Harbor, who voted for Pitchford in 2022, when he was elected commissioner. Julie Earle, a specialist at Boys and Girls Club, described him as a “tremendous advocate for the community.” 

But other local leaders believe he could be more responsive. Reverend Edward Pinkney, a minister and president of the grassroots Benton Harbor Community Water Council, said he didn’t vote for Pitchford and would not support him in the future. “He could do a whole lot better,” said Pinkney. “If you call Chokwe, he might not call you back.”

Some business leaders in the community don’t always agree with Pitchford’s priorities. For example, he advocated for revitalizing the nearby abandoned Orchards Mall by turning it into housing units, an idea that has faced some local opposition. 

Tess Ulrey, a city commissioner of St. Joseph and a Berrien Forward board member, has worked with Pitchford in many capacities. She said that sometimes she has to advise him to be patient, particularly when he is passionate about an issue. 

Depression and family troubles

Pitchford’s political journey is quite unconventional. His father was a drug dealer, and had frequent run-ins with the law, which took a major toll on Pitchford’s mental health at a young age. “I have depression and anxiety,” he said. “I was diagnosed when I was 13 after a suicide attempt.”   

Neither of his parents was interested in politics.

Later, Pitchford said his decision to run for political office split his parents apart. He and his father share the same name, so his father thought it best to leave the area to lessen the chances that he would tarnish his son’s name by association. 

“I haven’t heard from him in a very long time; I think it’s been almost four years now,” said Pitchford.  

The young politician was not a model student either. He was diagnosed with ADHD and failed algebra twice. But it was his high school English teacher who introduced him to one of his favorite books, “1984.” The book taught him the importance of remaining well-informed, which he carries with him into the world of politics today.

“One of the things that I took away from that book and I took away from her is: Question everything, but do it in a way that’s grounded in fact,” he said.

After working for Andrews’s campaign knocking on doors in 2018, Pitchford joined the Organizing Corps, doing campaign work for the Democratic presidential primaries. 

Andrews encouraged Pitchford to run for state representative in 2020. At the time, Pitchford was just 20 years old and still enrolled at Lake Michigan College, majoring in political science. He took Andrews up on his suggestion and launched his first campaign on campus.

His election journey for state representative was hard. 

“What I didn’t realize going into that campaign was how dirty it was going to get. They attacked me vociferously,” Pitchford said. 

Andrews believed Pitchford’s new ideas are bound to shake up long-standing power structures. “If he’s making long-time local leaders uncomfortable, he’s doing his job well,” said Andrews. 

Pitchford said it is all part of the job. “Being a county commissioner is a master class in bipartisanship,” he said.  He acknowledged he does not always get along with his colleagues on the board, but he knows he has to work with them to get any work done. 

Getting into politics so young has meant other personal sacrifices as well. Pitchford has been engaged for a year and a half, but still hasn’t been able to schedule the wedding date. 

“There’s always an election,” he said, laughing. 

By Jack Van Hecke 

In the five years ending in 2023, 58 percent of all Michigan Republican Party funding came from two billionaire families: the DeVoses and the Weisers. However, as of 2023, neither family has provided funding for the Michigan GOP, which was captured by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party following the January 6 insurrection.   

Both the Devoses and Weiser cited the Michigan takeover of the GOP by Kristina Karamo, a Qanon devotee, as the reason they’ve turned off the party’s financial spigot. Although Karamo, a former community college instructor and host of her own Christian podcast, was ousted in February, the state party has yet to recover. While more-moderate Republicans are hopeful that direct funding by donors to their campaigns will help them break the Democrat’s trifecta, continuing turmoil in the GOP could well hurt those efforts. (The Democrats won the Michigan State Senate and House, as well as the Governor’s seat, in 2022.)

“I’ll put it this way: everything that has happened is incredibly embarrassing,” said Emerson Silvernail, the legislative director for Republican Representative Sarah Lightner of Michigan’s 45^th District, which includes townships like Springport and Tompkins. The state’s GOP is “not associated with the most positive of things at the current moment,” Silvernail added. “Nobody wants to be associated with it; no sane person I would say.”  That said, Lightner is up for reelection in November, and is not worried about her seat flipping. District 45 has voted Republican in every election since 1965. Lightner won in 2022 with 68 percent of votes. 

Hugely influential in the state GOP, the DeVos family funneled more than $20.6 million into the party between 1989 and 2016. Betsy DeVos served as education secretary in the Trump administration, but resigned after January 6, calling Trump’s election denial “unconscionable.” Her husband Dick Devos is the scion of Amway, a health, beauty and home-care products company, who ran for governor against Jennifer Granholm in 2006 and lost.  

Ron Weiser is a businessman who made his fortune in real estate and served as ambassador to Slovakia under President George W. Bush. In July of 2023, Weiser halted his funding to the GOP after offering more than $4.5 million during the most recent midterm cycle. He does not support Trump loyalists and calls the election fallacies they push “ludicrous.” 

Initially, many Michigan Republicans believed Karamo would bring a much-needed grassroots energy to Michigan’s GOP — and wrest it from the control of big donors. However, after the 2020 election, Karamo spoke at Qanon conferences. Then, when she ran for Michigan Secretary of State in 2022 with a campaign focused heavily on false claims about the 2020 election, she lost by a whopping 14 points to Democrat Jocelyn Benson.  

“When it all started, I was very much for the new leadership” of Kristina Karamo, said Mark Forton, the former Republican chair of Macomb County. However, Forton said he has since come to believe that Karamo was “a fraud.” Forton himself was ousted as county chair in 2022. “The people around her were absolutely terrible and their goal was to destroy the party,” he added. 

Karamo lasted less than 12 months before she, too, was ousted and replaced by Pete Hoekstra, who served as ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration.

Healing the divisions of the Michigan GOP will be a challenge, however. Since 2020, the party can roughly be divided into three subsets: the ultra-MAGA wing, which claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; a more-moderate MAGA wing that supports Trump, but not the January 6  insurrection; and the never-Trumpers. 

About a month before Karamo’s ouster, the Michigan GOP released a 140-page report entitled The Failed Leadership of the Karamo Administration, charging it with financial mismanagement. “The Karamo administration has driven the Party into an unsustainable financial operating position,” stated the report, noting that the party’s debt had climbed to $619,000 by last December. “The Party cannot continue to operate any longer at this rate. Ms. Karamo’s financial plan has been a complete failure. And she has no new plan to bring the Party back,” according to the report. 

One-sixth of the party’s debt was attributed to the purchase of computers, which have gone missing. The Hoekstra administration is searching for them, and is unsure if they were ever actually purchased. No official investigation has begun to find them yet; no charges have been brought against Karamo.

“A lot of money gets wasted like you wouldn’t believe,” said Forton. 

Nor could Karamo “cultivate and maintain donors.” Between March and October of 2023, the Karamo administration was only able to raise $185,744, “an historically low amount,” according to the GOP report. During the same period, two years earlier, the party raised nearly 10-times as much.   

“Karamo refused to meet with donors,” said Forton. “There were people who approached her with big money, and they wanted to help, but she would not meet with them.”  

Turmoil in the GOP has already had a huge impact on election-year fundraising. The biggest race in Michigan this election year is for the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat. Although Mike Rogers, a Republican who chastised Trump for his election denial, won the state primary; as of March, Rogers has raised only $2.8 million, less than one-fifth of the $15.8 million raised by his Democratic challenger Elissa Slotkin. Rogers was recently endorsed by Trump.  

As of May, Slotkin is leading Rogers in the polls by three points. The same poll shows Trump leading Biden in Michigan by 4 points. In the past four presidential elections, whoever won Michigan was ushered into the Oval Office. 

Voters are aware of the party’s disarray and wary of the state’s GOP. 

Tammy Juroff, a factory worker from Benton Harbor and a registered Republican, said she thinks “we’re all in trouble,” with the current state of the GOP, noting that the Karamo fiasco was “absolutely crazy.” She is unsure how she’ll vote come November, but noted that at the local level, elected officials — most of whom are Democrats — are doing a good job. For the presidency, she will most likely vote for Trump. 

Tess Ulrey, a city commissioner for St. Joseph who calls herself a “staunch Democrat,” comes from a long line of conservative voters. Her father, she said, had voted red his whole life, but now feels “alienated” by the party, and “cannot support what is happening with the GOP.” She said he will vote for Biden and Democrats down ballot.  

St. Joseph is historically a Republican town that has been turning “more and more blue” because of the current state of the GOP, said Ulrey. 

Voters “don’t trust Republicans to govern,” said Joey Andrews, state representative for District 38, which includes St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. This district was Republican from 1993 to 2020, and while his is still considered a swing district, Andrews said: There would have to be an “extreme swing” for the Democrats to lose districts like his. He remains “optimistic” about the likelihood that the Democrats will retain their majority in the Michigan House of Representatives come November.  In 2021, Michigan gave responsibility for redistricting to a commission of randomly selected citizens, creating more competitive voting districts that helped the Democratic Party win its trifecta.

Pete Hoekstra’s hands are full as he works to right the party’s listing ship. “The Michigan GOP is working a little better with a new leadership that’s only been in place for a couple of months. They’re raising money,” and paying back some of its debt, said Forton. 

Hoekstra looks to bring major donors back to the Michigan GOP. He has been in discussion with Ron Weiser, and says he has a “good relationship” with the DeVos family. 

But with just six months left until the election, Forton, for one, isn’t optimistic about the state GOP’s prospects.  

 “We’re in a bad mess and we have to hope and pray and work our butts off,” he said.  

By Kyla Forde

Regina Weiss was a Detroit public school teacher in 2011 when she suddenly found herself facing financial disaster. A series of Republican-led education policies cut her teacher benefits and pay to the point that she almost lost her house. To make matters worse, she taught out of a dilapidated building where pests and a lack of air conditioning made teaching and learning difficult.

These conditions are characteristic of the Detroit school district — one marred by financial struggles and low-quality charter schools that put a strain on public school financing.

These were just a few factors that motivated Weiss to run for state representative in 2019. Today, she chairs the Michigan House Education Appropriations Subcommittee, overseeing education funding.

Last year, four Democratic teachers-turned-legislators — a historic number — were appointed to head the House and Senate Education Committees and Appropriations Subcommittees. Joining Weiss were Rep. Matt Koleszar, who chairs the House Education Committee; Sen. Danya Polehanki, chair of the Senate Education Committee; and Sen. Darrin Camilleri, who chairs the Senate Pre-K-12 Appropriations Subcommittee. The education committees oversee education bills, and the appropriations subcommittee deals with education funding.

With a thin Democratic majority in the legislature, these teacher-legislators are determined to reform education policies instituted during decades of GOP reign, which expanded charters, cut public- education funding and weakened teacher benefits. In the process, the performance of Michigan students on the National Assessment of Education Progress exams, which is known as the nation’s report card, plummeted. While Michigan outperformed the national average on every NAEP test as recently as 1998, by 2015, the state lagged the nation in every test except eighth-grade reading, where its performance equaled the national average. The state has continued to rank at or below the national average for student performance in mathematics and reading assessments for grades 4, 8 and 12 since 2020.

According to the teacher-legislators, declining education performance is at least partly due to systematic cuts in school funding. Between 2002 and 2015, education funding declined by 30 percent, and the amount of funding allocated to each individual student, also known as foundational per-pupil funding, decreased by 22 percent. “We have been working really hard to undo a lot of those (past) failed policies in the short time that we’ve been the majority,” said Weiss, referring to a series of bills she and her teacher-legislator colleagues helped pass last year.

Perhaps most significantly, this year’s $21.5 billion K-12 school aid budget includes a historic five percent increase in per-pupil funding from the previous year, as well as an additional $952 million for districts with “at risk” or economically disadvantaged students. A 2023 report by the Education Law Center found that about 77 percent of Michigan public school students attend schools in districts that are more than $2,000 below adequate per-pupil funding, and 30 percent attend schools in districts that are more than $4,000 below the adequate-funding level. To be below adequate funding means there is not a sufficient base per-pupil amount being spent on students to meet learning needs. Schools with adequate funding usually have smaller classes and student support, such as libraries, counselors and special education.

Another bill repealed a provision that would have allowed third graders to be held back for failing to meet reading requirements. The so-called read-or-flunk law was widely opposed by teachers and parents who argue that holding students back increases drop-out and incarceration rates. Black and low-income students are far more likely to be retained than white and affluent students.

The state legislature also reinstated teachers’ collective-bargaining rights when it rolled back the state’s right-to-work laws. By allowing teachers to bargain work conditions like classroom placements and teacher evaluations, the legislators expect that Michigan, which has a significant teacher shortage, can attract more and better teachers.

However, Michigan faces sizable education challenges going forward. The increased spending in the 2024 budget was made possible by the state’s federal COVID relief funds. The report by the Education Law Center estimated that Michigan would need to spend $4.5 billion more to bring all school districts to adequate funding. But according to economists, given the state’s declining population and low tax rates, there is not enough state revenue to go to education. “To me, the number one issue is a lack of adequate revenue for education in our state,” said Weiss.

The legislature also will have to address Michigan’s unregulated charter landscape — arguably one of the most pressing issues for the state’s most vulnerable and economically disadvantaged children. Championed by Betsy DeVos, whose family has been a major funder of Michigan Republicans and conservative causes and who served as education secretary under Donald Trump, a range of Michigan education reforms have resulted in a decades-long boom in charter schools, and “one of the most deregulated educational environments in the country.” Charter schools are privately managed schools that use public tax dollars.

Liberal charter laws plus a novel system for funding schools, have left Michigan schools underfunded, especially in its poorest districts. Today about 370 charter schools educate 150,000 students — 10 percent of the state’s total. Most of the state’s charters are concentrated within low-performing and low-income urban school districts like Detroit, where 70 percent of the district’s charters were in the bottom half of state school rankings.

Charter schools in Detroit — as elsewhere — are particularly ill-equipped to handle students with special needs. Detroit public schools, beset by low funding and high teacher turnover, aren’t much better.

“The public school system at this time in Detroit is a disservice to our youth,” said Kevin Jones, a community leader in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood of Detroit, who noted that young teens who visit the neighborhood’s James and Rose Robinson Community Center show a worrying lack of reading proficiency.

The state’s Board of Education is now calling for various measures to increase charter-school transparency and oversight. With hundreds of charter-school authorizers, even Michigan’s worst charters can often avoid accountability by “authorizer shopping,” a practice whereby low-performing charters avoid closure by finding a new authorizer.

The Michigan teacher-legislators have been working to rein in charters. In 2022, Koleszar and Polehanki proposed bills requiring that state superintendents suspend authorizers for failing to provide appropriate oversight. The same year, Camilleri and Polehanki introduced bills prohibiting authorizer shopping by the bottom 5 percent of low-performing charters.

With one of the nation’s largest for-profit charter sectors, these Democrats are also trying to force more charters to publish their financial data. Weiss, for example, has proposed a bill requiring charters to display information about their Educational Management Organizations and authorizers in their advertisements.

Though it is unclear whether these bills will advance, they were last referred to the Education Committee, but no further action has been taken. Charter law is also very complicated, which also has impeded progress.

Looking forward, even if Democrats manage to hold onto their slim majority, the teacher-legislators have a lot of work left to do if they are to improve overall education quality.