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.