Michigan:
Sparing the Rod

by Debra Viadero

With Engler's blessing, however, Ellis opted instead to give the schools the expert help they needed to shape up.

"We're going to hold off on sanctions while some of the solutions are allowed to work," says John Truscott, a spokesman for the Republican governor.

Michigan holds off on penalties for low-performing schools, offering help instead.

But some state business leaders accused the governor and state officials of being soft on a group of schools that had scored low on state assessments for at least three years in a row.

Although state school officials published the list of 22 "unaccredited" schools last year, stronger interventions remain only a threat. Instead, the state has offered to pay for teacher training and other forms of assistance.

James E. Ray, the superintendent of the 24,000-student Flint school district, doubts the threat of sanctions had anything to do with the improvements in test scores that some of the schools in his district have made.

"We felt we knew--not as a result of any external threat--that we had to improve and that we had to engage in a fundamentally different system," he says. "What does not help is when there are threats of receivership or takeover."

Scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, in fact, were up all around the state last year. In mathematics and reading, 4th and 7th graders posted their highest-ever scores in the history of the 29-year-old testing program.

The assessments, which state officials have been ratcheting up since the mid-'80s, will also be expanded this spring to include social studies for the first time. But the real test for the program will come after 2000, when the tests are aligned in every subject with rigorous academic standards that are under construction now.

The state's high school proficiency test, meanwhile, has proved more problematic. To appease parents who balked at the new tests in 1997 by refusing to let their children take them, the state adopted a rating scale for the exams and shortened the amount of testing time. But last spring, a few pockets of discontent remained where parents kept their children out of the tests.

"It hasn't exactly been a disaster, but it hasn't been a sterling achievement either. We're going to need to revisit this issue," says Kathleen Strauss, the chairwoman of the state's elected, Democratic-majority school board.

The state's 107 charter schools, criticized in the past for low test scores, came under scrutiny again, too, after a state auditor in late 1997 found that some of them were hiring uncertified teachers.

All of the schools in question had been chartered by Central Michigan University, which oversees about half the charter schools in the state.

The news prompted the state school board to set up a commission to study better monitoring practices. But a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled House to step up supervision of the universities that grant charters has been languishing in the Republican-majority Senate.

One group that lawmakers in both houses definitely hope to crack down on in the near future, however, is student troublemakers.

Prompted by the news of multiple shootings in schools in Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oregon, the legislature last year considered more than 15 bills aimed at improving school safety.

For example, bills passed in both chambers, but not yet cleared for final approval, would automatically expel students who assault teachers or classmates.

But legislators remained divided at summer's end over whether schools should be compelled to set up some kind of alternative program for students they kick out.

On other education fronts, Engler, who madeeducation a centerpiece of his successful campaign for a third term last fall, launched an initiative to improve reading.

As part of the $5 million program, schools will be required to provide summer remedial courses for 3rd graders who cannot read on their own. The state last fall also began distributing "reading readiness" kits to parents of newborns and prekindergartners.

Michigan also doled out $17 million in state grants in April of last year to help 17 of the state's poorer districts reduce class sizes to 17 students in grades K-3--a project the state eventually hopes to expand statewide.

Every district in Michigan enjoyed a financial windfall in the spring after the state agreed to pay them a total of $1 billion to settle a 17-year-old lawsuit over state funding for special education.

The original suit involved 84 districts that accused the state of chronically underfunding special education programs.

In an effort to stave off future lawsuits, the state agreed to make payments over 10 years to all public school districts. Districts received the first of those payments, ranging in size from $92,000 to $13 million, last spring.

But 125 districts, arguing that special education continues to be underfunded, filed a second lawsuit in May. A state appellate court threw out that lawsuit a month later, and the matter is pending before the state's highest court.

For the most part, state funding for education has remained stable at around $9.5 billion since the 1998 fiscal year.

Districts got some added assistance last year, though, when the state reduced the amount that districts are required to set aside for teacher pensions by 3.5 percent.

A last-minute injection of $91.4 million for schools also came from the state legislature in the fall. Lawmakers also voted to increase state spending for schools by another $341 million in the 1999-2000 fiscal year.

Even so, a number of districts complain they are strapped as a result of 4-year-old changes in the school finance system.

The funding changes helped raise per-pupil spending considerably in some of the most property-poor districts, but some higher-spending districts now contend that they can no longer keep up with inflation.

The state also made little progress on one of its most intractable education problems: its higher-than-average percentages of teachers teaching with temporary, emergency licenses or in fields for which they have not been trained.

"We have a major crisis in a growing retirement problem that's leaving us really short in terms of teachers at all," says Gire, the House education chairwoman. "What do you do about a lack of substitutes?"

© 1999 Editorial Projects in Education

Vol. 18, number 17, page 152