EAST LANSING – When Governor Rick Snyder unveils his education message on Wednesday, a hallmark will be moving authority for activity in the classroom to the teacher, he said Monday at the annual Governor’s Education Summit in East Lansing.
Snyder told the educators gathered at the Kellogg Hotel and Center at Michigan State University that school districts should become more than school systems that support local schools. And he said schools should have more flexibility in when and how they offer programs, as long as students are meeting achievement goals.
Though he did not specify yet what would be included, Snyder said each school district in the state would be implementing one of his online dashboards, and the focus for the state would lie in the numbers on that report.
“We have to put much more focus on proficiency, on measurement, on growth,” he said. “How do we make sure each child in our system gets a good education each and every year?”
He said schools were not hitting that mark yet, noting such statistics as less than half of the state’s students are considered proficient in reading on federal tests, and the state is in the bottom half in proficiency in a number of grades and subjects. “That’s not good enough,” he said.
The summit, now 15 years old and under its third governor, was smaller than in years past, taking less than half the space it had packed in prior years.
And the audience gave Snyder a standing ovation as he was introduced despite some grumbling before and after the event about both his funding and policy ideas.
Snyder has taken hits from the education community for his proposed cuts to overall school funding, as well as for his push to have school employees contribute more to health care and retirement.
And he said again Monday that his proposals for change would provide opportunities for public/private partnerships in education, an idea teachers unions have attacked as opening the door to loss of public-sector jobs.
Snyder said the changes he would propose this week would be aimed at helping schools better meet their goals of educating students. “We should be embracing change as an opportunity to be the best,” he said.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan said education leaders, including himself, need to be more open to new ideas. “We need to emotionally release the past and embrace the future our children need,” he said. “So much energy is being dedicated to preserving the past.”
He urged those in attendance to support Snyder, or at least to give him a chance. “We’ve had a couple of well-intentioned governors in a row and we’ve been sinking like a rock,” he said of the state’s economy. “I’m at least going to be open to policies that may turn that around.”
Among those policies, he said, was the pension tax. Most of those in the room would not, under current law, pay taxes on their pensions.
During and after his address, Snyder said his proposal to shift some School Aid Fund revenue to higher education indicates his vision for the education system.
“We need to stop looking at separate silos,” he said. “How do we have each sector, but how do we integrate them.”
He said prenatal through preschool programs were needed to prepare children for school, K-12 schools had to prepare children for colleges, and colleges and universities had to ensure more of their students were graduating.
But he said how those things would happen would be left more to the individual institution.
“We’ll put more and more emphasis on the individual schools and allow them to be creative,” he said.
Snyder said during his address that schools needed to change from the agrarian and industrial models to match the current economy, but he said after that did not necessarily mean he was promoting year-round schools. “We’re going to look at a lot more flexibility in schools,” he said. “We’re going to get away from looking at how many hours in school.”
Flanagan said schools are currently too restricted. “In my view, we should take away virtually all regulations,” he said. “Four thousand schools are going to be better without regulation to figure it out for themselves rather than having mommy and daddy telling them what to do.”
And that would include the provisions to allow the state to take over struggling schools or districts, he said.
As an architect of that proposal, Flanagan acknowledged that it was rather soon to scrap the Office of School Reform and Restructuring. But he argued the model would not help schools improve and said he hoped the Legislature would reconsider after Snyder’s message is released and pull the provision out of the Department of Education budget.
Both chambers added the office back into the budget as they moved it from the respective subcommittees.
Snyder said his changes were not designed to undermine collective bargaining agreements. “We want to have a good dialog with the unions,” he said.
Snyder and Flanagan, who is also Snyder’s education adviser, both urged an end to the attacks on teachers and other school employees as the source of the state’s education problems.
“Two hundred and thirty-eight schools had zero college ready in all subjects. That’s a failure,” Snyder said. “The way to approach that is not to get down on people.”
He said all parties instead needed to get together to look for solutions. “I think we’ve got tremendous talent in our schools,” he said after the speech.
“It’s just the system that’s broken; it’s not the people in that system,” Flanagan said.
But not all educators were convinced of Snyder’s plans. Several overheard in the hallways after his address registered less than enthusiasm for his leadership and one questioned how he planned to pay for all the changes he wants to make.
Dan DeGrow, superintendent of the St. Clair Intermediate School District and former Republican Senate majority leader, gave Snyder some mixed reviews.
DeGrow agreed there was more room for sharing services. “Local school districts need to do what they do best, which is educate kids,” he said. “We do the things we do best, like payroll.”
But he said the cuts Snyder had proposed would hurt. Administration officials had treated the proposed 7 percent cut to ISDs as “not that big a deal,” he said. “That would be true if we’d had a raise in the last few years.”
And he acknowledged there was room for change in how K-12 schools provide education. “We’re not good at being flexible with kids’ education,” he said. “Colleges are much better at letting people opt out.”
Law enforcement leaders urged Snyder to increase efforts in early childhood programs. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Michigan said, in a letter to the governor, that the state should be investing in public health services for mothers and infants, including home visit programs for new parents, and high quality child care and preschool programs.
“These are some of the proven efforts that can help kids to become more successful while curbing crime and delinquency that might lead to a longer and more costly life trajectory in the criminal justice system,” the letter said.
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