LANSING – Michigan has not gone as far as Florida on some education reforms and has moved away from some changes enacted in the Sunshine State, but its former governor said Wednesday that adoption of Governor Rick Snyder’s education plan will mean long-term improvement for the state’s students.
Jeb Bush, who testified before a joint meeting of the House and Senate Education committees and participated in a news conference with Snyder, said the plan Snyder had offered was the type of comprehensive overhaul Michigan and other states need to improve student performance.
“The idea that this is comprehensive really matters,” Bush said. “There’s no one single fix.”
Bush also agreed with Snyder that the focus has to be on the education system.
“We have incredible people, talented people,” Snyder said. “But the system is broken.”
“It’s completely adult-centered, not just teacher-centered,” Bush said of the current education system. And he said it is designed to force teachers to “teach to the median.”
“Children who excel are held back and children who struggle are moved along,” he said.
Snyder said Bush’s visit and presentations could help to shape and ensure success for Michigan’s coming education reforms. “I just wish he could stay longer so I could learn more about him,” he said, adding he expected Bush would be invited back.
Bush urged that, whatever reforms are adopted, no one expect quick results from the changes.
“We live in a world of immediate gratification,” he said. “Pass a law and overnight every child is going to be a grade-level reader is not going to happen.?
In his presentation to the committees, he and Patricia Levesque, director of Bush’s two education foundations, said changes need time to work through the system.
For instance, the reforms begun as early as 1999 had produced little improvement in middle schools until 2006, when there was a jump in performance. “We asked principals what happened and they said they were finally getting students who were prepared for middle school,” Levesque said.
A key part of that improvement is a policy that requires, with certain exceptions, that all students read at grade level to move on from third grade. Bush said he would like to see states expand that policy to eighth grade as well to be sure students are ready for high school.
“If we really want to be radical about it, no social promotion period,” he said.
The Florida plan focused both on teachers and districts in trying to improve education. But Bush said in both cases the most important factor was the state’s database of school and child information.
“We have the best database in the country,” he said. “In Florida, we can track fourth graders all the way through post-graduate and the job they have after.”
The data is also designed to tie each child to all of the teachers he or she had and the pre-school he or she may have attended, Bush said.
Michigan has been developing a system for tracking students within the K-12 system for some time, and this fall will launch an extension of that system to add colleges and universities. (This paragraph has been updated since original publication to reflect the status of the database development).
For teachers, Florida requires districts to bargain differential pay based on their evaluations. “We should be able to pay teachers when they consistently, with good data, overperform,” Mr. Bush said.
And for teachers rated as poor for two or more years, parents get a note informing them of that rating and giving them the option to pull their child from that class and the teachers can be denied transfers to new buildings. “We should have no tolerance for poor teachers,” he said.
Upcoming changes will also eliminate tenure and base half of teachers’ evaluations on the performance of their students on the state assessment.
While Michigan is moving to a system that includes student performance in teacher evaluations, Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan, who also serves as Snyder’s education adviser, said half of the evaluation is too much weight to give test scores.
“I like 40/60. I don’t want it totally driven by test scores,” Flanagan said.
He said it was as important for the students to be able to relate to the teachers. “Some of their needs are social needs,” he said of struggling students.
How teachers interact with other teachers, particularly how older teachers mentor those new to the field, should also be a consideration in evaluations, he said.
Flanagan also urged against the House proposal to remove all reference to tenure in making layoff decisions. He said senior teachers should have preference as long as they are of equal skill with the younger teacher and are able to teach the class in question.
For Florida school districts, those that improve or maintain “A” grades see extra funding. Those that fail more than two years could see their students leave for choice.
Bush said the choice option became less of a threat to schools, and so had less effect on school change, after the Florida Supreme Court ruled the state could not pay tuition for private schools.
But Snyder said he would not be seeking vouchers as part of his plan. “Some years ago there was a major attempt at vouchers,” he said. “Let’s focus on the package we have.”
Bush urged using a simple grading system for schools, instead of descriptions of a school’s progress. “Level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is a way of hiding,” he said. “Parents sure as hell know what an A or an F is.”
Michigan is in the process of moving away from a letter grade system to one that labels schools as Accredited, Interim Accredited or Unaccredited, but Flanagan said the proposal, adopted by the Board of Education on Tuesday, would provide enough other information for parents to understand how their child’s school stacks up.
And he said the ordered list of schools is simpler to understand even than a letter grade. “If you think your school is doing really well and you’re in the bottom 10 percent, the bottom 15 percent, someone has to answer for that,” he said.
There could, however, be some sentiment on the state board for adding the grades back. “I found the grading system very compelling,” said board member Eileen Weiser (R-Ann Arbor) after Bush’s testimony to the committees. But she said she would have to review the system more to know if it was needed in Michigan.
States also need to push more online education, Bush and Levesque said. “As we move into the 21st Century, students are going to have to know how to conduct themselves online,” Levesque said.
Florida allows school districts to offer their courses in electronic formats, and allows students to take classes from any district if their home district does not offer the course.
Those Michigan high school students who are graduating this spring will have had at least a semester of online education under the Michigan Merit Curriculum.
Bush also said the states needed to worry less about each other. “I think education needs to be a national priority,” he said. “We benchmark each other against the states. We really ought to be benchmarking ourselves against the world.”
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