Why Michigan can’t fix its schools
Education reform in Michigan is held back by a lack of urgency
Michigan is a bottom 10 state in education performance, according to one key recent measure.
The state’s fourth-graders fell to 41st from 38th in the National Assessment of Education Performance reading test; other grade levels and subjects posted similarly dismal results.
While other states are making some progress in improving education quality, Michigan is stagnant. And don’t think the numbers are skewed by poor-performing urban school districts — suburban students also lag behind, with just one-third of white fourth-graders hitting the proficient mark in reading.
The latest confirmation from the NAEP of the sorry state of Michigan’s schools has a lot of folks talking about what it will take to push the state back into the top tier. The first step is tearing down the obstacles to progress.
Chief among them is the absence of a unified vision. Education reform in Michigan has been an adversarial endeavor for decades. While other states found reform models that everyone from teachers to politicians to the business community could endorse, Michigan continues to fight.