School Problems Start with Funding Favoring Higher Education Over K-12
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The powerful and successful schools get all the cash. The schools that really need help can whistle for it.
Check out the marble palaces at any public higher education institution in Michigan.
Then visit virtually any public high school.
The difference in environment tells the story.
Michigan has been shortchanging K-12 education for so long it is obvious in the infrastructure.
School board members have been taking a terrific beating from their constituency in recent years.
The reason: all they can do -- their only option -- is cut, cut, cut their schools' budgets.
A board member from Pinconning has made news recently by quitting -- citing threats from the public for merely doing what was necessary to keep schools financially viable.
The board member, Tom Hornacek, we know from talking to Pinconning folks, was personally involved in leading the millage campaign that built a new high school after decades of defeats.
Mr. Hornacek deserves the praise of his community, and the state, not the scorn of a few crackpots operating on the fringe of local politics.
We fear the revelations of "failing schools" that are dictated by the state legislature in their reforms necessary to capture $400 million in federal funding.
We fear they will hit close to home, and they will be a farce. Failing schools are the fault of all of us; failing schools indicate a failure to target funding priorities where they should be aimed.
We are sure a close inspection of the budgets of state universities (not community colleges, which are just about as hard-pressed as K-12) would show plenty of fat, overblown salaries, construction excesses, etc.
The state of Michigan, and other states, all follow the same formula. They fund K-12 at a much less adequate level than that of higher ed.
The University of Michigan seems to be on another planet: it receives only about 10 percent of its budget from the state. Rumors are U-M is thinking about going private, like Harvard, Yale, etc. Probably not a bad idea.
The higher ed establishment seems oblivious to the costs of educating foreign students, even out-of-state students, while tolerating inadequate funding of in-state K-12. A tough analysis of this factor needs to be published, and decisions made. Is the diversity provided by foreign students really of more value than producing an adequate percentage of qualified K-12 graduates?
No, it's not the foreign student or the out-of-state student in our universities, who will probably leave and contribute to the prosperity in their home area, that we need. What Michigan needs is a greater number of highly educated K-12 students who will raise our college graduation rates and will stick around to buoy the Michigan economy.
It is a typical corporate elitism. The powerful and successful schools get all the cash. The schools that really need help can whistle for it.
K-12 schools can't hope to match the lobbying power of higher ed; can't match the power of a national athletic program gaining support; can't marshal the financial support that comes from having a donor base built over more than a century.
Michigan is currently hurting re its high school graduation rates, its test scores K-12, its school buildings, its support of teachers. But there is little urgency coming out of Lansing. Some of the reforms put into place to gain "Race to the Top" dollars seem punitive, not palliative.
To penalize schools we in the state have failed to adequately fund, and support, is like shooting ourselves in the foot. It is not only wrong, it is stupid.
The state legislature would be more fair, more wise, to make sure the funding base for K-12 is their first priority. Otherwise, we will continue to shortchange kids where the needs are -- in their earliest educational years.
This is not a new problem: it has existed as long as I have been working in this state, about 50 years. It took me 20 years as a news reporter and a volunteer strategist on about two dozen school millage campaigns to find out the game that was being played. "Oh, you are out of formula," the head of the Senate fiscal agency told me. "Out of formula meant the decision had been made not to fund the local school district, to shift dollars somewhere else. It was a clear sign that the money had gone to higher ed, to prisons, to welfare, or elsewhere -- rather than where it should have gone.
A vast change is needed in the attitude of the public and legislators; they need to realize that over-emphasis on higher ed and under-funding of K-12 leaves Michigan at a disadvantage in competing in the global marketplace.
We cannot raise university graduation rates to meet those of other states like Massachusetts, and to other countries, without first raising Michigan K-12 graduation rates.
The students who make it through high school and are smart enough to be admitted to the University of Michigan, Michigan State and other universities have had the support of parents, their communities and the state.
The public has been sold a bill of goods that "local control" is the panacea. But that concept gives state government the license to shortchange K-12, to force local taxpayers to pay the burden of all infrastructure improvements. Local control is as much a myth as the idea that casinos are a source of economic development, that high achieving college graduates stick around and make the state where they were educated prosperous. Neither of those ideas holds water.
The vast majority of students, the dropouts, the low achievers, the struggling wannabes, are where we are missing the boat. Those are the students who are dragging down the test scores, who are costing taxpayers high costs of welfare, prisons and other social needs.
But ironically that troubled cohort is where our additional high school graduates will come from. That is where we are failing our children, and the public, and the state itself.
The American promise always was seated in the elementary and high schools. That's where the success of the society is founded. Top students always will find their way. We have a duty to serve society's most pressing needs --and today that is in K-12 education. Real reform means changing our priorities to support K-12, not kow-towing to elitist higher education and heavy lobbying, and getting our priorities straight in enlightened self interest. ###
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