Michigan Board of Education President John Austin on Education

John Austin: Michigan must recommit to public education

John Austin

Many Michigan “firsts” in terms of innovations are well known, like the automobile and assembly line.

Less known is that Michigan helped create the great public education system that is one of America’s miracles and strengths. The first public land grant universities, offering high quality, low-cost education for all — were born here. So were innovations in K-12 education: Kalamazoo created the first, free public high school paid for by local residents’ tax dollars. Flint brought us the community school concept, the school as a “lighthouse” and center of community life and learning.

Today, this commitment to great public education is in tatters. Our public universities are being priced out of reach of working people. And when Albion has to close the doors on its community high school, 49 school districts are in severe financial distress, and districts like my own in Ann Arbor are cutting teachers, arts, music and charging for enrichment programs — we’ve lost our way.

The State Board of Education just conducted more than a dozen public education forums with residents across Michigan. Certainly, there is tremendous anxiety about the current push by the governor, the Legislature and their allies to turn public education into a competitive free marketplace. Rapid expansion of charters without quality control (the fastest growing are those that deliver poor quality education); opening the education market to for-profit, online-only providers (even as other states are rethinking this given poor results), and secret plans for more of same (skunkworks), all contribute mightily to Michigan’s education funding crisis and chaos.

But more important — we heard loud and clear at our forums that the public is yearning for a positive agenda to rebuild our schools; to figure out how we pay for a rich education for all students, and to lift up, not run-down and demoralize, our educators.

The great tragedy of the current debate is that the education-free market crowd says openly, “You can’t trust educators to support innovation.” This is exactly the opposite of what the public intuitively understands, what all education research confirms, and what the governor himself said in his 2011 special-education message: “To get the student learning, we expect nothing matters more than great teachers and great teaching. Every body of research confirms that the biggest contributor to learning gains and good school and life outcomes is the great teacher who inspires student learning.”

It’s been almost 20 years since Proposal A. The ambitious plans of the Oxford Foundation to rewrite Michigan school finance ended with a whimper, not a bang. The list of schools in distress and schools cutting classrooms past the bone grows daily. We need to remake our public education finance system.

The State Board of Education is committed to help lead the public discussion of how we rebuild and finance great public schools again. We look to work with the governor, Legislature and all comers. But I would suggest these three first steps as a guide:

■ Let’s have a moratorium on new school creation until we can agree on how to ensure new schools educate children well and don’t undermine learning for others.

■ Let’s forge new ideas for how we spend money differently to support rich learning and better outcomes for students, including creating positive financial incentives to personalize learning plans. Let’s also consider how we use school finances to create incentives that deliver better outcomes. For example, we should pay much more for full-service schools — with in-person teaching, career counselors, arts, music — versus online-only schools. We could pay more for robust career-technical programs, early/middle colleges and dual enrollments that deliver high school and post-secondary credentials. We could pay more for high schools than elementary schools.

■ And most important, let’s make the priority to better support, equip, train and aid those most central to great public education: our teachers and educators. The public knows, and research shows, that great teaching is the key to great learning. Let’s make this our focus.

In 1874, the residents of Kalamazoo fought in court for the right to tax themselves to provide free public high school education. Now, 139 years later, they created the Kalamazoo Promise, guaranteeing free higher education for all Kalamazoo school graduates. Let’s forge anew our commitment to do the same for all Michigan.

John Austin is president of the Michigan State Board of Education.