Governor Snyder’s plan for education in Michigan sounds just like Romney’s and Bobby Jindal’s.
The money should follow the student anywhere and everywhere, to any vendor of education services, regardless of who owns it or manages it.
So, students may take their money to private schools, to hawkers of services, to online courses, whatever. Welcome to anyone who wants to start a school and collect public money.
That is a plan to undermine public education, and the rightwing knows it. That’s their goal.
Education costs won’t go down without increasing class sizes, and the way that will happen is by shifting more dollars to online schools of dubious quality.
It may be worth pointing out that this is not the formula of any high-performing nation in the world.
An editorial writer for the Detroit Free Press sees an issue with the Snyder approach. His column is called “It’s Time to Reshape Public Education.” My suggestion, take care not to destroy it. The entrepreneurs who will flood the new marketplace will care more about their bottom line than about children. Surely, Governor Snyder knows that. This is the governor’s prescription for education spending:
“Any time, any place, any way, any pace.”
It’s a catchy way of saying state money should follow students through all kinds of educational options, from traditional neighborhood schools to charters and online coursework — whatever best enables the student to learn.
Snyder calls it “unfettered flexibility” and hopes to foster more “free market ideas for public schools in Michigan.”
Sounds good, but let’s make sure we have quality controls in place for educators who want to set up shop here and take in our tax dollars.
And let’s not leave decisions about learning entirely up to the students. A few may do just fine taking a physics class online at 2 a.m. from a teacher based in Arizona. But most will probably be better served by a little more structure — and a mandatory gym class.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“So, students may take their money …”
When students and their parents are the only ones paying school taxes, then it will be “their money”.
Until then, the public has not delegated their choice of educational systems to students and their parents.
If they keep asking for a free market education, they will get it …
If they keep asking for a free market education, they will get it …” And it will eventually cost a whole lot more than current public education does. See privatization of prisons.
Well, no, a free market prison system would be one where prisoners have a “choice” of which prisons to “attend” — but of course the prisoners would have to pay the full cost of imprisonment, so it would cost the public nothing.
Interesting!!
But since the prisoners aren’t free, how could they take part in a “free” market?
Our governor is a RINO, plain and simple. He’s a progressive that needs to be voted out. RINO Rick’s way of governing is to not say anything at all. His last famous quote was this, “I focus on the executive branch, that’s the legislative branch of government. Obviously there’s topics of discussion and I hope the legislative body and the people associated with that work through their issues.”
Granted he was talking about the latest political scandal, but that is still his basic tenet when it comes to governing. He is not available to anybody except his cadre of hand picked toadys and they only say what he wants to hear, not what the people of my state have to say.
Snyder’s proposal to improve education by maximizing parental choice implicitly rests on the Adam-Smith-“invisible-hand” doctrine — that is, in a free market, the sellers who offer the best product will survive while the sellers who offer inferior products will fail.
However, the invisible hand only works when the market works. As commenters have noted in responses to recent posts in Diane’s blog, there are major market failures in the school-choice marketplace, particularly in the low-SES/inner-city areas.
Most buyers (parents) have little/no accurate information regarding the quality of competing schools and no practical way of obtaining accurate information.
Similarly, many/most buyers (parents) do not know what mix of educational services would best serve their particular children’s education needs — i.e., strict vs. relaxed discipline, whole-language vs. phonics reading instruction, 1 well-paid experienced teacher or 2 poorly-paid inexperienced teachers/class; lots of computerized instruction vs. minimal computerized instruction.
For even the most concerned, well-educated parents, the school choice decision would be largely a crapshoot and would probably be driven by factors unrelated to school quality — i.e., neighborhood rumors, where the children’s friends are going, ease of transportation.
And, in low-SES areas (the only areas where we’re seriously concerned that school quality is too low), many of the parents will be relatively unconcerned with the school choice decision and virtually none of the parents will be well-educated. So, the school choice decisions of most parents in these areas will be entirely a crapshoot with the result that, in these areas, there is no reason to believe that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will operate — that is, there is no reason to believe that the schools chosen by the parents will be the schools that offer the best product.
For these reasons, under Snyder’s proposal, there is a strong incentive for a school to minimize operating costs and little incentive for a school to improve instructional quality, particularly in low-SES areas. We’ll see an explosion of low-cost, low-quality for-profit schools serving the low-SES areas providing an inferior educational product while making a high profit margin.
“Most buyers (parents) …”
The error begins there, and there is no hope of anything but a reductio ad absurdum after that point.
Let’s be clear about one thing — the Governor is proposing a voucher system, something that Michigan voters have rejected time and time again.
Vouchers are as vouchers do, and the fact that promoters of vouchers have taken to calling them everything but is just a symptom of their current level of dishonesty.
But it doesn’t matter what you call them — scholarships, larnin’ stamps, or monopoly money — the People of Michigan have always recognized that vouchers are a just a foot in the door for private corporations to play the same kinds of boom-&-bust games with public education as they love to play with banks, hedge funds, real estate, and everything else they can get their mitts on, if you’ll excuse the expression.
Unless I am mistaken, vouchers are unconstitutional in Michigan. But there is always a back door.
DIane, with Snyder, he ALWAYS leaves himself a back door. He’s not above signing an executive order if he has to.
Yes, that is why voucher vultures — way back when they were still the least bit honest about their agenda — tried to change the State constitution via ballot initiative:
A little bit of history regurgitating —
But it is of course part and parcel of the Madison Avenue Mindset to think that a clever enough ad man can disguise the reality of the product by changing the label on the package, so that is their con du jour.
I thought I’d post this quote here because I think Michigan provides an interesting (and distressing) case study of how various “reform” agendas interact when they are all enacted. The quote comes from the email announcement of a study by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a long-established, non-partisan (and centrist) policy think tank based in Detroit. More than many things I have read, this sums up where we stand today in my state:
“In Michigan, the state government exercises very extensive control over public education: the state School Aid Fund, rather than local property taxes, is the primary funding source for public schools; the Teacher Tenure Act is a state law; the state manages the Public School Employees Retirement System; the state is empowered to take over school districts that are in financial or academic distress. In 2011, the state legislature increased state control over the operation of local school districts through a series of public acts. Legislated changes lengthened standard probationary periods for teachers, required more rigorous formal evaluations, accelerated the due process timeframe for firing teachers, and restricted allowable subjects of collective bargaining. These changes, which both increased management control and increased management responsibilities, were intended as well to reduce costs. The eventual effect on children’s education is as yet unknown.”
Those interested can find the full report here: http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2010s/2012/rpt380.html
More signs of the times …
Commentary by Kary Moss. executive director of the ACLU of Michigan —
• Highland Park Is Everybody’s Problem
I thought a more appropriate title would have been: “Highland Park is Everybody’s Responsibility.” The state legislature (that is, those representing all of us) make noble-sounding decisions, but the burden of actually making the cuts and absorbing the blame is left to the local school boards, administrators and teachers. When things go wrong as a result of those decisions, we all have a responsibility to step up and make things right.
Yes, I think that is the point of the suit.