Now that the teachers and students are back in school, I can’t resist turning my attention to school sports, one of my favorite subjects.
I am a proud 1982 graduate of the Ann Arbor Public Schools. I can still remember the name of every teacher I ever had. Almost all were very good, and I had more truly exceptional teachers than anyone has a right to expect. I’m still in touch with many of them.
This wasn’t just my experience, either. Perhaps that explains why, when I graduated, public school students from state of Michigan ranked among the best nationwide, despite our struggling economy.
Our experience wasn’t just defined by classes, either. More than half my classmates played school sports. For me, that included baseball, cross-country, soccer, and a lot of hockey. I felt so strongly about my experiences, and the coaches who made them possible, that I returned to coach junior high school baseball and high school hockey – for the same peanuts my mentors were paid. I loved it, just like they did.
But since my day, things have changed rather dramatically, and I can’t say for the better.
In the past decade, state legislators have reduced their investment in traditional public schools by 25-percent, while school enrollment has dropped by 200,000 students. But at the same time, they’ve added more than 300 charter schools – some are great, more are terrible, but none are monitored very well — and also allowed for-profit, cyber schools to take millions of our tax dollars, and those don’t seem to work at all.
That’s right: we’re funding more schools than ever before, with much less money and fewer students. You don’t have to be an AP calculus student to know that doesn’t add up.
So what gets the squeeze? The same public schools most of us attended. This imbalance gets us smaller staffs, bigger class sizes, and less money for choir, band, theater and sports – one of the great strengths of America’s public school system. We have these after school activities because of the uniquely American belief that they can teach you things the classroom cannot, things like teamwork, competition, and compromise.
But thanks to endless budget cuts, my old high school, like so many of them, has had to cut bus service to most games. Teams have to pay for their own uniforms, basic equipment, ice time, greens fees, and bowling lanes, and they still have to charge students $250 a year to play sports. This actually represents a pretty heroic effort to keep these opportunities open for all the students who want to play, but it’s not been easy for anyone.
In my day, we didn’t have charter schools, schools of choice, or cyber schools, and not many went to private schools. No, back then, we just got on a bus, and when the bus stopped, you got off, and that was your school. Once we entered that school, we had to work with all kinds of people, people we might not have met anywhere else.
And that’s how you learn to play well with others. Reflecting on our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum” (“From many, one”), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said, “There’s too much pluribus, and not enough unum.”
Put me down for more unum.
And here’s the final kicker: Not only is our current patchwork approach to education creating more schools for fewer students, it isn’t working. In the past three decades, we have dropped like a stone, from the nation’s top tier to the bottom tier. We are now battling Alabama
I’m sure people will respond to this with their political positions, because these days, everything gets politicized. But I’m not making a political statement here. When it comes to education, my politics are simple: I am for whatever works – and this isn’t working.
So, why are we still doing it?
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Please join the conversation, but remember: I run only those letters from those who are not profane or insane, and who include their FULL name.
My latest book, “ENDZONE: The Rise, Fall and Return of Michigan Football,” debuted at #6 on the New York Times’ Bestseller List, and is still going very strong.
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The deterioration of the public schools is akin to theft. We are stealing the futures of children by not providing them with the same educational opportunities we had (Huron High, ’70). We can rail at politicians, but we are the enablers in this sad story. Hold them accountable, vote for school millages, voice your demands. Think of this at the true meaning of the highly charged phrase “Black Lives Matter”, but extend this to everyone. Above all, hold the state legislature and accountable for funding and local school boards for a non-partisan, secular public school system.
It’s not a simple answer. When Governor Engler moved the power of the State Board of Education by executive order to other departments, he made education more political. Now, the State Board of Ed is able to suggest things, and hire and fire the State Superintendent. That’s about it.
The legislature, on the other hand, has spent a great deal of time writing education law, without qualification to do so (not the same as authority). We have mandated copious testing, which takes education time and money – and helps not one student. We have mandated curriculum (Freedom Week anyone) which takes time and money. We tell schools how to educate, without being educators. You can thank them for charter schools as well.
Proposal A is killing schools. We thought sending money to Lansing (politicians) to parcel back out to districts would be smart and fair. Oops. They now attach demands to that funding and spending is very political. Not a bright move handing money over to politicians and then expecting it to come back wholly or without strings. An unofficial war was declared on teachers – who pay a special ‘tax; no one else pays (thanks to anti-union politicans) and are blamed for everything wrong in education. Lansing also separated their pensions out from all other state employees and tells districts what they have to pay for them – out of the money that Lansing sends districts each year. Yes, that is as dumb as it sounds. ‘Here is your money for the year, now here is your bill, so that money was really an accounting joke’. And…..the education budget is never set until AFTER school starts. So in February, the legislature can – and has – sent out a notice saying they want more money back. This is a farce. Can it be any surprise education in Michigan is plummeting?
The State Superintendent of Schools Brian Whiston seems to have little use for anyone outside of Oakland County. He has unimpressive education experience and spent much of his career as a lobbyist, including a financial scandal. He recently counteracted a paid study by national experts on reforms required in special education in Michigan. He is hiring his own local “experts” to redo their report. One assumes to be more to his liking and less painful to his old freinds in Oakland County. Guess what money he is using? It’s bad enough that the US Department of Education, no less, notified him this spring that Michigan is operating outside of the law in special education and the first experts told us how to reform now. He would rather help old friends and clients than Michigan kids with special needs. He needs to go.
Michigan needs to return education control to the State Board of Education and de-politicize it. We need to change our funding and get Lansing out the mix.
We need a new State Superintendent who is not a lobbyist, not a politician and knows what the word ‘pedagogy’ means. We have sent the water boy in as the QB – and it’s a hot mess.
I appreciate your editorial. We have lost so much in education in search of an illusory “better way” to fill our kids’ heads with lots of information rather than providing life experiences that help them to learn. You write about the importance of the sports experience. Add to that: practical applied mathematics or gym or shop class. All can be important to a child’s development and learning; all have been downsized in our schools. We graduate students who have “learned” Algebra 2 but who can’t balance a checkbook, calculate the amount of paint needed to refinish a wall, or give correct change. We purport to prepare young people for college degrees that they likely do not need, rather than help them develop skills and direct them to career opportunities that are available and in demand. Maybe we should be providing them with experiences that prepare them to be independent adults with knowledge and skills.
I am not what you might consider the typical public school champion. I am ideologically conservative, support private education, and am no great fan of unions. I am not impressed with money wasted in education. I am not in favor of teaching kids to put condoms on bananas. And I am not wholeheartedly opposed to vouchers. But I AM a teacher who cares about students, and I want to see the next generation succeed.
I think cookie-cutter public schools do not work for everyone, but they work for most. Charter schools are not working, there are not enough private schools to go around even IF everyone could afford to send their kids to one, and online classes for high school students are a joke. Period. But while public education may not be perfect, it is the system that we have – and it CAN work if we aim it in an effective direction and give it the support it needs. I believe in the value of school sports and extracurricular clubs, and I am a proponent of career and technical education (which has replaced the old-school “shop” class but is not available for enough kids). And I believe in the professionalism of teachers, versus the know-it-all attitude of legislators (who I would likely support on other issues) who don’t even ask the professionals what might work before creating legislation that does not.
Public education in Michigan is a mess, not because teachers are not capable and not working hard enough, but because there are crooks in education who misappropriate funds and legislators in Lansing that think the solution is to blindly regulate what goes on in the classroom and throw money at ideas that don’t work. So the purse strings are tightened and needed programs suffer. Public education is the system we have in order to educate ALL our kids. It would sure be nice if Lansing would sit down with those who have devoted their educations and their lives to becoming professionals in the very business of education and come up with a sound solution – one that allows for art and shop and sports. One that makes room for experience.
As one who effectively champions the cause of amateur college athletes, your concern for the welfare of students is well-placed. But we need to be careful of misdiagnosing the problem and creating misplaced expectations. I also appreciate your open-minded approach, to follow the evidence and see what works.
The claim that Michigan school funding has declined by 25 percent discounts significant amounts of revenues. Adjusting for inflation and per pupil, funding has been largely flat since about 2002. A slight drop in previous years was made up for by 2015: http://www.mackinac.org/22550. These overall figures include funding for charters, which on average take in significantly less dollars than do traditional public school districts.
Simply adding significantly more money doesn’t promise great academic improvements for students. The state’s own education cost study released earlier this year indicates that if funding were raised by $1,000 per student (about $1.5 billion), math and reading achievement would improve by 1 percent (not percentage point).
Still, challenges exist, including the rising obligation to pay for school employee pensions — currently at 36% of payroll to help pay for previously accumulated liabilities (https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/22408). Pension reform could help direct more dollars to classrooms and services.
A few other points to consider, related to educational choices and options —
The assessment that more MI charters are terrible than great doesn’t comport with the best research that shows MI charters add an extra 2 months of learning per year, and that many more schools outperform their local market than underperform: https://credo.stanford.edu/pdfs/MI_report_2012_FINAL_1_11_2013_no_watermark.pdf. If they were unmonitored, dozens of poor-performing charters would not have been closed down.
While cyberschools don’t have a tremendous track record in many states, Michigan is bucking the trend, certainly doing no harm: https://credo.stanford.edu/pdfs/OnlineCharterStudyFinal2015.pdf
Private school enrollment in Michigan has declined greatly over the past decade, certainly faster than the enrollment in traditional public schools: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_205.80.asp?current=yes. While state-specific data on private school enrollment from a generation ago is not easily accessible, national trends suggest that greater shares of students were enrolled in private schools in 1980 than as of 2013 (latest data): http://web20kmg.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/66806781/120%20Years%20of%20American%20Education%20A%20Statistical%20Portrait.pdf.
I graduated a few years after you and was honestly confused when I headed out into the ‘real world’ and heard people complain about crappy public education. I’m guessing the senior year Humanities mega-course has gone the way of the mastodon?
From your message it really sounds like a mess. I’m like you the school districts were set. No school of choice unless your parents moved. Then that was not my choice. This is just one of many things that has changed but did not make it better. Enjoyed reading your article.
Once more John, you are absolutely right. Our public schools have been the corner stone of our society.
I sure wish we had the ’70s back – I’d be a lot younger!
Here are stats with a different picture.
The Great Recession forced hard economic choices from 2006-2010 during the Granholm Administration. Michigan’s K-12 spending has increased from $10.67 billion in 2011 to $11.7 billion in 2015, not counting hundreds of millions to fund unpaid local district pension costs; improve school technology; provide significant increases for pre-school education, etc.
Michigan is now 20th in K-12 spending per capita from all sources & 24th highest in spending per child. Our 8th graders are 31st in reading, 38th in math; our second graders are 41st in reading, 42nd in math. We’re funding better than our kids are learning. Despite declining enrollment, schools that refocus and aim existing funds at higher student outcomes will help us compete for jobs with states educating their students better – many of which spend less on K-12 than we do.
Many families have been leaving our state for jobs elsewhere since the 80s. Businesses and schools cut costs to survive until better times. It’s not easy; some districts have adjusted their staffing and buildings faster and better than others. Few administrators were trained for downsizing – and the trend is expected to continue, adding to stress for our dedicated educators.
Ann Arbor has worked hard to adapt its schools to reflect the times; we’re lucky. Far too many Michigan kids can’t get on a bus for a safe, quality K-12 school around the state. High poverty children can’t move for good schools. Charters or school choice are their only chance for a better future, and caring parents will do anything to make that possible. Less than 10% of Michigan children attend charters – 143,113 of 1,540,005 in 2015. Taking away a child’s chance to attend the school they want because they can’t afford better housing won’t restore the neighborhood schools we all remember from the 70s. It’s also bad for our state. Supporting good educators as they adapt to our time is a better strategy for all children.
Message And, of course, I totally agree with my wife! The old basic way of doing education was pretty good. And then, the politicians started rewriting the script. Too bad that non-educators start thinking that they know more than the educators and students! Again, as always, thanks for trying to clear the piocture!
The dumbing down of Public School education has continued unabated since the early 1960s. Many HS teachers of that era were Teachers College grads, where teaching techniques made up 25% of the course of study. The textbooks were being downgraded as well, resulting in an increasingly underdeveloped student. When good teachers teach, using quality, challenging material, students learn. My mother, a junior college grad circa 1915, was educated in a one room school house.
Public school education has fallen in love with bricks and mortar and the student’s emotional and socio-economic well being, resulting in an outbreak of antisocial behavior and a disdain for any and all forms of authority or discipline. And as a result, many of these students are now residents of various governmental gatedcommunities.
Thanks for the column
bomberjohn5
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Thank you for the honest post and bringing some of your considerable audience to the discussion. Since you a Michigan guy, let me use some local references to corroborate your point. I graduated from East Detroit High School in 1983. My daughter now attends Bloomfield Hills High School. Starting her junior year, she already has taken more tests than I did throughout my entire secondary and post secondary education (I am academic with a Phd). Yet, the basic services at her upscale school District — which still has great teachers and currently an exceptional Superintendent — are far, far less than what I enjoyed. Her sports are privatized, and not really part of academic life. That is a shame.
John,
I always love your comments on WTKA and this is my first time reading your blog. And I agree with most everything you say – your wisdom fits your age. I am the same age and went to elementary school with your sister Nancy and HS with she and Andy. Despite my age, I have an eight year old and a ten year old. It angers me to no end that I have to pay for all the “extras” that we received in school – especially given I paid heavy taxes for many years so others got to participate for free.
The problem I have with this message is it sounds like a plea for more money. The reason why we have all these alternative schools is that the public schools are failing many Americans. The facts are clear that, every since the formation of the Department of education, our ranking in the world relative to education has continued to sink. Get the government out of it, and maybe we’ll see a turn-around and school can once again become affordable.