Education Policy in Michigan and How It is Created

One of my brothers recently was invited by the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to come and discuss the long range vision of education policy in the state of Michigan. This special task force composed of Republicans has been touring the state looking for both successes and failures in Michigan's education system. It was on the west side of the state and after talking to my brother about how it went, I have the following comments to pass on to you.

What the task force does is get input from parent teacher associations, student council members, administrator, teachers, board members, and students, from public schools, special education, alternative education, charter and private schools. The end goal is to develop ideas on how to improve the quality of the education system here in Michigan.

The result of these task force meetings is predictable and an indication of everything that is wrong with education in our state. Three hours of discussion produced all the wrong policy suggestions for education, suggestions politicians should not consider. The following account is a way for you to see how policy is created in our state and helpful in developing your own opinions about the future of education.

The first step in the discussion was to answer the question "What is the purpose of education?" Do that right now in your head- think about what you want the education system in our state to look like and do. Is it prepare students for college? Prepare them for future jobs? Mold good citizens? Give all students a broad base of knowledge? Or did you, like most people at this forum, say "everything!" The mission of education needs to be focused, clear, and consistent, and it can not be everything to everybody all at the same time. There is only enough time in the day, only enough resources to spend, and our state needs to think long and hard about what they want the goal of education to be.

In my opinion, our school system should move to a two-tier system- K-8 the goal is to provide a broad range of knowledge for all students, and 9-12 students will either go into a college-prep track or a job-preparation track. That's just my opinion though.

The next question the group that came to this task force meeting was asked is "what are we doing well right now in education?" Think about this question. Education is doing a lot of things well- babysitting students 8 hours a day, running great sports programs, educating a lot of top students, running a good special needs program, helping students learn how to think, giving students opportunities, offering many innovative learning styles, and nationally our K-5 program is the best in the world.

The next question the task force had us think about was "what do you want the education system to look like 10 years from now". I think the overall consensus of the task force was that we want education to do more to teach students critical thinking skills, to learn how to be innovative and creative, to teach entrepreneurship and job creation, and to have students focus more on the career paths that they are headed into after school rather than just focus on school.

The last step is the most important step, and the step that resulted in disaster for this task force and that produced information the Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education should utterly disregard. The question that was posed to us was "how do we build on what we are doing well to make our education system look like we want it to look 10 years from now?"

Here is the information the task force received, and it is a good lesson on why sometimes special interest groups should not be the ones designing the policies in our nation. The task force was told to drop all standardized testing and to just hand the money to districts with no more accountability. The task force was told that one way to increase the education levels in our state was to give more funding to teachers, have them work shorter hours, and give them more training. The task force was told that students should teach classes, as if they were subject matter and teaching experts. The task force produced a lot of garbage ideas, and in every hearing they conducted they pretty much got the same garbage.

This is why the state should not be trusted with running any sort of service industry. The failures in education are the failures of government planning and funding. The failures of education result from this idea that bureaucrats working in distant locations can issue rules and decrees and that will somehow make things better. And the failures of education and this process demonstrate that a system that ignores values and character will produce a valueless result.

The way to fix education is to increase choice, increase personal responsibility, increase local control, and increase the focus on value and character education. Students need to take classes that emphasise creativity and entrepreneurship and they need to buy into the system by making them realize just how much it is costing them to go to school (or at least their parents need to realize what the cost is for education and then demand the results to justify the cost). Standardized testing needs to be increased, but the information that comes from these tests needs to be disseminated throughout the system and analyzed and studied by everyone- teachers, students, and administrators.

Education needs to run more like a business, with the service provided being learning and the learning delivered by skilled professionals. It can not run like a government agency, answering to dozens of constituents and staffed by bureaucrats.

Please take a moment to look up your state Representative and pass on your thoughts to them about education and the types of policies that you would like to see put in place in this state. If you don't speak up, they will have only heard from others, and those others are pushing groups like that Michigan House Republican Strategic Task Force on Education to put in place policies that will only erode the educational quality of our great state.

UPDATE: Here is a story about the event... notice the utter lack of anything productive or useful mentioned in this article.