Sen. Albert: Michigan must sharpen focus on improved outcomes for students

The following guest article was submitted by State Senator Thomas Albert.

The overall academic performance of Michigan students continues to falter. There may be multiple reasons for this, but a lack of money is not one of them.

Our state is spending 29% more on public K-12 schools this year than it did five years ago, and 50% more than a decade ago. Despite this increased spending, results have worsened. Clearly, something is not working, and alternative solutions are needed.

Even Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after six years in office, recently admitted that what we’ve been doing isn’t good enough. In her State of the State address, the governor noted “hard truths” including that in Michigan “we invest more per-pupil than most states and achieve bottom 10 results.” This sentiment is reflected in her recent budget proposal which included new accountability and transparency efforts. It seems the governor finally put the “MEA” in mea culpa.

I agree with the general sentiment that we must do more to help our kids. There is no shortage of ways we can work to make things better and improve outcomes for students.

First, we should start by ensuring kids are actually in the classroom learning. This sounds like an oversimplification, but it is a massive problem. Here are several key improvements we could make right away:

• Schools must address the biggest disruption of classroom learning for many of our kids — cellphones. Rather than mandating a one-size-fits-all statewide policy, we should incentivize districts to adopt policies that best meet their communities’ needs in consultation with parents.
• Chronic absenteeism needs to be brought back down to pre-pandemic levels, at a minimum. Last academic year, roughly 30% of Michigan students missed 10% or more of the school year. We can get students back in class through targeted support and accountability.
• We need to roll back changes made in recent years that allowed more virtual learning days and exemptions for professional development days. State Superintendent Michael Rice was correct to point out this problem to the Legislature. I agree that students as a whole would be better served learning in their classroom.

Secondly, we should focus on helping students in failing schools. The governor was on the right track when she proposed targeted resources for intervention services such as tutoring and requiring that parents be notified about how targeted schools are performing and spending money. But her plan can be improved.

If a failing school gets extra resources, then parents should be notified about how Michigan’s school of choice law works and other educational options in their communities. On top of that, if a school continues to fail despite getting extra funding, then start-up grants should be made available for public charter schools to locate nearby. Families should no longer be beholden to a failing school that is given every chance to succeed, and a school should no longer go unchallenged in the face of persistent failure.

Lastly, we must restore commonsense policies to improve student outcomes. In the last legislative term, Democrats gutted a state law designed to ensure third graders knew how to read, stripping it of accountability measures. They repealed a school evaluation system that assigned a letter grade to every school, eliminating an easy-to-understand performance evaluation tool. Democrats also weakened the teacher evaluation system and made it less dependent on student achievement, while weakening collective bargaining laws to help unions instead of students.

We must return the focus to improving outcomes for students. If we don’t, spending more money on schools won’t matter.

State Sen. Thomas Albert represents the 18th District, which includes Barry County and portions of Allegan, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, Kent, and Ionia counties.