 Hello. Good evening. Welcome to the Ford School of Public Policy. My name is Brian Jacob. I'm a faculty member here at the Ford School and director of Close Up, the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy that is kind of hosting the event. I am very excited about tonight because in addition to being the director, my kind of primary area of research interest is exactly education policy. So I am eager to hear what the think tanks think. I'd first like to thank, before I start with the introductions, I'd first like to thank Chuck Wilbur for putting together this whole panel. We are just kind of the forum and figureheads here. He is the one who has brought all of the speakers together and organized this as I think part of his class. Then I'd like to also thank Bonnie Roberts and Tom Avoco from Close Up who have done a great deal of logistical work for the event. And finally I'd like to thank our speakers for tonight. I'm going to do brief introductions now just to kind of go over the format here. I'm going to do brief introductions very very brief. Then we're going to start off and we're going to have each of the speakers talk for about 15 minutes kind of giving their general views not meant no kind of strict guidelines on education policy in the next Michigan. Then we're going to open up for questions. We're first going to have a series of questions that I'm going to pose to the panelists and then we're going to open it up for you know 15 or 20 minutes of just completely open Q and A from the audience. So we'll be here till about 8.30 and hopefully we'll learn a lot in the meantime. So first the speaker the order of the speakers is alphabetical so starting John Bebo will start us off. He is the executive director for the Center for Michigan a non-profit think tank think and do tank. He has had wide experience in a variety of areas and I'm pex I'm reading the bio and I didn't even really know this. He's 16 years an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune Detroit Free Press and other papers and cover the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the Detroit News and he knows quite a bit about education policy in Michigan. So a man of all trades. Next will be Lynn John Dahl who is with the Michigan prospect again just I believe just stepped down as the executive director. He has a long career in Michigan State politics having been a state representative for 22 years. This followed his work as a campus pastor and he's been kind of interested involved in education issues and a variety of other social policy issues for many years here in Michigan. And finally we have Michael van Beek who is a member of the the Mackinac Center. He joined the center just in this past year as the director of education policy. Before that he had served as an administrator and teacher at a private school in Grand Rapids and we're glad to have him here as well. So without further ado I will turn the mic over to John Bebo for 15 minutes and if you're getting short on time I will start flashing cards at you. So thank you. He's the guy who really knows education policy is the education expert for the governor. We're just the pointy headed think tank guys. But the Center for Michigan we come at this from a consumer perspective. I'm not going to sit up here and spout a lot of economic study at you tonight. One of the things that we've done in recent years is try to engage the public around Michigan in a discussion about what they want in the future of Michigan. We've held about 600 town hall meetings across the state in the past three years involving more than 10,000 people and they have some pretty strong views about education. I'll try to touch on just a few of them. When you talk to citizens they talk at the menu level not the recipe level. They're not going to talk to you about their millage rate. They're going to talk to you at a broader level and I think a lot of my comments will be reflective of that as well. One thing we've heard citizens tell us around the state is they're open to changing how schools teach and changing what schools teach and one of the more provocative things we've heard people talk about is preschool. Education before the age of five. People are tuned into this thinking that an awful lot of the brain development happens between the ages of zero and five and we could offer universal pre-K in this state to about 70% of the kids for about $300 million a year. That's about 2% of the school aid fund in our state. If it would be that cheap to offer pre-K, why is it that almost all the money goes into the system after the age of five? That's one question we've had people ask a lot. A second thing that we've heard people say they're open to is transforming operations and funding of local schools. People are frustrated with these never ending budget fights and schools not knowing what their budgets are going to be. They'd like a more stable funding base for schools so they know what their kids are facing before they get in the classroom every fall. But they want in return a real sense that schools are operating as smartly and as efficiently as they possibly can today. Another thing that they want in terms of operations and funding is affordable higher education. One way to get at that is to attack the cost of prisons. Michigan is one of a handful of states that spends more on it. A prison system than it does on its university system. Another one of those states is California. The governor of California has just pledged that he's going to reverse that or try to reverse that. You can get at that through a couple of ways. You can change who you're putting into prison and you can also make make prisons more efficient. You may see some billboards around the state this fall saying prison guard toughest job in Michigan. Michigan's toughest job. That might very well be true. It's an extremely difficult job. But if it's Michigan's toughest job, isn't it also Indiana's toughest job in Indiana? They pay prison guards 30% less than they do in Michigan. Why do we pay so much more for prison guards here? We're in an age where it's really tough to raise taxes. It's about reapportioning resources at the state level. And one area that we could do that is in prisons. But a third thing we've heard people talking an awful lot about is higher standards in our schools. They want better results coming out of our schools. They want more accountability. They want to understand better why we can't get rid of bad teachers and why we can't reward really good ones. They're eager to experiment with things like merit pay. And I'm sure that's an interesting issue around here right now. The new movie that's coming out waiting for Superman deals with that. The Vanderbilt study that I'm sure some people in this room are familiar with just came out. As I said, parents and local business people that come to our community meetings, they're operating at the menu level, not the recipe level. They don't know all the answers. But I would challenge you in this room, if you're the up and coming education experts, answer them. How do we reward teachers for doing a great job? Our state school soon pretended is suggested that maybe one way might be to do some kind of merit pay system at the building level so there's more of a team sense of reward for performance. But another thing we've heard parents talk about is classroom time. We've heard parents around the state be concerned to say, we're not sure our kids are in school as much as they used to be. The center is run by a bunch of former newspaper reporters. So that perked our ears up a bit when we heard that and we went out and found the data on it. And what we found shocked us and shocked a lot of other people around the state. One of the reports that you have in front of you today is called School Days, Michigan's shrinking school year. Briefly, what it says is that about 40% of Michigan districts are now offering fewer than 160 days of instruction every year. The informal national standard is 180 days. Add that up over a student's 12-year career, K-12, that's a year and a half, fewer days of instruction over the course of a career. They're not doing this to experiment to make education better or to make outcomes better. They're doing it strictly as a budget cutting move. That's a serious issue. That's what I will argue to you tonight. It's partly a consumer issue. I mean, as taxpayers, we're paying for a full school year. We're not getting a full school year back. As a result of this report, the legislature did put some tourniquets around the bleeding last year. They've said that over the next couple of years, every district needs to get back up to 170 days. But that's one of the clear examples I can raise to you tonight on how what we're doing now is somewhat out of step with what the consumers of education expect from educators. Just a couple of views into the future that maybe we can talk about in Q&A. We're going to have about 200,000 fewer students in Michigan's K-12 system, seven years from now, than we did seven years ago. You're going to hear a lot of discussion over the next few years about per people spending and how big is the school aid fund. Just a question for you. If we're going to have 200,000 fewer students or if we're going to lose 15% of our capacity, isn't there room for some savings in that? Isn't there room for some creativity in the buildings we use and in the number of districts we have and in the services that different school districts offer? And lastly, I think we're reaching a point in Michigan where we've really got to ask ourselves what's most important in our school systems. Football season at the local high schools began on August 25th. That was the first day for high school football games this year. Classes began two weeks later. What's most important in our K-12 system? I've done some writing about the Plymouth School District and a group of parents, hardworking parents who get together at night and talk about class size matters. They're very concerned because they're seeing a lot of their high school and middle school classes now at 30 students per class. I took a look at their teacher contract. There are more than 200 coaches in that school system that are making a premium based on high school sports rather than teaching in the classroom. What's most important? I'll leave it there and I look forward to Q&A. Thank you. I apologize in advance which a speaker should never do. Because I have a cold in my head and I have been told by the doctor I'm no longer spreading it so if you trust him and I don't, you're safe. I want to do a couple of things here and primarily what I want to do is set some context of financial, the financial picture for school finance in Michigan because I believe we need that understanding in order to see where we're going and what future options are. Let me tell you some assumptions that I carry into this discussion. One of them is that the state is in a fiscal crisis and I know it's shocking to you but it is the context in which our discussion is taking place and almost daily that reality gets reinforced. As I came down this afternoon listening to the radio, I'm hearing the latest report from the Census Bureau about again the drop in our median income in Michigan. The biggest picture, the most accurate picture that describes where we are is that we have become a low income state in terms of household income and that's a serious drop from where we were. Years ago when I first began serving in the legislature, decades ago when I first began serving in the legislature, we were seen as one of the three states, Michigan, Alaska, California with the highest income, household income. We're now down somewhere around 37, 78, something like that. So that's the kind of overall picture. So schools are only one public service under assault. There is both the financial reality and there is a pretty widespread and growing apparently anti-government mood out there that puts all of public services up for a good bit of assault at the present time. No public service stands alone. So if we were to talk about it at some point, how do we get out of this, we ought to be talking about how do we do it together with a whole lot of other public services and challenge the cannibalism that is so much a part of the current financial debate. The problem is not, I think, government funding, excuse me, a government formula, and the problem is, you know, not our education finance formula, proposal A. The problem is that we don't have adequate, fair, stable funding system for the services that we want. And we haven't figured out how to put that together yet. Frequently, proposal A is pointed to as the problem, usually not described how it's the problem except if proposal A is the problem because it's the mechanism we have. I would argue, yes, proposal A ought to be tweaked. It invites that and should constantly be reevaluated. But inadequate funding is the problem if, in fact, we're going to do what we say we want to do in terms of overall educational programs. Proposal A was created to address the elimination of the property tax for school operations. Prior to proposal A, 65% of school operations were paid for out of local property tax dollars, revenues, 35% from state funds at the present time. Post proposal A is getting close to 80% of state funds now. And I'll say some more about that in a few moments. So we are in our system paying people less. We're hiring fewer people. We're reducing benefits for our public employees and so on. In education but more broadly in public service generally. We're getting rid of more expensive teachers and hoping we can get less expensive teachers to replace them although there's some challenge to that by some of the local school boards. So we're looking at various kinds of reforms. In that, let me now turn to kind of the background but those are the assumptions that I'm carrying behind my thinking. The Michigan Prospect several years ago convened a dozen former state representatives who had negotiated proposal A, the school finance proposal. And to put it on the ballot, six Democrats, six Republicans came back together now under our mandatory and experienced law in Michigan. Those people are not allowed to still be around in office. So we, but we invited them to come back together and raise in the presence of two research writers, one of whom is here tonight, Mike Adnezio, to sit down and say what did you think you were doing when you fashioned proposal A and what does it look like now? And they came up with a report, a study answering the questions that these legislators raised and this is where you can find that and it's the full report. I brought probably a couple dozen copies of it in hard copy here that I think Bonnie can tell you where they are at the back of the room there somewhere. And if people are interested in that. And Mike Adnezio and Doug Drake were the two primary authors of that. And I've tried with Mike, as we've over the years talked about updates on that and where we're going to put together some material on that. If you look at school revenues, essentially the biggest chunk is from state restricted monies. And I'll show you specifically more about that in a moment here. Federal dollars, local dollars, the state general fund. But it's the state restricted dollars that are the biggest chunk of that. The federal monies include no child left behind dollars, special education monies, free and reduced lunch monies and other federal revenues. The local operating revenues come from the 18 meals that are levied on non homestead property, the special education meals that are voted, the vocational education meals and the operating meals. This I think is a more helpful outline of where the dollars come from to show you in millions of dollars where the state funding for education comes from. And as you can see, the biggest chunk of money is the sales tax. And with proposal A that was the shift from the property tax to the state sales tax. That sales tax is in our economic situation, not a growing revenue. In fact, none of these revenues are growing revenues. In fact, people are even smoking less. And all of you should be smoking more if we're going to support the educational program. It's kind of a moral responsibility, I think. One of the questions that frequently comes up is where does the lottery money go? That $700 million. That amounts to eight and a half to nine days of funding the school system. It goes to education, but it's not a huge chunk of the educational dollars. The Michigan business tax as a part of the school aid fund is a reducing percentage of the school aid fund. Reducing because of various tax loopholes and expenditures that have been developed and reducing because of shifts in the business tax. The income tax, there's earmarked monies from the state income tax for schools, the state education property tax, and then the sales tax. And the sales tax, as you probably know if you follow the public policy debates at all, the sales tax, there are various proposals to expand it, to include some services, and then perhaps to reduce the overall rate and other proposals to tamper with that. The sales tax figure incident, I should tell you that's a, the number you can't read is a four, so it's 4720 there. The property taxes have just plunged, as you know, because logically property values have plunged. So that has been a significant drop, but that's the overall, excuse me, the overall policy funding background. Prior to proposal A, there was a guaranteed tax based formula. The local voters selected the tax rate, the spending level through their millage votes. The state would then guarantee a minimum per pupil revenue yield, per mill tax effort. The foundation formula, which is, came along with proposal A, says that there would be a certain number of dollars per pupil, essentially paid by the state. And this then becomes a real shift from the local property tax to the state sales tax, with the state then deciding maybe a local school district says we would like to add a program in our district. And we're willing to raise the mills to do that. Well, you can't do that anymore. You now got to take it out of the, the basic foundation dollars. That's essentially the, you know, the basic change in, in the school finance picture. The local property tax before proposal A, before 93, 94, covered about two-thirds of operating revenues. If you look at these examples, what we had developed was the rich schools, poor schools phenomenon with real inequities. Inequities of two kinds. One being how many dollars are behind each student, on away 3277, Bloomfield Hills, 10358. But the other inequity is on the other side of that. And that is very different numbers of, of dollars behind each pupil. But significantly different millage burdens who, who was having to pay that. So although you had in, in Ipsilanti, 43 plus mills levy, you had only raised $5,900 per pupil for that. Bloomfield Hills with, you know, 24 mills, 10,358. That's primarily a product of the value of housing in those two different communities. And you were lucky if you had a nuclear power plant in your district but there were not enough of those to go around as well. The proposal A then set up a series of goals. One was to reduce although not eliminate per pupil gaps, reduce and limit property tax for operations, reduce local share of operating costs, increase state funds and state share, and provide greater stability in, in funding. The per pupil foundation levels from beginning on this chart on, in 1994 and going through zero nine. You can see what happened. There were the low spending districts. That blue line at the bottom was given the authority under proposal A to increase but not the whole way at first but to gradually increase till they reached the basic, the basic level of funding. The, and that's the, the red line. The green line at the top was the, what had been the former, out of formula districts, the, the higher spending district where people had voted additional millies for, for higher spending districts. And they were assured that in the future under proposal A they could, they would continue to be a gap but it wouldn't grow. The, the gap wouldn't be expanded. The legislature in, in 2005 or six chose to eliminate the, the basic funds and put them all up at the, at the higher level. The school aid fund in, in the last year, the current year, found a reduction in the foundation dollars. ISD operations cut, cut in categorical monies, cut in, in payments to some of the whole harmless districts and, and an additional foundation cut that was debated. But I, I list these only to suggest that what we're now doing is talking about how do we cut money out of the education budget? It's not a question of how do we, what do we want to do? Who do we want to educate? How do we want to expand that? It's a question, I'd say our basic debate is, is a cannibalism debate. What are the things that we can cut out and what can we pay for at the expense of somebody else without going to additional revenues? This is a, is a chart of state membership and, and important because under the proposal A funding, the current funding, the dollars follow the students and therefore as the number of students in the district drop as they are dropping overall, then obviously that district finds itself hurting. The enrollment patterns therefore become a critical financial issue. Declining enrollment creates fiscal problems in, in states and very few districts are, are steady growers and the declining enrollments are not just an, an urban issue. The, the most, the greatest declines are here in red and you can see that many of them are in rural areas as well. So we're not talking simply about urban education. The two shades of blue are, are the areas of, of growth and it's, it's interesting because so often we think the problems in, in finances are in the urban districts but in fact as you can see they're, they're pretty widespread within the state. If, if you look at the blue line here that's over 70, from 1978, 79 through 2007 and 8. What we've seen happen to state and local revenues for school operations and as you can see they have grown if you adjust them for inflation however the, the bottom line they haven't grown very much. Has A Succeeded. There's a reduction clearly in per pupil gaps. Property taxes are reduced and limited. Major change in state and local share. Clear shift to state financing and revenue stability as you can see has suffered for many districts. Many districts saw improvements through 2004 in terms of finances. That, those increases are eroding now. This is a chart that shows fund balance savings accounts as a percent of current operating expenditures in, in schools. You can see the schools have had but are now seeing a reduction in the amount of money that they've been able to squirrel away while they wait for legislative action or while they wait for something to happen to give them the ability to put a budget together. The assessment cap on property taxes is, is critical. Value of property cannot increase more than 5 percent of inflation. The lesser of those two figures. So that green line is essentially if you had the increases in value without the cap, the, the taxable value is the, is the red line showing that the districts are, are receiving more than they would had there been the, the SEV increase and that's why your tax bill, your tax bill is so confusing to read. We've seen unexpectedly large foundation increases disappear now. There's over two billion dollars worth of tax legislation that has been enacted that has taken monies out of the school aid fund. Doug Drake did a study of that some years ago and, and there's a huge amount of money not advertised as education legislation, tax legislation that for other reasons reduces the, the monies available for education. The challenges now as we go ahead that are, are the political challenges is one is capital funding. Proposal aid didn't deal with that. It left it the same as it is now. You go to local voters for millage. Declining enrollments are, are another challenge. The impact of charters and choice on traditional district enrollment is having a major impact in some districts. Erosion in, in the tax base overall, the costs of personnel and, and fringe costs are ongoing. All of these challenges that we face. This is the fringe benefits essentially. Cost per pupil through two thousand seven eight and you've seen the increase in, in that. The capital funding as I say we didn't make a change in, in the state. So that still is a question. Is it possible for school districts to go to voters and ask for millage for, for votes? And, and in fact they've been able to do that in millage for buildings and, and been able to do that in, in many cases. The declining enrollment figures, they, they have an unpredictable impact because you see great jumps and then you'll see drops and, and so on. And there's not a consistency in that. But remember again, this is having an effect in districts across the state in all kinds of communities. The, I'm, I'm subconscious about timing here. The challenges as I think we now have are meeting the demands of the, the race to the top. An example, one of the legislative pieces enacted in the race for the top competition was to increase mandatory school attendance age from 16 to 18. That may do a number of things. Get a number more students in, in those limited years, limited hours of, of education. But somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for that. It's, it's, it's a cost, an added cost. Universal high quality early education. We've now in Michigan, the policymakers have, have essentially eliminated one of the programs that we know works best. And that's the preschool program. And, and you're probably familiar with neighboring Ipsilanti, the Perry preschool study 40 some years now. Looking at what happens in following people who went through a preschool program from the same neighborhood, people who did not. And, and every standard is, shows significant benefit for those who went through those programs. Knowing that, policymakers have chosen to eliminate funding for preschool. It's a kind of political logic that we maybe need to talk about to help you understand. The importance of, of non-school human services. It's pretty hard to, to educate people without being concerned about where they're coming from and the, and the homes that coming from. So a rational tax policy will address fairness, stability, efficiency, and adequacy. And that's the, the challenge we have before us. Thank you. That's true. Okay. Thank you for, for having me here. And thank you for the student group who supplied me with Happy's Pizza before the event. And that was much appreciated. I try to get Happy's every time I come to this area. I'm going to talk about improving student learning with fewer resources. Lynn already alluded to a lot of this, but, you know, Michigan schools are in a very precarious situation. And that is that they have ever rising higher standards and higher expectations put on them by local parents, which is, that's a really good thing. But also by the state and by the, in a large, larger extent than ever before by the federal government. And in Michigan, we have fewer resources than we did. As Lynn mentioned, we are moving from being a relatively wealthy state to being a relatively poor state. And we are trying to uphold a public school system that was built when we were a relatively wealthy state. So how can we do this? How can we improve student learning with fewer resources? I want to go through some of the things that we've tried. We've tried more money for our public schools. This chart shows operating expenditures per pupil, and that's not capital costs, this is just current expenditures. From 1960 to 2007, we spend almost four times as much as we did in 1960 after adjusting for inflation. We've tried more money. And this is not just a Michigan thing, this is across the board nationally too. Except for two times in the U.S.'s history, have schools received on average lower per pupil revenues. That was during the Great Depression and during World War II. And the U.S. is one of the leaders worldwide and how much we spend per pupil on K-12 schools. We've tried putting more teachers in classrooms. This is from 1996 to 2009, basic program teachers. So this is classroom teachers. It's not instructional aids, it's not para pros. This is classroom teachers. The ratio has dropped from 24.5 students to about 22.5 students per teacher. And this again is a national phenomenon too. We've tried more employees from 1996 to 2009. Our student to employee ratio went from slightly under nine to under eight. And from 2003 to 2009, which is one of those periods where we've lost a lot of state wealth over that time, people in administrative staffing positions in our school grew by ten percent while the number of pupils in our schools decreased by six percent. Over that same time period, employees like consultants, coordinators, supervisors, directors and other support staff grew by 23 percent over that same time period while enrollment declined. So we've tried more warm bodies in the classrooms. And it doesn't seem to have worked. And I'll show you more about that through these slides. Here's total per pupil spending. This is every dime that we spend on K-12 education here in Michigan per pupil, adjusted for inflation from 1994 to 2009. Here's our eighth grade math scores on the nation's report card. We've got about a half percent increase. This is by far our best score This is fourth grade reading on the NAEP. We're up about two percent. Eighth grade reading in math is down by about two percent. I used the NAEP because it's considered the best standard for judging student progress over time. And almost by any other standard that we use, we see that we haven't gotten a whole lot for what we've spent on our public schools over the decade and a half. SAT scores have gone up by about six percent, but only five percent of Michigan students take that test. ACT scores have remained relatively flat, and you see that big decline there in the green. That's when we started requiring all students to take it. And graduation rates were about 70 percent in 1994, and now they're about 75 percent. So we did see a little bit of an improvement So, what do we do? Well, I think from what we've tried, spending more money is not necessarily the answer. I think we need to look to other states and see what they are doing because other states are having success with improving student learning. And by far, the best example of that is Florida. And I want to tell you what Florida has done over the last 12 years with their public school systems. They created a genuine school accountability system. And by genuine, I mean they didn't water down their standards and they held schools accountable for when they did not perform. In Michigan, we have about three overlapping school accountability systems that rate our schools. They give them a grade and they give them a certain level of proficiency and they mark them as AYP and some are failing and some are not. Parents don't know what in the world that means. It's changing constantly. In Florida they did something revolutionary. They grade their schools like this. A, B, C, D and F. That's it. I've been told that in Florida when those grades come out, the state shuts down because parents are so interested in finding out what the score of their kids' school is. And what happens in Florida when a school receives an F, parents in that school are empowered to send their kids to other schools. They can send their kids to charter schools, they can send them to any other public school district that they want and they can send them to private schools using a voucher system or a tuition tax credit system. In Florida, they expanded learning opportunities as I just mentioned. They allow students to take advantage of a tuition tax credit scholarship program to send kids to private schools. They use a tuition tax credit scholarship program for students with disabilities. They expanded the number of charter schools that they have in their state and they created by far the largest virtual school in the country. It has eight times more enrollments in Florida's virtual school than any other virtual school in the country. The other thing Florida did is banned social promotion after third grade which I think creates incentives for parents to make sure their kids are learning because it's not always just the school's fault and parents are sometimes to blame too. So no parent wants their kid to repeat fourth grade or fifth grade. So in Florida your kid has to score at a proficient level on the state test in order to get to the next grade. That creates an incentive for parents to make sure that their kids are learning. Florida also instituted a teacher performance pay kind of system where if a school was given an A teachers in those districts or I'm sorry, if a school showed a certain level of growth within the district teachers in that district got a bonus. They used alternative teacher certification to improve the labor force and create more a more diverse working force in the schools and they created more early education options there hasn't been any research yet on how effective this is probably new in Florida. But it's voluntary and what it does is it allows parents to use a voucher basically to attend any private preschool that they want to or they can attend any preschool at a local public school as well. What has Florida got for this? Here's fourth grade reading scale scores from 1992 to 2009. As you can see Florida was one of the worst had one of the worst scores in the country in 1994 significantly lower than the US average and significantly lower than Michigan's average. Over the next 14 years they passed both the United States average and Michigan's average significantly. This is by far the largest gain by any state on any standardized or on any NAEP test. And I use fourth grade reading here because it is a lot of experts would say that if a child is on track by the time they're in fourth grade with reading they're much more likely to stay on track as they progress throughout their school career. Here's more details about the Florida miracle. If you can see in the bottom right if you look at the state of Florida there African-American students in Florida's average fourth grade reading score was 211. If they were a state the African-American students in Florida would outscore eight other state averages. That's the average for all of their students. Hispanic students in Florida's average is 223. If they were a state they would outscore 31 other state averages including Michigan. Florida's not just improving the high flyers in their school system it is the students who are the lowest performing traditionally who are the ones that are benefiting the most from Florida's system. So one of the things that we can do is model policies in Michigan after some of the things that Florida did and basically what they're doing is they are taking into account the fact that schools and teachers and administrators and school board members act just like everyone else in the universe. They respond to incentives and they put incentives in place in their schools for them to improve student learning. The other thing that we need to do in Michigan is improve teacher quality. Outside of a student's background or socioeconomic status teacher quality in the classroom is the most important factor that determines how much that student is going to learn. It matters more than the size of the class. It matters more than I would argue with John probably the amount of time that they spend in that class and of course if it's three minutes then it's not really going to matter but teacher quality is the thing we need to focus on. And what we need to do is hold teachers accountable for student performance to some degree. I don't mean that we need to base all of their evaluations on how students perform in the classroom but it has to be taken into consideration. There are local union contracts in Michigan that strictly prohibit the school from looking at student performance when it comes to evaluating teachers. And we need to reform pay structure for our teachers. We pay our teachers like their early 20th century industrial assembly line workers as if they're all equal and as if they're all interchangeable. Teachers are not widgets. Teachers are professionals and we need to pay them differently and I don't necessarily think that we need to create a widespread merit pay kind of system but just differential pay. We need to pay physics teachers more than we pay teachers who are in subjects where we have an oversupply something like social studies or something. So we need to attract the highest performing teachers by paying them more in areas where we need them. And of course none of that can be done without reforming tenure and Colorado has done this successfully. They created a more accountability based tenure system where teachers basically if they have a poor evaluation for two consecutive years their tenure is then going to be reviewed again and they have a couple years to reform and to get back on track. Alternative teacher certification which has had success in Florida is something that we need to continue to expand and unleash the virtual learning capabilities that we have. We still pretend like kids need to sit in seats in a physical classroom in front of a physical teacher to learn. They don't have to do that. We need to identify who our rockstar teachers are and then get them get as many kids as we can in front of them and through virtual learning we can do that. Other ideas for change and categorical funding. That was another thing that was part of proposal A was to get rid of all of these different categorical funds that the state legislature decided to use to fund different school districts in different ways that they chose. We've sort of moved away from that and now we have more than 30 different categorical funds that go to schools and I think that local school administrators and school boards are better at spending their money than what bureaucrats and Lansing are. That's an example from charter schools. That's one of the things that they're able to do differently than what public school districts are. Dual enrollment we need to break down this idea that there's a K-12 system and then a higher education system. Our end goal is to just teach kids skills. Whether that comes through the K-12 system or the community colleges or vocational schools or higher ed it shouldn't matter. Virtual schooling as I mentioned has a lot of potential to reduce costs by scaling and to put more students in front of high performing teachers and ultimately what we need to do is create incentives, create an educational marketplace, create a place where schools innovate to essentially compete for students to compete for consumers and we know through history that monopolies don't work very well and we've done very little to address this fact when it comes to our public schools. Just one brief final example of this. Today is the most important day on the school calendar. Do you know why? It's count day. It's the most important day because schools need the kids in the seats so they can count them to get paid for them. This is a really important day. We do that today. I think in Detroit they offer them iPods and pizza parties and all sorts of things just to attract them to the class. Then what do we do tomorrow with those students? We don't even really keep track of them until the MEAP test maybe next spring to figure out whether they need anything. We need to create incentives within the districts to serve the students and serve the parents at all times. Thank you. It's also a really important day because it's picture day in a lot of schools. I don't think those are coincidental. I'd like to thank the panelists and now we're going to have a few questions. I have some from Chuck's class that I'll start with. Are these just generally addressed to all the panelists? One might be more specific. I will start with this and we'll let the same alphabetical order let people respond. Question number one Many studies have been done comparing the low upfront costs of pre-K programs with high returns to society. Are politicians receptive to this comparison? Is it politically feasible to increase early education period? I couldn't quite read the last part but I think that's the main thrust of it. I never get the last word, is that right? I never get the last word at home either. Why aren't we speaking? We can go backwards. I'm flexible. You can say the last word first. Okay, Michael, why don't we start with Michael. Early education politically feasible? Sure, yeah. I want to push back a little bit on the research on early education because the research on early education shows that there are several programs that are really really great like Perry preschool program like program that was in Chicago like I think there was another one in North Carolina that we've studied again and again and again that show high returns long lasting returns over time but what we don't talk about is those programs were extremely expensive they were intensive they were much more than just an added year of school they involved home visits they involved post preschool tutoring they involved parental counseling so when we talk about preschool we need to define what we're talking about exactly are we talking about head start and great start or are we talking about these really intensive expensive programs like the Perry preschool and when you look at head start in particular just this last year the United States Department of Health and Human Services did a study of more than 5,000 students in head start and after one year of head start they identified 114 different positive benefits to the students in head start not one of those benefits was there after first grade the research is not clear on how effective all early education programs are we know that some are but not all of them are politically feasible I think from what John has heard from the rest of the state is that parents are really interested in it and even without a universal public funded system we have still about 70% of parents send their kids to preschool and they fund them on their own I think it is politically feasible okay, Lynn the one measure of political feasibility would be to look at the last couple of years of budget activity in the Michigan legislature in which essentially the preschool funding has been eliminated that does not suggest that it is real feasible politically at the present time now the reasons for that I do not think go back to what Mike is talking about I do not believe there has been a serious policy debate in the legislature about which are the good preschool programs I do not think there has been that kind of sophisticated discussion at all and it would seem to me if you are trying to argue that some preschool programs are not good therefore we should not fund preschool it is a difficult argument for me to affirm but I think politically under the present circumstances preschool is seen as an extra education program primarily most of the education establishment is not invested in preschool it is invested elsewhere and so as a consequence it becomes competitive in our cannibalistic discussion about other programs and I think that reduces the political feasibility I would partially agree with Michael quality is a huge issue with preschool and in the preschool world there is a lot of hand wringing about it but quality is an issue throughout the education system in general anybody here just raise your hand did you think 12th grade was a blow off here anybody well if you get a beer if you can get education leaders to have a beer some of them will tell you after a beer that they get a wild eye in their look and say what we really ought to do is get rid of 12th grade and educate 4 year olds instead pretty radical idea and they only say it openly after a beer I am only half joking these are the kinds of things we got to be we got to think about changing the whole system we have got about 40,000 kids in Michigan by some studies who qualify for the publicly funded preschool programs we have now who aren't in them because there aren't slots and because of bureaucratic snafu and other reasons in terms of political feasibility last year our state senate tried to zero out the pre-k program $100 million tried to get rid of it one of the wackier arguments made for this is this is another government's conspiracy to take kids out of the home and you look at the research the brain development is all occurring between so much of it is occurring between the ages of 05 but we have got an old agrarian model school system that doesn't begin to deal with that fact we have got to find some political feasibility to get students learning earlier okay and actually following up with John this is a question specifically for you so I do get the last word you get the last and now the first one so your 10,000 voices report mentioned several educational actions that no politician seem to be talking about school curriculum overhaul increased parental involvement college affordability how do you get legislators to focus on these issues the school funding seems to be the first issue on everyone else's education agenda well I'll just take one of them higher ed affordability it's the first area that we're going to now to cut is to cut university funding because it's a pot of money that's accessible if you look at our general fund budget in michigan more than half of it goes to either human services or to prisons that doesn't leave a lot left over and when you're spending more on prisons than you are in universities I would argue that's just not a sustainable system it's just simply not sustainable but we've not gotten a lot of movement in the legislature to deal with that I think you've got two gubernatorial candidates here who have taken this issue on and hopefully it's not just lip service they're saying that higher ed is important that the competitive workforce is important and we've got to invest in that just a quick follow up relating to political feasibility and kind of your community conversations so I think the conversations about the length of the school year the importance of sports versus academics you seem to kind of be suggesting in some of your comments that there was the kind of groundswell you know popular pressure for kind of some reforms I think your personally would make sense but it's not clear to me that those really are feasible would the population of Michigan be willing to give up their sports programs to reduce class size I mean is that what your community conversations are suggesting? No they're not but I think we're reaching a point where we're cutting libraries we're cutting textbooks we're maximizing class sizes that's an issue the center wouldn't exist today if there was a clear bridge between citizens and our state legislature in getting things done I guess I'm here because that's part of the problem citizens are extremely frustrated at the gridlock and the lack of working together the partisanship in lancing on issues like this the fact that we never get a budget done in time because it's always about political gamesmanship instead of getting things done one result out of the community conversations that we've been able to make a little progress on in lancing is that for the first time in this session in the legislature there's a bipartisan caucus of legislators that it wasn't too many years ago about the time the center was being formed five years ago we'd go talk to legislators and they literally didn't know the names of people across the aisle Lynn I don't know if it was that way it wasn't but legislators literally tell them they don't know that person over there they mistake each other for staffers pretty regularly in that kind of environment nothing is getting done okay one last question from the note cards then to the audience so what education policy issues do you believe the next governor will address and what actions will they take this is I guess a not what they should address but what are the one or two things that you think the next governor will do or try to do Michael to be perfectly honest I don't know when I hear both of the candidates talk about education they sort of talk in very general terms and I'm not exactly sure what kind of things they'll look at it both of them talk a little bit about creating efficiencies limiting rising costs that we have but I've been disappointed quite honestly I haven't heard specific things that they wanted to well we know some stuff and they know some stuff and one of the things that we know is that they're going to have to address educational funding in the context of an overall budget debacle and what we don't know is how they're going to do that I'm predicting that they will do a very political thing whichever of the candidates wins and that is they will call upon the establishment of some panel to think these things through and work on a proposal and I'm not often a Betty man but I'm open to a deal on that and I think that will happen because they will be forced to address not only the specific issues like are we going to fund preschool versus promise scholarships versus income tax credits they're going to have to look at that whole budget situation and there will be a great deal of pressure on them in fact I think it will be smart of either of them to lay out a panel of that kind and give them substantial authority if I were one of them or if one of them were listening to me neither of which is likely to happen ever I would take the emergency fiscal commission that Governor Granthoma pointed chaired by Governor Milliken and Governor Blanchard which is an excellent document from five years ago and which has now been celebrated by some of us annually on Ground House Day just because nobody's ever looked at it or done anything with it and so on it's an excellent document that I would convene people around and say okay let's take this bipartisan document of thoughtful people and who have some political insight and so on and savvy and let's use that as the starting point for discussion about the overall state budget and the education in the night Coming right off of that one of the issues raised in that panel of experts four or five years ago was the idea of service sharing and consolidation in schools and local government I think that's one area that could get traction under the next governor they both talked a little bit about that and a lot of that in schools at the level in terms of sharing services payroll counseling issues bus systems Mike Flanagan the state superintendent I probably don't have my exact numbers straight here but he talks about the many different school bus systems that we have in Wayne County many different kinds of ways of purchasing tires repairing the air filters putting in new seats painting them hiring and firing there may be some ways to reach some economies of scale by doing things more regionally we're not talking about creating mega school districts where we've got one school district for a million kids or anything but service sharing is one idea that has quite a bit of traction and comes right out of that report based on what the candidates are saying I also am a little bit hopeful that there might be some change in the preschool funding environment we've talked about the importance of pre-K and they may try to put some money into that there's only one spot that you're going to see the candidates on the same stage at the same time talking about education or anything else it's on October 10th the centers hosting the only gubernatorial debate they're going to do it's going to be on TV stations across the state hopefully they will provide some enlightenment that night I think they'll both before education well why are you against it so let's get some questions from the audience just kind of a follow up to what you guys were just talking about in terms of trying to reduce the cost of services and I think Michael may have written something on privatization of services can you guys speak a little bit about that I'm sure yeah we do an annual survey one of their three main about 50% of districts and the main reason they do it is because it saves money and because they have rising costs elsewhere in their budgets they're expecting lower revenues in the future so I would expect that to increase okay in the back there I'm a student teacher right now at the school of education here at U of M I'm a student teacher in Detroit and what is very obvious is the difference in funding between the year and between Detroit and the school that I went to here in Ardor which is Pioneer and I just in light of the race atop and how schools are how the council and in response to that the ones that are suffering more are losing money and that's like all of Detroit how can we improve schools in Detroit if they're if they're being punished with less money when they have to address challenges that include lower academic success like for example my students some of them cannot read at all and some of them have trouble finding where the United States is on the map which for the record makes social studies that is equal to math and I just don't know how we can address the situation when and as in the city Detroit used to move us forward as a state if all the resources are taken away from lower performing schools I feel like we're doing the chances of improving education we don't always take money away from failing school districts in fact there's a pot of money in Michigan where we actually put money into school districts that are failing and reward school districts that are losing students I'm not sure that's going to work either some years ago there was a huge bond issue in Detroit one of the biggest bond issues ever and the results of that weren't red hot Detroit has some of the lowest scores anywhere ever recorded on tests there's a lot of concern about what to do about Detroit and it goes a lot deeper than funding there's a huge conflict between rural Michigan and urban districts these are huge problems and I don't think anybody has a real solution for them I think there needs to be an identification of cause and effect in terms of what creates the kinds of problems you articulate and much of our response so far unfortunately has been to apply some structural template and say if the mayor made the decisions instead of the school board or if we could do away with the influence of the unions things of that kind that don't get us into the cooperative discussion cooperative between parents and educators in the community and others who've got a stake in that education system to say okay let's talk about cause and effect when it was said to Mayor Archer by the governor and legislature you're going to become responsible for running the schools in Detroit Archer foolishly agreed to do that I say foolishly because nobody said here's what needs to be accomplished here's what the goals are here's what we want to see happen and so as a consequence it was simply a matter of somebody else administering a system that really the basic kinds of changes didn't occur we know some stuff again we know that there's a positive correlation between home stability and student performance there have been a number of studies Wayne County Risa did one and there have been others of those well if that's the case then that would tell us that it's not alone what happens in the classroom but it's also what happens outside the classroom and somehow we have to address that and it's that discussion that I think would be an exciting one to see nurtured but is a difficult one to put together it's also dangerous to paint with a too broad a brush here there are some huge educational success stories in Detroit Wayne State runs a fantastic summer math program for kids that don't have many advantages I believe it's the Roberto Clemente School on the southwest side of Detroit they've created an incredible community of learning that brings parents in after school and their test scores are doing very well we've written about that school a little bit on the center's website University Prep Academy is an amazing success story they're sending graduates to college at an unbelievable rate I think we can do more looking at what is working in some very challenging areas and try to replicate it I want to just kind of give them the time here and kind of give them all the questions I've seen let's have short questions and short answers if possible yes you Michael, but really if anyone has a comment Michael you mentioned you were talking about the reforms in Florida and Colorado and I'm specifically interested in teacher buy-in and union effect I don't know much about unions but I've heard that Michigan teacher unions are very strong compared to other states and so while the reforms sound appealing and certainly the charts ones we would like to claim I mean how applicable would their plan be in our state given the union situation well I mean that would be applicable it would just be how feasible would it be the Florida education and any of those reforms Michigan we think we have a really powerful teachers union and I suspect that we do but I hear the same thing from every other person in every other state that their teachers union might be the most powerful in the country what's that right well there's just an education association there's a professional association but they don't have mandatory dues it's a professional association which is not a union which is not a union just keep the facts straight it's not a union the Florida education association okay Michael I was interested in your comment about doing a way of categorical funding and it sort of plays off of the comment categorical funding in theory and in practice it really named providing additional resources to kids with special needs I mean that's the whole purpose of category of funding all kids are not alive as you well know and some kids have special needs of different sorts school districts rural school districts would have much more needs for transportation assistance say than suburban schools if you did away with category of funding how would you address the special needs of those kids and those schools when I'm talking about ending category of fund education I'm talking more about some of the things that John talked about we reward schools for losing pupils we pay schools for being in a certain geographical area where they don't collect as much tax revenue because they're in renaissance zones other things like that I'm not talking about special education funding or title one funding or things like that there and then I'm interested in your thoughts on the recent growth in the charter movement and whether you think that this is a long term or short term trend and if you think it's helping or harming public schools I know you mentioned making education more of a competitive market so that way maybe you feel it's benefiting schools and maybe in some other ways I'd like to hear how you think it's hurting public schools the you're on a roll we're getting bold there's a good deal of research that I think begs us to be begs to be taken seriously now on impact of charter schools the dramatic things happen in terms of some very dramatically creative things happening where teachers unions have come together and essentially organized schools and in very creative kinds of situations we see the research that I read a couple of weeks ago suggesting that overwhelmingly by many review of many of the studies there's not dramatic indication of improvement as a result of charter education the students are performing that much better something like 17% of students in charter schools perform better than their surrounding traditional schools and so on so it seems to me we can trust the testing that leads to that conclusion it's pretty hard to say that's going to be a movement that will grow with great hope of dramatic improvement it does there are a variety of studies that suggest there are patterns of segregation and so on there are a variety of studies and nurtured by charter school development and that the charter school's ability to turn away some students the more difficult students and so on is just heaping a greater problem on the traditional schools and so on so I think there are enough questions out there that it's hard to see that as a major solution although I think there's a lot of attractiveness that people have find attractive the concept of competitive schools and schools of choice and so on how that's playing out I don't know I live in the school district that is running around looking for ways to get students to buy into their because of the head funding formula whether that's going to result in improved education it's too early for me to say it's a huge topic I'll try to be really brief one of the biggest disappointments with charter schools is their athletic performance they don't even have football teams for goodness sake how can they call themselves real schools I'll just have one thing on what might be the future for charter schools I think that those 13,000 students the race of the top legislation created a flex cap for charter schools to perform well they will continue to be effective I have a real quick question I didn't come in first but the I I really don't know what the the elements of that were and it becomes more difficult for me to understand it the more I read about the criteria of race to the top I mean it would be pretty hard to understand what you had to do to go through those hurdles I don't think the states that won know why they won so figuring out why we lost is virtually impossible I'll give a slightly less smart tricky answer does it matter the amount of money involved was a tiny percentage point of what we already spend on schools in Michigan and the whole thing seemed to me to be quite a distraction from some of the more fundamental issues that we're dealing with in Michigan schools but it wouldn't matter John if it was a test of whether reform of whether reform was occurring it wasn't a test it was a money chase that's all it was but the degree to which that's the case I think you're right but we also changed a bunch of policies in terms of Michigan as a result of that we did and one policy there that's going to be interesting to watch is written into the law as the idea that student performance has to be built into teacher evaluation that's going to play out at the local school district level that's going to be fascinating to watch and if some of you are working on grad projects it's going to be a great one there succeed on a global basis I think we may be benchmarking the wrong direction in terms of looking at what's happening in another state rather than you know what the most successful because many of the national national school systems are about the size of our states and some of the most successful that's a more productive place to look sometimes I like that I agree, I think there are good examples in a variety of settings I think looking at other states though can be beneficial still because it's the political the way it plays out politically is more likely to be similar state by state than it is country by country so a question to that given all of the plans that are out there people talking what changes to come about do you think parents and teachers are at a point now they're willing to sit down and look at these plans and start impacting upon what they put in candy from that library very few things mentioned about what are the role of parents in this game play in the mentoring process you said reading was essential for the early greats we're to call for more mentoring for kids to start reading to turn off their dollars and tell them especially we and it's critical now to talk about getting ready for the 21st century and beyond second question what is the media's role to point out the good things that are happening in education so that we can follow those good role models and stop nicking around and get down to the grandstand it's financial need to do don't take money to do like attitude change we're going to the next direction and I believe in the Chicago school system making major changes longer school days like you mentioned the Chicago school system especially after American ales happened the school system had over 90 no hundreds of kids one college I'll take the second question about the media from that world what media the number of reporters covering education and every other public policy issue has dropped precipitously because people aren't buying newspapers there just aren't that many people covering this issue that's why groups like the center and the Mackinac center have had space from certain perspectives to try to cover policy in more depth the last question we've asked in all of our community conversation is what's going right in your community what's working really well it's why we know about the Roberto Clemente school it's why we know about things like the Hastings public library over in west Michigan it was built a few years ago by kids literally riding downtown and handing in their penny jars there's no millage it was built before by the citizens in that community there are success stories going on every day we're writing about just a tiny handful of them at the center and we do a newsletter every week please sign up for it you'll be able to read some of those there's I pull out of my folder here extra which is a magazine out there called fair there's September issue deals with covering the race to the top the question you just raised of how has the media covered the whole education reform movement and so on and I think it's worth looking at because it's quite provocative in suggesting that the media has worked off a script that doesn't necessarily deal with specific examples but deals more with prejudgements that are brought into that discussion it's worth looking at if you look at the state there isn't much media coverage of education as such well I think from the media perspective I expect them to report good things that are happening in schools because it's not a real good story to hear about Johnny going to school and learning his fractions and doing his geography and learning a little bit of English too what is a good story is some of the really bad things that happen in schools if we can figure out how to change that that would go a long way parents and teachers and school officials need to let the media know about the good things that are happening in school and the kind of stuff that John's doing is great for that we have time for one more question well how about why don't you both ask the question at the same time and we have all three answers why don't you ask your question briefly and then you can choose to say something that responds to that or anything else you think is useful in concluding also critique the race of the tap some interesting know what you would like the federal government role of any to be in education policy instead of machine learning in our states great question I wonder what you guys think we lose and gain we use market certain marketizing frames some consumers and things like privatization not treating education as a special role role of the feds and then kind of cost benefits of the market place framing of education issues John the special good idea I think by educators looking at parents and students as consumers I think we gain a lot it's the way the rest of America works I would like to see the fed be not the educational policy makers because in truth that's not the major source of funds and so on but to provide almost foundation like funds for innovation that are available for creative proposals so we look at some of these things that are working these pilot studies, these examples and find some source of funds to cause things to happen currently school districts don't have any backup money to be able to do those kinds of things and it would make sense to have that without saying here's the conclusion we want but here are the sources of funding in terms of the federal role the federal government didn't really start getting involved in public education until 1965 and their results the improvements that have happened since then are hardly detectable so I'm skeptical of any sort of benefit from having the federal government involved in an issue that has traditionally been a local and state issue as far as looking at education as a consumer or kind of more in a competitive marketplace I just concur with John the more we focus on the great thing about a market type environment is it's always focused on outputs we don't do that enough in our public school system we need to focus on what our outputs are instead of just what our inputs are what I mean by the way the rest of America works they are consumers there are reasons that districts lose students and it's not because you know Martians came and took those students away it's because parents voted with their feet districts who ignore the fact that they're consumers are ignoring pieces of their product I'm getting more and more uncomfortable in this discussion okay can I think I'm gonna have to just know I'm uncomfortable and with that everyone be assured that Lynn is not comfortable yet we will conclude thank you very much for coming out and thank you to the panelists and I imagine