Michigan school administrators and teachers received top marks from State Department of Education evaluations in 2024. Meanwhile, more than 60% of Michigan’s third graders failed to meet state standards for reading proficiency this spring.
Public education in Michigan has a serious accountability problem.
The core of the problem is our educational blob, by which I mean the too cozy relationship between school districts, the Michigan Association of School Boards, the public sector unions, the state’s Democratic politicians, and the Democrat-controlled state school board.
Start with this irony: In the 2024 lame duck legislative session, the Michigan State School Board, along with most Democratic state lawmakers, fell over themselves trying to gut the state’s charter schools with a slew of bills.
Meanwhile, the state’s conventional public schools want to gut transparency and accountability for their own performance.
Consider Flint’s public schools, where just eight of the 220 third-grade students (3.6%) who took the 2023-24 MSTEP assessment were proficient in English language arts.
While the students struggled mightily, Flint Community School’s teacher assessments told a different story. Not a single Flint teacher, of 154 evaluated in 2023-24, was found to be either “minimally effective” or “ineffective.” Instead, 35% of teachers reached the top rating of “highly effective,” with the remaining 55% receiving the second highest rating, “effective.”
Apparently, the lack of learning going on in Michigan’s schools is no fault of the state’s teachers, if the evaluations are to be believed.
Statewide in 2023-24, school districts rated 43% of their teachers to be “highly effective,” and 56% as “effective.” Just 1% of public-school teachers across the state received the lowest rating, “ineffective.”
Michigan’s Legislature does not appear to regard any of this unreality as a problem. Starting in 2024-25, student growth via test scores will drop in weight from 40% of teacher evaluations to just 20%.
No longer will the poor academic performance of those slacker students stand in the way of high ratings for their teachers.
But just in case some teachers rate poorly, any consequences will now be subject to collective bargaining. If a district ever wants to dismiss that rare teacher who’s persistently not cutting it, the district will have to talk to the union first. I don’t suspect the union will carve out much time for that, since most years the number of teachers found to be rated “ineffective” in this state is statistically 0%.
As recently as 2017, the state made a far better effort to communicate with the public about the performance of its schools.
From 2011 to 2017, the Michigan Department of Education released an annual “Top to Bottom” ranking of individual school buildings. Parents could quickly discover whether the school their child attended was at the top, at the bottom, or somewhere in between.
Back then, newspapers could run full page lists of school ratings, from worst to best.
The last such list appeared in 2017, when the Michigan Department of Education announced it would develop a new accountability system.
That new system is just a bunch of obscure websites filled with links and links and links of difficult-to-parse data. This is apparently the “transparency” parents deserve.
“The Michigan Department of Education has since its creation failed to inform the public of academic achievement in any meaningful way,” said Beth DeShone, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, in an email sent to Michigan Enjoyer. “Instead, they hide data, bury test results, and duck responsibility. It’s a department in desperate need of new and truly transparent leadership.”
Tom Gantert is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
