Talent & Education

The pay incentives, after years of cutbacks, allowed the state’s largest school district to hire hundreds of additional certified teachers, often plucking them from charter schools.

University of Michigan School of Education dean Elizabeth Birr Moje says Michigan risks widening achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students through the increased use of untrained teachers.

The use of long-term, uncertified substitute teachers has exploded in Michigan as a teacher shortage has intensified. Search to see how many of the teachers are in your school district.

One was a wedding planner. The other, an assistant basketball coach. Their stories say a lot about how Michigan increasingly is using long-term substitutes, full-time teachers with no training in education to lead classrooms.

In the last five years, the number of long-term substitutes taking over public classrooms has risen tenfold in Michigan. Critics say reliance on subs is an embarrassment for a state with lagging school performance.

The University of Michigan is seeing gains since offering free tuition to low-income families. But for many students, the class divide remains daunting once they step foot on one of the nation’s richest campuses. 

How partisan are Michigan schools? Legislators say the parties don’t even use the same vocabulary on education. But an influx of educators just elected to the House and Senate wants to change that.