If state budgets are a reflection on priorities, Michigan has not been prioritizing our children. 

Contrary to recent articles in Bridge Michigan, the state has dis-invested in K-12 education for decades. It shows in our performance on tests like the “nation’s report card” (the NAEP), exacerbated by Michigan’s alarmingly high rate of child poverty. 

  • Michigan has been committing a smaller share of the state’s economy to K-12 education, in good times and bad, for nearly all of the last 30 years. Even with recent increases, getting back to 1995 levels would require $6.2 billion more in annual state spending, about $4,480 per student.
  • After adjusting for inflation, state-source funding available to actually run schools is still almost 11% lower than it was in 2002 — and before the increases of the last two years, it was over 33% lower.

What has grown? The strain on the School Aid Fund, for one thing, which now funds the community college budget and a large chunk of higher education. For another, the burden of mandatory contributions to keep the state public school retirement system (MPSERS) afloat, which ballooned almost 300% in real terms from 2002 to 2024.

Steven Norton headshot.
Steven Norton is a public policy analyst and executive director of Michigan Parents for Schools, a nonprofit public interest advocacy group working to support community-governed public education in the state, and coalition partner of the Michigan Education Justice Coalition. (Courtesy photo)

The costs have risen because of the system’s unfunded liabilities, which stem almost entirely from missed targets for investment returns, not from fancy benefits. These costs, whether paid by districts or as a separate budget item, are all covered out of the School Aid Fund, reducing the amount available for school operations. The total cost of erasing the unfunded liability is close to $4 billion per year in current dollars, until 2038 when it is scheduled to be paid off. If only our kids could wait that long.

As to test scores, everyone’s talking about the latest 4th grade reading scores on the NAEP. And they were disappointing. But from 1998 to 2011, Michigan was statistically tied with the national average for 4th grade reading. After funding bottomed out in 2013, we started slipping slightly below the average. In 4th grade math, however, we’ve caught up to the national average after a dip starting in the Great Recession. In 8th grade reading and math, we’ve been tied with the national average for most of the last 25 years.

Not great, admittedly — we all want to be above average. But a crisis requiring us to blow up the system? No.

Graduation rates are at an all-time high, as are the number of students completing career and technical education programs while in high school, and students taking and successfully completing advancement placement classes. The share of high school graduates requiring remedial coursework in college has been dropping for over a decade. There are some real bright spots, the result of patient and painstaking work at the local level. But that gets lost in the cacophony of political sound bites.

Over the last two decades, Michigan public schools have suffered a blizzard of ideologically driven “reform” attempts, a new round with each new Legislature. Nearly all of these focused on punishing what the sponsors saw as “failure” and reshaping schools to fit their ideologies favoring privatization. They were not designed to help our local public schools, but to drive parents to other alternatives, weakening public schools in the process. How can we possibly be surprised at the result?

State Board of Education President Pamela Pugh argued that we are not doing right by our children because of “longstanding policy decisions that prioritize cost-cutting over sustained investment,” and we couldn’t agree more. Our children deserve fully funded schools with targeted resources for the students who need the most help. They deserve mental health support, school transportation, special education support and much more. But without adequate resources, none of that can happen.

We’ve been living for 30 years with a school funding system that was meant to be a medium-term fix in a crisis. We fund our schools with revenue streams that can collapse whenever the economy sours, and can be diverted away from classrooms whenever Wall St. catches a cold. We’ve also treated that pot of funding like a cookie jar to solve budget problems and to enable huge tax cuts for business. When we’re disappointed by the results, we’ve tried blaming teachers, principals, and administrators. We’ve tried blaming local school boards and local communities. We’ve tried blaming parents and even the children themselves.

But we’ve not tried facing up to our responsibility as a state to invest in all our kids.

It’s time to set aside the political fear-mongering blame game and agree on what we want our schools to offer our children and how to pay for it. We’ve seen the cost of political gamesmanship. It’s time for a new approach.

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