What’s the Fix (WTF)? as Michigan’s Education “House is on Fire”?

• Many things contributed to Michigan’s distressing drop in educational achievement over the past 30 years.  

• There are no silver bullets to recovery, but Michigan must invest more in schools, simplify educational bureaucracy, stop punishing teachers with burdensome testing requirements, and be more open to innovative steps that help students learn outside the traditional classroom. 

• On an optimistic note, the demand for educational reform seems to be widespread and bipartisan, a reflection of people finally realizing how much trouble Michigan schools are in. 

Michigan was once a leader when it came to schools. But over the recent decades, that began to change, and today Michigan’s educational achievement scores rank among the lowest in the nation. Led by moderator Devin Scillian, this panel of experts looks at what went wrong and suggests ways to get Michigan’s schools back on track.

View the full video below.

Introducing the dismal “house on fire” statistics about Michigan’s lagging education performance, Journalist and Author Devin Scillian asked each panelist why the state saw such a decline. 

Ron Hall of Bridgewater Interiors said, “It starts with disinvestment.” Michigan was disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession and is still digging out, he said. “Lots of other things need to be addressed as well, but I think we have to start with realizing that you have to invest in it if you want” better schools. 

Vanessa Keesler of Launch Michigan took a different tack, pointing to increasingly strict accountability standards that she called almost teacher punishment. “When you don’t have your resources, and you have really high, really punitive accountability, that creates a really negative situation for the education system,” she said. 

Chandra Madafferi of the Michigan Education Association agreed with Keesler, saying, “I think we have buried [teachers] with standards that are unrealistic, and we’ve really taken the joy out of learning, which we see probably in some attendance things, and I just think that it’s a culmination of issues.” 

Former Gov. Rick Snyder, meanwhile, called for more innovation, noting that the “one teacher, one classroom” model has been in place for more than a century. Students need more opportunities to learn outside that traditional environment, he said, adding, “I think if anything, the world’s changed and that system doesn’t work well in the world of today.” 

Hall cited the number of individual school districts in Michigan — nearly 900 — while Maryland has just 24.  

“By all accounts, it’s too many,” he said. “We’ve got fancy consulting work that develops data that tells us almost $600 million you could put in the classroom, if you could just make the administration of schools more efficient. Trying to figure out how to get there is the accountability that’s on the rest of us, the business community, elected officials, and not the educators who are dealing with students in the classrooms.” 

Snyder recalled that “one of the first, coolest programs I ever did as governor was First Robotics. It is a rock concert for nerds. And if you ask the high school kids what was their greatest experience in high school, they will bring up First Robotics. And the ironic part is, because of seat time and the rules in place, to my knowledge, I didn’t know one school district giving credit to someone for doing First Robotics, their very favorite program, the coolest program they were working on.” 

In that same vein, Madafferi recalled visiting a school in Norway where four-year-old kids sat at a table with hammers and nails.  

“Can you imagine us having three- and four-year-olds doing hammers and nails?” She asked. “And I said, obviously, well, what happens when they hurt their thumb or their finger? And the teacher said, ‘You won’t do it again.’ I was so blown away by that, because not only as a society, as adults, we’re scared to fail, we’re teaching that to our children.” 

Asked by Scillian if anything was really changing, Hall sounded an optimistic note.  

“I really do think that our moment is finally at hand,” he said. “This is the issue all the gubernatorial candidates are talking about. Mayor Sheffield is talking about it. I think everybody gets Michigan into increasingly more trouble. It’s, you know, not just the hardscrabble places, it’s everywhere. And this is our ticket, this is our opportunity.” 

Snyder agreed but added, “The intense talk is wonderful, but we need to get our dashboard up that says, did we get this done, did we get this done, did we get the reforms? We need to start moving from just intensity to results.” 

The What’s the Fix (WTF)? series is sponsored by PNC Bank.