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Two top officials with the Michigan Department of Education on Tuesday defended the current state of Michigan schools amid House Republican calls for dismantling the department.
Board of Education President Pamela Pugh and Superintendent for Public Instruction Michael Rice appeared Tuesday before the Michigan House Oversight Committee, which included a lengthy presentation on the department’s goals, its latest budget requests, and some heavy back and forth between Republican lawmakers.
Several Republican members of the committee, including its chair, Rep. Jay DeBoyer, a Republican from Clay, lambasted Pugh and Rice over low literacy rates and flailing math scores. Eventually, the specter of tearing down the department and starting anew with a department controlled closely by the Michigan Legislature materialized from Rep. Jaime Green, a Republican from Richmond.
Before dismantling the department became a topic of conversation, Rice and Pugh attempted to show the committee that schools, students, and educators have been making progress in multiple ways to achieve Michigan’s Top 10 Strategic Plan, which did include record achievement in several areas.
Part of that forward progress was seen in the passage of new literacy and dyslexia laws, some of which were spearheaded by Greene, who worked closely with Rice to make that reality. Rice and Pugh extolled how much of a difference those laws will make in the screening of all children for dyslexia, for example.
The pair also praised the Legislature for increasing funding to public schools over the last few years, but said those budgets did not make up for decades of underinvestment in public schools a decade earlier.
Pugh discussed some of the challenges currently facing schools and the effect disinvestment has had on public schools, not only on student needs and achievement but also the state’s teacher shortage.
“It is critical and crucial to understand that the challenges before us are not new,” Pugh said. “They are the result of longstanding policy decisions that prioritize cost-cutting over sustained investment in our children and our schools. Despite these challenges, the state Board of Education has remained resolute in our mission to reverse those harms and build an educational system that truly serves all Michigan students.”
Pugh said students, as well as teachers, parents, and administrators, were doing their best to provide a quality education in the face of crowded classrooms, aging buildings, limited access to mental health and special education services, and what she called an alarming shortage of adequately paid teachers.
“These issues are not anecdotal,” Pugh said. “They are symptoms of systemic neglect.”
Rice added that Michigan’s four-year graduation rate had improved to the highest level in state history, growing to about 83% in 2024, which is also the highest that figure has been in the last 10 years. The percentage of adults with a post-secondary certification (51.8%) was on track toward Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Sixty by 30 goal. The initiative aims to have 60% of Michigan adults between ages 25 and 64 holding some sort of postsecondary credential by 2030.
There were moments of seeming common ground between Rice and the Republicans who control the powerful House Oversight Committee, with Rice praising Public Act 146 and Public Act 147 of 2024 addressing literacy coaching and dyslexia screening assessments and interventions.
Progress was being made, but Rice noted that Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS, training was needed for educators to keep up pace and do better on the literacy front. Rice called for mandatory LETRS training for kindergarten through fifth grade classroom teachers, and lower class sizes for kindergarten through third grade classrooms.
Rice said there was also a need for more in-person instructional time, as there had been cases of professional development days being treated as student instruction days in 2019, and 15 virtual days being counted as the same in 2023.
The meeting, however, was not one of the House Education Committee meant to discuss budgetary needs and goals, but rather one designed as a means to grill department officials over failures in public education.
That became clear in lines of questioning from Rep. Brad Paquette, a Republican from Niles, who engaged in a lengthy and at times testy tit-for-tat with Rice and Pugh.
Paquette, a former teacher, said he’s seen all the headlines showing the breadth of Michigan’s public schools struggles and that he has been on various House committees in the past that dealt with public education and the budget. In that vein, Paquette said he’s seen similar presentations from Rice before and, despite additional funding over the last few years, Michigan schools are continuing to struggle.
“We’ve increased funding yet results are still tracking downward,” Paquette said. “When does accountability come into play?”
As Paquette became frustrated with Rice and Pugh’s answers, Pugh said accountability needed to be based in reality.
From there, Greene, who received a shout out from Rice for her work on the dyslexia screening law, turned the conversation toward the perceived need to dismantle the department, echoing Congressional Republican calls to do the same at the federal level.
Pugh said that studies have shown that states with elected boards like Michigan’s, and not under the control of the governor’s office or the Legislature, provided critical checks and balances, and correlated with better student outcomes. Those systems were also tied to more equity in funding and policy consistency.
Rep. Josh Schriver, a Republican from Oxford, hailed the fact that the “Greatest Generation” of the early 20th century had class sizes of 30, 40, or sometimes 50 children and they fared fine. He made other comments before being cut off by DeBoyer in the essence of time.
As the meeting wrapped, Rep. Dylan Wegela, a Democrat from Garden City, tried to set the record straight on various comments made by his Republican colleagues.
Wegela called out Schriver’s point, noting that the early 20th century was a time of rampant racial segregation, and literacy rates today were far higher than they were in the 1920s. Schriver at one point brought up school vouchers, and Wegela said in Arizona it was found that parents spent that money on items like toys and other merchandise instead.
He also noted that Michigan cannot talk about its problem with schools without looking at funding adjusted for inflation.
“Record funding is only as good as saying we have record wages today,” Wegela said. “When you adjust for inflation, we are barely ahead of the year 2000. This has created a classroom size problem, and a teacher shortage.”
Ben Solis is a reporter for Michigan Advance. You can reach him at bsolis@michiganadvance.com.
