The House Education Committee held more hearings today on the remainder of the bills in the so-called “parent empowerment” package. We offered testimony opposing one bill in particular: Senate Bill 619, which would remove any limits on the number or enrollment of entirely online charter schools, called “cyber schools” in the bill.

We’ve updated our legislative briefing on the “school choice” package of bills to reflect the final version of SB 618 being sent to the Governor, as well as other legislative action.

The update document is in PDF format, and we will be updating it regularly as the bills make their way through the Legislature. The download link is at the end of the article.

The document is current as of 12/16, reflecting the bills as reported from committee or as passed by the Senate or House.

When would you guess the following two sets of quotes were written? You might be surprised.

No matter what some people say, local public schools don’t make a “profit.” But many charter school operators do. Is that what’s best for our kids?

After years of quiet, malign neglect, the issue of profit in our public schools has become a topic of public discussion. What’s the problem? The problem is that we are starting to see a separation between the “school” and the companies that run the schools and hire the people who actually teach our kids. That is where the issue of profit raises its ugly head. Because where there’s profit, there’s also an incentive to use the political process to create more.

Talk of an ever-growing flow of money to schools is, like many such things, wildly exaggerated. But it does serve to frame the debate about school funding in such a way that cutting schools seems only “fair.”

We started to hear it during the debate over next year’s state budget. Lawmakers backing the governor’s budget responded to constituents worried about cuts to K-12 schools with two, oddly contradictory, palliatives: that money for schools continued to “pour in” even though there were fewer students; and that “getting spending in line with reality means understanding our lack of revenue.” Sometimes these earnest-sounding claims were in the same paragraph.

The most recent example of this effort to depict schools as awash in cash comes in an interview of State Budget Director John Nixon by the AP’s Kathy Barks Hoffman.

Among the least discussed, and arguably most important, aspects of the “tenure bills” which recently became law are the provisions mandating new teacher evaluation systems and creating a process to identify a model which most districts in Michigan will have to use.

This article provides an in-depth look at the teacher and administrator evaluation provisions in the law, highlighting some of the choices legislators made which reflect their views of teachers and educators in general. Attached to the article is a table comparing provisions in the final legislation with a separate bill on evaluation systems from which it derived.

MIPFS believes that it’s critically important for parent activists and others to be aware of these changes and the impact they are likely to have on our schools.