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Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Data-informed budget priorities: the key to success for Michigan's kids
Moms and their kids line up for a picture on the Michigan State Capitol Building steps after the annual "Mama's March" on April 30, 2025 | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols Good decisions start with good data. These are the opening words of the 2025 KIDS COUNT® Data Book released this month to give us a broad overview of how children are doing across the country. And right now, the data is telling us that we need to do more to meet the needs of kids in Michigan. Each year, the Data Book ranks states along four domains — economic security, education, health, and family and community — using 16 indicators of child well-being from trusted state and federal data sources. This year's data shows that progress is happening in Michigan. More children have access to health insurance, fewer children live in high-poverty areas and fewer children are being born to teens. But other areas highlight the need for urgent policy action. By far the area of greatest concern in Michigan is in education. Michigan is ranked 44th nationally — in the bottom ten states and the lowest in the Midwest. Academic performance has worsened nationally, but Michigan's outcomes are particularly concerning, as the vast majority of students are not proficient in basic skills. Michigan ranks 33rd for child well-being in annual report with education among the nation's worst The poor ranking is driven primarily by the worsening trend in fourth-grade reading proficiency, where we outperform only three states. Just 1 in 4 students in Michigan is proficient in fourth-grade reading. This trend highlights the unprecedented learning loss during and after the pandemic and the extreme toll chronic absenteeism is taking on academic performance. Some of this is a reflection of how we invest in students and schools. In a recent report, EdTrust-Midwest demonstrated how Michigan's education revenue growth has not kept up with other states, leading to persistent underfunding for at-risk students for many years. Although Michigan's new Opportunity Index provides a roadmap to addressing these inequities, legislators in Michigan have failed to provide adequate funding. The challenges facing schools, teachers and students will only grow in the coming months as Michigan House leadership has willfully refused to lay out a budget proposal, threatening the ability of districts to plan for the upcoming school year. Meanwhile, both the Senate and governor have proposed a budget that fails to provide increased funding for weights for students at the highest risk: students who are economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities and English-language learners. Addressing the needs of students also extends beyond the classroom, including ensuring children have access to a warm bed at night, healthy food to eat and a safe way to get to school. All children deserve to have their needs met, and policymakers have a responsibility to meet those needs by making smart policy choices guided by data and evidence. In 2023, 18% of children in Michigan — more than 365,000 young people — were living in poverty. One in 4 children (more than half a million in total) lived in a household where the family spent more than 30% of their income on housing, a financial burden that makes it difficult for families to afford other essentials. Unfortunately, right now many of the most successful programs to meet the needs of children and young adults are being threatened in Congress. Access to health care, food assistance, and the Child Tax Credit are all under attack from lawmakers who care more about providing tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations than the well-being of the children living here in our state. If we want to give our kids the best chance to thrive in adulthood and in the workforce, we need to position them for success now by supporting family economic security and access to programs and services that are essential for children's healthy development. As our state and federal lawmakers work on passing their respective budgets this summer, we call on leaders to act boldly where needed and rely on what we know works. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Michigan Students in Poorest Districts More Likely To Have Less-Qualified Teachers
Michigan students in the highest-poverty school districts are most likely to learn from teachers who are inexperienced, have emergency or temporary credentials or those who are teaching classes outside their field of expertise, according to a recent report by The Education Trust-Midwest. For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan's wealthiest school districts. 'The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,' said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom. While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been well documented as an intractable issue that's worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem. 'Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,' said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. 'Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.' DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research. They used Michigan's Opportunity Index, a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts. They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that's twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have less academic growth in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren't available, though they're more likely to be rated as 'unsatisfactory' or 'needs improvement' when compared to other new teachers. Related Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but 'it's no guarantee.' And while these findings do likely point to a 'more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and … a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it's probably not the case that it's going to be 16 times more effective.' Yet, 'of all these different factors and characteristics that they're highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that's documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,' he added. Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of enrollment in schools where teachers were most likely to leave. In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students. In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they're being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay. Related 'We're not competitive regionally and we're not terribly competitive nationally,' DeNeal said. Between 1999 and 2019, Michigan's inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts. This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles. 'I don't think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,' he said. 'This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.' Related DeNeal said that although these challenges are 'troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.' The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers. Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions. 'When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,' he said, 'the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.'
