By Brenda Ortega
MEA Voice Editor

Support over blame

MEA member Danielle Cover has seen the difference it makes for students when state leaders listen to educators and deliver resources that schools need, rather than issuing unfunded mandates and setting up systems of punishment based on standardized test scores.

A 19-year educator, Cover teaches first grade in Ferndale and recently witnessed dramatic improvements — in her classroom and districtwide — as the state funded high-quality literacy training along with reading coaches and interventionists.

“My students’ success or failure should not be used to score political points,” Cover said. “It should be a driving force for policymakers to ask, ‘What can we do to make it better?’ And ask the people who it affects every day.”

In Ferndale, shifts made over four years helped the district to buck statewide trends in third-grade reading on the 2025 M-STEP assessment, surpassing the state average and jumping more than 11 percentage points in third-grade proficiency from pre-pandemic levels.

Cover credits key supports put in place since 2020, under Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s leadership, with offering both means and methods for schools to beef up early literacy approaches. Those include funding for LETRS, a training for educators on the science of reading.

She is one of 12,000 Michigan teachers who have completed Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) or are working toward completion at no cost since 2021.

Ferndale and other districts have also leveraged new state funding sources to purchase research-aligned elementary curricula and materials.

LETRS explores the latest research into how children learn to read and best practices for teaching. Some districts used state grants or federal COVID-relief dollars to pay educators for extra time required to complete the course — up to 160 hours over two years.

“Out of all the professional development I’ve ever received, this introduction to the science of reading was the most beneficial,” Cover said — while adding the course was a “huge lift,” and all educators should be paid for spending many nights and weekends completing it.

She praised bipartisan literacy and dyslexia laws, passed in 2024 by a Democratic-led Legislature, which take effect in 2027. But many schools remain short of needed literacy and mental health supports, she added.

“If more legislators came to classrooms willing to listen, I promise — we have solutions. It starts with investing in the dedicated professionals doing the complex work of teaching young people how to read and write, building a foundation of literacy for the future.”

Learn from mistakes

In this election year, too many candidates will push a message that calls for market-based “competition” favoring consequences over supports: school choice, charter schools, and test-and-punish accountability.

Ironically those have been the most consistently pursued state education policies for the past 35 years.

Cutting funding while expanding for-profit charter schools and cycling through numerous accountability systems for public school districts all have destabilized the state’s education system since the early 1990s, says MEA Labor Economist Tanner Delpier.

“We should learn from that instead of doubling down on failed policies,” Delpier said.

Yet big donors, such as Betsy DeVos, have vowed to use their money and influence to center November’s General Election on the so-called “failure” of public education — as voters decide on the next governor and control of the state Legislature.

One example is former Gov. Rick Snyder calling the performance of Michigan schools and educators “an outrage” last spring as he rolled out his plan to spend millions of dollars targeting and promoting political candidates – despite it being his own policies that created the problems.

Ignoring a decades-long assault on school budgets, critics argue schools need reform over funding. They claim recent efforts to rebuild education funding prove money doesn’t make a difference — even though inflation-adjusted spending remains far below previous levels.

They say educators, including school administrators, need more high-stakes standardized testing to force better student outcomes.

“We’re seeing increased emphasis on school accountability even though these systems have been a primary focus of policymakers for quite a while and despite the fact that past accountability policies failed to raise literacy scores in any meaningful way here in Michigan,” Delpier said.

A respected expert on school finance with a doctorate in education policy, Delpier points out the names and acronyms by which accountability has been known at the federal level: No Child Left Behind, ESEA, ESSA.

State-level systems have included AYP; Beating the Odds; top-to-bottom and achievement gap rankings; focus, priority and reward designations; multiple iterations of teacher evaluation; the accountability scorecard; A-F grading; and the Michigan School Index system.

“We can’t forget emergency management and the Education Achievement Authority,” Delpier said, referring to laws used by the state to assume control of high-poverty local school districts or funnel students from Detroit schools designated low-performing to state-run EAA schools with no local accountability.

The EAA was a key part of Snyder’s school reform agenda initiated in 2011, which he tried to expand statewide, but the district was shut down in 2017 after poor performance and financial mismanagement led to federal lawsuits.

Snyder’s other reform — emergency managers — closed some majority Black school districts and privatized others.

At the same time, state assessments required to measure public school performance have continually shifted the ground under educators’ feet: MEAP, M-STEP, ACT, SAT, Michigan Merit exam, BPA, Work Keys, PSAT, benchmark assessments.

Constant change — called “policy churn” — and underfunded mandates make it harder for school districts to effectively utilize scarce resources, Delpier said. An example is the Read by Grade 3 law, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature and later amended when Democrats took control in 2022.

The third-grade retention requirement included in the original law was removed in 2023 because it didn’t show results improving student literacy. Aside from failing to provide additional resources to struggling readers, the approach was expensive and redundant.

“You’re essentially adding an entire extra year of schooling for a particular group of students without changing the approach,” Delpier said.

Research proves there are better long-term strategies that require sustained investment — such as smaller K-3 class sizes, targeted interventions for at-risk students, and wraparound services to support young people and families.

“Schools need to have enough resources to be able to serve the needs of a diverse population of students, and they require stable policy environments to be effective,” he concluded.

Read all of three parts of our Facts v Fallacy series, and find related source information, at mea.org/facts.