Despite Record School Spending, Michigan Test Scores Just Fell to New Lows
Fiscal discipline faces political resistance as debt accumulation threatens future generations.
Michigan just posted its worst reading and math scores in years, and it did so while spending more per student than almost any point in the state's history. That's not a coincidence anyone in Lansing wants to talk about. For a decade the answer to every bad number out of Michigan schools has been the same: more funding, smaller class sizes, another line item in the budget.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
How many times have we heard Democrats say we do not spend enough on public schools? Every problem from low test scores to crime to poverty is blamed on the fact we simply don't "invest" enough in our children's education.
That's just not true, of course. As states like Mississippi and Louisiana have demonstrated, the issue is how material is taught and the standards students are expected to meet, and not how much we spend per pupil.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Michigan just posted its worst reading and math scores in years, and it did so while spending more per student than almost any point in the state's history. That's not a coincidence anyone in Lansing wants to talk about. For a decade the answer to every bad number out of Michigan schools has been the same: more funding, smaller class sizes, another line item in the budget. The money showed up. The scores didn't follow.
Meanwhile Mississippi, a state Michigan legislators would never dream of imitating out loud, keeps climbing the national rankings on a fraction of the budget. Louisiana too. What they did wasn't complicated. They rewrote how reading is taught, held schools accountable for results instead of intentions, and stopped treating third graders like they'd figure out phonics on their own through "exposure." It worked because it addressed the actual problem instead of writing a bigger check and hoping.
Michigan's response to its own numbers will probably be a request for a bigger budget next cycle. That's the reflex. Nobody wants to say the curriculum itself failed a generation of kids, because that means admitting the people running the system for the last ten years got it wrong, not just underfunded.
Parents don't care about per-pupil spending charts. They care whether their eight-year-old can read a paragraph and explain what it meant. Michigan can't answer that question right now, and no amount of new spending is going to change that until someone in charge admits the method, not the money, is the problem.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.