I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
After a series of hastily-passed major education reforms were pushed through the state legislature and signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and two rounds of applications signed off on by the state’s school districts, state officials and the teachers unions, Michigan still lost out on the possibility of receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative. The Detroit Free Press reports:
Michigan was knocked out of the competition today for $4.35 billion in federal education grants, the second time since March that the state failed to be chosen for President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program.
Michigan has some of the lowest-performing schools in the country, including Detroit Public Schools, the nation’s most battered big-city school district, and the state planned to use $400 million in federal money to implement school reforms to improve instruction and enhance accountability.
“We are disappointed that Michigan’s efforts to strengthen our public schools and ensure that every child is successful were not recognized by the U.S. Department of Education,” Gov. Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
In March, the DOE rejected Michigan’s application largely because the teachers unions did not support the plan. In the second round, the Michigan Education Association supported the state’s application but that was not enough to convince the administration to award the funds.
Michigan Messenger has previously reported that passing anti-bullying legislation for the public schools might help the state in that application process because Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a strong advocate of such legislation and because the Race to the Top program guidelines included a call for schools to “remove obstacles to, and actively support, student engagement and achievement.”
But the anti-bullying bill, called Matt’s Law, continues to be buried by the Republican-led state Senate. It has already passed the state House.
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