Jeb Bush urges education reform in MI

On Thursday a joint education committee of the Michigan House and Senate heard testimony from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush regarding his platform for education reform, which he has been touting around the country.

The program that Bush has been advertising to other states and now Michigan has caught the eye of Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican leaders in the state legislature. Both Bush and Snyder were strongly critical of the current public education system.

“It’s adult centered, it’s completely adult centered, it’s centered on the economic interests of the adults a lot more than it is on the learning experience,” said Bush. “It’s a system where we’re going to assume they’re all exactly the same, we’re going to teach to the median and that result is that it’s not customized so the children that could learn faster are held back and the children that are struggling are passed along.”

State funding for public education took a big hit this year after Snyder signed bills reducing the per-pupil funding by hundreds of dollars. Those cuts continues to draw heated criticism from educators, community members and Democrats.

“It’s a broken system,” said Snyder during a press conference following the testimony.

The reforms Gov. Snyder advocates for Michigan essentially mirrors the policies Bush enacted in his political tenure in Florida.

The testimony provided by Jeb Bush, who is chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, was well received by most Republican legislators on the committee but drew some criticism from Democrats.

Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield), Education Committee Minority Vice-Chair was skeptical about the testimony.

“There are a lot of concerns I have,” she said. “I think that when you give a presentation you can always pick and choose what you present. They talked a lot about getting to kids when they’re younger but they didn’t talk so much about high school.”

Bush said pre-kindergarten was the “highest priority” in the press conference following his testimony and Gov. Snyder says he is going to follow Bush’s lead and issue an executive order to create a type of early childhood development coordinating office.

“Data really matters in this,” said Bush at the Thursday press conference. “One of the things that Florida does that I think is important is that we assess children when they enter kindergarten to find out what their literacy skills are what their phonetic awareness skills are, what their social development skills are, so that teachers have the tools necessary to customize the learning experience early to get it right.”

Along with the pre-kindergarten focus comes a focus on standardized test scores throughout the K-12 process in Snyder’s proposal.

“By 2014 the plan is to have multiple student achievement checkpoints during the year, but right now it goes on a year-to-year basis,” said Michael Flanagan, Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Diane Ravitch, Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, in an article from the St. Petersburg Times recently warned against overemphasis and reliance on standardized testing to help students learn and succeed.

Other nations expect their students to demonstrate knowledge, understanding, thinking, and imagination. A sustained diet of multiple-choice testing for 12 years is likely to discourage the creativity, ingenuity and innovation that have been the driving forces of our nation’s economic success in the past century.”

If implemented, those test scores will create the foundation on which to grade schools and teachers. Florida uses an A through F system, with teacher tenure payments and job security heavily influenced by the scores.

Bush argued that the system should be geared toward “compensating great teachers with greater financial rewards” as well as having a new set of consequences for teachers who “are not doing their jobs.”

Superintendent Flanigan said if the system changed to incentive-based funding then everything would realign for the better because “everyone chases money.”

Doug Pratt, Communications Director of Michigan Education Association, in an email to the Michigan Messenger said adopting merit pay would be futile in attempting to increase student achievement, saying research shows no correlation between the two.

“Jeb’s ideas are designed to dismantle and privatize our system of public education,” Pratt said.

Bush also talked about how the role of teachers would change when Michigan moved toward a more technology and online based learning environment.

“It makes the teaching experience different, less focused on world class content and more focused on managing the learning experience that could be unique for each child,” said Bush. “That may sound like some weird notion but that’s how life works in America and across the world today and it could easily work in education with structural changes.”

But not everyone was convinced. Rep. Brown questioned Bush and Levesque about their success with college entrance exams, pointing out that, even after the Bush reforms in Florida, Michigan’s college bound students outperformed Florida students in the ACT. Michigan students, she said, average a score of 19 on the ACT, while Florida students averaged 16.