Mich. Ed. Update-Oct 9

Support from the Bosch Community Fund will help improve the quality of teaching and learning in Michigan schools. The two-year, $50,000 grant will provide support to the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, an initiative of The Education Trust-Midwest.

“The Education Trust-Midwest shares our dedication to provide strategic opportunities that help close the education gap in accessibility and achievement for students,” said Kathleen Owsley, president of the Bosch Community Fund. “This critical work supports our goal of enhancing the equity and advancing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. We’re honored to be partnering with an organization that sets the standard for exceptional education in Michigan.”

By supporting teachers and principals through high-quality professional development and mentoring, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is helping narrow achievement gaps in partner schools.

Read more here.

The following blog post, by 2018 Policy Fellow Dan Botting was posted on October 8. Read the full post here.

All students’ matters and every student should count. Yet Michigan routinely fails to count nearly 100,000 students…

Last week was Michigan’s “count day” – when students in each school are tallied so that per-pupil funds can be appropriately distributed. But it also plays an important role for including the learning of every student in school accountability.

This is because a school is held accountable only for the students who attend for a full school year. But a student who starts the year at one school and transfers to another school isn’t included in accountability rankings for either school.

The result? Mobile students don’t count. This under-counts about 6.7 percent of all Michigan students.

Unfortunately, this is not the only way that Michigan under-counts historically-underserved groups of students…

[A]lmost 200,000 students have a diagnosed disability. But because most schools have relatively small populations of special education students, almost 25,000 Michigan grade 3-8 students with disabilities are hidden from school accountability. This is because nearly two-thirds of all schools have too few students with disabilities taking the M-STEP to be reported as a group in school accountability… [I]n a state considered to be at the national bottom for serving students with disabilities, Michigan is not even tracking how well or poorly special education students in the vast majority of schools.

Michigan cannot fully address the significant educational inequities found within schools and districts, and across the state until every student truly counts. This count day should be about much more than school funding. It should be about uncovering our hidden students and insisting that all students are well served and prepared to succeed.

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Last week, the Education Trust-Midwest announced our support for three bills that will ensure that Michigan students have access to school libraries and certified media specialists. Since then, many others have shown their support and spread the word about these policies on Facebook and Twitter.

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The State Board of Education will meet today, October 9 at 9:30 a.m. at the Lenawee Intermediate School District TECH Center (1372 North Main St., Adrian, MI). The agenda is available here.

• The children of 8B: One classroom, 31 journeys, and the reason it’s so hard to fix Detroit’s schools – Erin Einhorn & Chastity Pratt Dawsey, Chalkbeat Detroit
• Michigan’s special education efforts near bottom in nation: U.S. report – Lori Higgins, Detroit Free Press
• Flint schools are getting safe water fountains thanks to Elon Musk – Christina Zdanowicz, CNN
• At some Detroit schools, toxins in water reached excessive levels – Jennifer Chambers, Detroit News