It’s that time of year again: Back-to-school deal hunting season.
Hoping to give their kids every possible advantage, millions of Michigan parents will flock to nearby retailers for new school supplies. But before loading up on notebooks, pencils and crayons, parents should remember that their local public school is required by law to supply these necessities to every student free of charge.
The details are laid out in a 2011 Michigan Department of Education memo listing specifically what supplies schools must provide, including pencils, paper, crayons, scissors and glue sticks. In addition, school districts may not charge for registration or any course fees, even for elective courses.
Yet many parents remain unaware that the tax dollars tendered by themselves and their neighbors have already paid for these school supplies. Some school districts improperly suggest that parents are responsible for these supplies. According to the 2012 Huntington Backpack Index, parents will spend between $548 and $1,117 on school supplies and fees for each student on average.
Our new "Context and Peformance" Report Card factors student poverty levels into four years of standardized test scores for nearly 600 public high schools in Michigan and ranks the schools accordingly. Here's a list of the top 10 town high schools.
To see more comparisons like these, download the full report card here.
Henry Payne, editorial cartoonist for The Detroit News and editor of The Michigan View, was the guest speaker at an event honoring Milton Friedman Tuesday at Northwood University, according to the Midland Daily News. The event, held on the 100th anniversary of Friedman’s birth, was co-sponsored by the Mackinac Center.
The Manhattan Institute last year commissioned polls in a number of states on public attitudes regarding government workers. One of the questions dealt directly with an issue the Michigan Legislature will face during a one-day session scheduled for Aug. 15: closing the school pension system to new employees, and instead giving them generous 401(k) contributions.
Health Savings Accounts are becoming ever more popular and widespread even as Obamacare threatens to effectively prohibit them. Health policy expert Greg Scandlen reports that the number of Americans covered by HSAs grew 18 percent last year, from 11.4 million in January 2011 to 13.5 million in January 2012.
A decreasing property tax base gives municipal officials a chance to “engage in innovations and efficiencies that will improve city government,” a Mackinac Center expert told the Dearborn Press and Guide.
Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, suggested that cities and counties “give up the specialty items,” such as golf courses and wave pools, if there is a concern about revenue and providing core services.
Despite student and parent protests, Detroit Public Schools closed Southwestern High School this year because of its poor academic and attendance track record.
The Mackinac Center's new high school report card, which attempts to account for socioeconomic factors as well as student academic performance, supports the closure decision: Southwestern High School received an 'F' on the high school report card, and was the 20th lowest-scoring high school in the entire state of Michigan.
Our new "Context and Peformance" Report Card factors student poverty levels into four years of standardized test scores for nearly 600 public high schools in Michigan and ranks the schools accordingly. Here's a list of the top 10 suburban high schools.
(Editor’s note: Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed economist Milton Friedman. The Mackinac Center will celebrate with blog posts commemorating his impact on free-market ideology and his educational choice.)
Mackinac Center interns today commemorated the life and work of Dr. Milton Friedman at “100 Years of Milton Friedman,” a luncheon and forum co-sponsored by the Center at Northwood University.
(Editor’s note: Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed economist Milton Friedman. The Mackinac Center will celebrate with blog posts commemorating his impact on free-market ideology and his educational choice.)
Milton Friedman’s 1979 interview with Phil Donahue includes a brief segment in which the two men discuss a common criticism advanced against proponents of the free market: capitalists are greedy. It serves as an example of an oft-recited complaint among those against whom such criticism is advanced.
Our new "Context and Peformance" Report Card factors student poverty levels into four years of standardized test scores for nearly 600 public high schools in Michigan and ranks them accordingly. Here's a list of the top 10 city high schools.
To see more comparisons like these, download the full report card here.
(Editor’s note: Tuesday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed economist Milton Friedman. The Mackinac Center celebrated with blog posts commemorating his impact on free-market ideology and educational choice.)
Milton Friedman is considered by some to be the father of today’s education reform movement. While this is a bit of a stretch, Friedman’s ideas have been extremely influential within the school choice movement and are frequently used to make both the economic and moral case for expanding parents’ freedom to choose the school they think is best for their children.
The Mackinac Center recently published a high school report card that accounts for student socioeconomic differences. While this “Context and Performance” report card produced several illuminating results, its main limitation is that it only compares schools within Michigan. Fortunately, a new study published by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance gives a much broader comparison of school performance. Unfortunately, the results aren’t very good for Michigan’s public schools or the nation as a whole.
A union-backed ballot initiative that would make union bosses more powerful than local and state elected officials is “extremely radical,” Labor Policy Director Vincent Vernuccio told The Chicago Tribune. The story also appeared in The Columbus Dispatch and on Yahoo News.
A new Mackinac Center feature that allows users to compare the social outcomes of alcohol control policy in all 50 states based on each state’s level of regulation was cited in an Op-Ed Saturday in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The Op-Ed was co-authored by Antony Davies, an adjunct scholar with the Center and an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University who, along with Fiscal Policy Director Michael D. LaFaive, wrote the recent Center study, “Alcohol Control Reform and Public Health and Safety.”
James Taranto today in the Wall Street Journal cites the Overton Window — developed by the Mackinac Center’s late executive vice president, Joseph Overton — in a column about the controversy surrounding comments made by Boston Mayor Tom Menino and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel about fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A.
Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting
Senate Bill 1144: Restrict no fault auto insurance gamesmanship
Introduced by Sen. Roger Kahn (R), to prohibit an auto insurer from issuing an auto insurance policy for a term less than one month. This is intended to prevent individuals from purchasing a policy required under Michigan’s no-fault insurance law to register a vehicle, and then cancelling it after he or she gets the license plate or tab. Referred to committee, no further action at this time.
The Detroit News reports that there are fewer opportunities for new teachers in Michigan’s public schools and the profession as a whole is getting older. Amazingly, even though the article cites a number of different education experts, no one mentions the most obvious reason for this phenomenon: union contracts.
Nearly all teachers union contracts dictate that when school districts need to downsize (very common in an era of declining enrollment and rising labor costs), the districts must use seniority as the sole factor in determining who gets laid off and who keeps their job. This works to automatically increase the average age of Michigan teachers.
Some union contracts go to great lengths to avoid using something other than seniority to determine layoffs. For instance, when there is a tie in seniority between two teachers eligible for layoffs, the Ann Arbor school district uses the last four digits of a teacher’s Social Security number to determine who goes and who stays. The lower number “wins.” Battle Creek uses the same method, but the teacher with the higher number wins.
Fortunately, these kinds of arbitrary layoff procedures may be coming to an end in Michigan. Statewide reforms were passed last year that prohibit school districts from making personnel decisions based solely on seniority. These reforms, however, would likely be overturned if the union-backed “Protect Our Jobs” constitutional amendment is approved in November.
Nevertheless, hopefully in the future, the teachers who remain in the profession won’t just be there because they have the most years on the job; they’ll be there because they’re the most successful at improving student learning.
A Mackinac Center investigation about a 13-year-old boy in Holland, Mich., being denied the ability to sell hot dogs from a vendor cart has attracted national media attention. This Capitol Confidential story and accompanying video was picked up by Huffington Post, Real Clear Politics, USA Today, Reason, Fox News, Hot Air, The Blaze, MLive and the Detroit Free Press and has received tens of thousands of views.
MLive reports that Shaton Berry, president of the Michigan Parent Teacher Association, is blaming Highland Park School District’s dismal student test scores on a lack of public resources.
In a release commenting on the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the district for providing an inadequate education, Berry stated:
According to the Huffington Post, last year The Detroit News attempted to compare student academic achievement between Detroit-area public charter school high schools and their conventional Detroit Public Schools counterparts.
The News found that just six of 25 Detroit public charter schools reported higher math or science proficiency rates than DPS high schools.
Labor Policy Director Vincent Vernuccio was a guest on Fox Business Monday, discussing contract unrest at Caterpillar. The company wants to reform pensions and freeze automatic wage increases while offering merit-based raises. Union employees at the company make an average of $55,000 a year before overtime. Vernuccio said the union feels threatened by incentive bonuses the company gave workers because it makes union bosses unnecessary in order for employees to make money.
Assistant Editor Lindsey Dodge in a Detroit News Op-Ed today explains why feminists should embrace capitalism. A free-functioning market, Dodge says, is the greatest environment for female achievement.
Why is the SEIU involved in a ballot initiative that would seemingly have little to do with them?
That should be the question media members and taxpayers ask themselves as we get closer to November when voters may be asked to decide on whether to enshrine into our state constitution the “Michigan Quality Home Care Council.”
Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman writes in today’s Detroit News that Michigan’s elected officials should exercise “principled procrastination” in implementing Obamacare, which he says is a “divisive and astronomically costly law.”
