The notion that America’s public school problems are confined to inner cities, and that our wealthy suburbs produce world-beating high school graduates, is a myth.
If the Michigan Board of Education, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the state Legislature hope to regain any credibility with the public, they must now show that they are serious about helping kids — and not just exiling people who offer straight talk about the system.
We cannot know what views Douglass and Washington might hold if they were alive today. But it’s worth remembering that the injustice and racial discrimination they faced in their era were at least as unforgiving as any persecution experienced in America in recent decades.
Telecom firms are understandably reluctant to invest in markets where regulators wield power arbitrarily.
If people are the lifeblood of a city, then Detroit is bleeding to death. Staunching the flow will require a dramatic improvement in the city’s schools.
Only eliminating the SBT and ensuring a bold net reduction in business taxes can begin to trump Michigan’s other handicaps in its economic competition with other states and nations. Even eliminating the SBT and cutting state spending dollar-for-dollar is not impossible; the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has detailed billions in potential state budget savings in areas like Medicaid, education and corrections.
The world economy is relentlessly, ruthlessly competitive. Michigan has no entitlement to a healthy economic future. Unless Lansing finds the courage to abandon “business‑as‑usual,” the state’s economy — and the people of Michigan — will fall further and further behind.
Maybe what’s needed in the public schools is more profit, not less. Think about it: Where is the crisis in public education these days? Is it in the availability of desks, food or computers, or in other areas provided by the for-profit private sector? The crisis concerns the classroom — the part delivered by government, regulated by legislatures and supervised by district bureaucracies.
At the end of fiscal 2000, Michigan budget officials informed lawmakers that the treasury had received $600 million more than had been budgeted. Rather than return it to taxpayers, state legislators went on a spending spree that included a new polar bear exhibit for the Detroit Zoo.
In innovative and very pragmatic new contracts with Ford, Chrysler and leading suppliers Delphi Corp. and Visteon Corp., the UAW finally consented to different levels of compensation for members who previously were entitled to the same, famously rich packages.
In spite of this year’s candidates singing interminable paeans to “our democracy,” America is thankfully not one and never has been. Our founders established a republic, modifying democracy considerably.
State compliance requirements divert enormous resources toward monitoring the process followed by local mental health authorities, while doing little to measure whether patients in the system actually get better.
For the past 87 years, the Netherlands has enjoyed a universal, nationwide school-voucher program. Dutch high school seniors and recent graduates score first in the world in mathematics, second in science and fourth in literacy.
We cannot lose sight of the fact that selective favors discriminate against those who do not receive them and distract policymakers from the broader business-climate reforms that would benefit everybody.
“In every city and town,” historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in 1947, “the multiplicity of time standards confused and ewildered passengers, shippers and railway employees. Too often, errors and mistakes turned out disastrously. …”
“[Canadian health care] produces inferior age-adjusted access to physicians and technology, produces longer waiting times, is less successful in preventing deaths from preventable causes and costs more than any of the other [health care] systems that have comparable objectives.” — The Fraser Institute of Vancouver, British Columbia
I have looked carefully at the relationship between economic growth and state spending on universities. I found a strong negative relationship — higher state spending equals lower rates of economic growth.
Between 1995 and 2003, Michigan finished 51st among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in employment growth.
There’s no shortage of examples in which public policy has proved deadly when divorced from science.
Charter schools were created with the idea that “performance will be rewarded and poor performance will be sanctioned.”
A reversal in deregulation would restrict choice in electricity supply, harming rather than benefiting consumers and the businesses that employ them.
As Intel CEO Craig Barrett told Congress, “The sad truth is that the longer our students stay in our schools, the farther they fall behind in math and science.”
Judge Susan Borman delivered a stinging rebuke to government officials who could not show a public necessity for taking over the family’s bridge.
The MEA is alone among NEA state affiliates in requiring objecting teachers of faith to do anything more than write a letter outlining their basic beliefs.
The Michigan Public Service Commission says it wants a “consistent regulatory policy.” Aiming for “consistency in policy usually means protecting special interests.
When we expect the government to substitute for what we ourselves ought to do, we expect the impossible and end up with the intolerable.
Michigan taxpayers are shelling out almost $40 per rider on two Amtrak lines, on top of paid fares. No one has explained why it’s worth that much tax money to put a rider on a train instead of a bus or car.
The governor can’t credibly call for improving the business climate and making Michigan more competitive with other states, while at the same time pushing for overregulation.
Outsourcing greatly lowers our cost of consumption, raises our standard of living tremendously and directly supports many jobs.
Sometimes the most penetrating economic insights come from “real people” in the rough-and-tumble world of small business capitalism.
The Army Corps of Engineers came up with the “migratory molecule” rule, which says that even isolated wetlands fall under federal jurisdiction because there is a theoretical chance that a water molecule from any location may reach a navigable waterway.
“I was told that I could not be hired because my degree is from outside of the state, because I have no union affiliation, or because it would be ‘too difficult to confirm my credentials.’ These were different ‘reasons’ on different occasions,” related Robinson.
To Smiles, the road to riches was not paved with over-reaching ambition, disregard for others, or cutting corners when it came to matters of truth. It didn’t mean securing favors from government at the expense of the competition.
“Because the profits are so fantastic, we’re now seeing drug traffickers, other criminal organizations, and even terrorists involved in tobacco smuggling.”
School districts tempted to dodge the demographic bullet with deluxe buildings and beggar-thy-neighbor policies should think twice. Instead, they should work on what really matters: making their education programs better.
Tuition hikes could actually help those students who truly need help — by enabling the school to offer greater outright gift aid and tuition reductions to students from low-income families, as is often the practice at private universities.
Government school monopolies that typically spend more on failure than most private schools spend on success are, in our inner cities especially, veritable poverty mills.
If the 1994 amendment needs amending at all, it needs it in the form of changes that would increase options for parents and produce greater accountability in the ways that education dollars are spent.
“There is,” he said, “a steady tendency toward polarization of the white and non-white peoples of the world which can lead to ultimate catastrophe for all.”
The stumbling blocks for further innovation today come not from entrepreneurs, venture capitalists or the marketplace, but from the regulators.
There is no need to pressure Cintas into a neutrality or card-check agreement. When a majority of Cintas workers are convinced they want a union, they will vote to have one.
The MEA and MESSA have set up an obstacle course that prevents public schools from introducing competition for teachers’ health care coverage or putting reasonable limits on the extent of care.
The governor’s handling of a $200 million proposal by Plymouth philanthropist Robert Thompson to build 15 charter schools in Detroit was her biggest leadership failure of the year.
A slim majority of county commissioners has so far refused to put the millage on the ballot, citing significant unanswered questions about its economic effects.
No one — neither the governor, nor the legislative appropriations committees, nor the heads of 20 state departments can know where all the money is going.
As LifeSharers grows, so does the incentive to become a registered donor: preferred access to an ever-larger pool of donated organs.
When state governments can tell local school districts what to do with regard to a detail as tiny as whether or not students can buy candy on school grounds, it’s time to question whether local control has become a thing of the past.
Our state and its city governments would do better to focus on their more important functions (schools, roads and public safety, for example), which are often carried out in ways that are anything but cool.
The French can advance civil society only when they get serious about replacing government programs with private initiative, when discussion gets beyond such infantile reasoning as, “If you want to cut government subsidies, you must be in favor of starving the elderly.”
Rather than scrimp on safety measures to gain short-term profits, airlines have found it even more in their interest to ensure the safety of their passengers. No one makes money by putting passengers in danger.
ISDs have become bureaucracies in search of a mission — funded to the tune of $878 million per year in property taxes statewide — with abuses such as those at OISD as the result.
In the end, the blackout was primarily the result of failures at the transmission level — the level where almost no deregulation has occurred.
The risk for parochial and other religious schools in Michigan is that their mission could be undermined by having to cater to union demands.
By every measure, Michigan remains largely a rural state. More than 18 million of Michigan’s 36 million acres is forestland, a share that has actually grown by 2 million acres in the past 20 years.
Gettelfinger no longer can shield UAW members from competitive pressure. Instead, the UAW must prepare domestic autoworkers for competition.
Anti-takeover laws … often promote the very harms they are supposed to prevent, while imposing great costs and delays on the shareholders and other stakeholders in the corporations.
It makes no sense to hold tuition below market rates if it doesn’t achieve the goal of giving a financial leg up to students from poorer families.
We could have what Colorado has: a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which limits spending growth to population growth plus inflation and requires immediate refunds of surplus revenues above that limit.
Minor offenses aren’t overlooked. For example, a motorist unable to find his or her proof of insurance when requested by a police officer — even if they were, in fact, insured — would be assessed $300.
Just nine days after Langley’s failure, the Wrights took turns flying their carefully designed plane for as long as 59 seconds at Kitty Hawk. The craft cost them about $1,000. It cost American taxpayers nothing.
It was clear to Ford that hard work and entrepreneurial risk-taking were the sources of America’s great wealth. “Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves,” he wrote. “The government is our servant and never should be anything but a servant.”
The fact that poor-performing private companies have been fired — a point the MEA makes very clear — doesn’t prove that privatization doesn’t work. It proves that it does.
Labor unions should abandon the old, outmoded adversarial model of labor relations and instead study ways they can create a better atmosphere; in which labor and management cooperatively solve problems in ways that promote free enterprise.
Regulators would do far better … to focus attention on the dumping of raw sewage and chemicals that are triggering abnormal plant and algae growth along the lakeshore.
“The curricula offered by university education departments are heavy on fuzzy ‘self-wareness,’ ‘multicultural,’ and other faddish or politicized material, and light on the hard knowledge of the subjects that teachers must eventually teach.”
The state could give grants to county sheriff departments equivalent to 77 percent of the amount it currently spends for road patrols, or $128 million. This would allow sheriff’s departments to hire more deputies, and also boost their overhead to support the expanded operations.
The United States and Canada have identified 14 areas within Michigan’s jurisdiction in which water quality does not support a full range of uses, such as drinking or fish consumption.
How refreshing it would be for the federal government to advise the folks at Lake Express LLC, “If you need money to make money, then go get it the honest way: Prove yourself to your investors and to your customers.”
The freedoms aborted in 1968 were won in the “Velvet Revolution” of November 1989 when, sapped of any moral legitimacy or resolve, communist rule and Soviet domination evaporated as millions of jubilant Czechs danced in the streets.
By what standard of social justice does the state inflate the wages of workers who would most likely be earning above-average wages without government intervention?
Highway safety in general has dramatically improved despite a doubling of licensed drivers and twice as many registrations. The fatality rate hit a historic low of 1.51 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2001, down from 5.5 in 1966.
Who can calculate the value of a life saved or the improvement in the quality of life of a dialysis patient or of one who is constantly being admitted to hospitals with congestive heart failure?
With government at all levels consuming over 40 percent of national income — more than ever before in our nation’s history — now is the time for bold initiatives to re-shape what state government does and does not do.
The fact that the IDEA program comes with federal money [means] school districts have a strong incentive to classify more students as being learning disabled.
For a visitor to give every exhibit the attention it deserved would have required 200 hours in the building.
Surely, no property owner can be expected to underwrite the private operations of tenants who are running fledgling businesses that may not be able to survive in the marketplace of supply and demand.
Cooley was no advocate for special privileges and perks for the wealthy or politically well-connected, and he condemned the cozy, corrupt relationships that often tied powerful interests and government.
No governor in recent Michigan history has done more to lighten the state tax burden than John Engler. Michigan has made more progress in this regard than any other major state.
Union corporate campaigns and undemocratic, push-button labor deals run roughshod over the rights of employers and employees to fairly and freely make their own decisions about unionization.
...when the same FOC office that failed to collect for Nancy Fox for a decade got wind of the private agency’s success, it mandated that Supportkids route the ex-husband’s payment through the FOC, at which time it would take its “processing fee.”
To Plunkitt, taking from some and giving to others was a key ingredient in the recipe for reelection. He saw nothing wrong with it, morally or otherwise. Using the political machine to bestow benefits and buy votes came quite naturally to him.
The dirty little secret of Michigan’s education establishment is that it doesn’t really believe the system (that is, itself) needs to be reformed. That’s why reformers devised the idea of charter schools, and vouchers and tax credits: as ways to impose reform from outside the system.
...we may waste vast sums of money on remote threats, while ignoring the real sources of environmental problems.
The great day finally came on July 26, 1833, when Britain became the world’s first major power to unshackle an entire race within its jurisdiction.
Such findings are in keeping with a growing mountain of evidence that teacher certification, whether on the state or national level, doesn’t translate into teacher excellence.
... if Michigan adopts Vermont-style Medicaid vouchers, and employees take advantage of the new HRA option, Michigan citizens will be able to obtain better insurance at lower cost.
Proposal 3 would impose a slow, expensive labor negotiation process on the state of Michigan, while uprooting a civil service system that has worked well for both the state and its employees.
Surely, the right to vote is precious enough to be worth the effort of a thoughtful casting of votes, issue by issue, candidate by candidate.
A well-crafted tax credit plan will simply relieve the public schools of the obligation to teach a relatively small percentage of students across the state, while providing the resources to increase the average student expenditure.
Warrantied projects require less supervision and testing than standard projects, thereby reducing the state’s costs and giving motorists more value for their gas tax dollars.
When government is free to put up barriers to development and make property owners bear the cost, its ability to infringe on private property rights is unchecked.
With both gubernatorial candidates favoring the proposal, homeowners could be socked with billions in additional property taxes.
Even after Gov. John Engler’s efforts to cut taxes, Michigan remains one of the most highly taxed states in the union, resulting in lost jobs and forgone economic opportunities. To get a handle on high taxes and runaway state spending, Michigan needs to follow the lead of 14 other states and adopt a constitutional amendment or law requiring a legislative supermajority before any tax can be raised.
Freedom of association is the legitimate basis upon which the union movement helped establish legal protections for workers in national and state labor laws. But what about the freedom to not join or pay dues to a union in order to get or keep a job? Right-to-work laws—operative in 22 states, but not Michigan—respect this individual choice of workers, and a new study shows states with such laws also enjoy greater economic prosperity.
With the fraud scandals of Enron, WorldCom, and other corporate giants roiling the stock market, along comes Amtrak to announce a shutdown unless it gets an emergency $200 million cash infusion. But the government should stop subsidizing the failed national rail service, which has wasted billions of tax dollars, and allow the market to punish mismanagement with bankruptcy—exactly as it is doing with the corporate malefactors.
The tax differential is so great between low-cigarette-tax states like North Carolina and high-cigarette-tax states like Michigan, that the U.S. government is beginning to uncover a startling trend: Suspects linked to Middle East terrorist groups have been discovered making "cigarette runs," buying them in North Carolina and selling them at thousands-of-dollars profit in Michigan.
Critics of high-priced pharmaceutical products are missing the bigger picture: Over the past several decades, better, more expensive drugs are making far more expensive treatments such as surgery no longer necessary, in many cases. Michigan lawmakers should stop being "penny-wise and pound-foolish," explain to their constituents why drug prices seem so high, and allow the health-care market to come up with the best treatments for the lowest prices.
Emil Hurja, a native of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was the pioneer of political polling, and was instrumental in the success of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his political program, "The New Deal." Later, a disillusioned Hurja broke with Roosevelt over policy and lost a run for Congress. Known as "the Crystal Gazer from Crystal Falls," Hurja was a local boy with a national impact.
Michigan is one of the few states where retailers are not allowed to use new electronic price labeling technology because of an obsolete law, the Item Pricing Act, passed in 1976. This law requires paper tags on most merchandise. Allowing stores to use the new technology-as called for in a bill currently before the Legislature-would result in savings that would be passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices.
