Michigan Parents for Schools – story from new PAA affiliate
by pureparents
Michigan public school supporters have just come out of a bruising lame duck session of the state legislature that promises even greater battles to come next year. I think our experience may be helpful to other states because of the common ideological framework behind all these attacks on public education.
You may have heard about some of the damaging, and in come cases bizarre, bills that became law in the last days of the session. Among those which impact education: “right to work” was signed into law, barring unions from collecting an agency fee from employees covered by collective bargaining; elimination of the local “personal property tax” which is actually a tax on business equipment, without any guarantee of replacement revenue for school districts and municipalities (this is important in a state dependent on manufacturing); and in a bizarre turn, a law which would allow those with a permit to carry concealed weapons to apply for a waiver so that they might carry those weapons in what are now “no carry zones” including schools, places of worship, university classrooms, and more. This last measure was adopted only one day before the terrible events in Newtown, CT.
We did eek out a couple of important “victories,” in that we were able to stop two damaging pieces of legislation from coming to a vote. Proposals to codify a state-wide school district empowered to take over the “bottom 5%” of all schools in the state and charter an unlimited number of new schools, and another to
