For proof that DeVos sellout and special interest candidate Tudor Dixon intends to shortchange our students, parents, and teachers, look no further than her wrong-for-Michigan agenda that seeks to decimate public education as we know it.
Dixon backed a plan to cut public education funding by up to $500 million annually and sell public schools for parts, while diverting resources into private schools-turned corporate tax havens.
In step with Betsy DeVos who said abolishing the Department of Education should be a pillar of the GOP platform, Dixon wants to kneecap public education by rewriting our state’s constitution to allow public funding to be siphoned to private schools. These unsustainable cuts come on top of the $3.5 billion she has vowed to indiscriminately slash from the School Aid Fund.
Meanwhile, Governor Whitmer has been working with anyone to protect and strengthen the institutions that ensure future generations of our workforce can compete for the best jobs.
Last year, Governor Whitmer secured a bipartisan $17.1 billion dollar public education budget that completely closed a decades-long state funding gap between school districts, and made the “largest investment in PreK-12 schools in state history” — all without raising taxes.
Governor Whitmer recently signed a historic, bipartisan $19.6 billion School Aid budget. This massive win for working families builds on per pupil investment gains, closes pandemic learning gaps, and retains teachers in their own communities. Additionally, she has tripled the number of reading coaches, helped reduce class sizes, and closed the school funding gap.
As part of the new bipartisan budget, Whitmer recently signed the highest per-pupil state funding in Michigan history – $9,150 for every kid, in every district with a $450 increase. She negotiated resources to recruit more teachers, increase mental health care, improve school facilities, boost “career and technical education programs by 27 percent,” and expand before and after-school programming as well as free tutoring. She secured hundreds of millions of dollars to help schools build new classrooms, labs, and libraries and more on top of that to support every single school with safety initiatives.
While she was still in the legislature, Governor Whitmer voted multiple times in favor of legislation aimed at implementing systems for public schools and school districts “designed to increase parental involvement in schools and instructional programs.
