This afternoon in Traverse City, every Republican gubernatorial candidate showed Michiganders that their public education agendas would be harmful to Michigan students, parents, and teachers.
Candidates like Tudor Dixon, Garrett Soldano, and Kevin Rinke have proposed radical education plans to saddle public school districts with unsustainable cuts and siphon funding to private schools. Tudor Dixon has even proposed rewriting our state’s constitution to get her wrong-for-Michigan education agenda across the finish line. Kevin Rinke has introduced a plan to indiscriminately slash 3.5 billions from schools.
At the previous debate, Garrett Soldano bizarrely attacked Michigan’s public universities as “indoctrination centers” and threatened to slash funding calling it “common sense” to cut state funding and force universities to find private funding from alumni instead. Ryan Kelley has called multiple times to eliminate the federal Department of Education.
Meanwhile, Governor Whitmer has proposed another historic investment in public education that includes a significant increase in the per-student grant each individual school districts receive along with pay raises for educators and school personnel.
Last year, she 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.
To ensure those inequality gaps don’t once again broaden, Whitmer recently vetoed “the latest effort by legislative Republicans to create a school voucher system in Michigan” that could have diverted $500 million annually away from Michigan public schools.
And for the upcoming budget, Governor Whitmer has proposed providing teachers with annual retention bonuses of 2,000 to $4,000 and allocating $600 million for educator recruitment in the form of training and “expanded programs to attract and keep teachers in their own communities.”
