Failure is success for Governor Snyder and MI Orwellian education reform

Failure is critical for Governor Snyder and his education "reform" team led by chair of the House Education Committee, Lisa Lyons, daughter of Snyder's top advisor Dick Posthumus.

Without failure, nothing will work.

So the Governor and his team are ready to impose failure.

As Hamlet might say, this was "sometimes a paradox" but no more in the Orwellian landscape that is Michigan education reform: failure is success, bottom is top, right is left, small government is big government, local smocal,  and so on.

Here is HB5111 set for a quick vote this week in the few days (6) the House is still at "work" this fall. http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2013-2014/billintroduced/House/pdf/2013-HIB-5111.pdf

HB5111 takes retention out of the hands of parents, teachers, and schools and puts it in the hands of Lansing term limited lawmakers. HB5111 insists no third grader can go to 4th grade until she passes a state issued computerized test.

So much for small government.

And so much for research and, correspondingly, the Governor's notion that education from pre-K to university should be seamless. Grade retention, university research has shown again and again, is extremely complicated and needs to be handled with the utmost care to yield productive results.

But the Governor and his team -- despite their cries for breaking down boundaries between educational institutions -- don't really care what university faculty think or prove.

Here is HB5112 http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2013-2014/billintroduced/House/pdf/2013-hIB-5112.pdf

This bill tosses out the color coded grading school system just established in the summer for a letter grading system, a system created with some consideration of what research actually shows about best practices in education. The  contrary critical piece here of 5112 is that some schools (10%) always will be failing. Success is not an option: "YOU GET AN F!!"

This means that the EAA (the Orwellian named Educational Achievement Authority) -- the linchpin of the Governor's education reform strategy -- always will have schools to feed its hungry mouth and the Broad Foundation can continue to funnel money Snyder's way. Nerfund, nerdfund, nerdfund.

You see, the EAA is actually failing pretty badly. It lost some 25% of its students and more are fleeing everyday.http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131122/SCHOOLS/311220039.

Eastern Michigan University faculty -- the institution of higher learning that chartered the EAA when no other state university or college would -- have revolted, yesterday staging a courageous protest that prompted the Dean of the College of Education heroically to resign from the EAA board.http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131203/SCHOOLS/312030107/EMU-education-dean-leaving-EAA-board?o...
The only people at Eastern Michigan University now supporting the EAA are the state appointed regents and the non-academic administration.

Keep this bit of insider baseball in mind to get the seriousness of this: when a Dean publicly stands ups against a university administration and its regent it usually costs that person their job.

Did I mention Detroit Mayor-Elect Mike Duggan (albeit quietly) resigned from the EAA board earlier this year?

At any rate, the Governor is now relying on the Superintendent shill, Mike Flanagan (Mike, retire, take the pension), to promote the EAA. Yes, despite everyone fleeing the ship the hapless Mr. Flanagan is hanging on, not sure where to grab hold. He always gets the memos last it seems. And the education community writ large can't seem to see that the biggest threat to them at the moment is not moderate Republicans but the Governor's man at MDE.
http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2013/12/eaa_expansion_likely_to_happen.html

The state Board of Education, Democratically controlled, supposedly hires and fires the School Superintendent who -- I think -- could learn a thing or two from the EMU Dean of the College of Education.

But who knows? May be Mr. Flanagan now gets the memos first? In this topsy-turvy world will EAA failure mean success? It now very much looks like the push to retain the 3rd grade and even the school grading business is really a smokescreen to push the statewide EAA codification bill through through this December

Oakland County Republicans now seem to see the folly of all this (Chuck Moss and Tom McMillan aside). This was sometimes a paradox.

It is -- to mix literary allusions -- a brave new world that blurs right/left, local/Lansing distinctions and perhaps what is needed in 2014 is some brave new political animals better suited to see this sort of thing through.