Save Michigan
What happens when you cut funding to local schools? Easy: they can’t pay their bills. Over the past two weeks, Buena Vista schools, the Flint School District, and Albion High School have had to shut down, cancel classes, or lay off staff and teachers. Even Ann Arbor schools are having trouble and considering cuts to…
One year ago today, the election-rigging scandal now known as “Bolgergate” started to unravel. On May 16, the day of the 2012 election filing deadline, then-Democratic State Rep. Roy Schmidt announced he was switching parties to run as a Republican, and an unknown amateur bodybuilder named Matt Mojzak filed to run as a Democrat. Bolger…
Fresh off a major embarrassment when his Administration’s secret “Skunk Works” project to defund public education was exposed, Gov. Snyder forced the group into the public eye. State Superintendent Mike Flanagan is now leading the project, and accepting public input on Facebook and through an online survey. We saw earlier this week that Superintendent Flanagan…
Sometimes things get so out of hand it becomes hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, we’ve developed a tried and true system for dealing with this: lists of said chaff. So here are five of the most recent examples of proposals from Michigan’s fever swamps, which we affectionately call “Bills from the…
Michigan students are paying the price for massive cuts to education funding, and it’s time for Lansing Republicans to do something about the problem they created. The financial mismanagement of the Buena Vista schools has resulted in the district closing a month early, even though teachers volunteered to work for free. It’s time for this…
Yesterday, the Detroit Free Press’s Stephen Henderson said what everyone’s been thinking about Michigan’s alarming taste for secrecy and privatization: Privatization might sound, in theory, like the way to bring Michigan’s prison costs under control. But because the desired outcomes in the corrections system are about more than bottom-line dollar analyses, privatization is just not…
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE News from Progress Michigan Thursday, May 9, 2013 Contact: Jessica Tramontana, jessica@progressmichigan.org, 517-974-6302 FOIA request on secret Snyder voucher group partially denied after online records deleted LANSING – Today citizens’ watchdog group Progress Michigan released the Freedom of Information Act response from Gov. Snyder’s administration on the secret “Skunk Works” voucher group.…
To the far-right, corporations are like people… only better. Last week, Gov. Snyder insisted that we treat citizens like customers, and despite his calls for “shared sacrifice” the only ones sacrificing anything are working Michiganders. This corporate-first mentality pervades every aspect of Michigan government, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think Michigan is…
What happened to us? When did we start asking ourselves “How can we provide our children with the cheapest education?” rather than “How can we provide our children with the best education?” From our outset, we prioritized education, using our taxes to build public schools – recognizing their economic and social value. Now, the same…
Listening to Gov. Snyder you’d think Michigan is a business, he’s the CEO, and we’re all his customers. Just the other day, he urged GVSU graduates (in what must have been a truly inspirational speech) to treat “everyone like a customer.” This is the most disingenuous – and dangerous – argument being pushed by the…