STATE SENS. DARRIN Camilleri, D-Trenton, and Ed McBroom, R-Waucedah Township, discuss Michigan’s education system during the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference on Wednesday. (Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance)

Gathering in Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel on Wednesday, state Sens. Darrin Camilleri and Ed McBroom joined Skillman Foundation President and CEO Angelique Power to discuss areas for improvement in Michigan’s education system.

The discussion was one of the forums scheduled during the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference.

McBroom, R-Waucedah Township, and Camilleri, D-Trenton, both former educators, opened the panel by recounting the pathway that brought them to begin teaching, before answering some pre-recorded questions from Michigan students about education policy and how they engage with education on the ground.

Jia Patel, a senior at Grand Blanc High School, asked the lawmakers how they interact with and listen to youth voices in their policymaking process.

Camilleri said one of his guiding philosophies as a lawmaker is to stay connected to the kids.

“I go to my classrooms all the time, all across my district. I listen to students, listen to educators, and I’ve never really left … I may not be teaching in front of the kids anymore, but I miss them all the time and I talk to them,” he said.

Additionally, Camilleri said he works to bring youth into the campaign and political world through internships, telling attendees it’s something that would have benefited him as a young adult.

Along with raising five teenagers, McBroom said he also visits schools within his district but noted those invitations have slowed since the pandemic. He also helps conduct mock interviews with student teachers for Northern Michigan University’s teachers education program.

McBroom touched on Patel’s effort to bring forth legislation allowing youth to serve on school boards, calling it an excellent opportunity and noting his school had put students on the board while he was in eighth grade.

Alongside youth engagement, McBroom and Camilleri touched on funding for schools, with McBroom arguing the state’s shift to merit core curriculum in the mid 2000s, which requires students to earn a specific number of credits in subject areas including English, math, science and social studies, had strangled the state’s career technical education, as funding for many classrooms hinged on their enrollment from the year prior.

However, in his 13 years in the Legislature, McBroom said there have been a lot of efforts to provide more resources to career technical centers and work with labor unions to teach skilled trades.

The state has also worked to close the funding gap between students, noting that the gap had almost been closed since efforts began in 1994.

Camilleri pointed to the Opportunity Index Formula used in recent years which shifts school funding to the schools with greater need and higher levels of poverty.

“I wanna be clear, it’s not just urban schools, right? These are rural school districts across the state that have transportation funding issues and special education funding issues and all kinds of other challenges too, and this puts them through that lens as well,” Camilleri said, noting that lawmakers had paired this lens of historic levels of school funding with the Senate’s latest education budget allocating another $250 million into the formula, for a total of $1.3 billion in funding.

Shifting to another question from University of Michigan student Brandon Hofmeister, Camilleri and McBroom discussed ways to ensure Michigan students have the tools they need to pursue a post-high school education.

McBroom again looked to Michigan’s merit curriculum, noting that prior to those changes, the only requirements were a year of physical education and a semester of government, with the remaining curriculum left up to a local school district.

“Unfortunately, the Legislature, in my opinion, overstepped by a long way, by creating this huge ‘here’s the classwork everybody should accomplish’ and directed so many students away from the skilled trades,” McBroom said, calling merit curriculum the turning point in going down a “bad one-size-fits-all path.”

Instead, lawmakers should be setting overarching goals for graduation, literacy skills and job attainment rather than telling students they have to take specific courses, McBroom said.

Whether a school focused on the arts or the sciences should be decided by the local school board and the community in collaboration with parents and students, McBroom said.

As Michigan’s literacy rates have decreased across the past two decades, leaving the state at 41st in the nation for education, Power asked both lawmakers what needs to change in Michigan to improve the state’s educational outcomes.

While Lansing could do more on credentialing of superintendents and principals to ensure quality staff are administering schools, McBroom called for lawmakers to empower locals more, giving them more opportunity and more freedom with clear directives of what to accomplish.

“We also need to stop changing the rules so often — we need less turmoil from Lansing, more good guidance,” McBroom said, emphasizing that local communities know their needs best.

He also argued that changes to the state Board of Education are necessary, pointing to the current process of allowing political parties to nominate candidates for the board without holding a primary.

Camilleri offered a different approach, arguing there are too many school districts in Michigan. While lawmakers can get local by allowing them to set goal posts, total local control is not in the state’s best interest, he said.

“We gotta get, again, these guiding posts of where we all want to be and in order to meet better standardized testing and be prepared for college and career, all of these things have to be with a vision in mind. And we as stakeholders in Lansing and policy makers in Lansing, we need to be empowered and feel comfortable with setting that direction and do so in a collaborative way,” Camilleri said.

“I’m not saying ‘no local control,’ but when you have 1,600 people, plus boards, plus superintendents, all these different people in the room, it makes it challenging,” Camilleri said, with McBroom agreeing.

Camilleri and McBroom also offered their perspectives on moving forward amid federal disruptions and efforts to eliminate the federal department of education.

While it’s possible to move forward, it will require willing leaders on both sides of the aisle, Camilleri said, noting that the state Senate had already advanced its own education budget.

However, Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, has avoided committing to passing a budget before the July 1 legislative deadline, which carries no mandate, arguing the Legislature’s responsibility is to pass a budget before the fiscal year ends on Oct. 1.

“I hope that we can still meet that deadline. Well, we are in uncharted territory. I mean, I don’t have a good answer on that front, because we still do have the chaos out of (Washington) D.C. where we don’t have a final budget from them. What are they attempting to cut? And then, how does that have the impact on our budgets here at the local level,” Camilleri said, arguing the state does not have to cut funding to schools due to a surplus in the school aid fund.

McBroom offered a more optimistic assessment, arguing the situation was something lawmakers navigated before, with lawmakers previously working under a split-legislature in 2010.

“We’ve had chaos from the feds before. We’ve had cuts before in times of bad finances and bad decisions. So I don’t really see this as uncharted, whereas it’s just different than it was for the past 15 years in Michigan,” he said.

“Whether the feds are doing a good job or not, we should always be trying to labor for something better, to do a better job. If the feds are going to give us these dollars that used to come through the Department of Ed and block grants, let’s make sure that we work together to make sure they get to where we need them to be,” McBroom said.

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