For 39 years, Michigan’s business and political elite have gathered on Mackinac Island to discuss plans and policies for our state. Hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, this gathering produces some of the most vicious and damaging ideas affecting people. For example, as the Detroit bankruptcy was unfolding, the Mackinac gathering was credited with framing the “Grand Bargain,” pitting pensioners against the DIA and stifling any creative thinking about how to address financial issues in the city.

This year is no different. The gathering is troubling both for what it addresses and for what it evades.

Education got a lot of attention on the agenda, but there was little sense of urgency. The sessions on education offered no new thinking about our common responsibilities, the kind of education our children need and deserve, or the destruction of local control via emergency management laws. There was no reflection on how the decades of meddling by state level entities have done nothing but destroy public schools and create an abusive environment for children and teachers. To pretend that this gathering has either the intention of the capacity to advance the education of our children is foolish and dangerous.

It is under the leadership of the Regional Chamber, the assembled foundations, and the Mackinac Policy Center that we have endured the drive to "improve" schools through a false “accountability” based on punishing and controlling teachers. They have encouraged the opening of “schools of choice,” and pushed for profit-making charter schools.

Michigan was among the top centers for public education in the early 1990’s and was developing impressive new ideas about urban education. Creating programs that supported children and their families, working on curriculum that emerged from addressing real issues in the community, and fostering African-centered educational philosophies and practices, Michigan’s urban centers offered serious perspectives on moving education away from the factory models of the earlier century.  

But as these new ideas of education started to reflect concerns for social justice and cultural integrity, right wing forces reacted. Under the influence of ideologues like Betsy DeVos and the legislators she helped elect, Michigan has fallen to near the bottom in comparison to other states.

Our children, teachers and schools have been under assault. Most of it led by the people highlighted in this Island gathering. The very people who created the problems we face are not likely to have any answers for the future.

Meanwhile, the legislature is refusing to eliminate its most recent weapon, the third grade reading law. This law mandates the retention of children who are falling behind in reading.  Almost anyone who cares about education knows this is a disaster. We are likely to see a six-fold increase in the number of children who will be forced to repeat the third grade. The Governor is quickly backing off of her effort to repeal the law and has come out against a "right to literacy."

In sharp contrast to the gathering on Mackinac, people around the state are looking for new ways to develop our children rooted in love and compassion. For example, as elites gathered on the Mackinac Hotel porch, the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools begin their summer gardening program with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Here is where progressive thinking and commitment to children can be found.