‘Children Are Our Future’ Politics

by Gongwer News Service
December 4, 2009

We’re back to the “children are our future” stage of politics currently, but the past keeps intruding, both as an annoying reminder and a potential lesson to the work of today.

Fresh from hunting, fresh from gobbling turkeys, legislators and executives sat down earnestly during their return to Capitol business to tackle legislation to help snag a share of the federal “Race To The Top” education monies. It’s an ambitious program that requires some ambitious changes to state education policy, changes that in some cases have been argued about for more than a decade.

There’s nothing like money to help make those policy changes suddenly more attractive and intellectually compelling. That said, all the details have not been worked out and disagreements remain, so this Gilead has still not yet been balmed.

Still, the process in the Senate, at least, to pass the Race To The Top bills was a model of legislative cooperation, bipartisan spirit, and collegial interaction — just exactly as the public wants, though it did lack for some of the anguishing entertaining angst the state has come to expect from legislators.

It is the type of conduct that a person could reasonably ask lawmakers to comport to always. It was not the type of conduct followed during the budget session that has not really adjourned.

And the recent history of the budget conflict bubbled up during the action on the Race To The Top deliberations. For the most public of the cuts were skinned from education, and that gets back to the tired but true triteness of “children … future” (everyone knows the phrase).

There were three significant items related to education that had Lansing implications during the week past. One was the action of the Race To The Top. The second was a study released by Grand Valley State University. The study promoted the astonishing increase the Allendale-based school had seen in its graduations, a nearly 100-percent jump in 10 years while its total school enrollment had increased by some 42 percent. Grand Valley was entirely justified in applauding itself.

The study also showed, however, that among all 15 public universities, total graduation rates had jumped by almost 21 percent in the same 10 years. Again, not a shabby accomplishment, especially considering that most of that time the state has been slowly sinking economically.

Tellingly, however, the study shows most of that gain occurred from 1998-2004, when the state saw the number of degrees issued jump by 15 percent. The increase has been anemic since then, and that is reflective and tragic for two reasons: it demonstrates, in part, the hammering effect of the deepening recession, with students struggling to pay higher tuition, with the state effectively cutting back on university funding (and this is all before the current controversy surrounding the Michigan Promise Scholarship), and it happened after the state made it a policy of doubling the number of college graduates.

And why now do we especially need college graduates? Because our children, even if they are college students, are our future, and highly educated societies have more vibrant economies. So while praise abounds on the Race To The Top action, many wonder how that can be translated into helping the state’s universities.

The third significant education-related item was the results of polling conducted by EPIC/MRA that showed huge majorities of the public opposed to the education cuts, huge majorities wanting those cuts restored, huge majorities blaming partisan politics for the state of the budget. One could intuit the cause of the huge outrage was, all together now, because our children are our, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The same poll showed a majority, not a huge majority but a majority nonetheless, of those asked said they might vote against their legislator if budget cuts were not restored.

Oh yes, most of those polled also said they would support either a graduated income tax or cuts to business tax credits to help close some of the budget cuts.

Governor Jennifer Granholm has spent a month rallying school parents, school officials, college students and executives to put pressure on lawmakers to reverse those cuts, and so far failed. She acknowledged that failure in a radio interview where she sounded both tired and frustrated from the fight. She was hoping business executives who see the importance of education to the state’s economic future could move lawmakers to compromise “where I have not,” and all she wanted, she said, was a little compromise.

It was another leader from a far distant past, however, who might provide insight into acting for the future.

Midweek, the state’s Lincoln Bicentennial Commission held a discussion with Michael Burlingame, possibly the nation’s leading scholar on Abraham Lincoln and author of a recently published Lincoln biography that is fatter than the New York phone book. His topic was Lincoln as a statesman, and in the tiny audience of 30 were six legislators: Sen. Cameron Brown (R-Fawn River Twp.), Sen. Glenn Anderson (D-Westland), Sen. Ron Jelinek (R-Three Oaks), Sen. Gerald VanWoerkom (R-Norton Shores), Rep. Dick Ball (R-Laingsburg) and Rep. Terry Brown (D-Pigeon).

Much of the key to Lincoln’s success was a deep emotional maturity, an ability to shrug off criticism and attack, Mr. Burlingame said, and to act magnanimously toward his opponents, to the point of making two of them key members of his cabinet.

Mr. Burlingame did not quote the oft-quoted Lincoln comment that “we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we will save our country,” but from the past it is a comment pertinent to today and therefore our future.

Said one person at the event, “We can only hope they could learn that in the Capitol.”

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