Dive Brief:
- Ongoing controversy over teacher pay and benefits, class size, and reform proposals are the reasons cited for Detroit teachers holding "sickouts," in which they call out sick from work, reportedly leaving over 60 schools unable to open Monday and affecting tens of thousands of students.
- Teacher strikes are illegal in Michigan, and the sickouts are said to be led by a former teacher union leader who was ousted amid scandal.
- Detroit's struggling schools have been under emergency management from the state since 2009, and one of the reform proposals being scrutinized is Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's plan to chop the Detroit School District in half, creating two districts.
Dive Insight:
Emergency management hasn't served Detroit schools, and allegations of corruption by school and district officials have led to FBI investigations. Snyder's plan to establish a new district proposes letting appointed officials run the schools until power is turned over to a regular school board by the year 2021.
Yet that plan and Snyder's larger $715 million reform package are likely to be delayed as the feds continue investigating alleged vendor kickbacks in Detroit's state-run Education Achievement Authority district (also created by Snyder). The EAA was supposed to help turn around the lowest-performing 5% of Michigan schools, which totaled 15. It has not succeeded.
The current wave of teacher "sickouts" are just one problem among many for education in the state.
