Michigan’s Democratic Governor Whitmer deals schools a blow in the 2025 budget
On Monday, July 1, Michigan’s Democratic-dominated state legislature passed its fiscal year 2025 budget, dealing a gut punch to public schools already reeling from the end of federal Emergency Assistance for Elementary and Secondary Schools (ESSER).
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who cynically welcomed the deal because it “puts students first,” has cut the school aid fund’s budget by nearly $1 billion, from $21.5 billion to $20.6 billion. Democrats, who control all three branches of government, have left public schools’ per-pupil funding unchanged, a significant cut that comes as inflation has hit school budgets particularly hard as transportation, food and utilities costs have risen by double digits.
This attack exacerbates the loss of the ESSER program, under which Michigan schools received $6 billion. The Biden administration has ended the program, plunging public education across the United States into an economic crisis. Even before the budget agreement, it was expected that 5,100 teachers in Michigan would lose their jobs due to the termination of the ESSER program.
The Michigan budget underscores the Democratic Party’s national priorities – war and Wall Street. Democratic Gov. Whitmer is emerging as the national party leader and has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible successor to the crisis-ridden Biden candidate.
The budget doesn’t offer school districts even a hint of inflation protection and drastically cuts funding for mental health services in schools from $328 million to a paltry $25 million. Whitmer is following Biden’s approach and phasing out the multimillion-dollar state mental health initiative that began in 2021, even though such services are needed more urgently than ever.
In the days before the budget was released, the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) pushed through an early collective bargaining agreement with the state’s largest school system. The DFT bureaucracy was fully aware of the long history of militant activity by Detroit teachers, as well as recent teacher sick-out demonstrations in Flint and teacher protests in Ann Arbor and Wayne-Westland. The snap collective bargaining agreement was a preemptive attempt to avert a statewide fight against layoffs and budget cuts. Detroit is the state’s largest school district, with about 53,000 students and 3,200 teachers.
School officials reacted to the statewide cuts with stunned disbelief. “The zero increase in basic tuition per student is unbelievable to me,” said RJ Webber, superintendent of Northville Public Schools. “It was horrifying to see,” he added.
Andrea Oquist, superintendent of Livonia Public Schools, said, “A 98 percent drop (in mental health and school safety support) is hard to comprehend right now.” Andrew Brodie, superintendent of Flat Rock School, called it “a pretty rough day for a teacher in the state of Michigan.”
Webber, who fears cuts to student mental health programs, said The subway At the beginning of the year it was stated: “Mental health problems affect students of all grades – even children in kindergarten.”
Erik Edoff, superintendent of L’anse Creuse schools, emphasized: “This really cuts across all socioeconomic boundaries, all kinds of backgrounds, and is now impacting the education of children of all ages.”
State Democrats tried to defend the cuts by pointing to a recent cut in mandatory district pension contributions. While this provides schools with some short-term liquidity, it is not a solution. Michigan’s public school employee pension system is already underfunded by an estimated $35 billion, which is essentially a time bomb that threatens the livelihoods of thousands of retirees.
The Democrats’ priorities couldn’t be clearer. Biden’s current military budget allocates $1 trillion to wars – currently being fought in the Middle East and against Russia, as well as to prepare to fight Washington’s biggest economic rival, China. Biden came to Michigan touting the state as an “arsenal of democracy” and declaring that Americans need to build more “aircraft carriers and tanks.” Yet schools and social programs face endless cuts.
At the state level, virtually unlimited sums of money were transferred from the state treasury to the automakers and other corporations. The Democrats not only want to satisfy the insatiable hunger for money of the rich, but also to prepare Michigan industry for more intensive arms production and the technological innovations required for war.
To this end, the 2025 budget provides an additional annual tranche of $500 million for large businesses through the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) Fund, while numerous other grants and initiatives are planned for business interests. A study by Bridge Magazine The study, released on June 12, found that Michigan has already paid out $1 billion to automakers for electric vehicle (EV) production and battery factories. Another $1 billion has been pledged to Ford, Gotion Inc, LG Energy Solution, General Motors and Our Next Energy. GM will save about $2.28 billion in taxes by 2029.
For their part, the teachers’ unions act as political police, keeping teachers segregated while districts implement cuts, claiming there is “no money” – an obvious lie. The bureaucracies of the pro-capitalist American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by warmonger Randi Weingarten, and the National Education Association (NEA), act as a wing of the Democratic Party, serving as an ideological battering ram against anti-war and socialist thought among teachers.
The sellout of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, announced on June 25, is a case in point. After stonewalling teachers for months and preventing their participation in the negotiations, the DFT insisted that teachers vote without allowing time to analyze the 64-page agreement. Everything was done to prevent teachers from joining forces with their sisters and brothers who faced layoffs and cuts after ESSER’s termination.
The deal left about 300 DFT members stranded, whose jobs were being eliminated in anticipation of the end of federal funding. Instead of demanding more hiring and better training in the impoverished city, the union congratulated itself on pushing through the district’s layoff order.
In addition, the DFT failed to negotiate an across-the-board salary increase, instead joining the district’s strategy of handing out a patchwork of bonuses and summarily abandoning the incremental salary increases promised to the “COVID cohort” of young educators.
Members of the Michigan Educators Rank-and-File Committee (MERFC) have called for a “no” vote on the tentative agreement in Detroit, insisting that defending public education requires a fight for socialism and against war. A statement from the MERFC said:
The DFT boasts that this contract restores seniority rights in layoffs – instead of demanding no layoffs and insisting on restoring the 300 jobs we have already lost. We know more layoffs are coming as the federal government stops funding schools through the ESSER program and diverts more than a trillion dollars to war. To properly educate Detroit’s children, we need smaller classes, support staff, more counselors and psychologists, and more resources. This contract is another setback for defending jobs – vote no!
We must join the fight in Detroit with that of educators fighting cuts, layoffs, and school closures across the state, the country, and the world. We must draw a clear line to defend our students’ right to a quality public education and establish our right to decent wages and working conditions. We will find allies among faculty at Wayne State University and teachers in Chicago whose contracts are also expiring, and among educators everywhere—from Ann Arbor to New York to the United Kingdom—who oppose cuts to education funding. The DFT does not unite us. It divides us from our colleagues everywhere—Vote No!
The MERFC statement goes on to say that the DFT and AFT bureaucracies are actively sabotaging educators’ struggle because they are allied with Biden and the Democratic Party, who care only about war funding and Wall Street, not social needs. Under these conditions, there can be no defense of public education without a fight against imperialist war and capitalism. We urge educators, workers, parents and students to join us today.
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