How Michigan ‘Melted’ the Urban-Rural Divide in Public School Funding

And what it means for the rest of the country.

Six states have passed laws this year allowing almost all students to attend private schools using public money. But time and again these private voucher plans have been met with especially fierce resistance from rural communities, who want to stave off spending cuts to their popular but already underfunded rural public schools.

In Michigan, a different story is playing out. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer just signed a major education budget that won support from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, public school advocates, teachers’ unions, and rural communities alike.

Here’s what happened.

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How Michigan ‘Melted’ the Urban-Rural Divide in Public School Funding

By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union

After watching from the sidelines as right-wing policies have decimated public schools for years, Democrats in the Midwest are taking advantage of gains made in last year’s midterms to restore the state’s role in funding education. 

In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz signed a budget that boosts funding by $2.3 billion, or 10 percent. House Democrats in Pennsylvania have used their one-seat majority to push Gov. Shapiro to kill the state Senate GOP’s $100 million school voucher plan, even as Shapiro himself had publicly supported it. And in the wildest, most creative example, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers used the state’s expansive gubernatorial line-item powers to unilaterally boost education funding for the next four hundred years.

Now, Michigan is getting a turn: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a $24 billion education budget last week which increases education funding by five percent, expands eligibility for state-funded preschool, spends tens of millions on teacher recruitment, helps teachers with student loan payments, and makes Michigan the seventh state in the country to offer free breakfast and lunch to all public school students. 

But the Michigan education budget also notably takes aim at the gap between rural schools and their suburban and urban counterparts. A Michigan State University report last year shed light on a number of challenges disproportionately facing rural schools, including transportation, broadband access, poor teacher recruitment and career development, and a lack of mental health resources.

Dr. David Arsen, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University and the report’s lead author, told More Perfect Union Tuesday that the overall education budget was “very positive from the standpoint of public schools.” 

But additionally, Arsen said rural school districts, many of them represented by Republicans, stood to gain enormous benefits from the new funding. “There was, for the first time in my memory, a concerted effort to take rural schools and challenges seriously,” Arsen told More Perfect Union. To drive that point home, Whitmer signed the budget in Suttons Bay, a small village of around 600 people in the northern part of the state. 

The new budget includes more than $11 million in special weighted funding for rural and isolated school districts, $15 million in startup funding for a pilot program to back career development for rural teachers, and — perhaps most importantly — a new $350 million transportation fund that will help alleviate the costs of getting students to school, $125 million of which is earmarked for the new shool year. 

Until now, transportation has been funded entirely by the districts, to the detriment of poorer and more geographically sparse communities; the aforementioned Michigan State University report found that rural districts spend approximately five percent of their budgets on transportation, compared with less than three percent for city districts. 

Additionally, Arsen said, new funding not targeted at rural school districts will still benefit them greatly. This includes $310 million for activities targeted at improving students’ mental health as well as school safety (with at least half intended to go toward the former), and new funding streams for broadband access. 

And Arsen, who testified before the legislature on the education budget in March, said that the key underpinning of the plan’s success both in passage and scope was support from superintendents, union officials, and legislators from all over the state, as well as the governor’s office. “That chronic rural-urban divide melted away in this budget cycle,” Arsen said. 

What’s happening in Michigan is particularly instructive for the rest of the country. A 2019 report (also authored by Arsen) found that Michigan was “dead last” in education funding in the U.S. from 1995 to 2015, following changes in 1994 that shifted responsibility for school funding to the state. 

The absurdly wealthy DeVos family has also wielded enormous influence over the Republican Party to enact its pro-privatization, anti-labor agenda, culminating in the decade-plus capture of the legislature by the Michigan GOP. Whitmer’s landslide re-election, anger over the Dobbs decision, and the introduction of fair redistricting maps finally swept Democrats back into narrow control of the legislature in November.

A similar fight is taking place in Texas, where rural House Republicans have teamed up with Democrats for years to stop vouchers that would gut public education funding, decimating accessible education and an economic driver in rural Texas to the benefit of private schools and the wealthy. The latest attempt to siphon taxpayer money away from public schools and towards unaccountable private institutions failed once more in May, though Gov. Greg Abbott has hinted at calling a special session in the fall to try again.

Notably, the Michigan budget passed this year with support from a majority of Senate Republicans, meaning the legislation can take effect as soon as the next fiscal year begins in October. “No budget is perfect,” said Republican state Sen. Jon Bumstead, who voted for the budget in conference committee, when the plan passed in June. “But this budget before us incorporates many Republican priorities and I ask for a yes vote.”

Arsen said there’s more progress to be made on public education in Michigan, which he ties to Whitmer’s legacy-making effort to increase Michigan’s long-declining population growth. But Arsen said that this year, the needs of rural communities and schools were “elevated” in an unprecedented way, to the benefit of students and teachers all over the state. 

“In terms of finding common ground between rural and urban, management and labor, for the goal of advancing public education as a whole,” Arsen said, “I think that message sunk in for the first time.”

For more, watch our recent video digging into the private school voucher program in Arizona and its implications for similar efforts around the country.