Michigan Should go Part Time

Michigan needs to go part time. Part time on the legislative front, that is.

Our state lawmakers make $79,000 per year. They meet less than 100 days per year, typically. That's $790 dollars per day. How many people do not make $790.00 per week? Indeed, how many of the people who make less than $790 bucks a week are more productive than state legislators? A good guess is that high schoolers pushing burgers off a grill at McDonald's are more productive than Lansing. They're getting paid for products in demand as well; we can debate whether those products are good for us, but that is certainly a separate question. For well or for ill, they're doing something the general public wants.

Are the products emanating from the State Capitol in demand? Well, they seem to spend a lot of time attempting to name highways. How often has that been a question in your mind? Have you ever had a conversation with a friend, family member, or co-worker about that? Have you ever though that our economy would be very much improved if we could only get a road named after Ronald Reagan or Coleman Young?

We have no quarrel with such honors per se. Yet when they become little more than partisan footballs for which the only obvious purpose is to give a legislator a political soap box (my opponent refused to honor Reagan/Young/insert name here) then what useful purpose is served? Why do we pay people for this sort of unimportant wrangling?

Needless to say, there is more than that. Yet it illustrates our point rather well. If Texas can afford a part time legislature, if the vast majority of the states of our Union can as well (the National Conference on State Legislatures lists only four full time legislatures; see here: http://www.ncsl.org/legislatures-elections/legislatures/full-and-part-time-legislatures.aspx ) then surely we can. It might force them to consider more important questions than road signage. It might even help ensure than only those keenly interested in Michigan's welfare run for office.

Education should be Local

Michigan has adopted the Common Core State Standards for education, as have 43 other states. But as is also happening in several other states as well, the Michigan Legislature is sowing seeds of revolt against them, asserting that the CCSS are little more than another intrusion by the federal government into state areas. Education has traditionally been a local rather than national issue in these United States.

But dare we ask: what's wrong with national standards in education? Surely math is math and science is science; history and literature do not vary, do they?

Not as such, perhaps. But indeed there is some variance: which history do we teach, and whose literature do we read seem valid questions. Still, there are core values beneath them. History teaches us cause and effect no matter which history we deign to enlighten students with, and good literature inspires in myriad ways no matter the source material. Even in the hard sciences and mathematics, it isn't necessary to teach everyone with the exact same problems and questions, is it, so long as the principles involved are understood?

Yet is that the issue? Truth is truth no matter the font from which it springs. But who controls, or ought to control, the flow of information? Does that matter?

Of course it does. Truths from a parent matter more to a child than those from a teacher; truths from afar less than truths from a neighbor. The source is important. Even if the essential truth is the same.

The Michigan Legislature ought to resist the Common Core initiative. Not because it may be all that wrong in content; it probably isn't terribly bad for our kids in that sense. It ought to resist it because it does, or attempts to do, exactly what the state legislature fears. It takes learning away from the near and dear and thrusts it into the abyss of the all knowing yet shimmering mass of the far off. It makes education something from on high rather than from the personal and intimate.

Education should be personal and intimate. After all, it's meant for the person, isn't it?