MI Pub ed budget: Sound of Schauer Campaign Washing Down the Drain

Michigan Reporter Dave Eggert described Mi House Democrats as reasonably content with this year's school budget. 

Indeed, it was much better than in the past two years. While I am sure they are not celebrating loudly you can also hear in the House Democrats muffled contentment the more depressing sounds of the Mark Schauer/Lisa Brown gubernatorial challenge going straight down the drain. 

Having based their campaign and limited resources almost exclusively on 1 year K12 budget issues -- and ignoring entirely or endorsing the larger problems of Education "Reform" like the EAA expansion, fed overreach, teacher effectiveness via VAM, Common Core, charters, and so on -- the campaign quite simply has left itself with no where else to go. 

Snyder added enough to satisfy the general population, certainly enough to limit any outrage big enough to overcome the 7 to 11 % gap between himself and Schauer; and now we have a long summer vacation with schools set to open "as normal" in the fall. 

The schools and their paid lobbyists spent their political energy on this short 1 year game, and have had little convincing to say to the voting public about the larger threats to public education. 

Many public ed advocates, then, have spent considerable time and energy on a campaign that fizzled before it began because the Mi Democratic party would not attend seriously to the issues of those it was supposedly supporting. 

Weird. 

 Instead, Lon Johnson is counting on 1 million voters to come out in 2014 -- many of them African-American women -- to support Schauer and Lisa Brown as they did Barack Obama. 

I wish him luck there.

 Long term, the fate of public education looks bleak -- and one can not blame the Republican party or its extremists for its undoing. For Democrats, one has the hope they decide to invest time and money now in winnable races and try not to look like complete whiners on public education.