Michigan Republicans want to move authority over K-12 assessment testing to the Department of Treasury. It’s a move that tells you all you need to know about how Republicans feel about schools. Currently, the responsibility for school assessment lies with the Department of Education. That’s exactly where you’d imagine it would be and where it has been for years. It […]

As I have written about before, Republicans are petrified of a drive to put raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour on the ballot in November. It’s such a winning issue for Democrats that Republicans know that they simply must kill it or risk losing big on election day as more Democrats than usual turn out to vote in […]

University of Michigan law professor Steven Croley was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as general counsel for the U.S. Energy Department this week. Croley, the husband of State Supreme Court Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, has been working for the White House as deputy assistant and deputy counsel to President Obama and spends his weeks working at the White House. He […]

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is looking for Summer Fellows to work this summer to elect Democrats across the country. That’s especially true here in Michigan where the DCCC is supporting a number of our candidates like Pam Byrnes (MI-07) and Jerry Cannon (MI-01). Below is an announcement that explains things. The only way to defeat the Republicans is to […]

It’s good to be know the king A Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) permit has been issued to Russian steel corporation Severstal this week, allowing the company that DEQ once called “the most egregious facility in the state” to continuing spewing pollutants in Dearborn and Detroit at levels far in excess of state regulations. As I wrote about earlier this […]

Correcting one more bad decision on top of so, so many others Bowing to public outrage, officials at the Education Achievement Authority — Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s failed education experiment with Detroit students — have reinstated fired teacher Tiffani Eaton. Eaton was fired for breaking up an exceedingly violent fight in her classroom by whacking one of the kids on […]

NOTE: this story has been updated HERE. When Tiffani Eaton stopped a violent classroom fight between two strapping high school boys by whacking one of them with a broom, she was fired by the Education Achievement Authority that runs Pershing High School in Detroit. EAA administrators defended her firing saying that she violated state corporal punishment laws; that it amounted […]

The Detroit News has a report out today that is both shocking and unsurprising. In it, they reveal that, since its inception in the fall of 2012, the Education Achievement Authority has spent nearly a quarter million dollars in travel, gas, a chauffeur for Chancellor John Covington, on furniture and other miscellaneous, non-education-related items. And they put it all on […]

Last week, a vicious fight broke out between two students at the Education Achievement Authority’s Pershing High School. With a non-functional walkie-talkie and no other adults around to help, teacher Tiffani Eaton had to act fast as the two brawling boys thrashed around the room, punching each other, and knocking over desks. She grabbed a broom handle and whacked one […]

When Republicans passed their odious “rape insurance” law, they did it on the basis that women should have to pay for their own abortions. It was a faux argument because there was nothing about insurance companies offering abortion coverage that forced anyone to pay for someone else’s abortion. But that, of course, didn’t stop them from making the argument. Now […]

“Here are some crumbs. Don’t eat them all at once.” Senate Republicans seem to be on a mission to outdo each other on making meaningless and insulting gestures toward lifting the working poor in our state out of poverty. First we had Rick Jones who proposed raising the minimum wage to a paltry $8.15 an hour and giving full-time waiters […]