Back in March, I penned an essay critical of Michigan tea party legislator Todd Courser’s complete freak out over a bipartisan move to create a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) endorsement for graduating high school students. If students complete six credits each of math and science, a half credit each of technology and engineering, and meet certain other criteria, […]

Part 2 of a series. Part 1 is HERE and Part 3 is HERE. Before I get into this piece, I want to clarify a couple of things. First of all, in the conversation on Proposal 1 in Michigan, at least on the progressive side, we are starting from the position that Republicans are hideous leaders that created gigantic hole […]

Part 1 in a series. Part 2 is HERE and Part 3 is HERE. There are few topics that unite tea partiers with progressive liberals but Michigan’s Prop 1 has not only united these two disparate groups, it has, for all intents and purposes, turned many progressives into tea partiers in their own right. What I mean by this is […]

Once again proving that reading comprehension isn’t a requirement for being a legislator… Lapeer state legislator Todd Courser, a self-described “Constitutional, Conservative Republican”, is an ardent defender of “the freedom of parent’s choice in education for their children”. This is code language for homeschooling children, something Courser and his wife have done with their own kids. There are myriad reasons […]

NOTE: This story has been updated twice below and in HERE, HERE, and HERE. Over the past few months, I have written about the efforts of a group formerly known as the American Christian Academies to form a tea party charter school in Brighton, Michigan that would use tax dollars to run as a public school. The name of the […]

Last night, the Brighton Area Schools (BAS) board declined to take a vote on chartering the tea party “classical academy” being pushed by Pasquale Battaglia and a coalition of homeschooling parents. You can read more on the history of this politically extreme group HERE. After months of heated public discussion, the Brighton Area Schools Board of Education refused to even […]

We’ve all seen the signs in restrooms of restaurants we go to that say “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work”. Why do you see these? Because it’s the law. The Food and Drug Administration requires it. That’s a good thing, right? Because, as the FDA’s regulations say, “Proper handwashing reduces the spread of fecal-oral pathogens from the hands […]

Let’s you and him fight… Thanks to the division within the Michigan Republican Party, the state legislature which is dominated by Republicans was unable to find a way to fund our roads. Their internal disputes led them to toss the decision to voters who will decide if we should the state sales tax by one-percent to pay for road repairs, […]

Over the past two months I have been writing about the efforts of a group of people led by tea party zealot Pasquale Battaglia, to set up a “classical academy” in Brighton, Michigan in an elementary school building purchased from the Brighton Area Schools (BAS). The group is called the American Classical Academy Coalition and they received a $100,000 grant […]

I have been writing about the efforts of a tea party-driven group called “American Christian Classical Academies” (ACA) to open a religion-based school in Brighton and their push to have Brighton Area Schools to be their chartering organization. Having purchased the Lindbom Elementary School from BAS for the tidy sum of $1.45 million, ACA, led by extremist Pasquale Battaglia, are […]

Last night during his State of the State Address, Gov. Rick Snyder broke very little new ground. Many of us were happy to hear him support further investments in education and to call for an expansion of civil rights for the LGBT community. One glaring point for me was that Gov. Snyder never once mentioned K-12 education in the part […]