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Epoch Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Michigan's Public Schools Get a Bad Report Card From Research Group
Michigan's K-12 education system has a 'statewide pandemic recovery problem,' and more money is the answer, a nonprofit research group says. As a result of two decades of 'underinvestment,' the recovery of Michigan students from learning loss caused by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic is 'not going well,' according to a 2025 State of Michigan Education ETM stated that 'Michigan is woefully underfunding public schools.' From 1995–2015, Michigan was the 'worst in the nation for education revenue growth,' the report said. Ranking seventh among the 50 states, Michigan currently spends $9,608 per pupil. New Jersey leads the nation, spending $13,946 per student, according to the report. The learning loss is reflected by the continued poor academic performance of Michigan's K–12 students. Related Stories 5/7/2025 5/1/2025 ETM researchers put Michigan in the bottom five of the 50 states for post-pandemic reading recovery, as measured from 2019 to the present. Nebraska experienced the greatest learning loss and Hawaii the least. Louisiana experienced no learning loss during the same period, according to the report. Students Lag in Reading and Math The report revealed that Michigan's third- through eighth-graders are 40 percent of a grade level behind in math and 75 percent of a grade level behind in reading from where they were in 2019. In the 2023–2024 school year, ETM found that 60.4 percent of all Michigan third-graders were nonproficient in reading. Nearly 68 percent of seventh-grade students were found to be nonproficient in math during the same year. In 2024, Michigan's fourth-graders were 44th in reading, and its eighth-graders ranked 31st in math among the 50 states. According to the report, one out of every eight Michigan students entering college is required to take remedial courses to make up for deficiencies in their high school education. The number is double for black students. Supt. Doug Muxlow of Carsonville-Port Sanilac Community Schools, Carsonville, Mich. Courtesy of Doug Muxlow The ETM report also warned of the potential impact of the Trump administration's quest to do away with the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The report found that federal funding of Michigan schools amounted to $3.7 billion and accounted for 13.8 percent of their budgets in 2023. According to the report, federal dollars are used by Michigan school districts to pay for things that the state does not fully fund, such as programs for disabled students, English learners, and even first-time applicants for college loans. In a March 20 ETM researchers found that, beyond financial support, the DOE benefits Michigan schools by collecting and analyzing useful data concerning education. The DOE also serves as a source of oversight and accountability to school districts to ensure equity in the use of grant funds, they said. Racial and Income Disparities In the 2023–2024 school year, 83.4 percent of black third-graders in Michigan tested nonproficient in reading. The rate was 53.3 percent for white third-graders. During the same year, 90.6 percent of black seventh-graders tested nonproficient in math, while the nonproficiency rate among white seventh-graders was 61.1 percent, according to the report. According to data from the 2023-2024 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress cited in the ETM report, 57.1 percent of third-graders with higher income backgrounds tested proficient in reading, while 26.9 percent of third-graders from low-income backgrounds tested proficient in reading. The same test found that 48.9 percent of seventh-graders from higher income brackets were proficient in math. By contrast, 18.1 percent of seventh-graders from low-income backgrounds were proficient in math. The Most Needy According to the ETM report, nine states provide their highest poverty-rate school districts with between 10 percent and 40 percent more state funding than their low poverty-rate school districts. Michigan is not one of them. 'For many years, Michigan's school funding formula mandated an additional 11.5 percent in what is called 'at-risk' funding on top of the foundation allowance—or base student spending —for students from low-income backgrounds. Yet that amount was often underfunded, with districts receiving on average only 9 percent per student more in additional 'at risk' funding,' the report said. ETM said its research suggests that students from low-income backgrounds should receive between '100 and 200 percent more funding than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds to close gaps in opportunity and outcomes.' Michael Rice, the state superintendent of schools, told The Epoch Times that despite historic investments in education in recent years, 'Our schools remain underfunded by billions of dollars.' Beyond an increase in funding, Rice said other reforms are needed to improve student achievement, particularly in low-income schools, such as smaller class sizes in K-3 high-poverty classrooms and better teacher training in the science of reading. Rice pointed to a few bright spots like a rise in the high school graduation rate and the rate of postsecondary credential attainment, as well as large increases in the number of black and Latino high school students taking and completing Advanced Placement classes. A View From the Ground Superintendent Doug Muxlow of Carsonville-Port Sanilac Community Schools, a district in rural Michigan serving just over 400 K-12 students, told The Epoch Times that the financial impact of declining enrollment is probably the biggest concern of most Michigan school systems. Muxlow said that the reduction of revenue resulting from a loss of students, when coupled with the annual rise in expenses due to inflation, can result in a district breaking even or sometimes losing ground, despite increases in the state's contribution per student. 'Our state's small town and rural school districts are typically low-income. They are really struggling with the financial challenges stemming from enrollment decline. 'Michigan does have a small program to help deal with this by giving additional dollars to school districts losing enrollment, but it needs to be greatly expanded,' said Muxlow. Muxlow said learning loss from the COVID-19 lockdowns is not a major factor in his district. 'Socio-economic factors are huge when it comes to disparities in academic achievement. For example, there are some students in our district whose families still do not have internet access at home,' he said. He also said the dismantling of the DOE would have a minor impact on Carsonville-Port Sanilac Community Schools.
New Statesman
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Andrea Dworkin's dispatches from the sex wars
When Andrea Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing Women in 1981, her argument was uncompromising: pornography must be banned, literally and urgently. As she would in 1987's Intercourse – in which she infamously outlined heterosexual sex as a key site of oppression for women (an argument that was reductively reframed by popular media to the line 'all sex is rape') – Dworkin writes passionately, painting with broad and beautiful brush strokes. To understand her fervour, we must remember how suddenly pornography had come to the fore with Dworkin's lifetime: she was born in 1946 and died 20 years ago last month. In the years before Pornography's publication, a slew of US Supreme Court cases had battled over the legal treatment of sexually explicit material. In 1957's Butler vs State of Michigan, the Court struck down a state law preventing the printing of material not fit for children, and in the same year, Roth vs US held that material with 'the slightest redeeming social importance' was protected by the First Amendment's right to freedom of expression. In 1964's Jacobellis vs Ohio, the Court overturned Ohio's conviction of a theatre owner who had screen Louis Malle's film The Lovers; while the majority created the 'community standards' test for pornography, Justice Potter Stewart's concurrence created the better-known 'I know it when I see it' one. But not all decisions were for liberalisation. On a single day in 1966, the Court upheld the conviction of the publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who mailed the magazine Eros from post offices in Blue Ball and Intercourse, Pennsylvania, under a federal obscenity statute, but rejected Massachusetts' finding that Fanny Hill was obscene. Stanley vs Georgia (1969) held that states could not prohibit the private possession of pornography. But the landmark ruling Miller vs California (1973) allowed for obscenity statutes based on local community norms, which would severely curtail nationwide theatrical releases of pornography. Nationwide theatrical releases of pornography? It may seem unimaginable today, but Dworkin was writing in the so-called Golden Age of Porn, inaugurated by Andy Warhol's Blue Movie (1969) and Howard Ziehm's Mona the Teenage Nymph (1970), the first 35mm adult film released in theatres nationwide (though, due to pornography's still uncertain legal status, screened without credits). High-production value pornography was entering the mainstream, screened across the country, nearly making top-ten lists, and even garnering critical praise. In 1972, Deep Throat – a major preoccupation of Dworkin's – became a box-office success reviewed in the New York Times; Roger Ebert gave a positive three stars to The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and a more ambivalent two-and-a-half stars to the X-rated Alice in Wonderland (1976). Marlon Brando's notorious Last Tango in Paris was, according to Andy Warhol, inspired by Blue Movie. By 1980, things had begun to take a turn. Introduced in 1976, the consumer VHS would soon usher in the video era, with theatrical screenings of dirty movies now a relic remembered mainly from the date scene in Taxi Driver (1976). But it was of more interest to Andrea Dworkin that Linda Lovelace, the supposedly insatiable star of Deep Throat, published the memoir Ordeal in 1980. In it she claimed that her husband and producer Chuck Traynor had taken advantage of her when she was a teenager recovering from a serious car crash, becoming violent, abusive, and forcing her to move away from her family to New York City, where he became her pimp. The story she told here – one in which Traynor watched her even while she used the bathroom, held a gun to her head as he eavesdropped on her phone calls, and initiated her into prostitution through a brutal gang rape – was starkly at odds with that of the two pro-porn autobiographies she had previously published, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (both 1974), and many doubted her revised account. Dworkin did not. To her, Lovelace's anti-porn turn proved the truth of pornography: that, as Robin Morgan put it, 'Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.' For Dworkin, pornography was 'the blueprint of male supremacy… the fundamentalism of male dominance… the essential sexuality of male power'. The book is alive with Dworkin's propulsive, almost incantatory insistence: 'Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity – the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.' For her, pornography was never about the individual woman: 'The very power to make the photograph (to use the model, to tie her in that way) and the fact of the photograph (the fact that someone did use the model, did tie her in that way, that the photograph is published in a magazine and seen by millions of men who buy it specifically to see such photographs) evoke fear in the female observer unless she entirely dissociates herself from the photograph: refuses to believe or understand that real persons posed for it, refuses to see the bound person as a woman like herself.' That meant, for Dworkin, that one could not be a feminist and support pornography; could not be a leftist and support pornography. 'The new pornography is left-wing,' she wrote, 'and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.' Pornography was far from the harmless, even healthy, expression of natural urges (as claimed by those who cited, for example, that violence had reduced in Denmark since the country legalised pornography). Instead, she wrote, 'Pornography exists because men despite women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists.' Others disagreed. Ellen Willis, whose essay 'Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?' is an ur-text of so-called sex-positive feminism, wrote in her New York Times review of Pornography that 'in Andrea Dworkin's moral universe the battle of the sexes is a Manichaean clash between absolute power and absolute powerlessness, absolute villains and absolute victims.' Rejecting the book's conclusions, Willis writes that 'cultural images influence behaviour… only because they articulate and legitimise feelings that already exist. Pornography that offers concrete images of how to act out hatred of women may invite imitation and re-enforce an atmosphere of complacency towards sexual violence, but the hatred and complacency that produce violence are built into the culture. In short, pornography is a symptom, not a root cause.' For Willis, the anti-porn feminists, despite their good motives, were unwitting allies of the pro-family values Christian right. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe These were the wings of the Sex Wars, in which second-wave feminism came to an impasse over the issue of sexual freedom. On one side was the Women Against Pornography (WAP) movement led by Dworkin, Morgan and Susan Brownmiller. For them, true sexual freedom meant reshaping society towards sexual equality. Dworkin was, as Willis noted, highly critical of the supposedly sexually liberated (writing in Right-Wing Women that 'the Left only champions women on its own sexual terms – as f**ks; they find the right-wing offer a tad more generous'; she expressed admiration for the conservatives Richard Brookhiser and Maggie Gallagher, and in opposing pornography, indeed did ally with the right). In her view, the idea that pornography was a simple outlet of pre-existing, immutable desires was naive and retrograde, a male fantasy in feminist clothes. The sex-positive feminists rejected the anti-pornography view as a traditionalist, exclusionary prudishness. In 1979 and 1980, Willis and Deirdre English published pieces in the Village Voice and Mother Jones arguing against the anti-pornography feminists. Prominent feminists from the lesbian S/M community rejected the equation of consensual sexual fantasies of violence and actual violence. The new right was ever-more in ascension, and attacks on abortion rights, feminism and sexual minorities were a live concern. The clash came to a head at a 1982 feminist conference at Barnard College titled 'Towards a Politics of Sexuality', organised by a group including Willis and Gayle Rubin. WAP picketed outside, wearing shirts that said 'For a feminist sexuality' on the front and 'Against S/M' on the back. Despite this conflict, the movement against pornography carried on. Together with Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor, Dworkin worked to craft city ordinances that allowed women to sue creators and distributors of pornography for violating their civil rights, spending 1983 and 1984 drafting anti-pornography ordinances for Minneapolis and Indianapolis that never made it into law. But it is the sex-positive faction that has, of course, won the day (as has its close relative, 'choice feminism'). Popular feminism is pro-sex, pro-pornography and pro-sex work (and to judge the reaction to the Oscar-winning Anora, under pressure only to be ever more so). In the 1990s, the second wave of feminism gave way to the third, and academic feminism shifted more towards discussions of kink, non-heteronormative lifestyles, and the search for autonomy. The tide may yet turn. In recent years, the pornography industry has been wracked by controversy. Disturbing allegations around underage pornography, rape videos and revenge porn led Pornhub to remove over 75 per cent of its content library, remove its download feature, require verification for uploads, and moderate its content more rigorously. Mia Khalifa, a prominent performer, has spoken about her regrets about briefly participating in the industry and the difficulty of having content removed, stating 'corporations prey on callow young women and trap them legally into contracts when they're vulnerable'. The legal landscape is again in upheaval, too. The new right manifesto Project 2025 states, unambiguously, that 'pornography should be outlawed'. Since 2023, 19 American states, home to more than one third of Americans, have passed laws requiring websites that display pornographic content to verify that visitors are over 18 years of age, including Texas's stringent age-verification law, which requires site visitors upload their IDs and sends warnings, such as about the link between pornography and prostitution, to even verified adult users. As before, much anti-pornography legislation appears to be driven by the right; but with radical feminism – including that of Dworkin – finding favour among young feminists, it remains to be seen whether they might take up the mantle. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Donald Trump vs Columbia] Related
CBS News
10-03-2025
- Automotive
- CBS News
Michigan officials shut down Hamtramck driving school for violating state law
The Michigan Secretary of State has shut down a driver education school, after the provider was found to be in violation of state law. The notice from State of Michigan, issued Friday, was directed to Al Baraka Driving School, 11405 Conant St., Hamtramck. Driver education schools in Michigan can be certified by the state for adult, teen and/or truck driving, according to the secretary's office. All of them must meet the requirements of the Driver Education Provider and Instructor Act calling for providers and instructors to be certified; and that certain record-keeping and program requirements be followed. "Driver education providers and instructors may receive a written warning, be placed on probation, be fined, or have their certificate suspended if the actions cannot be resolved," the state says. In the Hamtramck case, "the provider failed to maintain records at this location and was not able to provide records upon reasonable request," the press release said. An investigation by MDOS staff also found the place of business closed, with boards on the windows and doors. Anyone who is directly affected by the summary suspension can contact the MDOS' Driver Education Unit at DriverEd@ or 517-241-6850 for additional information.
