June 6, 1997

Legislative & Political Week in Review

• State students’ math, science, and reading scores are up in the second year of Michigan’s high school proficiency test, a two-day exam designed to assess pupils’ basic skills mastery. But writing skills dropped by four percentage points over last year, leaving educators to debate the accuracy and relevance of the battery of tests that replace the Michigan Education Assessment Program. It wasn’t just the students who fumbled written communication skills: The national firm scoring the tests made computational errors that delayed for several days announcement of the test results. Fewer than half of Michigan’s students passed the controversial exam in its first year, a number that inched up to almost 53 percent this year on the math test.
• In a push to wrap up budget action, the Senate passed three budget bills this week and sent them back to the House for concurrence.
  • School aid HB 4310 totals $9.2 billion for FY 1998 and passed on a 28–9 vote. The Senate version allocates a per pupil foundation grant increase of 2.9 percent, or $154. The House earlier had approved a 3 percent increase; the governor’s recommendation had been a 2.6 percent hike.
  • Corrections Senators stripped from the $1.4 billion budget of HB 4307 several House-passed social policy amendments, including those dealing with castrating sex offenders, guaranteeing substance abuse treatment for prisoners, and inmate Braille transcription services.
  • Education Not a single amendment slowed the upper chamber’s disposition of HB 4308. All but a half-million of the $835.5 million department budget is pass-through funding.
• Cigarette manufacturers will be forced to kick the billboard habit under a Senate-passed bill banning outdoor advertising of tobacco products. SB 341 passed 31–6 and includes a last-minute amendment adding sexually explicit materials to the types of advertising banned on any billboard in Michigan. The measure offers no definition of sexual explicitness. Liquor—another controlled, legal substance that Michigan adults may buy—initially was on the billboard blacklist but was removed from the measure on a vote of reconsideration.
• An Ingham County circuit court judge has ruled that the governor’s reorganization of a state department is unconstitutional. Sound familiar? It should; in recent years, circuit courts have several times ruled that Gov. John Engler’s executive orders encroached on constitutional autonomy or legislative prerogative. Engler has nearly always prevailed in higher court, however, which is where the current case involving the State Board of Education is headed. After a Democratic majority was elected to the state board, the governor issued two executive orders currently being disputed: One made his appointed superintendent of public instruction, Arthur Ellis, head of the Michigan Department of Education; the other transferred from the board to Ellis well over 100 specifically named board responsibilities and duties.
• Steering clear of a potential political pothole, the governor canceled his planned participation in the Oldsmobile Classic Pro-Am Golf tournament this week so that he could—in the words of his press release—"spend the day working on legislative matters, including his transportation package . . .." This U-turn in the schedule occurred only days after what Detroit News columnist George Weeks terms an "unseemly spat" on Mackinac Island between Engler and Michigan’s congressional delegation: Testy words were exchanged about federal highway funds and who is more to blame for the state not getting a bigger share of them.