Education

Toledo, Ohio is just across Michigan’s southern border, but as far as policy makers in our state are concerned, it might as well be another country. In fact, virtually nobody in Michigan pays much attention to anything going on in Toledo, which is unfortunate.

That’s because in many ways, Toledo, a city of about 300,000 people, is more like Michigan than like the rest of Ohio. It has a blue-collar economy that has long mirrored Detroit’s.The Motor City made cars;Toledo made Jeeps and auto parts.

People stealing metal, computers and other equipment have done more than a million dollars worth of damage to Flint school buildings in the past 18 months. 

Linda Thompson is the Flint Community Schools superintendent. She says the problem goes well beyond kids with spray paint.   

Thompson says in one case a school building was ransacked as part a sophisticated scheme.   

"These are not kids doing this," Thompson insists, "You can look at the fact that electricity was disconnected….we’re talking about people who are not amateurs about doing this either."  

Thompson is worried vandals might take advantage of the upcoming Christmas break to do more damage to Flint schools.    

She’s urging people to report any suspicious activity around Flint schools to the police.  

Thompson says Flint is not alone. Many urban school districts have seen a big increase in vandalism during the past few years. 

ADRIAN, Mich. (AP) - Adrian College says it recently received a $20 million gift that's the largest in its history.

The private college about 60 miles southwest of Detroit said in a statement Monday that the bequest is from the estate of Willard M. Cornelius Sr., who served as a member of the school's board of trustees from 1931 to 1948.

According to the school, Cornelius was an early innovator in rustproofing for the automotive industry. The money will be used to help students with tuition as well as support renovation to the college's science and business buildings.

Adrian College President Jeffrey Docking says the "benefits of this tremendous gift are difficult to quantify."

Leaders of a new statewide school district are looking for citizen input.

The Education Achievement System (EAS) is Governor’s Snyder’s plan to improve the state’s lowest-performing schools. The EAS held input sessions in Detroit and Kalamazoo Monday.

Plans for the EAS have been sketchy so far. It’s set to launch in 2012 with an unspecified number of Detroit Public Schools.

Low-income immigrants in the Washtenaw County area will soon be able to get free legal help from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s Ann Arbor campus.

Jason Eyster, an associate professor at Cooley Law School, will run the new immigrant rights clinic. He says they’ll be able to take up to six immigration cases at a time, dealing with a variety of issues:

"In the immigration area: individuals are seeking asylum, seeking withholding of removal,  seeking cancelation of removal, or seeking clarity on what their rights may or may not be," said Eyster.

Eyster says they’ll also help immigrants with other issues, like "foreclosure, landlord-tenant, custody issues, and that sort of thing."

The clinic doesn't open until next month, but Eyster says they're already booked.

Discussions are underway to figure out how best to evaluate Michigan’s teachers.

Governor Snyder has tasked a group of five people to develop a so-called “teacher evaluation” tool as part of the state’s new teacher tenure law. The law contains a lot about teacher evaluation, but doesn’t detail what the evaluation would look like.

In 2011, nearly 70,000 Michigan school children who speak English as a second language had to take a special test of their English language skills. A new Michigan State University study says that test is causing unintended problems for those students.   

The English Language Proficiency Assessment is intended to identify which students may need help learning English as their second language.