Elementary school classroom(Photo: dolgachov, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Here's the last decade in Michigan education:

Schools are getting worse. Teachers are getting paid less. We've barely increased state education spending. We're not paying what we owe for teacher pensions and retiree health care, and aroads funding plan proposed by Lansing Republicans could make all of it worse.

It's a lot.

If you have kids in school, it's pretty clear why you should care about all of this stuff. But even if you're childfree, or your kids are grown, ifyou care about schools, education, kids, the state's ability to attract and keep businesses, all of that should be troubling.

Basically, it's better for all of us if our schools don't stink. And we can fix it but only if we're honest about what's going wrong.

Michigan teacher pay is ranked 13th highest in the nation, on average, with a trendline over the last 10 years that's at least stable.

But adjust those salaries for inflation, as the nonpartisan policy shop Citizens Research Council did in a report published last week, and the trend is very different. From 2008 to 2018, if you measure teacher payagainst the increasing costs of goods and services, teachers are actually getting paid 10% less.

The state collects taxes from across the state and distributes it to districts according to the number of students enrolled in each. That's how the state tries to equalize funding across districts.

And again, on paper, those numbers don't look so bad. During the recession, state government cut per-pupil funding, but it's been inching up since 2014.

When you adjust for inflation, the Citizens Research Council found, the state spentbarely more on schools in 2018 than it did in 2008, about 3%.

And most of that increase is paying for teacher pensions and retiree health care.

The state's teacher pension system has what's called "unfunded liabilities." In other words, it is paying out more in retirement and retiree health care benefits than it has in assets. A pension system accrues unfunded liabilities when its investments don't earn as much as expected, or when the government that supports it isn't making big enoughpayments or both.

More: Michigan schools stink because we stopped paying for them | Editorial

When that happens, the school districts that pay into the system are supposed to pay more. Districts have been doing that since former Gov. Rick Snyder reformed the teacher pension system in 2012. But making bigger pension payments means fewer of the dollars Lansing sends to local districts are making it into classrooms.

This is a problem that is not complicated to forecast: Not enough students are enrolling in teacher training programs, and baby boomer-aged teachers are approaching retirement. Shortages in critical areas, like math or special needs, have become commonplace.

Lower-income districtsgenerally feel the brunt of shortages first.

But it's only going to get worse.

At the same time, teachers have become a punching bag for some lawmakers, who point to teacher salaries, teacher pensions and teacher performance as the root of all the state's education problems, from unbalanced budgets to slipping test scores.

More: Kaffer: How Michigan is failing our teachers

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's proposed budget included a 45-cent gas tax hike, a levy that would generate sufficient funds to fix our roads, and free upmore dollars for education.

Lansing Republicans successfully fought Whitmer's proposed tax increase to a standstill, without offering any viable alternative.

But one plan proposed by GOP lawmakers would, in essence, borrow against the state's teacher pension fund: Those lawmakers say the state should borrow $10 billion, invest it, and use the proceeds from that investment to pay for part of teacher pensions and to fix the state's roads.

It's a terrible plan, for a lot of reasons expecting a stable rate of return over the lifetime of $10 billion in debt is wishful thinking, and there's likely a recession coming.

But the Citizens Research Council report highlights another problem with the GOP plan: If the investment income Republicans would rely on to pay for teacher pensions and retiree benefits dried up, school districts would be on the hook for even bigger payments, meaning even fewer dollars would be spent in the classroom.

If lawmakers would recognize a few facts:

We have to start now, to stop the worsening teacher shortage. In an essay for Forbes, contributor Peter Greene argues against using the term "teacher shortage." It implies, Greene writes, inevitability, when the reality is, students aren't training to become teachers because we have made teaching a less attractive profession. Make teaching attractive, and voila the teacher shortage will disappear.

Without more high quality teachers, our schools won't improve.

Good schools cost money. There are stacks of reports that say we're not paying enough, even in some of our most successful districts., and definitely not in those where student performance lags.

Teachers who want to be paid fairly or at least for their salaries to keep pace with inflation aren't greedy.

Mixing teacher pensions and roads is a terrible idea.

If we can't agree that it is important to improve our schools, we should probably hang it up.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.

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Why you should be worried about teacher salaries in Michigan - Detroit Free Press