Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Rethinking Public Schools - 4.11.11

There’s been speculation that Robert Bobb might possibly stay on as Emergency Financial Manager of Detroit’s Public Schools. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the evolving nature of public education.

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There’s been a flurry of speculation lately that perhaps the best choice to replace Robert Bobb as Emergency Financial Manager of the Detroit Public Schools might be ... Robert Bobb himself.

Bobb’s contract expires at the end of June. While he has faced endless financial problems, his main frustration during his two-year stint running the schools seems to have been a court decision that his powers did not extend to determining what kids actually learn.

The academic curriculum, in other words. However, that has been changed by the new Emergency Financial Manager law. Last Thursday, Bobb said in an interview with the Detroit News that he wasn’t lobbying to keep the job, but added, “I do drool when I think of the pace of change we could achieve under the new law.“

That same day, I had a wide-ranging conversation with Dteroit Mayor Dave Bing about a number of topics, including education.

He said he admires much of what Bobb had done. “He made a lot of hard decisions that had to be made, and I respect him for that. He had an impossible job from a fiscal standpoint.”

However the mayor didn’t think the emergency financial manager deserved an A. He noted that whether out of necessity or not, Bobb had alienated teachers and people in the community.

And Bing felt that it was clearly time for Bobb to go. Indeed, the governor’s office also seems to be lukewarm at best to the idea of his staying around. But the mayor said something else I found even more interesting about public education in Detroit.

What may indeed be happening is that in the future, most public education in the city will take place apart from the trouble-plagued Detroit public schools. “People are now talking about systems of education, rather than DPS,” the mayor told me.

What he meant by that was this: “There are private schools, parochial schools, charters. You know, forty percent of our kids now go to charters -- forty percent! -- and that number is only going to grow.” Charter schools, are, by the way, alternative public schools. Incidentally, even many fairly sophisticated adults don’t understand exactly what they are. They are not private in any sense.

They receive state money and have to meet statewide standards, including the use of certified teachers. Regardless of how you feel about traditional public education, it is clear that the people of Detroit have overwhelmingly rejected their school system. Mayor Bing feels that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. Or, as he put it, “if they are going to lose students out of DPS, we don’t want to lose them out of the city of Detroit.“

Detroit is a special case, but there are communities all over this state where traditional public school systems are losing popularity and the newer public schools, mostly chartered by colleges and universities, are gaining ground. Perhaps we all may need to rethink our concept of public education along these lines:

Supporting a particular school system or bureaucracy should no longer be the name of the game. Instead, we should be looking for and supporting the system of public education that best educates our kids, whatever that is, and however that may be.

Essay: Doctors With Borders - 4.1.11

Michigan is facing a medical school boom, with new ones in Oakland County and Kalamazoo on the way. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wondered how we can get the most out of this.

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I had a interesting conversation yesterday with Joe Schwarz, one of the best-informed, multi-talented men in public life in this state. After a stint as mayor of his native Battle Creek, Schwarz spent sixteen years in the state senate, where he was immensely knowledgeable on education policy and finance.

That was, of course, back in the era before term limits. Schwarz is also one of those people whose resume could fill a box. He’s also had a career in the U.S. Navy, and as a spy in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He ran for governor once and congress twice, finally winning a single term in 2004.

Schwarz’s problem was never the general election. Every time he got to one of those, he won easily. But he had trouble in Republican primaries. He is a fiscal conservative and a military hawk, but also believes in funding education, and that abortion should be “legal, safe and rare.” Nor does he always suffer fools gladly.

By the way, I didn’t mention his day job. He is an otolaryngologist, which we civilians call an ear, nose and throat surgeon, and is still happily practicing medicine.

That is, when he isn’t teaching at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Schwarz understands health care issues, and I was curious about our medical school explosion.

The U of M has a medical school; Wayne State has one; Michigan State has two; Oakland University and Beaumont Hospital have started one, and Western Michigan is now starting one.

Is that too many? Will we be producing too many doctors?

That’s a good question, the good doctor told me, but not the most important one. When all these medical schools are up and running, they’ll be producing something like six hundred and ninety doctors a year, trained largely at state expense.

If current trends continue, about half will eventually leave the state and practice elsewhere. My guess, given our situation, is that the real figure will be considerably higher.

There are areas of this state which are under-served by physicians; other places, like the rich sections of Oakland County, where doctors are thick on the ground. But the biggest problem is what the new doctors are specializing in. What’s needed most are family practitioners. These days, fewer than five percent of new doctors want to go into family practice, in large part because they make less than specialists.

Joe Schwarz has a solution for that: Michigan should offer full-ride scholarships to fifty students a year interested in family practice, or maybe pediatrics. In return, they’d agree to practice medicine in this state for at least eight years. Otherwise, they’d have to pay Michigan back the two hundred thousand or so it cost to train them.

That might cost the state five million or so a year. But it strikes me as excellent public policy, and virtually pocket change in a state that spends nearly two billion a year on prisons.

Reinventing Michigan means more than just cutting taxes; we also need to invest for the future. My guess is that Governor Snyder put some money aside for his kids’ education.

Investing in family doctors sounds to me like a good way to invest in our entire state.

Essay: Glimmers of Hope - 3.15.11

Many people have been disillusioned by our political polarization and lack of cooperation. But Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry sees some hope in those still too young to vote.

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I know we’re just a week or so away from the beginning of spring, but it’s hard right now to feel especially hopeful. It’s been a long and grinding winter, and we all know we haven’t seen the last of the snow and ice yet. And while unemployment is down, most of us know people who have been out of work, or still are.

But I can’t help but think of something inspiring that happened at the start of this winter. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan ran a high school essay contest.

Students were asked to read Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, the one that includes the famous line, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free.”

Then, they were to write about how their experiences as a part of this melting pot had defined their American identity.

The contest was sponsored by a friend of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, a humanist and community leader in the Detroit area who was tragically killed in a car accident in Morocco three years ago.

I was a friend of the rabbi, and since I supposedly know something about writing, I was asked to be the final judge. Frankly, I wasn’t too optimistic. This is a busy time of year, and for many students, reading and writing aren’t top priorities.

But I have to say, I was blown away. The ACLU asked me to pick the best two. But four were so good I insisted they honor all their authors. When I judged them, I didn’t know who the writers were. But when I met the students, I had a pleasant surprise.

The winners included a girl of Irish ancestry named Oona, and an African-American star basketball player. Plus a Muslim girl from Pakistan who intends to become a brain surgeon, and a Hindu girl who wants to be an attorney fighting for civil rights.

That young woman wrote “My differences have not made me feel like I don’t belong to this nation -- they have made me feel like an important addition to this melting pot. I think my differences make me feel even more American than I would feel if I were not an immigrant.”

Her Pakistani counterpart wrote about third grade classmates who told her September 11 “was caused by your kind.” Gradually, she realized that she could still be a proud and open Muslim because this was America: “Islam has made me who I am today, and the Bill of Rights helps protect that identity.”

The African-American young man wrote candidly that he still lives in a nation where all is still far from equal -- but added “my American identity is diverse, frustrated, proud -- and still evolving.

The most lyrical essay was that of the girl named Oona, who attends a high school with students whose native languages include Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and German.

She wrote: “We are America’s melting pot, the true national treasure. Who would have supposed this “wretched refuse would become the ones who would shape our past and dictate our future?”

“But they have.” This nation will belong to her generation before long. And I think that they just may do a better job with it than those of us who came before.

Essay: Wacky Weather - 3.11.11

This winter has been one to remember, and it isn’t over yet. But what causes extreme weather, and does this winter call the whole question of climate change into some doubt? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been doing some reading.

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You don’t need me to tell you this, but we’ve had a rough winter. Not nearly as tough as they’ve had in New York, or almost anywhere on the eastern seaboard. But it’s been cold and snowy.

How snowy? Well, in Detroit, we are already in the top dozen winters of all time, with more than sixty inches. Last month was the third snowiest February in recorded history.

But it could always be worse. If you have any interest in the weather, by the way, there’s a fascinating little book that just came out last year: Extreme Michigan Weather: The Wild World of the Great Lakes State, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Author Paul Gross is a longtime meterologist who now works for WDIV-TV in Detroit. His book looks at the strange and constantly changing weather we have in this state, or, as he puts it, everything from heat waves to bitter snows, ice storms to tornadoes to floods.

We don’t, however, have hurricanes, and his book will tell you why. (Not having any tropical ocean waters around here is a big part of it.) Ice we do have -- in abundance.

Ice and snow. But if you are feeling so tired of snow you can’t stand it, consider this. We lucked out today. Grand Rapids once got almost seven inches of snow on March 11. In Flint, it’s been as cold as seven below zero this day, which I found in Paul Gross’s book.

He includes all these tables for fun in Extreme Michigan Weather. So, just in case you were burning to know, it was once twenty below zero on this date in Ironwood.

I’m glad I wasn’t there -- though I wish today was going to match the seventy-two degrees we once hit on this date in Motown.

What has been happening is snowier winters. Five of the last nine winters have had at least sixty inches of snow. Prior to that, we had only ten such winters in more than a century. So the logical question is: Does that mean global warming is a bunch of hooey?

Not at all. I talked a few weeks ago to Professor Andrew Jorgensen at the University of Toledo. He is a chemist who has been studying climate change. He told me that one effect was hotter summers and colder winters. But with fifty years, if present trends continue, he expects our climate here to be somewhere between that of Kentucky’s and that of Arkansas.

We may feel nostalgic for winters like this if and when that happens, though this year I’ve had enough of walking a rambunctious puppy on icy sidewalks to last me a lifetime. Paul Gross’s book didn’t answer every question I’ve ever had about the weather, but he did clear up one mystery for me: What makes weather happen?

“There’s one main concept to remember,” he says. “Weather results from change and from rising air.” Works for me.

By the way, I read that sentence the other day while waiting for a meeting in Lansing, and I realized that if you substitute the word “politics” for “weather,” and make it “rising hot air”…. you’ve got a second handy definition that’s just as true as the first one.

Essay: Emergency Financial Managers - 2.24.11

The Michigan House of Representatives passed legislation making it easier to appoint emergency financial managers yesterday, and the senate is expected to follow. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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If you had any doubts about difficult the situation is for local governments these days, consider this. Even before they tackle the budget, our lawmakers in Lansing have been working hard on new emergency financial manager legislation.

Yesterday, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a package of bills designed to make it easier to appoint emergency financial managers to run troubled cities and school districts. The legislation also gives those managers broad new powers. The Senate is expected to easily approve this as well.

There was a lot of heated debate, but what was left mostly unspoken was the real reason they want this done quickly. They believe the state will have to appoint more emergency financial managers before long. Last month, state treasurer Andy Dillon said five communities may not be able to pay their employees by the end of March. And that may be only the tip of the iceberg.

The state has been appointing emergency financial managers for some time, and in some cases, with good results. There is general agreement that an EFM helped Hamtramck get back on its feet a decade ago, though the city is in trouble again now.

There are a number of them currently in place in cities that include Benton Harbor and Pontiac, and the Detroit Public Schools. But how far should their powers extend?

Robert Bobb, the EFM over Detroit’s schools, have expressed frustration that the courts have ruled his powers don’t extend to academic matters. Other people are worried, however, that the new emergency financial manager legislation will give the state too much power. Specifically, residents of troubled older cities, which tend to be heavily Democratic, fear Lansing Republicans will use this to seize power in places where they could never win it on their own.

There’s a racial element to this too. State Representative Maureen Stapleton of Detroit yesterday complained that the emergency manager law was most likely to be used in “communities of color.” Unions are, if possible, even more upset. The new legislation would allow an emergency financial manager to void labor contracts, require competitive bidding and strip local officials of virtually all their power.

All this passed the house on an essentially party-line vote yesterday. The bill’s supporters say color and politics don’t have anything to do with it. They say this is about nipping crises in the bud.

In fact, the legislation’s main sponsor, Republican Al Pscholka of Stevensville, said we should see this as “tough love” designed to encourage communities to make the difficult choices necessary to avoid a state takeover.

However, this could have the opposite effect. Rather than take the heat for tough decisions, local authorities may throw up their hands and ask for a financial manager to do the dirty work.

That’s already happened in Pontiac. Sadly, these bills are probably largely necessary. That doesn’t mean this legislation is perfect. A Democratic lawmaker from Oakland County named Lisa Brown had some legitimate criticism. She noted that some communities have been driven to the brink partly because they’ve been denied adequate revenue sharing and school aid.

The lawmakers, she said, “need to take responsibility for what you do in this room.” That’s good advice for all of us in these times.

Essay: State of Detroit - 2.23.11

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing gave his state of the city address last night. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks it can all be summed up in the words of an ancient rock n’roll song.

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You may think I am a little crazy, but while I was listening to Mayor Dave Bing’s State of the City address last night, what kept running through my head was an ancient rock and roll song.

An early hit called Chantilly Lace, by a now half-forgotten artist called the Big Bopper, whose main claim to fame is dying in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly more than half a century ago.

That song features a poor guy who keeps telling his girlfriend that he‘d like to do all sorts of things, except for one problem: “I ain’t got no money, honey.” Which is actually a pretty concise statement of the problem. Actually, that pretty much sums up the situation in all Michigan, with Detroit being an especially acute case.

Seventy miles away in Lansing, lawmakers spent the daylight hours yesterday considering Governor Rick Snyder’s proposed spending cuts. There’s a three percent cut to Community Health Programs. A forty percent cut to graduate medical education. Cuts to revenue sharing, cuts to schools, cuts that will affect Detroit and other cities like a blow falling on a bruise.

Some legislators raised objections.

They spoke of the pain this would cause, and the long-term damage it would do to people and the state itself. But the answers from the administration were variations on the Big Bopper’s theme. In nuanced, professional and bureaucratic words, they told lawmakers like Detroit’s Rashida Tlaib, “We ain’t got no money, honey.”

There’s little doubt in anybody’s mind of that. Then last night, the mayor took the stage at the Max Fisher Music Hall. The venue itself was ironically symbolic. To get inside, you had to cross a picket line supporting musicians from now what may be the former Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The season was finally canceled last weekend after a long strike. And frankly, it isn’t clear to me if Detroit will ever have a symphony again. Incidentally, both sides agreed that the musicians would have to take a massive pay cut. The impasse was over how massive. This is no longer Walter Reuther’s Detroit.

The mayor, in keeping with the kind of man he is, gave a dignified speech, as optimistic as he could honestly be. “We are a work in progress,” he said. It made me wonder how different things might be had Bing succeeded Dennis Archer, another honest and intelligent man, in 2002. But instead, Detroit had to endure six years of plunder. Mayor Bing said he believes his city has turned a corner. In one sense, that is true. It is no longer a government of thieves.

But neither is it one that can balance its books, and the governor’s budget makes things that much harder. As the mayor said, with the governor in the audience, the budget “has potentially devastating consequences for Detroit. It threatens the fragile gains we have made, and we simply can‘t afford it.”

It’s easy to imagine the governor giving him the Big Bopper’s answer. Elsewhere in Lansing yesterday, other lawmakers toiled away on new Emergency Financial Manager legislation.

Everybody expects Michigan is going to see a lot more of these. Whether one will someday be in charge of Detroit is something no one yet wants to try to say.

Essay: Sins of the Fathers - 2.22.11

The state of Michigan has ordered Detroit public schools to adopt a deficit-reduction plan that will result in an average class size of more than sixty students. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what this really means.

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Something happened this week which will, unless something changes soon, have the effect of finishing the job of effectively destroying the Detroit public schools. And maybe, Michigan’s future.

The state department of education has ordered Detroit to put in place a financial restructuring plan that would close half the district’s schools within two years. That would result in an average high school class size of sixty-two students.

That would make anything resembling education all but impossible. As a conservative columnist for The Detroit News said recently, that’s not a classroom, that’s a holding pen.

Detroit’s schools have been dying for a long time. Parents who care about their children‘s future have been fleeing the district in droves. Back in 1999, they still had 175,000 students. This fall, that had shrunk to seventy-four thousand. That’s a loss of nearly ten thousand a year. The district is expected to lose another sixteen thousand over the next three years.

What happens to the students who are then left is anybody’s guess, but it won’t really be education. Not a lot of education seems to be happening now. Fewer than half graduate from high school,, and many of those who do get diplomas are barely literate. Whose fault it is that the Detroit schools are in such a state has been argued over endlessly. But what baffles me is that the rest of us don’t feel compelled to do something about it, both out of human compassion and sheer self-preservation.

Think about this. Detroit is being populated with hundreds of thousands of desperate young people who are not going to be employable at any conceivable legal, twenty-first century job.

How can that be good for our state? How can that leave the rich people in the Grosse Pointes, some of whom live only blocks from urban squalor, feeling secure?

We live, sadly, in two worlds in this country: The white world and the black one. Several weeks ago, I talked about how the West Germans pitched in and spent billions to build up East Berlin after Communism fell and the wall came down.

I said it was baffling that we weren’t willing to do that here. I immediately heard from an elderly white woman I know. “Tain’t baffling,“ she said. All Germans were white.

Incidentally, this woman is about at politically liberal as they come. She lived and worked in the city until about a year ago, when the sheer cost and difficulty got to be too much.

Now, deeply pessimistic, she worries that the answer to Rodney King’s famous question -- can’t we all just get along -- might be no, primarily because of the way white Americans treated black Americans for generations after slavery -- “brutalizing and ghettoizing them and keeping them in “separate but equal ignorance.“

That, she fears, as led to hatred and rejection of our culture on the part of much of black America, and a lack of interest on the part of white America in whatever happens to blacks.

“Politically incorrect?“ she said. Perhaps. But true, nevertheless. I don’t claim to be a sociologist or an economist, but I do know this. That unless we solve the problem of Detroit, Michigan has no chance of serious prosperity in any scenario we can foresee.

Essay: The Budget - 2.17.11

Governor Snyder presented his budget today, and people were stunned and surprised. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks they shouldn’t be.

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Well, the governor’s budget has landed, and people are shocked. They shouldn’t be. This is what we bargained for. This budget is, in part, a legacy of the last thirty years.

Starting with Ronald Reagan, we’ve been told repeatedly that taxes were bad. Not that they were sometimes too high, but that they were bad, period. So we cut them, and cut them again.

However, we didn‘t want to give up any of our precious services, and our politicians were afraid to ask us to sacrifice. We could have avoided huge pain now by sacrificing moderately years ago. Sort of like brushing your teeth so you don‘t get cavities.

But we were addicted to sugar, and didn‘t want to pay for dental insurance. So, it’s now multiple root canal time, and we are going to pay out of pocket. What‘s worse, the state and the nation are out of laughing gas.

Governor Snyder is a businessman, and thinks our best hope for the future is slashing business taxes in an effort to attract jobs and job creators. To his credit, he said so when he was running. The Democrats really failed to articulate an alternative.

We’ve known that there was this enormous deficit, and that the budget had to be balanced. For years, we’ve had a governor and a legislature who tried to ignore the laws of arithmetic. They knew there wasn’t enough money coming in, and that a day like this would come.

However, they also knew they were term-limited, and could avoid responsibility by stalling. So they used up our reserves and pushed the problem down the road. When President Obama gave the states stimulus money to invest in the future, Michigan’s lawmakers just threw it at the deficit.

That is not what they should have done. They should have raised the state income tax on people like me who are still working, perhaps from the present 4.35 percent to 5.5 percent or so. We would have barely noticed it, and today the state would be much better off. I still think they should do that, instead of much of what Governor Snyder is going to do instead.

But we’ve been told that “taxes are bad,” so often that we believe it. So our roads are crumbling and our schools are falling apart, and we’d evidently rather have that than raise taxes.

However, bills come due. Most of us will pay more taxes now of one kind or another, including those who can’t afford it. The budget ends tax credits for lower-income Michiganders, and taxes both private and public pensions. This governor evidently believes that government shouldn’t try to pick winners or do social engineering in the marketplace, so tax credits for things like battery development, the film industry and brownfield reclamation will end.

He’s also going to slash spending for schools and universities, gambling that this won’t destroy the next generation’s prospects for the future. The legislature will certainly quarrel with some of this, but I haven’t seen anyone offering an alternative.

You get what you pay for, but in the end, you do have to pay. We weren’t willing to pay for years, and now, we largely can’t.

That’s what got Michigan to this budget today.

Essay: The Agony of the Detroit Public Schools - 2.10.11

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is asking the legislature to guarantee an earlier loan. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks there’s a bigger problem here.

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Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, came to Lansing yesterday to ask for something he has to know he’s probably never going to get.

He wants the legislature to give what amounts to a loan guarantee to the company that insured the schools’ last round of borrowing. If that firm, Assured Guaranty Municipal Corporation, doesn’t get that assurance, it may block the schools from borrowing more money? Why? Because it worries DPS will go bankrupt.

Which would leave Assured Guaranty holding the bag. And it’s a pretty unpleasant bag, The schools are hemorrhaging money and students. Bobb came in two years ago, full of confident promises to eliminate the deficit. But it has only gotten worse.

Assured Guaranty insured a loan for a little over a quarter of a billion dollars the schools borrowed in 2005. Now, the schools need more. They have a new deficit of $327 million dollars.

That’s more than half their entire general fund budget. To make ends meet, Bobb says he needs to borrow $219 million next month.

He wants the legislature to help him get it. But lawmakers were skeptical at best. Bobb, whose time as Emergency Financial Manager ends in June, assured them that the district has no plans to file for bankruptcy. But that, of course, is what the chairman of General Motors said, right up until the time they filed for bankruptcy.

Senator Bert Johnson told reporters he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of any one company being entitled to extra protection.

“I think you’ve got to question if it’s a prudent move,“ he said. Johnson added that the lawmakers were sure to demand, quote “some serious accountability.” Robert Bobb “has got to prove the merit of his proposal.” Senator Johnson, who said those words, is a Detroit Democrat. If he feels that way, just imagine what the reaction is likely to be from the outstate Republicans who run the legislature.

The sad fact is that despite his best efforts, Robert Bobb has failed in his efforts to turn the schools around. So far as I can tell, he did reduce corruption, close buildings and cut costs where he could.

But the disaster was too far advanced. The schools are continuing to lose thousands of students a year, which means a loss of millions of badly needed dollars from the state.

Detroit’s Public Schools continue to be hit with almost daily scandals. Today, one Detroit newspaper is exposing an illegal grade-changing scheme. The other paper is writing about a Detroit high school basketball coach who was arrested for allegedly selling heroin on the side.

America is a nation that became great in large part because of our tradition of public schools. But common sense has to conclude that this model just doesn’t work in Detroit anymore.

Nolan Finley, the Detroit News’s editorial page editor, has urged the governor to dismantle the district, to instead oversee a portfolio or schools run by independent contractors.

That may sound like libertarian theory. But increasingly, it seems like it might be worth a try. The schools themselves don’t matter, after all. The children do. Their future, and that of our state and society, depends entirely on their getting an education.

By any means necessary.

Essay: Save the Children - 2.8.11

The annual Kids Count report on the well-being of Michigan’s children was released today. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says it sends a clear message about our state’s future.

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We could argue endlessly over who is responsible for the state of Michigan’s economy. Some people blame globalization. Others, the short-sightedness of the domestic automakers. Some say, Jennifer Granholm‘s failure to lead.

Some say it was the callous selfishness of the Republican Party, and on and on. But one thing is clear: today’s toddlers aren’t to blame. Neither is any child. They didn’t make the policies or the mistakes. But they are suffering as a result of them.

That’s not only unfair to them, but sabotages all of our futures, and that of Michigan. If we live long enough, our destinies will all be in the hands of people much younger than us. And right now, we aren’t serving them well. Certainly not well enough.

That’s the clear message emerging from a document released today, The Kids Count Data Book. This is an annual, joint project of two non-partisan, non-profit institutions, the century-old Michigan League for Human Services, and the newer Michigan’s Children.

Jack Kresnak, a longtime newspaper reporter who left journalism to run Michigan’s Children a few years ago, had this to say about it: “We have more kids living in poverty, more kids being abused and neglected, and almost a third of all babies receiving less than adequate prenatal care.”

That ought to worry you, even if you have the heart of Scrooge, because all that is a blow to the future prosperity of our state.

Why does prenatal care matter? Because mothers who don’t get it are far more likely to have babies who have physical and developmental disabilities. This stunts their potential, and has an astronomical cost to all of us.

Remarkably, there are still a lot of so-called intelligent adults who still don’t get that. Fortunately, Governor Rick Snyder clearly does. During his State of the State message, he called for what he called a P-20 council that would do everything it could to make sure Michigan help educate children even before they were born.

Experts have long known that if children’s needs aren’t met and their minds stimulated from birth, by the time they get to school, it is too late. Yet that night one of the commentators on Detroit television, a former football broadcaster, ridiculed the governor for advocating prenatal care.

Evidently, he didn’t read the playbook. According to a study cited by Michigan’s Children, every dollar invested in high quality early childhood care and education services produces a return to society of more than seventeen times that amount.

Not all of the news in the new Kids Count book is bad. Fewer teenagers are having babies. A smaller percentage seem to be dropping out of high school.

But most indicators are very grim -- and show that the recession has clearly taken its toll, especially on minority kids.

The report’s conclusion, backed by hard evidence is that Michigan isn’t responding to the needs of children and their families.

Nationally, we’ve lost ground on child well-being, both absolutely and when compared to other states.

There are those who say we can’t afford to do any better right now. But the truth is that if we don’t take care of our children, there won’t be much point in worrying about Michigan’s future.

We just won’t have one.