Above photo: Invest in MI Kids campaign representative Molly Sweeney. Michigan PTA.
Invest In Michigan Kids.
Lansing, Michigan – Corporate-backed lawyers descended on the state capital in late June in a frantic attempt to derail a popular ballot initiative that would tax the wealthiest Michiganders to fund the state’s starving public schools.
The Invest in MI Kids campaign (with the MI pronounced like “my”), an evolution of the “Babies over Billionaires” movement, arrived at a Board of State Canvassers meeting to get its 100-word petition summary approved. The measure would levy a 5% tax on annual income over $500,000 for individuals and $1,000,000 for couples, directing the revenue exclusively to the State School Aid Fund. The funds would be used to reduce class sizes, recruit and retain teachers, and bolster career and technical education.
Opponents, however, were lying in wait. Lawyers from the right-wing Heritage Foundation (the architects of Trump’s Project 2025), joined by the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the Michigan West Coast Chamber of Commerce, turned the meeting into a marathon. They spent hours nitpicking the petition’s language in a blatant effort to delay the campaign’s signature-gathering efforts.
By the end of the exhausting 10-hour day, all public comments against the Invest In MI Kids proposal had been withdrawn. In an outrageous display of bad faith, the Heritage Foundation lawyers later sent a letter complaining that not enough time was allotted for public comment.
“I think this is their atomic bomb in a lot of ways,” campaign representative Molly Sweeney told People’s World. “They want to protect anything from taxing the wealthiest folks, and they’re very afraid we’re going to get on the ballot. They’ve been trying to throw every tactic in front of us that would derail signature gathering or dissuade us.”
Permanent solution to manufactured crisis
The fierce opposition stems from the proposal’s power and permanence. The fair share surcharge is structured as a constitutional amendment, not a simple law. This would prevent a hostile administration from repealing it, or watering it down as they did with the minimum wage laws, and would require another statewide vote to remove it from the constitution.
“It is locked in there,” Sweeney explained. “It is not beholden to what those folks are doing in Lansing… We’ve seen both sides of the aisle give power over to wealthy corporations. Both sides have been bought and paid for. If we’re going to invigorate the next generations of politicians in Michigan, we want them to be folks who actually have the courage to say things like, taxing the wealthy is popular!”
The need for stable funding is dire. Michigan ranks 48th in the nation for school funding growth, a crisis manufactured by decades of austerity that began with former Gov. John Engler’s ‘Proposal A’ in 1994. That plan eliminated $6.5 billion in school taxes, creating an anti-funding environment that has plagued public education for over 30 years.
For Detroiters, this period was marked by a series of strikes by the teachers union who struggled against the austerity regime to keep the schools, and teachers, funded enough to keep the lights on.
Meanwhile, the state’s wealthy and powerful corporations have perfected methods of tax avoidance. Among the most egregious is the “Dark Store” loophole, which allows big-box retailers to slash their property taxes by claiming their bustling stores should be assessed as if they were vacant. While states like Wisconsin have closed this loophole, Michigan’s legislature has let a bill to do so, HB5865, languish in committee.
The DeVos privatization playbook
Tucked within the original Proposal A was another poison pill: the legalization of charter schools. These schools are publicly funded schools run by private interests independent of the state’s wider school system This opened the door for the privatization movement that has been bankrolled for decades by West Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos, former Secretary of Education under Trump.
“It started really with the DeVos’ in the early 90s, late 80s, trying to privatize schools. Michigan was a testing ground for a lot of those really right-wing, anti-public education folks, and they’ve been trying to get vouchers here since then,” Sweeney said.
DeVos’s main vehicles for influence have been the Mackinac Center, a right wing free-market think tank, and the Great Lakes Education Project, a political action committee. Both have been heavily funded by the DeVos family fortune.
Their goal, as People’s World has reported, is the implementation of a statewide voucher system by using public dollars to subsidize private schools and further impoverish the public education system and crush the teachers unions.
“We even saw in the last state budget, they allocated public funds to private school funding, which is unconstitutional,” campaign representative Drew Hohman told People’s World.
The road ahead
Facing this well-funded opposition, the Invest In MI Kids campaign is pushing forward. To qualify for the ballot, they must collect approximately 450,000 valid signatures within a 180-day period.
The work is being led almost entirely by volunteers in coalition with local school boards, community organizations, and teachers’ unions—a true grassroots effort to reclaim Michigan’s schools from the grip of the capitalist class.
As reported by People’s World, Detroit’s immigrant community is leading the fight against ICE abductions, which have seen even a high school student picked up and deported in spite of fervent community outcry at a Detroit Public Schools board meeting. “Some of our most active folks in this campaign are folks who are deeply impacted by immigration justice,” Sweeney said. “It’s a way to fight back.”
