State after state gave families more freedom to choose their children’s schools last year. This school choice revolution is empowering families to hold poor-performing schools accountable and put their sons and daughters on a better path. Yet Michigan , where I live, is deliberately stifling educational accountability.

I am the parent of two children, as well as a former teacher and administrator, and few things frighten me more.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and her allies in the legislature, fresh off capturing both the state House and Senate for the first time since the 1980s, have systematically rolled back reforms designed to help parents and improve students’ education.

One example came in May, when Whitmer repealed a law that created an A-F grade-ranking system for every public school in the state. Michigan created this system in 2018 because parents deserve to know if the public school down the street provides a quality education — or not. The grading system assessed schools’ performance on a host of measures , including student proficiency, learning growth, graduation rate, performance among competing schools, and other indicators. Parents can compare schools in an easy-to-use searchable database.

Since Michigan allows families to send their children to any school in their district as well as to some in neighboring districts, the grades are essential to making the right choice. Why send your 6-year-old daughter to an elementary school with mostly D's and F's when a school 10 minutes further away gets mostly A's and B's?

Repealing this commonsense law makes it harder for parents to know if schools are doing a poor job teaching students. Whitmer says parents still have access to all the information they need since the state still offers a so-called Index System . But the Index System requires a flowchart and a 32-page user guide to navigate, making it difficult for the average person to evaluate the data about a school’s performance.

It gets worse.

In March, Whitmer repealed the state’s requirement that students who can’t read by the end of third grade get held back. She’s ignoring the reality that students who can’t read at that point will struggle for the rest of their education.

Already, literacy rates in Michigan are abysmal. A third of third graders can’t read. This problem is exacerbated in low-income districts such as Detroit, where only 5% of eighth graders can read at a proficient level. Rather than holding schools accountable for this basic function of education, the governor has made it easier for children to fall through the cracks and lag behind.

And just a few weeks ago, Whitmer signed a new law that fundamentally weakens teacher evaluations. Currently, student test scores play a significant role in evaluations. If most of a class is falling short, the teacher will be docked points.

Once this law goes into effect, however, teachers will no longer be held accountable for their students’ academic achievement. Instead, a couple of 15-minute classroom visits by an administrator will suffice to assess the teacher’s impact on student learning. And instead of four evaluation categories, there will only be three. But if an administrator neglects to evaluate a teacher’s performance, the teacher’s score for that year defaults to “effective,” the highest rating a teacher will be able to receive.

It should be noted that many schools are not providing realistic ratings even under the current policy. In the last three years, 99% of teachers in the state received an effective or highly effective rating despite a sharp decline in test scores. But rather than looking for ways to reform, the legislature has decided to give unions the power to bargain over how and when teachers get evaluated. The governor signed a different bill in July that will end any hope of creating a more robust accountability system. Instead, districts will likely revert to policies where seniority determines teacher placement and firing decisions.

This accountability apocalypse couldn’t come at a worse time. In 2022, Michigan ranked 43rd in the nation for fourth grade reading on the National Association of Educational Procurement assessment. These scores plummeted during the pandemic and fell at a faster rate than the national average. And the latest M-STEP scores in reading and math remain below pre-pandemic scores in third grade through seventh.

Meanwhile, colleges are doing a lot of remedial education because of K-12 failures, and businesses are often picking between candidates who didn’t receive the education they needed to succeed in the workforce. These policy changes will make all these challenges worse while making Michigan a less attractive place to raise a family.

As someone who recently moved to Michigan, this is incredibly depressing. And considering I spent 18 years forming young minds in the classroom, as well as 16 years and counting helping educate my own children, my heart goes out to all the families that will suffer from this backsliding.

We deserve the same kind of school choice that’s sweeping so many other states. Instead, our politicians are making the schools we have worse.

Molly Macek is the director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute in Midland, Michigan.