Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s executive budget proposal would cut funding for schools serving some of the state’s neediest students. It would also fund preschool for all the state’s four-year-olds even though many parents have no interest in enrolling their children. Worse still, the budget fails to fix the dire state of Michigan’s K-12 education system.

The governor’s $21.2 billion School Aid Fund proposal for fiscal year 2026 would give districts a 4.1% increase to the foundation allowance, which is the state’s per-pupil minimum funding guarantee for every public school. The 2025 budget maintains the $9,608 allocation from the previous year, while the 2026 proposal would raise it to $10,000 per student. This would help narrow the funding gap between districts at opposite ends of the funding spectrum.

At the same time, the 2026 proposal would increase some funding disparities between conventional district schools and charter schools. Last year, the Legislature lowered the amount districts are required to contribute to the state’s retirement system for school employees, a decision that boosted districts’ funding by about $374 per student, on average. Charter schools, most of which do not contribute to the retirement system, received a one-time appropriation of $375 per student to offer comparable treatment.

But the current budget proposal neglects to include this same provision for charter schools. This means charter schools will effectively receive less funding per student than conventional districts. This is part of an old and unfortunate trend. Charter schools have historically had to make do with less than conventional districts. One big reason is they’re unable to raise local property taxes for facilities, repairs and construction projects like local districts can.

In Detroit, charter schools serve more than 50% of the city’s school-age children, and most of them are from disadvantaged backgrounds. Even so, they outperform their peers who are enrolled in the neighboring district schools, according to a 2023 study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University. Yet the governor’s budget would allocate fewer dollars to these students than to those enrolled in the city’s struggling conventional schools.

The funding disparity is even more pronounced for online charter schools. Students at these schools are more likely than those at conventional schools to be considered at-risk. Yet the governor would give 20% less to these schools — only $8,000 for each student enrolled. Her proposal does not seem to be grounded in a belief that online schools by their nature need less financial support: Online schools run by conventional districts would be funded at 100%, or $10,000 per student. The message this disparity sends is that students who enroll in charter schools deserve less than their peers enrolled in conventional schools.

The budget also fails to address the downward performance trend revealed by the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. Money for transparency and systems for reporting data to parents appear in the budget, but it’s unclear how those systems would differ from the public data platforms already in place. The recommendation on transparency spending is also a policy reversal for the governor, who repealed the A-F School Grades law in 2023. That, too, was an initiative designed to provide better reporting of school performance for parents.

Whitmer has not given up her attempts to expand no-fee preschool to all four-year-olds. She would spend an extra $676 million of taxpayer funds to do this. But parents, so far, aren’t buying it. Tens of thousands of eligible families are choosing not to participate in government-provided preschool, even though they could do so without paying tuition.

The 2026 budget proposal serves Michigan poorly because it would worsen funding inequalities that have historically disadvantaged charter school students. A budget that offers equal treatment of all students — regardless of the type of school they attend — and provides innovative solutions to reverse the performance trend would do much to improve education in Michigan.

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