The nonprofit Institute for Education Reform, to be housed at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, will focus on helping school districts that struggle with low test scores and other problems to improve.
"The Institute will draw upon the tremendous accomplishments of Oak Park Schools and other education innovations to provide a statewide resource for 'at-risk' schools interested in achieving success," Engler said at a news conference at Key Elementary School in Oak Park.
Engler didn't help plan the institute, and the state will be just one of several partners involved in it, along with Consumers Energy, EMU, the EMU Foundation and other business leaders.
But the governor wanted to highlight the facility as a "center of excellence" that school districts could go to to avoid being taken over by the state, a highly controversial proposal Engler announced in January.
Districts deemed academically bankrupt, or fearing they could become so, could voluntarily contract with the institute and solve their problems without state oversight, Engler spokesperson John Truscott told the Detroit Free Press for a story yesterday.
"The governor said all along, it's not his goal to take over districts," Truscott said. "It's his goal to improve districts. But if all else fails, we can't just ignore the students in those districts that aren't improving."
In its efforts to help schools, the institute will use the same 16-step improvement plan developed and used in Oak Park, as well as in Albion, Saginaw and Muskegon Heights, by the Oak Park Education Initiative.
That group started five years ago when Paul Elbert, chief operating office of Consumers Energy, decided the state's largest utility needed to do something more than give money to help boost Michigan's public schools.
He and John Porter, a former state schools chief and EMU president who now heads the Urban Education Alliance at EMU, met and realized they both believed precise and frequent measurement is the key to performance.
So Consumers hired Porter to put a recovery plan in place in the four districts.
In 1992, five of every six of Oak Park's students failed the annual Michigan Educational Assessment Program tests in fourth- and seventh-grade math and reading.
Porter and the district, along with Consumers Energy personnel, gathered nearly 100 residents to set down a vision for the schools. They wrote 33 goals, including raising student attendance from 88 percent daily to 94 percent and helping 75 percent of students earn satisfactory MEAP scores.