Michigan school funding tops inflation since before the pandemic

Funding for public schools in Michigan has grown faster than inflation since before the pandemic.

Yet some school teachers, like Amanda Walker of Bay City Schools, have said that schools are being defunded. Walker is vice president of her district’s chapter of the Michigan Education Association.

“I do think there’s been a concerted effort to dismantle public education by defunding, by diverting funds to private schools, by tearing down teachers and accusing them of all sorts of nonsense. People see it, and they feel it, and they don’t like it," Walker told an MEA news publication recently.

It can feel that way at school districts such as Bay City, where the student count dropped 16% between 2018-19 and 2025-26, according to MiSchoolData.org. Fewer students means less in per-pupil funding.

The Bay City school district’s funding from the state has decreased once inflation is factored in, dropping from an inflation-adjusted $71.84 million in 2018-19 to $62.7 million in 2025-26.

The district responded to the enrollment drop by reducing its full-time staff 6.4% over that period.

General fund revenues stood at $10,323 per student for the Bay City district in the 2018-19. That amount increased to $14,909 per student for 2024-25, according to the Michigan Department of Education’s 1014 Bulletin for each year.

Statewide, school funding (local, state and federal dollars) increased from $19.31 billion in 2018-19 to $21.28 billion in 2025-26 on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to the Senate Fiscal Agency. School funding, boosted at first by the federal government’s emergency measures during the pandemic, has reached record levels in the post-COVID-19 era.

Tim Golding, state director of Americans for Prosperity-Michigan, disputed the idea that public schools have lost money to private schools.

"And not one dollar (of state money) can legally go to a private school under our constitution. That's not defunding," Golding said in a statement to Michigan Capitol Confidential. “The real question is why record spending has left us 44th in the nation for public education, with only a quarter of our fourth graders reading proficiently and why the MEA would rather blame something that isn't happening rather than answer for it.”

Education Trust-Midwest reported last year that Michigan was 44th among the states for fourth grade reading.

U.S. News & World Report had Michigan at 45th overall in education in the U.S.