Mitchell Robinson
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2023 - Present
2031
2
Mitchell Robinson (Democratic Party) is an at-large member of the Michigan State Board of Education. He assumed office on January 1, 2023. His current term ends on January 1, 2031.
Robinson (Democratic Party) ran for election for an at-large seat of the Michigan State Board of Education. He won in the general election on November 8, 2022.
Robinson completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Mitchell Robinson was born in Kenmore, New York. Robinson graduated from Grand Island High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in music education and music performance from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980, a graduate degree in music education from the University of Hartford in 1983, and a Ph.D. in music teacher education from the Eastman School of Music in 1999. His career experience includes working as an associate professor with Michigan State University, the University of Connecticut, and the Eastman School of Music.[1][2]
Elections
2022
See also: Michigan State Board of Education election, 2022
General election
General election for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
The following candidates ran in the general election for Michigan State Board of Education on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Pamela Pugh (D) | 25.2 | 2,068,706 |
| ✔ | Mitchell Robinson (D)  | 24.2 | 1,989,022 | |
 | Tami Carlone (R) | 23.3 | 1,914,330 | |
 | Linda Lee Tarver (R) | 22.8 | 1,873,715 | |
 | Mary Anne Hering (Working Class Party) | 1.7 | 135,789 | |
 | Donna Gundle-Krieg (L) | 1.1 | 87,353 | |
| Bill Hall (L) | 1.1 | 87,316 | ||
 | Ethan Hobson (U.S. Taxpayers Party) | 0.6 | 48,248 | |
| Total votes: 8,204,479 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Democratic convention
Democratic convention for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
Incumbent Pamela Pugh and Mitchell Robinson advanced from the Democratic convention for Michigan State Board of Education on August 21, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Pamela Pugh (D) |
| ✔ | Mitchell Robinson (D) | |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican convention
Republican convention for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
Tami Carlone and Linda Lee Tarver advanced from the Republican convention for Michigan State Board of Education on August 27, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Tami Carlone (R) |
| ✔ | | Linda Lee Tarver (R) |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Libertarian convention
Libertarian convention for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
Donna Gundle-Krieg and Bill Hall advanced from the Libertarian convention for Michigan State Board of Education on July 10, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Donna Gundle-Krieg (L) |
| ✔ | Bill Hall (L) | |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
U.S. Taxpayers Party convention
U.S. Taxpayers Party convention for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
Ethan Hobson advanced from the U.S. Taxpayers Party convention for Michigan State Board of Education on July 23, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Ethan Hobson (U.S. Taxpayers Party) |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Working Class Party convention
Working Class Party convention for Michigan State Board of Education (2 seats)
Mary Anne Hering advanced from the Working Class Party convention for Michigan State Board of Education on June 26, 2022.
Candidate | ||
| ✔ | | Mary Anne Hering (Working Class Party) |
| ||||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign finance
Endorsements
To view Robinson's endorsements in the 2022 election, please click here.
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Mitchell Robinson completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Robinson's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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- Strengthening public institutions, like our public schools
- Providing a high-quality education for all children, not just those who grow up in the suburbs
- Defending our colleagues in the schools who are doing tremendous work under very difficult conditions
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Campaign website
Robinson’s campaign website stated the following:
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Responsibility for education is a local concern, and the strongest schools are those governed by elected school boards that are responsible to the citizens of their communities. It is no coincidence that every instance of “mayoral control” or “emergency management” of schools in our state has taken place in communities in which the majority of students were black and brown.
I’ll finish up here with a quote from one of my education heroes, Dr. Elliott Eisner: Our schools, teachers, and students might be a lot better off if schools embraced the idea that education means learning what to do when you don’t know what to do. This, to me, is the great power and promise of public education—because, when our schools are functioning well, they can provide the means for our students to figure out what to do when they don’t know what to do. And that should be what we want for all of our children.
Vouchers are overwhelmingly unpopular with voters, contribute to school segregation, don’t help poor families attend the “school of their choice,” and the most recent research on vouchers suggests that the students who use them perform worse academically than their peers in public schools. Betsy DeVos and other voucher advocates have begun using terms like “education tax credits,” “education debit cards,” and “neovouchers” to try to throw citizens off the scent of their true intentions. In Florida, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program offers a neat end-around to avoid the impression that tax dollars are going to subsidize private and religious school tuition–which is exactly what the program does. In essence, the Florida Tax Credit program is a state-sanctioned money laundering scheme. Knowing that citizens would object, as they have in the past in the state, to the idea of public tax revenues going to support private institutions, former Gov. Jeb Bush and his friends in the “ed reform” movement devised a scheme in which tax revenues that were slated to be deposited in state coffers–such as corporate income taxes–could be redirected as “donations” to private and religious school scholarships. In exchange, the corporation making the donation receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit–a win-win for the corporation, and a lose-lose for the state’s public schools.
Testing can be an excellent way for teachers to learn more about what their students know and can do, and to improve their own practice in the classroom. But for these things to happen, testing needs to be the responsibility of the teacher—not multinational corporations whose agendas focus more on market share and profits than on children, teachers, and learning. If we are going to use data to evaluate what our students know and how well our teachers are meeting students’ needs—and I believe we should—then that data must be appropriate and meaningful: the data must be discipline specific, should not be the only part of the evaluation process, and the use of school-wide data (standardized test scores in math and reading, VAM) should be avoided. We also need to understand that in-school factors only account for around 10% of the differences in student achievement results, with out-of-school factors being responsible for over 70% of these differences. In other words, if we are really interested in making changes in student learning outcomes, focusing on rooting out “bad teachers” by the use of standardized test scores is the equivalent of tinkering with the placement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to address the root causes of the problems with student learning, which have more to do with out-of-school factors such as systemic child poverty, food insecurity, and access and exposure to books, technology, the arts and culture, and travel—all of which are strongly related to socio-economic levels and poverty.
Charter schools are technically public schools, so should be expected to follow the same regulations regarding transparency as all publicly-funded schools are expected to follow. That said, while the original notion of charter schools as “laboratories of innovation” came from teachers unions, that original purpose has now been lost; lost to predatory charter management organizations, education “reformers,” and politically-motivated special interest groups. After studying the effects of the proliferation of charter schools in Michigan over the last 10+ years, I see no evidence of “innovation” in the charter sector, and would support not only a moratorium on the approval of new charters, but much stricter oversight and accountability measures for existing charter schools. Charters tend to pay teachers less, pay administrators more, remove local control of neighborhood schools, and provide a fertile ground for financial mismanagement, fraud, and more.
I have published a number of scholarly articles on the issue of high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE), and would suggest the following: There are serious issues associated with using statistical models, such as value-added measures (VAM) to make high-stakes decisions on teachers and schools. It is worth noting that the American Statistical Association, and numerous other professional societies and organizations, have issued position statements condemning the use of high-stakes teacher evaluation systems in general, and the use of VAM in these systems specifically—and yet Merryl Tisch, former Chancellor of the NYS Board of Regents, recently came out in favor of increasing the use of VAM in the New York’s teacher evaluation system. Its almost as though policy makers don’t care whether or not the approaches they are using are valid or not, and are simply designing tools to get rid of veteran teachers. So, what should we do? What kinds of evidence make the most sense for use in the evaluation of teachers? Acceptable Forms of Evidence Standardized test scores—NO State exams—BETTER District/locally-developed assessments—BEST Recommendations:
As a teacher educator, I believe the minimum level of educational attainment and qualification for beginning teachers should be a bachelors degree and initial teacher certification as granted by the state in which they are employed. I am all for making teacher credentials more “portable,” and streamlining reciprocity requirements between states. Our children deserve committed, dedicated, highly-qualified professionals—not lightly-trained and uncertified “edutourists” who spend a year or two in the classroom, and then use that experience as resume fodder for positions as congressional interns, entrance to law school, or jobs at ed reform “think tanks”. The current teacher shortage is no excuse to lower the qualifications needed to become a teacher in our state’s schools—rather, we need to see this as an opportunity to address the underlying causes for that slow motion exodus of professionals out of the classroom by improving salaries and working conditions for public school teachers.
While virtual/online schools may provide an option for some students, I think that one of the takeaways from two years of “emergency” teaching during the Covid pandemic was the failure of online learning for most children. For me, education is about the development of relationships—between teachers and students, and among learners. Those relationships are best nurtured in classrooms, face to face. Virtual learning is a pale imitation of in-person learning.[3] |
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| —Mitchell Robinson ’s campaign website (2022)[4] | ||
See also
| Michigan | State Executive Elections | News and Analysis |
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External links
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Candidate Michigan State Board of Education |
Officeholder Michigan State Board of Education |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on June 6, 2022
- ↑ LinkedIn, "Mitchell Robinson," accessed December 5, 2022
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Mitchell Robinson ’s campaign website, “ On the Issues,” accessed October 20, 2022
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