As a member of the State Board of Education, Reginald Turner has built partnerships with key stakeholders to drive constructive change in our educational system. Far too many students leave school unprepared to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  To remedy this problem, Turner and his colleagues on the Board implemented a plan to enhance our K-12 curriculum. Under this plan, Michigan has gone from simply requiring that students take a civics course before graduation, to requiring English language arts, math, science and social studies.  The plan is flexible enough to allow for subjects to be taught in a variety of ways that can be tailored to meet individual students’ needs.  The skills developed in the new curriculum are necessary for students to build bright futures for their families in a highly competitive world. The Board also adopted a plan to work with our intermediate school districts to provide more professional development for teachers, more remedial support for struggling students and their schools, and more shared services for administrative cost savings.

Turner believes that we need more accountability for universal literacy. We must expect parents, teachers and students to work together to ensure that every child is reading at grade level to provide the foundation for quality education, for employability and for active citizenship.

Turner and his colleagues on the State Board of Education are working to ensure that we have highly qualified teachers in every classroom. They have issued a moratorium on the creation of new teacher education programs until they complete a review of existing programs and adopt new standards to produce highly qualified teachers.  The Board and the State Department of Education will work closely with teacher preparation institutions and use best practices from around the world to create rigorous curricula that will prepare our teachers to improve student achievement.  Our children deserve the best teachers, and it is our job to ensure that they get them.

Turner and his colleagues on the Board also support diversity in higher education. They voted unanimously to oppose Proposal 2 because it is a poor solution for a nonexistent problem.  In the Michigan affirmative action cases the U.S. Supreme Court delicately balanced between the state’s interest in diversity and the interests of individual students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.  Proposal 2 would overturn this balance, ending gender and racial diversity programs, dividing us at a time when our economic competitiveness, our national security and our national unity require that we benefit from the diverse talents and skills of women and men of all racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.  Proposal 2 hasn’t worked elsewhere; it’s wrong for Michigan.