Curtis Lewis believes Michigan’s education system can change to better serve students, but it might take thinking outside the box and a little bit of experimentation.
Lewis, 47, an assistant professor of teacher education at Michigan State University, has spent decades inside the education system. He got his start as a teacher in Lansing, where he taught elementary, middle and alternative education. He taught incarcerated teens at the Ingham County Detention Center. He was asked to run a program for students who were expelled from their district so they could still earn credits and graduate on time when their expulsion was over.
Those experiences, along with his own time as a student in Chicago, taught him just how “screwed up” parts of the education system were, he said…