Education

The state board of education, elected for an eight-year term, appoints the superintendent of public instruction, who supervises the state department of education. School attendance is compulsory from age 6 to age 16.

Father Jacques Marquette founded missions at Sault Ste. Marie and St. Ignace in 1668 and 1671 to educate the Indians. White settlers in Detroit established schools in the 1800's. John D. Pierce became the first state superintendent in the nation, in 1837, when Michigan became a state. He had been appointed in 1836. The first free, tax-supported school in the state was opened at Detroit in 1842. In 1872 the legality of using tax money to support free, public high schools was tested for the first time in a case brought before the Supreme Court of Michigan. The decision, rendered in 1874 and called the Kalamazoo Decision, legalized the use of such funds for public high schools in the state and established a national precedent.

Michigan's first normal school (for training teachers) opened in Ypsilanti in 1852, the first such institution west of the Alleghenies. It developed into what is today Eastern Michigan University.

The University of Michigan traces its origin to the Catholepistemiad, or University, of Michigania, founded at Detroit in 1817 by a group of clergymen of differing denominations. The Catholepistemiad was abclished in 1821 and the University of Michigan established by acts of the territory's legislative council. The university did not begin operating, however, until it was moved to Ann Arbor and organized as a state-supported institution in 1837. There are branch campuses at Dearborn and Flint.

Michigan State University, at East Lansing, was the nation's first agricultural college and land-grant institution. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan and offered its first post-secondary instruction in 1857. It changed its name several times before adopting the present one in 1964.