Tag: DPS (page 2)

Given some recent examples of charter school performance versus public school performance.

The remainder of the scores are identical.  Follow the image to a more complete representation. (PDF)

I have suggested before that schools be contracted out for the sake of the children.  Don't teach the kids? Don't get paid.

"The best way for Detroit to clean up that mess, is to kick ALL the teachers, employees, and management in the Detroit schools to the curb.  Then open contracts and bidding for the purchase or rental of the school buildings and resources."

Its not the lack of material that causes this, but rather a question of "where should I start?"  An article that has been written and re-written by me for the last month is one that addresses the Detroit schools problem.  Namely its inability to educate the kids, and then do so within a particular financial framework.

Something we outstaters call a budget.

PJ TV has a video released today worth watching.  from the introduction:

Detroit has been controlled by liberals for years, but close to half of the people living there are functionally illiterate. Even more surprisingly, Detroit had a Public School Board President who had difficulty writing coherently.

Of course one might think this is old news as the 'old news' cycle goes.  One might have been banging one's head too long over Otis' written word issues.  Detroit STILL has a failed system.  It has a new emergency manager in who thinks carefully slicing away with a scalpel is the cure for an unbelievably cancerous patient, when all that will be accomplished is a painful biopsy at best.

The City of Detroit is literally in ruins, but not quite there financially yet (h/t to CS). You would think that the opposite would be true, but I'm not quite sure how they managed to pull this off.

Their educational system is roughly in the same boat at local government.

Parents who are able, are pulling out their children en masse (and now burdening surrounding school systems who now have to deal with students who aren't accustomed to something called standards and outcomes).

That mass exodus is causing a massive hit on DPS's bottom line.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...

Detroit schools apparently have some gaping holes to fill, and they would like to do it with money that the state doesn't have yet. So to make ALL schools feel like they have failed as badly as the best laid liberal plans in Detroit, they have proposed using $400,000,000.00 in [future] tobacco settlement money to plug a couple hundred million of that leak. From the Detroit news:

Rep. Fred Durhal, D-Detroit, sponsored the legislation in response to a request by Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools.

In an interview Monday with The Detroit News Editorial Board, Bobb said the district was asking for money from the state's settlement with tobacco companies to alleviate DPS' $327 million deficit. In return for the aid, DPS and other districts would implement reforms based on the federal Race to the Top initiative.

How long has it been since the average Detroit Public School graduate measured up to national academic standards? Further, how long has it been since Detroit's graduation rate itself measured up to national standards?

Most of the cream of the crop (that is, students with involved parents that will not accept failure from their children) long ago were removed from DPS. Whole families moved out of district to avoid the DPS while still others did whatever they could to afford a private education.

While there remains many good students and many more potentially good students at the mercy of a DPS classroom, these students are handicapped by block headed teachers' unions worried more about their benefits and pay, knuckle headed administrators worried more about power and territory, and boneheaded vendors and money changers more worried about heavy wallets.

With a state budget $1.8 billion in the red and federal stimulus cash disappearing faster than Vanilla Ice (and leaving just as unpleasant a memory) I'm willing to listen to just about any kind of plan to shake up the status quo in Lansing.  

When the Michigan Education Association lambasted Dillon I was that much more prone to agree with the man.  When Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Cox several days ago supportively praised Dillon's concept I became that much more encouraged by the possibility of bipartisan cooperation and real "change."

This morning, personally, I'm chalking up one more notch on the PRO side of the ledger... spite.  Pure, unadulterated, spite.  

Booth Newspapers reported late yesterday that Governor Jennifer Granholm hates Dillon's idea because, apparently, it is a difficult political issue.  And if that doesn't make you want to find the nearest Granholm apologist and shake him firmly you're a better, more balanced person than me.

"The concern that I have is that this plan is not something that would save money in the budget year we are negotiating or the budget year afterward," Granholm said. "The timing of this is challenging."

Um, hello?  McFly?  McFlyyyy?  Anybody home McFly?  A $1.8 billion CHRONIC budget deficit, a nation's worst 15.2 percent unemployment rate and already a half-million one-time-residents exported to other states... those issues are challenging.  "Timing" has got freaking nothing on the economy the Governor, her number two John Cherry and Dillon himself have done their best over the last half-decade to permanently cripple.  

The "timing is challenging?"  Are you kidding me?  Madame Governor... look around this state!  You're worried that the timing is challenging?  The timing is challenging.  Lamest excuses in the history of lame excuses.  Add that one to the lame excuse hall of fame right alongside "the dog ate my homework" and "I have to wash my hair."

Read on...

Yesterday while the President was turning a long-planned town hall meeting with Macomb County moms and dads into an invitation only speech for Democratic Party donors and big-wigs about Community Colleges a little dose of that "yes we can" attitude was force-fed into the southeast Michigan atmosphere.

If only it'd filtered south a few miles and made it's way into the D, where Robert Bobb has been waging a one-man war with the entrenched Democratic Party education bureaucracy in an effort to turn around one of the most maligned public school districts in the nation.  And the man has been getting things done.

His reward from the all-Dem Detroit Public School board?  A lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop him in his tracks.  The Detroit News:

"We have no problem working with him, but we have a problem with him working around us, (said board President Carla Scott). You can't do something without discussing it with us. You don't have a right to set the policy."

Last week, Gov. Jennifer Granholm's spokeswoman said Bobb, whom the governor appointed earlier this year, is not overstepping his role with the district. Granholm gave him a very difficult job of turning around the district, and he doesn't need to be micromanaged, Liz Boyd said.

Apparently Ms. Scott and the rest of the board (which voted unanimously to take the man to court) didn't get Ms. Boyd's message.  And while I fully understand there is ZERO chance the Governor will actually defend her appointee against elected Democrats in public, at least we've got last week's statement to keep us warm at night.

Not that I wouldn't trade those warm fuzzies for a bit of common sense at DPS.  Let the man do his job cleaning up your mess, Madame Chairwoman.

Read on...