On August 1st, Judge Rhodes, the Governor’s Transition Manager, and Interim Superintendent Alycia Meriweather, gave us candidates for the new Board an overview of District status.
Firstly, the District is to be commended for doing this. It is a first.
Secondly, be forewarned, that I may be somewhat biased with regard to the Interim Superintendent. She was my oldest daughter’s classmate at Renaissance High and they were housemates at the University of Michigan. We all attended her wedding some 20 years ago. We thought highly of her then, and even more so now.
But as a former Board Member, who served as Chair of Committees on Physical Plant, Finance, and Audit, I left the session with more doubts than comfort.
“We are beginning this new district with a balanced budget.” But, it appears that there is no detailed data to back-up the budget estimates, because nearly all of the finance staff had left or had been terminated earlier-on, and there were very few people left to prepare this budget. The Finance Director has had years of experience reviewing school district budgets in the mid-state. But in my mind, Detroit is likely to be a lot different than the average district. There are very few experienced budget control staff to monitor the week-to-week implementation of this spending plan. Yes, the State Financial Review Commission (FRC) has approved of this budget, but how much do they know? Darrell Burks, who was the District’s Finance Director, is on the FRC, but his knowledge is now 20 years old. (And so, of course is mine.) But I did not leave feeling very assured that the District can avoid yet another setback.
Do be assured that maintaining a balanced budget is critically important. Repeated budget crises sap efforts and morale in all parts of the district and especially in the classroom. True balancing decisions may well mean further sharp cutbacks, until a workable balance is achieved. Elected officials (and candidates) generally have a very hard time of facing-up to that need.
“We don’t have much money for innovation, but we have reached-out to our staff for new ideas, and we will be starting 7 new Montessori kindergarten classrooms at 3 locations in September. These teachers are highly enthusiastic, because they have seen their own children benefit from the Montessori approach. They were more than willing to give-up their summer vacation, in order to attend intensive training in the Montessori technique.” I did not hear any immediate kickback in the room from any of the candidates, but it is inevitable down the road:
“Montessori is a middle-class orientation to education. It’s a code-word for discrimination against poorer people. It will mainly just attract middle-class parents and will result in more class segregation in the district.”
This kickback is inevitable, because waging class war is such an effective means of gaining votes in a City in which 80% of the students qualify for a free breakfast and lunch.
Judge Rhodes asserts that any decent Board Member must be a Trustee for Detroit’s children, but suggests no serious means of defusing corruption of the Board by the long-standing and corrupting political and vending subculture in the City.
The Judge further asserts that Board Members must give-up talking about “them vs. us”, if any progress is ever to be made in reforming State-wide school financing. He is right, of course, but once again, he makes no suggestion of how to stop that talk. That talk will never stop so long as anyone can launch a lucrative political career by fanning the flames of racial and class antagonism, by first running for the Board in order to get a foothold on next gaining some better compensated office.
If there is just one small thing that State Legislators could do to help improve the Detroit Public Schools, it would be to prohibit anyone who is elected to the Board from seeking any other public office for at least 10 years after being elected to the Board. That would effectively keep these seats from being exploited to finance anyone’s higher political ambitions. And this needs to be done with immediate effect before November 8th, if it is to impact this re-start.
School administration is locked into a no-win corner. In order to compete with the false promises of the charter schools, it thinks that it has to invest big dollars and efforts to put it’s best foot forward, and to be up-beat and enthusiastic about the future. But, this also has costs in both dollars and longer-term credibility that the District can not afford, because there are numerous bumps in the road ahead that no one seems to be taking into account.
But, before going into any of those glitches, let me layout the core of what I think has gone so wrong, and what we together can do about it.
Most of what we hear in the news media and from “community leaders” is deeply flawed. But, they and most listeners accept it without ever thinking about it, most often, because they would simply like to believe it. It sounds like it will make their life easier and more predictable. Stuff like:
- “Education is just another consumer good; all we need to do is give parents a choice, and the marketplace will provide a solution.”
- “Just send your child to us, and we have the technical expertise to educate them the way you want.”
- “Society (other people)(the village) OWES your child a sound education.”
- “You and your child have a Constitutional right to be provided with a sound and free education.”
- “We must have much better accountability, from both the DPS and the charter schools which operate within the City.”
- “The whole future economic rebound of the City is largely dependent upon the creation of an outstanding school system.”
Most of this stuff is fanciful, misleading, and totally warped. I will come back to each of these points in a later blog. For now, I will limit my points to my reactions to the August 1st presentation.
Most simply put, a sound education takes a large group of parents, teachers, and students, who actually respect one another, and who collaborate intensively with one another over an extended period, say 8 years. So long as you keep your eye fixed upon these key relationships, you can create both better and very good schools. But there are dozens and dozens of institutional issues which can distract you from cleaving to that core reality, which have little to contribute to making schools better.
For example: In her brief remarks, the Interim Superintendent advised us that every district employee is expected to become an Ambassador for the betterment of the District, to become aware of numerous great things going-on in the schools, and in placing a positive spin on what the community thinks about the District. This comment comes directly out of the recommendations of a Transition Team Report which was conducted last Spring. In that report, a group of outside and inside public relations consultants, better known as “spin-doctors”, recommended that the District undertake a “robust” public relations campaign to overcome all of the typical negative stories that may appear in the media.
Well, here’s my take on that:
Firstly, parents most care about what is happening with their own children. They don’t care much about any other happenings in the District, which don’t immediately affect them. All available resources need to be concentrated upon what is happening in the classroom. Those folks in the ranks who championed the appointment of Alycia Meriweather as Interim Superintendent did so mainly because she had proven herself to them in past years as a honest and reliable peer resource. It is one thing to ask everyone to stand on their own two feet and to do the best that they can to support the District. It is quite another thing, however, to “expect” it, “or else”. That’s a “top-down” attitude, which is more likely to be resented, because it skips the need for a mutual respect.
Secondly, the media is not much fooled by “robust” public relations campaigns. They deal in negative stories precisely because that is what the public is most concerned about, and not because they have an axe to grind with the District. Whatever we do, we simply have to live with that. We can not afford the efforts of spin-doctor opportunists, who will also demand that they be in control of every word said to the media by any school district employee. That kind of thought control just further aggravates the establishment of critical trusting relationships between the central services and the neighborhood schools.
Thirdly, this is not to say, however, that I buy into much of what the media latches onto, in their misguided thought that they are “serving” the best community interest. Most often, their attention is captured by the self-interested opinion of some other significant institutional stakeholder. They are not very dependable any more for keeping their hand on the pulse of the community; in today’s highly competitive multimedia world, they do not have the resources to do that effectively. Their coverage and their understandings are therefore superficial at their best.
In response to the Transition Team Report, the District now proposes to add a School/Community Liaison to the staff at each of our 93 schools, and also to increase interdiction by security officers to deal with truancy. Things like this have been done before, and they are totally ineffective. No one responds positively to this kind of intervention. Unless one has an up-close and personal relationship with a problem parent or family, you have no serious means of changing any of their conduct, attitudes, or student outcomes.
That’s why I say that the only workable answer to such interventions lies within the congregations of our churches. The very young, poor and struggling parents of most of our students are not very likely to belong to a church. BUT, their older extended family is very likely to belong to one of our City’s thousands of churches. These folks can have a maximum impact upon their younger family members, if they are provided with a real-world orientation by their Pastors and School Board Members as to what it takes to effectively educate a child. School Board members should expend more than half of their work-hours (at least 500 per year) exhausting this resource. (More explicitly, that’s 50 Sundays X 4 hours, plus 50 Wednesdays X 3 hours, plus 50 Saturdays X 3 hours.) Seven Board Members X 500 hours equals 3,500 hours. That is pretty much enough to reach each and every church and pastor in the City each year, and to begin to make a real grassroots difference in the community understanding of what it really takes to build a solid and effective school system. If you can’t make that commitment, then you should not be on the School Board!
“We are proud to have the only certified school district police department in the State of Michigan!” The head of the department assured us that our students are safe and in good hands. He was proud to report that reported crime in our schools had decreased by 15% over the past 6 years. In a Transition Team Report last Spring, the heavily police executive staffing of that part, recommended expanding the District Police Force from $6 Million per year to $10 Million per year. Here again, I have my doubts. For 13 years, from 1970 until 1983, I was Deputy Director of a City/County agency which applied $140 Million to reforming various aspects of the justice system, including crime reporting and policing. I have to wonder, if reported crime is down 15% over the past 6 years, but student population has dropped 35% during that time, doesn’t that mean that actual crime per student has increased about 20%.
More than this, as a person schooled in sociology, I have to wonder whether any middle or high school which has more than 400 students can actually be expected to be safe and effective. Many juvenile justice system studies have shown that once the population of an institution exceeds 400, where staff and inmates can no longer know one another personally, that the staff loses all control and effectiveness of the learning climate. Rather than pumping more and more dollars into increased security, I think that we need to be down-sizing our troubled high schools to a size where staff is stable, and where everyone knows and respects everyone on a first name basis, and in pumping those security dollars into more educational staffing. The main counter argument is that: Because of relentless news stories about school crime, parents are afraid to send their children to DPS schools, and that that is a serious drain on potential State Funding from the Foundation Grant. So, we must plow ever more funds into providing more security staff.
In general, based upon my past experience, our schools are 20 times safer than our streets. While some crime occurs in our schools, 20 times more occurs after our students leave their schools for the day. Base-line: Isn’t the cost of in-school security being grossly over-promoted to the detriment of our educational programs? Let’s get real. If we have to have added security in our schools, shouldn’t we just hire more teachers who are retired police officers, and who pull double duty? My youngest daughter’s best teacher at the Communications and Media Arts High School in the late 1990s was a retired Detroit Police Officer pursuing a more satisfying career as a teacher. I don’t suggest arming teachers who have never served as law enforcement officers. But, I do suggest that we should be actively recruiting teachers who have already made a career as a law enforcement officer, in order to do something both effective and practical to make our schools just a bit safer. And, I also suggest that we do a lot more to convince parents that our schools are a whole lot safer than the streets.
The Buildings Director was especially upbeat: “We have responded to the City inspections, and just about all of the punch lists have been resolved. Our 93 schools should all be ready to open in September.” Apparently, this was accomplished with just $5 Million from the $150 Million State Transition Funds. I am astonished that these buildings could be up to snuff, after having been neglected for 80 years. As a rule of thumb, major maintenance of a building takes 2% per year of the cost of building it from scratch. When you defer those needs, especially roofs, the cost actually goes up, because the leaks cause other damage to floors, walls and other parts.
Judge Rhodes talked about the need to hold the Governor’s feet to the fire with regard to a commitment to add another $50 Million to the Transition Fund, for building maintenance needs. That is just 1% of the $5 Billion sum estimated by a Barton Mallow Study done in the mid-90’s, to bring our school buildings up to modern standards, and that was in 1995 dollars. Yes, we were talking about 260 buildings then rather than the 140 now in use, and some of those were much older than the current inventory. But, clearly, $50 Million is just a drop in the bucket.
In the case of Detroit, State Emergency Managers and Reform Boards have maxxed-0ut the levy of additional property taxes for building improvements, by building a bunch of new buildings which serve less than 20% of our student body. It will take another 15 to 25 years before those bonds are paid off, and we can ask for another capital improvement millage. Meanwhile, the only means of keeping our buildings in good repair is to take funds from the Foundation Grant. This makes being stuck between a rock and a hard place seem like a lark.
It appears that District administration still has its head in the sand and is grossly underestimating the challenges which lie ahead.
BUT, IF YOU GET WHAT I’M SAYING, THEN PLUNK FOR BEN WASHBURN!