An inside view of the troubled Detroit Public Schools
MY BASIC TEN-POINT PLATFORM
Get the State Legislature to disqualify anyone elected to the Detroit Community School Board from running for any other public office for ten years after the last time that they are elected to the Detroit Community Schools Board. Strip the most basic motivation for folks who are within that highly corrupting political and vending subculture of the City from seeking a board seat.
Keep the newly elected Board from divvying-up school “oversight” into several micro-managing committees. The merits of such committees are greatly out-weighed by the fact that they provide committee chairs with an easy way to put the squeeze on District vendors to fatten the war chest for their next stepping stone. Keep any Board oversight to the Committee of the Whole. Don’t ask and expect answers to questions which only trigger and then seemingly justify more top-down intervention from central service offices, and more lost time to teach at the local school.
Adopt a comprehensive purchasing and ethics policy, based upon the National Model Procurement Code. Delegate most final contracting authority to the Superintendent, without any further Board intervention, other than after-the-fact audits. Keep Board Members mostly out of the contract-letting process, and out of all of the temptations and distractions which that would surely bring. (During the State take-overs, the Board has been divested of the power to approve contracts. Based on the past abuse of that power and its corrosive effect all down the ranks, the new Board must voluntarily stay-out of most of the up-front contracting process.) Yes, Michigan law requires the Board to approve any contract for more than $23,000. But the law also allows the Board to delegate that authority, so long as it also provides an effective set of guidelines and requirements for the exercise of that delegated authority. History shows that delegation with such conditions is the absolute better choice. Get our schools what they need as fast as it is needed. Keep the Board out of that process, because it slows-up most buying by at least a month.
Establish a competent, well-staffed, and independent Audit function, which is directly responsible to the Board, to seek-out fraud, waste and favoritism. The Superintendent should also have a robust Inspector General to safeguard his or her interests, but the District should not have to depend alone upon that unit to maintain and assure honesty down the ranks. Yes, this is expensive and redundant, but experience has already shown that not everyone can be totally trusted. Combined with explicit requirements to document buying decisions, white collar crime is one of those few kinds of crime that can be prevented by the use of thoroughly random and independent audits. Those who doctor the records to cover their tracks usually hang themselves. It is the phony documentation that trips-up most frauds.
Select a Superintendent who has had a successful career at entrusting most decision-making and school-level spending to the local school. Avoid creating and reinforcing any more top-down efforts to command and control what happens at the local school. Good schools take an enormous collaborative effort by teachers, parents, students and others, who respect one another, and who stick with one another for the long haul. This cannot be dictated from the top-down. Make the right choice from day one, and stick with that person through thick and thin for the long haul. Keeping the Superintendent on a short leash is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Spend at least 50% of my time as a Board Member on reaching-out and engaging all existing community institutions, and especially the churches, to engage parents and to coach them in taking a strong and pro-active role in their children’s education. Turn-around the existing and long simmering community mindset that education is just another consumer service, and that all a parent really needs to do is to be a critic of their children’s teachers, or to jerk their children out of a school whenever conflicts arise. Concentrate upon building enduring bonds and ties, and mutual parent support networks, beginning especially with pre-school. Concentrate upon recruiting outside efforts to build strong neighborhoods around each of our neighborhood schools.
New-Wave teaching techniques have been forever oversold as the answer to all that ails education. Make sure that parents and their extended families know that teaching technology is not magical. It has severe limitations when not consistently and continuously reinforced from the home, and especially when teaching dollars are tight. Make sure that parents understand that much learning results from close bonds and ties with classmates over the long haul. It is extremely important to keep your child in the same school, and with the same teachers for that long haul.
Assure that the District not only maintains a balanced budget, year-after-year, but also reserves a rainy-day fund for unforeseeable setbacks. The currently approved budget was hatched by just a few inexperienced staff members. It could just be a train wreck waiting to happen.
Refuse to relent to popular pressures to create and sustain unaffordable programs like all-day Kindergarden, new buildings, and unlimited wrap-around social services. Get real about the American economy, and it’s limited possibilities. Ignore the empty promises of State and Federal politicians. Realize that there is hope, but that it mainly depends upon the ability of parents and their extended families to face-up to the need to do things for themselves. Yes, it takes guts and sacrifice. But if you just sit on your hands and believe in political fantasies, someday, you will surely regret it.
Be relentless in calling-out and exposing anyone who makes empty promises and predictions of easy success. Serious educational results take tremendous collaborative efforts on all sides. Charter schools are not yet a better option, even though it ought to be easier and more feasible to build a great school from scratch, that to turn-around one that has sunk into a dismal funk. The Detroit Community District is authorized to create charter schools, but so far, has not been very imaginative and pro-active in doing so.