Detroit Schools

According to a draft report prepared by a group of outside financial experts, Detroit Public Schools has only "pockets of competence" among its stable of financial whizzes. How many of us really find this confounding? Seriously, that 75 per cent of children that drop out before graduating from high school have to work somewhere, right?

The Freep writes:

The district also had only "pockets of competence" among its financial staff, hasn't followed basic accounting procedures and the current administration has done little to address those problems, according to the document, prepared by Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools.

The Detroit School Board is to vote tonight on a budget and deficit-elimination plan that would address the shortfall, but the report notes there is "little long-term planning" to guide the process, according to the draft report.

If the Detroit Public Schools were a nursing home, Jack Kavorkian would be the director of nursing.

My guess is that the report, if it looks far beyond financial personnel, would find that there are only "pockets of competence" in nearly every area of school operations, from the janitorial staff to the teachers.

Why? Because schools do not operate like businesses. When a business reaches the point where it ceases to provide a quality product in an efficient manner, it struggles financially. If it does not right the ship soon enough, the doors will close.

While this is reality to any private enterprise, it is a foreign concept to government entities where incompetence is often rewarded by an increase in funds--particularly in public schools where the first reaction of bureaucrats and social scientists to poor performing schools is to cry of the need for more money. FOR THE CHILDREN! This cry for financial help is often echoed by the labor unions representing every faction of the public school labor force. Um, FOR THE PEOPLE! I suppose.

This is not to say that a majority of very concerned workers in the schools are not trying their hardest to educate children, it actually means that these dedicated professionals try to educate these children despite a corrupted system, and not because of it.

Here is our current recipe for Detroit public schools.

• First, through far reaching social measures, create a dependent class of people who lack the resources to educate their children without the help of government. This will help to eliminate all competition for the sub-standard product.
  
• Second, remove control from local districts for the things that really matter, such as firing substandard performers and booting out disruptive children. Replacing parental empowerment with distant government meddling is always a good choice.
  
• Third, compensate employees based on length of service, not effectiveness. This will help to frustrate the good workers while the ones that suck can collect a paycheck for life.
  
• Fourth, make a school's financial viability dependent on keeping the maximum number of children in school, regardless of how difficult to control and disruptive the student is. 'Force that kid into a desk Maxine, he's worth about $7,000!'

With this recipe for success, it really isn't too difficult to believe that Detroit Public Schools is struggling.

While each of these items directly affects the quality of the education that students receive, it may not appear is if they deal directly with the fact that Detroit Public Schools has woeful problems at the highest levels of its bureaucracy, and not just at the instructional level.

This is not the case, however, because each and every problem experienced by large urban school districts is systemic. Somewhere along the line, public education became less about educating children than it did about providing social planners a tool with which to mold young minds. Public schools have became arenas in which politicians are able to offer a nearly unassailable jobs program to a highly valued constituency.

We will see whether the $400,000,000.00 budget deficit of Detroit schools will result in an infusion of cash into the blighted district as is typically the result of such shortfalls.

Whatever the result, until power over schools is placed where it firmly belongs, in the laps of concerned parents, it is a system that is destined to fail.