Bobb promises deep changes to Detroit schools

Detroit Public Schools won't be the same when Robert Bobb's one-year tenure as fiscal manager is up. That much is clear from his forceful, honest interview with the Metro Times and TV appearance this morning. He has an ambitious, five-part plan, and he says, "I'm going to get it done in a year. This plan will be done come hell or high water." Not everyone will be happy when he does it. Here are three passages that are bound to provoke:

1. On security:

We want our public safety personnel to be able to press a button to a camera and see everything that is happening in and around the schools. There are cameras around schools but we want to be able to have cameras so we can see up and down corridors into dark spots — we want to be able to see where our kids are. We’ll have a crime camera that will look up and down the streets onto our playgrounds that will be able to capture people with sensors who come into our buildings at night when they shouldn’t be there.

2. On charter schools:

Bobb also said he has entered discussions with Doug Ross, founder of University Preparatory Academy charter school, to possibly turn over management of Mumford High to Ross’s charter school management company. Other charter school companies met with district officials Wednesday, just weeks after Bobb announced that some of the 40 schools that will be reformed next year may become charter schools or may be managed by companies.

3. On the elected school board:

They're over there, I'm over here.

Accountability returns to DPS

The results of a district-wide audit are in and they're as bad as anyone feared. Just five DPS schools out of 194 had a "clean" audit. The rest had accounting errors or outright theft, including "misappropriation of cash, loans made to officials using school funds, funds diverted to personal accounts, and missing money from dances and sports activities."

And no surprise: the district eliminated its internal audit department four years ago. Of course, that didn't stop widespread petty theft a decade ago, when according to the Detroit News, "auditors found nearly $2 million in missing or misspent money during a review of the 270 schools, including a principal accused of buying booze and sending a son on a trip to Italy with school funds, another accused of taking school money as loans, while others used the money for cell phones, staff luncheons and fraternity dues."

This time, the wrongdoers need to be fired and/or prosecuted, and protocols must be put in place to prevent abuse at this scale from repeating itself yet again. Let's hope Emergency Financial Manager Robert C. Bobb is up to the job. He can't just expose past problems; he has to fix them for the future, too.

Restructuring DPS

Big changes are coming to Detroit Public Schools -- and just in time. The News reports the district has now lost a shocking 44% of its enrollment since 2000 to charters, the suburbs, and other areas of the country.

On Tuesday, the state-appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, announced the closing of 29 schools and the restructuring of 40 others deemed "miserably failing." On Wednesday, he took the unprecedented step of asking President Obama to issue a special emergency declaration to allow the district to receive emergency funding. (If granted, it would be the first emergency declaration not tied to a natural disaster.)

Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, has promised to send millions of dollars to the district if it pursues fundamental change. Speaking in the city on Wednesday, he called Detroit "ground zero" for education in the United States. "Detroit is New Orleans two years ago without Hurricane Katrina," he said, "and I feel a tremendous sense of both urgency and outrage." He supports copying the model used in Chicago and letting Mayor Dave Bing take control of the district.

Both can be heard on Wednesday's edition of Detroit Today. Also worth watching: Geoffrey Canada at the New Yorker Summit. Liberals and conservatives alike (see David Brooks, for example) have championed his Harlem Children's Zone as the single best model for fixing urban education -- something Bobb and Duncan are surely looking at.

DPS gets something right ... or not

Just a year after it was first announced, the Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies, an arts academy for seventh to twelfth graders, is set to open in the newly redeveloped Argonaut Building. This is public education done right -- a focused curriculum, major institutional backers, a pledge to graduate college-ready students, an architectural gem saved, and an economic boost to the New Center area.

Update: In the comments, a reader points out that this new school is not, in fact, a DPS initiative. Daniel Howes calls it a "public school" in the first sentence, but it's actually a private charter -- one that is free and open to any applicant, but private nonetheless. Oh well, it was nice to imagine for a moment that DPS was capable of reform.

Never get too optimistic

So the year's off to a bad start. Standard and Poors lowered the city's credit rating to junk bond status, requiring the city to pay its creditors $400 million dollars to prove the city's solvency. Bear in mind the city was already projecting a $300 million budget shortfall. This year's budget cuts will be brutal.

Over at the Metrotimes, Jack Lessenberry has a devastating column on Detroit Public Schools. "Detroit's only hope lies in fixing the schools," he writes. "It's as simple -- and as maddeningly difficult -- as that." Mass transit, urban gardens, downtown lofts -- those are all great developments, but without functioning public schools, the city is doomed. DPS is not functional.

DPS enrollment shrinks to World War I levels

The Detroit News:

The preliminary tally showed enrollment dropped to about 88,000 this fall -- far below the 104,501 students counted last fall. It could constitute the largest one-year enrollment drop in the district's history.

If true, the News says "the drop could cost it about $52.6 million in state aid" and DPS will surely lose its first-class district status unless the state rewrites the rules.

Can Calloway fix DPS?

The Metrotimes evaluates the performance of Connie Calloway, Superintendent of Detroit Public Schools, who is charged with stabilizing a district that now anticipates a $400-million shortfall this year and is contemplating a drastic deficit-reduction plan.

DPS superintendent criticized

The Detroit News questions DPS Superintendent Connie Calloway's competence:

Superintendent Connie Calloway is drawing criticism for a series of recent communication missteps that have community leaders and even supporters concerned that she may be losing buy-in for initiatives that are essential to rehabilitating the 106,000-student school system.

Calloway's plan to overhaul five low-performing schools nearly collapsed before getting off the ground as frustrated parents and board members blasted her administration for its lack of information on the concept. She has been absent for meetings on the school overhaul initiative and for a press conference on the district's $45 million budget deficit.

"Either she is passionately disrespectful or just inept, but at $280,000 a year, neither is acceptable," said radio talk show host Mildred Gaddis.

Perhaps saving DPS is too great a task for anyone to handle.

Bad news for DPS: $45 milion deficit

Worst case scenario: DPS could return to state oversight. That's according to the Detroit News, whose editorial board seems to be awaiting just such a catastrophe so charter schools can take over the district.

The News to DPS: Reform or die

The News has begun a four-part editorial series on Detroit Public Schools. The message: reform or die.

I don't endorse their formula for reform (charter schools, privatization), but the News has one thing fundamentally right: a sense of outrage. The disintegration of the school system is the single greatest failure of the Kilpatrick administration. DPS has lost more than 50,000 students in the past five years. Of those who remain, 80% qualify for a free or reduced cost lunch. Only 25% of high school students graduate. And when enrollment finally falls below 100,000 (which it will in the coming year), the caps on charter schools will be lifted.

This is a school system in absolute crisis. On this point the News is right: "Too much time and money have already been wasted. Detroit Public Schools and its employees must recognize that their survival is at stake." More importantly, the future of Detroit's students is at stake. The status quo is unacceptable.

Vacant Detroit schools vandalized

Most of the schools that DPS shuttered last year have been secured. Those that have not, the Free Press reports, have been stripped of valuables and vandalized. The story is accompanied by a stunning photo gallery of the damage done to Joy Middle School in just the past ten months. Sadly, the more damage done to any of these schools, the less likely they are to ever be redeveloped.

DPS making smaller high schools

The News and the Free Press both report that DPS will totally reconfigure five high schools into smaller, more specialized units. The district is removing all teachers, administrators and staff at each school and subdividing the buildings into three or four smaller schools. The "Turnaround School Plan" will be financed through the 21st Century Schools fund that Granholm announced in her State of the State address.

Reform couldn't come soon enough. A report issued today revealed that Detroit once again has the lowest high school graduation rate among all major cities in the United States.

Goodbye Detroit Boat Club?

In the State of the City address, the mayor briefly mentioned a plan to build a boarding school on Belle Isle. Now that the uproar over Kwame's outburst has calmed down, the plan is finally getting attention in the News and on the Detroit Yes! forums.

The proposal is to build a military-style maritime academy for Detroit high school students where the historic but decaying Detroit Boat Club now stands. It's unclear whether the Boat Club would be rehabbed or razed, but many fear the latter and are outraged. My bet is the school will never be built, so it won't matter, but this serves as a reminder of the administration's a) disregard for community input and b) total lack of vision for the island.


Update: The News published an article last September that discusses the Boat Club's dismal future and its current state of disrepair.

Find out about Wayne State's master plan

Cityscape Detroit is presenting a series of four speakers who will discuss the neighborhoods that border Woodbridge. The first event features James Sears, a Wayne State official, who will discuss the university's master plan and its longterm vision of Midtown. The free, open meeting will be Feb. 25 at 6:30 pm at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, which is located at 5141 Rosa Parks Blvd.

Hat tip: Model D.

How Wayne State has changed

Preserve Detroit describes how outgoing President Irvin Reid has transformed Wayne State's campus and contributed to the construction boom in Midtown.

DPS quickly losing students and money

I missed an important article on DPS two weeks ago. The News reports:

Nearly a third of Detroit's students -- or about 51,000 -- are attending charter schools and suburban public districts, causing enrollment and budgets at other districts to surge while Detroit Public Schools shrinks.

State to fund smaller high schools

The News:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm will propose in her State of the State address Tuesday a plan to spend $300 million on as many as 100 smaller, more personalized high schools to replace larger schools whose students are doing poorly and have high dropout rates.

Detroit, which has ten high schools with an enrollment of more than 2,000 students, will be a major target of the proposal.

Three articles on education

• Since the 1970s, the primary goal of many urban high schools has been simply to graduate as many students as possible. A high school diploma was considered the end goal of education. Now, the New York Times reports, urban high schools are reorienting themselves to prepare as many graduates as possible for college.

• Michigan's universities have been building large endowments to compensate for lost public funding. U of M's is worth $7.1 billion. However, universities generally spend less than 5% of these funds annually even as they continue to raise tuition every year. Now, according to the Free Press, lawmakers are considering mandating that universities spend a minimum percentage of their endowments every year.

• Finally, according to the Free Press: "Detroit Public Schools spent more than $1.5 million on hotels, travel and catered meals in the year that ended Sept. 1." I'm sure other districts spend comparable amounts, but that sounds extravagant for a district that can't always afford textbooks.

CCS to expand into New Center

CCS hopes to redevelop the Argonaut Building, a beautiful, Albert Kahn-designed structure in the New Center:


The photo is courtesy of a discussion thread on Skyscraper.com that includes dozens of photos of great Detroit buildings.

According to the News, the building would include "new graduate programs, dormitory facilities for about 250 students and studios, and will include office space for nonprofit organizations and a business incubator to help fledgling design businesses."

In a move similar to that of the Science Center, they also plan to sponsor new charter schools within the building for middle and high school students. The schools will focus on art and visual design.

Science Center sponsors new middle school

The University Prep charter system is opening a new middle school in partnership with the Detroit Science Center, reports the News. The middle school, which promises that at least 90% of its graduates will attend college, will be built as a new wing of the Science Center, which will also add more gallery space during construction.

The concept sounds great, and judging from other University Prep schools, the students will receive an excellent education. (Although the jury is out on whether charter schools in general perform any better than their public counterparts.) The question here is whether new charter schools will succeed at the expense of the existing public school system, depriving DPS of the resources and bright students it so badly needs to sustain itself, let alone revitalize itself.