A Stretch Indeed! (NOW if WE Could Just Stretch Those DOLLARS Into the CLASSROOM!)

Editorial

Editorial

Michigan schools at the starting line

The whole idea of the federal Race to the Top program, which could bring hundreds of millions in new education funding to Michigan, was to get states to stretch.

Stretch the conventional restrictions on charter schools. Stretch the typical ideas about who can be a teacher, or how teachers can be evaluated. Stretch the notions of who should be able to call it quits on school.

The good news is that Michigan will stretch with other states, thanks to recent, last-minute legislative action. Michigan lawmak ers may have spent most of the year frittering away their chances to reform the state’s finances, but their quick, collaborative work on Race to the Top showed how much can be accomplished when they’re properly motivated.

Now school districts themselves have to embrace the new legislation and stretch themselves to meet the challenge.

That could be toughest with regard to collective bargaining agreements, which must reflect new attitudes toward nontradition al teachers and historically taboo subjects such as merit pay and peer review.

Districts must make the changes just to apply, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll get any of the federal money even if they do.

But local administrators need to sell teachers, in particular, on the idea that these changes are good for Michigan’s schools and, especially, for its kids. That’s what makes them a good idea. Not the money.

Teachers will perform better if their contracts reward merit and indulge intervention for those who are struggling. They’ll do more for children if their reviews are aligned with student outcomes.

Michigan has lagged behind other states in this regard and has some catching up to do if districts here want to really compete for Race to the Top dollars. Union recalcitrance here has been stron ger than in other parts of the country.

But the Michigan Education Association ought to turn its con cerns about change into vigilance in the name of making the state as competitive as it can be. The only thing accomplished by resis tance now would be a loss for the state — both in terms of the federal cash being made available and the great possibilities opened up by the Legislature’s actions.

Phoenix Rising or Mirage? (WE'LL make the DIFFERENCE)

RISING FROM THE WRECKAGE: REVVING UP MICHIGAN 

Free Press editorial 

Lessons of a near-fatal crash 

Rx for recovery: A new commitment to education

Education first, last and always.

That maxim practically leaps out of “Rising from the Wreckage,” the Free Press series ending today on the downfall of the American auto industry, and what happened across Michigan as a result.

Somehow, even in its budget struggles, this state has to find a way to invest in improving education or risk prolonging this ugly chapter in Michigan history.

That means changing the culture, too, to emphasize the value of schooling beyond the 12th grade and of continuous learning. The days of taking a high school diplo ma to the local factory and getting a tick et to the middle class are over. They were great while they lasted, but they left Michigan ill-equipped to adjust to the 21st-Century global economy.

The future belongs to the smart states — and Michigan had better be among those states if it expects a better one.

People who learn are also people who change, challenge, adapt and innovate, the very things the auto industry has struggled to do for a decade. Complacency is born from a lack of appreciation for learning and stretching. And that complacency, as much as anything else, brought Detroit’s auto industry to the brink of extinction.

You can see proof of that among nearly all the key characters in “Rising from the Wreckage.” They clung to what they had and disinvested in what they would need for the future.

That was also the grim assessment of the outsiders who were sent to help clean up the mess in Michigan. Steve Rattner, the private equity banker who became President Barack Obama’s car czar, couldn’t have been more blunt in summing up what was wrong in the board rooms at GM and Chrysler.

“They were delusional … just more of the same,” he said of the turnaround plans submitted by the car companies and ultimately rejected by the government.

For Michigan, the way forward begins with a commitment to creating a populace that’s better schooled, better trained, more adaptable and nimble. It has to start with a reinvestment in education.

Reinvestment is the right word, too, because for at least the past decade (colleges and universities would say even longer) this state has been slipping steadily away from its once-formidable commitments.

The 1990s could appropriately be called the gravy years of K-12 funding in Michigan, after Proposal A’s passage in 1994 leveraged statewide resources, rather than local millage rates, for school districts’ operating costs.

But as sales tax revenues have declined over the past decade, K-12 funding has lagged badly, increasing at an average rate of just 1.8% each year — well below inflation over that period and, just as important, less than many built-in cost increases for services and benefits.

The retreat from Michigan’s historical support for higher education has been just as glaring. A recent study shows Michigan dead last among all states in terms of increases in higher education appropriations over the last five years and the only state whose outlay is lower in real numbers, by more than 5%.

At the same time, an ever-increasing proportion of the funds allocated to education have gone to support a benefits structure that threatens, as in the auto industry, to bankrupt the entire enter prise.

Waning financial support is just one barometer of Michigan’s growing complacency about education. Recall how quickly the Legislature acquiesced to the idea of a watered-down Michigan Educational Assessment Program (where scoring 60% on the tests is “proficient” and a cheaper to-grade multiple choice exam has replaced one that focused more on writing) and how little resistance was put up by Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Look at how quickly legislators backed away from tough high school graduation standards when parents and teachers complained about students’ struggles with it. Algebra II? Never mind that it includes skills that kids will need to compete in the workforce. It’s too hard, so not everyone will need to take it.

In higher education, Michigan also has not done enough to strengthen community colleges — so critical to sustaining lifelong learning both for college graduates and those seeking certification for technical jobs. Shouldn’t they be growing programs and partnerships with industry, rather than retrenching under severe financial strain?

Michigan must embrace the idea that rigor breeds greatness, and recognize that the jobs of the future will require more mental dexterity than physical brawn.

That’s especially true of the auto industry, which, even if it comes back to pre-recession levels, will never again be able to support tens of thousands of uneducated workers. A better educated Michigan will be a more stable, and more prosperous, state.

It’s no accident that the correlation be tween a state’s per capita income and the percentage of college graduates who live in that state is very strong. Mississippi, with a per capita income below $30,000, has a population in which fewer than 25% have earned a bachelor’s degree. In Connecticut, where per capita income is highest, the rate of college-educated citizens is above 35%. Michigan is in the middle of the pack, with less than $35,000 in per capita income and less than 30% of its citizens boasting 4-year degrees.

Michigan will need money to reclaim a competitive advantage. A revamped tax structure that halts the erosion of funding for K-12 and higher education has to be a priority. So does a plan to spend money on the things that matter in education — instruction, curriculum, connections with real-world workplaces — rather than administrative costs and overly generous benefits and pensions for employees.

Michigan will also need leadership focused intently on defining and maintaining standards, and dedicated to making the political sacrifices to keep funding healthy. The governor and the Legislature must work together to build a work force that won’t be as susceptible to single industry collapses. And Michiganders themselves must commit to the value of primary and secondary education, as well as lifelong learning.

Lorenzo Byrd, the former Ford worker in “Rising from the Wreckage,” had the right idea. When he lost work because of the economic downturn, he turned to more education as the way forward.

When things bounce back, he’ll be better positioned than others to take advantage.

Michigan has to become a state of Byrds, dedicated to a life whose only guarantees are predicated on a simple motto: Education first, last and always.




Jobs shake-up slams black middle class

But many say change is a chance to fix schools

From 1910 into the 1930s, the black population of Detroit rose more than 600% — double the rate of nearby Cleveland and four times faster than the in crease in Chicago. Nobody was moving here for the weather. The influx of people to Detroit — the city tripled in size during the same period to a population of about 1.5 million— was about jobs, mainly in the auto industry, after Henry Ford made his famous offer of $5 a day.

Among the many side effects of the assembly line was the rise of the American middle class and, in Detroit more than anywhere else, the creation of a black middle class. While segregation and racism were obstacles, Detroit became a place where good factory wages enabled African Americans to afford homes and cars; where black businesses could start up with ready customers and where succeeding generations had a measure of upward mobility.

Hundreds of African-American professionals, businesspeople and academics owe their start to parents or grandparents who were able to make a decent living in Michigan’s auto plants.

That avenue to the proverbial American dream has now been largely closed off by the disap pearance of job opportunities at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and the many industry supplier firms.

“What is happening now to the black middle class is absolutely devastating,” said Dr. Curtis Iv ery, chancellor of Wayne County Community College District. “But it is also much needed. We needed to come out of our comfort zone, that sense of entitlement to those jobs.”

Ivery and others said this massive economic shake-up should be a wake-up call for Detroit and indeed all Michigan to fix its schools and redirect young people toward higher education.

“The old paradigm was graduate from high school and get a good job,” said Daniel Baxter, director of elections for the City of Detroit and the son of an assembly line worker. “Now, it’s totally different. We have to shift the thought process, recognize the new dynamic.”

Juliette Okotie-Eboh, senior vice president of public affairs for MGM Grand Detroit and the daughter of a Ford worker, recalled a time in the 1960s when the best-dressed among her class mates at Detroit Northern High School were the young men who had second-shift auto jobs.

“They had the cars, they had the clothes,” she said. “The point is, I guess, they didn’t need the education at that time to make the good money. But those doors have been closed for a while. Are blacks disproportionately affected? We’re always disproportionately affected. … But the lack of opportunity is more acute now.”

Michael Porter, vice president for corporate communications at DTE Energy, is the son of an auto worker. His mother started out as a stenographer but worked her way up to computer systems analyst at the Army’s Tank Automotive Command plant.

“I was exceedingly fortunate,” Porter said. “My parents placed a high premium on education and sacrificed — sending us to parochial schools to help prepare for college. … But for those who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to college, the plants were a viable option.

“Today, those manufacturing jobs are gone. … And even if the auto companies had the market share they enjoyed in the 1960s, the jobs our parents held would be gone. … Today, computers and robots do many of the things that were formerly done by men and women with air wrenches and paint spray guns.”

Hence the critical need, said Porter, Ivery and others, to address the ills of predominantly African-American school districts and the widespread applause for Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, who’s becoming a local folk hero as he reshapes the district with an emphasis on accountability. Bobb’s trying to make changes that are at least a generation beyond overdue.

“The school systems have got to do a much better job now of meeting the needs of these stu dents,” said Bart Landry, a pro fessor of sociology at the University of Maryland and author of a 1987 book, “The New Black Middle Class,” plus a 2006 follow-up, “Black Working Wives.”

“But first, students have to understand, the good dollars-for hours jobs are gone. ‘If I’m going to make it, I must go to college’ … and if they don’t get into precollege work, that road is extremely difficult.”

At WCCCD, which now has upward of 80,000 people taking credit and noncredit courses, Chancellor Ivery is more blunt about the impact of all the closed factories in southeast Michigan.

“Unfortunately, we’re exactly where we need to be, and it’s a painful thing,” he said. “But we’ve got to get something out of this.

There’s an opportunity if we take it over the next one or two years.

And if we get it right here, we can get it right for the whole country.

“We have a chance,” Ivery said, “to … turn this around.” 

RISING FROM THE WRECKAGE: REVVING UP MICHIGAN 

Back to the beginning: Innovate

We have lost sight of where it began. It is not about jobs, wages and benefits. It is all about productivity and a culture of innovation.

How can you compete against a Chinese worker making 50 cents an hour? You beat him with machines, automation and robotics. One man running multiple machines can produce more parts faster and of higher quality than any cheap labor can. By using more robotic and automated systems, the overseas shipping costs would be eliminated and the time to delivery would be faster. We have focused too long on attempting to save jobs and benefits rather than increasing productivity, which would expand sales through lower prices and thus create more jobs.

Once, Detroit and Michigan were the epicenter of innovation. We knew how to build and improve on every process of automotive manufacturing and all its components. The culture of innovation and inspiration needs to be restored and rewarded to awaken the deep manufacturing capabilities that Michigan still has.

Look back at the late ’70s, in the midst of a recession similar to today’s, and no one would have believed that a giant computer industry was about to be born. But there were precursors in the form of microprocessors that the innovative entrepreneurs could see. Those precursors today are in the form of sensors, tiny microcontrollers, software and advanced machining that Michigan possesses. All together they will build a new robotics industry. Michigan can lead it.

Ronald Horner 

Clinton Township 

Spend in Michigan

We all are responsible (“Rising from the wreckage: A story of survival,” Dec. 13-20). Instead of finding people to blame, this is what we all can do: Go to a car dealer and ask them what cars they sell that are manufactured in Michigan. Drive them.

Go to buymichigannow.com and search products that are made in Michigan. Stop buying items that are made in foreign countries — food, clothing and transportation. We can’t do any thing about what our predeces sors have done, but we can do something about what we buy.

Oh, and all those Christmas items you bought online? Write a check to the State of Michigan for the sales tax.

Jim Dundas 

Bloomfield Township

More wrecks ahead 

What happened to the U.S. auto industry, which the Free Press calls “creator of the middle class and home of labor victories that set a standard for generations of American workers”? Just look at the standard of lifetime pensions and health care, promised when health care costs were low, which is now suffocating American automotive companies. Now, how can any company with hundreds of thousands of paid retirees with “Cadillac benefits” survive? Unfortunately, what has happened to GM, Ford and Chrysler is now suffocating cities and states and the country.

Then tell me who believes that the new “health care reforms” of the Congress will actually reduce health care costs of companies, their workers, or their retirees?

Tragically, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this wreckage.

Arnie Goldman 

Farmington Hills 

State can tough it out 

I left Michigan four years ago, not for economic reasons, but just to try something new.

I don’t think that this crisis is the end for Michigan’s staple industry. Just look at the layout of America. It’s still fairly spread out. However, the type of car that Americans are looking for has changed drastically. Gone are the excessive days of the late ’90s when SUVs were all the rage.

The rise and fall of oil prices was quick and sharp, far too fast for auto producers to adequately respond. Then, there was the financial crash in September 2008, which made everything more complicated. But at the end of the day, the majority of Americans are still commuting to work by car.

The uncertainty of change is undoubtedly scary, but there are so many talented professionals (especially in engineering) in Michigan that I trust that creative solutions will be found for the auto industry and in the de velopment of other new businesses in the state. Michiganders are just too practical and hard working a people to give up in the face of crisis.

Megan Cottrell 

New York City 

Where to start 

We have to be mindful that Michigan’s leadership as the reigning capital of the automotive industry, once the driving force of this country and the world, is indeed “gone with the wind.” It is especially difficult since Michigan was the cradle of its beginning and will probably never rise to this leadership status again.

In this technical age, in order to compete with the world’s changes, we must prepare ourselves to meet and understand this challenge in order to sustain meaningful jobs and a living. It must start with the education of both children and adults, where we have fallen short.

As far as the basic need of jobs for our future success, we must continue to support entrepreneurs and serious development of our wonderful water’s potential for greatness. It will not be easy, but I hope that — with God’s help and understanding — we can develop and maintain the belief and tolerance in one another’s self worth. That would be a wonderful start! 

Rosetta Brooks 

Detroit 

A new business

After retiring from more than 40 years in the film and media business in the Detroit area, the rash of media stories about the growth of a vibrant “new” industry, employing hundreds if not thousands of unemployed workers has been viewed by me with a certain amount of amusement.

But after reading your article about Vanir Entertainment, I feel a sense of hope for the future (“Former autoworker is going green,” Dec. 16). It appears that Lewis Smith and Alex Greene have a realistic grasp on what it takes to make a successful busi ness as well as a new industry.

Starting small with a lot of dedication and hard work, as well as taking a gamble financially, will probably make them successful entrepreneurs. At least I hope so, and I wish them well. 

Keith Clark 

Troy 

Diversify — and learn

The lesson for Michigan and the Detroit area in particular, is to diversify. Never again must we rely on one industry to sustain us. I think that the introduction of the movie industry to Michigan is a good step. There will always be a need for motion pictures, and the jobs that come with it.

We must also step back into the past. Technological and green jobs might be the new momentum, but we have a population that is heavy in blue-collar experience. There will soon be an acute demand for plumbers, carpenters, electricians and welders. Apprenticeships in what were once restricted guilds must open up.

Illiteracy is not just a problem in Detroit Public Schools. People who grew up during the 1980s up until now, especially males, preferred video games to reading a good book, or — as you know too well — a daily newspaper. We must bring back the desire to read and learn.

We must also make Michigan more appealing for businesses to move here. We must change the negative images of Detroit.

We can do it. We can come back, but only if there is a will to do so and the willingness on be half of everyone to sacrifice. 

Naomi Susan Solomons 

Oak Park 

Dealership woes 

I realize that the abysmal rhetoric about dealers you printed, while terribly inaccu rate, is most likely from dealers themselves. Unfortunately, the dealers who have survived have turned into pirates, wooing em ployees and working behind the scenes to sabotage any dealer rights legislation.

My husband, a GM dealer who got a “surprise” wind-down letter on June 2 — two weeks after the massive cut — has had his fellow dealers call employees at home, offering them signing bonuses and assuring them that life will be better at their new place of employment. Other dealers were privy to the lists of dealers being cut and shared that with their employees. We first heard about our dealership’s cut when an employee from another dealership told one of our salespeople.

As the industry declines, so does human decency. As much as I hate what GM and Chrysler did, they were doing their jobs. The surviving dealers, who prey on those who are losing, are greed riddled vultures.

Emily Tennyson 

Grosse Pointe Farms

Maintain direction 

Being a GM retiree of 31 years from the Hydromatic plant, I can assure you the ups and downs I experienced over my years as an employee are something I’ll nev er forget, from the oil embargo times in the early ’70s to now. I still lose sleep worrying about my future and if the company I gave my life to is going to stand behind

its promises.

It’s hard to show loyalty to a company that has no clear bearing, and seeing the face of the skipper change almost monthly doesn’t make me warm and cozy in any way. I know I’m a lot bet ter off than most people nowadays, and, believe me, I’m grateful for that.

But I think it’s time for Gener al Motors to point in one direction and keep on that path, if not for the workers that make it a strong company now, then for the people who gave years to make them profitable and respected.

Robert Denstedt 

Canton 



Henry Ford’s lesson 

It has been the policy of many state governments to provide our foreign competition what can be considered tax welfare to locate assembly plants mainly in the anti-union South. These tax breaks, along with the inherent cost advantages of having no significant legacy expenses, have created huge capital advantages for the foreign companies. What did we expect from 100-year-old companies such as Ford and GM, but to eventually mortgage the farm or go bankrupt in the face of such an unlevel playing field?

Secondly, the American consumer needs to be educated on the importance of buying domestic automobiles.

To illustrate the lack of appreciation for the domestic industry, all one has to do is to drive around the country. Other than the Midwest, it appears the American consumer prefers foreign cars over domestic cars.

This shift to foreign cars has eliminated over 50% of the manufacturing infrastructure in the Midwest. Because the auto sector has an extremely large economic multiplier, affecting direct, in direct and spin-off employment, the unintended consequences of this shift has resulted in huge unemployment numbers, decline in property values and taxes at every level.

Government should level the field for fair competition and keep in mind our national interest.

Educated consumers will ultimately do what is in their own best interest.

The car companies should remember that Henry Ford changed the world in two unforgettable ways. He built an affordable car efficiently and he paid a wage that enabled his workers to buy their own products right here in America!

James Sturgill 

Flat Rock



Get a license

I have wanted an electric car since I had the opportunity during the ’40s to drive electric milk delivery trucks, which were as quiet as elevators. So I bought a 2001 Prius, then a 2005, and I already have a deposit on a 2011 plug-in model.

During 2001, I immediately recognized the Prius technology as transformative and essential to our U.S. product mix. In my judgment, all of our auto compa nies should have licensed this technology immediately. If the Japanese balked, we would have been justified in excluding their vehicles from the U.S. market.

Did anyone at our auto companies ever explore such licensing?

It would have been a steal even if we had paid Toyota $1,000 per vehicle.

Richard Rosenbaum 

Bloomfield Hills



Future is electric

Whether you are opposed to fighting global warming because of your religious beliefs, your political hatred of anything tagged as “progressive,” or because you are not willing to accept the science, there is still a large benefit to Michigan should federal climate change legislation be signed into law. Electric cars are the future of automotive manufacturing, and nobody builds them better than us — even if you don’t think they are necessary.

Tina Moore 

Warren

WITHOUT (much) FANFARE: Alignment "Tent-Poles" for SWEEPING CHANGE Achieved! (NOW to the WORK of CRAFTING the INTENTIONAL-FABRIC for Same)

School reforms finally get through Legislature 

State positioned to compete for $400 million in U.S. aid

By CHRIS CHRISTOFF

FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF

LANSING — With $400 million in federal money at stake, lawmakers finally approved sweeping reforms Saturday to reward good teachers, turn bad schools over to the state and allow more charter schools. But the reforms won’t give Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb control over the academically challenged district’s curriculum. Instead, a state reform manager will be named, with authority to intervene in the academically worst 5% of schools.

The legislation also allows two cyber schools — at-home, online curriculums — aimed at dropouts. And the minimum drop out age increases to 18 from 16.

The five-bill package will allow Michigan to compete for up to $400 million from President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, in cluding as much as $70 million in Detroit. The reforms have been sought for years by some but opposed by teachers unions.

Even if the state doesn’t win all the money, reforms were needed, said proponents. “Today’s action is all about helping kids get a first-class education in a world that demands nothing less,” said Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who spent Saturday urging legislators to pass the bills.


OUR EDITORIAL 

Better than expected 

Race to Top legislation doesn’t accomplish everything, but it’s a good start to reforming state schools

Getting there wasn’t pretty, and some of it was pure nonsense. But finally, the Legislature finished the job of preparing Michigan schools for a leap in quality and accountability.

Michigan’s Race to the Top legislation, months overdue and needed so the state can compete for more than $400 million in federal dollars, came to fruition on Saturday— nothing less than a holiday miracle for a bitterly divided Lansing.

It is a good package that will bring reform to Michigan classrooms. But whether it goes far enough to win the grants — other states seem to have done more — will be up to the Obama administration.

The Legislature took a measured approach to charter school expansion that is expected to open dozens of slots under the state cap of 150 charter schools.

Under the new law, existing charter schools could convert into “schools of excellence”— and not be counted against the cap — if their students score well on tests.

The existing alternative public schools would either have to exhibit 90 percent proficiency in math and science or 75 percent proficiency if at least half of the students come from low-income households. High schools with 80 percent proficiency in student learn ing and high rates of graduation and college attendance also would qualify for “schools of excellence” status.

Opening more alternative public schools will help push traditional schools and existing charter schools through competition for stu dents and their state school aid dollars.

Overcoming fierce resistance from the state’s largest teacher and school employee union, the Michigan Education Association, Michigan will use student achievement data to measure teacher performance for the first time. This is essential to meeting the White House’s call to move toward a more perform ance- based education system.

The legislation says student progress must be weighed in teacher evaluations, pay, bonuses and tenure. This is not a state requirement for merit pay for teachers, but it certainly gives districts ammunition to demand the practice in their contracts if student achieve ment is stagnant or dismal.

In addition, the Race to the Top reforms imply that teachers with poor performance should not be protected by the tenure law.

Although this is not the straightforward reform of the tenure system that is needed, it is an important legislative admission that the rigid tenure system lets bad teachers hold schools and their students hostage.

There are some disappointments. The Detroit Public Schools’ elected school board and its legislative allies effectively squashed giving the district’s Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb the official legal authority to reform academics, and not just finances.

The need to give Bobb academic control is obvious. This month, Detroit set a new national low in student test scores on a national assessment. House leaders promise to hold a public hearing on the matter in January.

But the legislation tries to make up for this by giving the state more power to take over the state’s worst academically failing schools.

Two cyber schools were also created — in part to meet federal preferences. While such experiments are worth trying, taxpayers de serve to know much more about these schools and how they will be held accountable.

The Race to the Top legislative package is a good start to making Michigan schools better for all children. But the work — on merit pay, tenure and charters — must continue.


Reforms hailed, but issues linger

Bobb doesn’t get control; teachers fear losing input

By CHRIS CHRISTOFF and GINA DAMRON

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

LANSING — Even if Michi gan doesn’t win a piece of the $4.3 billion the Obama administration will dole out to states for at-risk schools, reforms approved by the Legislature on Saturday are worth it, said lawmakers who led the way.

The reform plan had to be in place for the state to apply next month for as much as $400 million in federal grants under the Obama administra tion’s Race to the Top initia­tive to improve at-risk public schools.

But it’s not a victory for the Detroit Public Schools emer gency financial manager, Robert Bobb, an appointee of Gov. Jennifer Granholm. The legislation does not grant him the power he wanted to control the district’s academic programs.

Instead, a state reform manager will have authority to shake up or close down specific schools based on their students’ achievement.

“The community and ev eryone involved really was looking for the single line of accountability with academ ics that they now have with fi nances,” said Steve Wasko, spokesman for Bobb.

Wasko said the legislation “threatens to dismantle the school district as we know it.” The question of giving Bobb academic authority over Detroit schools will be aired before the House Education Committee on Jan. 14, said committee Chairman Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills. Mel ton, who led House Democrats in negotiating the reform package with Senate Republicans, successfully argued for a state-level school reform manager to tackle failing schools or clusters of schools. Senate Republicans and Granholm preferred appoint ing individual crisis managers who could take over districts’ entire operations — as Gran holm wanted for Bobb. 

Opening way for charters

One thing Detroit could see under the reform plan is more charter schools. In fact, Michigan could have a few dozen new charter schools within 10 years under the guidelines.

Currently, state law limits to 150 the number of charter schools established by universities. Michigan has 240 char ter schools in all.

The new law sets high standards for charter schools that cater to large numbers of low income, at-risk students. If the charters meet those standards, the authority that created them can open more schools.

“This bill allows for modest growth of charter schools based on quality,” said Gary Naeyaert, spokesman for Michigan’s Charter Schools. “The state is saying, ‘You have to have excellent academic achievement among an at-risk student population. If you figure out how to do that, we want to do more of that.’ ” Even if the state wins federal grants, it won’t solve what Granholm and others call a funding crisis for public schools.

Public school funding was cut $350 million in the 2009-10 budget and faces a $212-million hit next month.

“This is just incentive money that gave us the impetus to get some reforms done that would not have gotten done in another 20 or 30 years,” Melton said. 

Results will take time

Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R Holland, said the full impact of the reforms won’t be felt for 10 years, as more charter schools open, bad schools are shored up or closed and good teachers are rewarded with money. The legislation will allow school districts to judge teachers in part by academic achievement of their students. It doesn’t eliminate teacher tenure laws, but it could affect merit pay and promotions.

“We took big steps toward rewarding high-performing teachers,” said Kuipers, who led negotiations for the Sen ate Republican majority. “But at the same time, you’ve got to get rid of bad ones. We didn’t get there with this package.” 

Teachers have concerns

Still, teachers unions were upset with a bill that gives the state reform manager broad powers to take control of individual schools, fire people and impose work rules apart from negotiated contracts.

“This strips employees of their voice in helping students in these struggling schools,” said Doug Pratt, spokesman for the Michigan Education Association. “It is completely inappropriate.”

He said the MEA and AFT Michigan, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, went along with other reforms they have resisted in the past, such as al­ternative certification for teachers and merit pay. 


Reform highlights

■ Expands the number of high quality charter schools (at least 10 over five years), including two online schools.

■ Gives state greater authority to take over up to 5% of schools with worst academic perfor mance.

■ Increases the dropout age from 16 to 18.

■ Allows some professionals to teach in public schools without a four-year teaching degree (example: engineers teaching math).

■ Permits schools to give merit pay to teachers based in part on the academic performance of their students.

Next steps in the Race to the Top

■ Governor signs the bills.

■ State identifies underper forming schools.

■ State officials develop federal Race to the Top application by Jan. 19.

■ Feds announce first-round winners in April.

■ Feds announce second round of grants in September.

EXAMPLES OF WHAT’ S AVAILABLE

■ Detroit Public Schools: $70.6 million

■ Flint Community Schools: $6.3 million

■ Southfield Public Schools: $724,197

■ Warren Consolidated Schools: $938,853

■ Ecorse Public Schools: $519,020 

Our RULE of LAW reaffirms JUSTICE can indeed sometimes BE BLIND!

POSTED: 9:48 P.M. DEC. 18, 2009 | UPDATED: 10:08 P.M. DEC. 18, 2009

Judge rules for Detroit school board

Bobb told to stop DPS academic policy-making

BY CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

Wayne County Circuit Judge Wendy Baxter ruled Friday that Robert Bobb, the Detroit Public Schools' emergency financial manager, must cease making academic policy decisions.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the Detroit school board, which has been rendered nearly powerless since state-appointee Bobb took control of the district's $1.2-billion budget in March.

While saying that there are gray areas involved in Bobb's duties because finances overlap with academics, Baxter said nothing in state law allows an emergency financial manager to make academic policy or curriculum decisions.

She also acknowledged that this case, filed in August, has dragged on and that the Legislature was debating this week whether to allow the state to grant academic control over failing schools to an appointee.

"Waiting for the Legislature to act is ridiculous to me, because it's not within our control," Baxter said.

In its lawsuit, the board asked the court to demand that Bobb stop making academic policy decisions, powers that belong to the board. The board also claimed that Bobb failed to consult it on finances as required by law and that he should reinstate its budget for attorney's fees. Bobb countersued, demanding that the board cease attempts to make hiring decisions, powers that fall under his authority.

Baxter denied the request to force Bobb to reinstate the board's attorney's fees and ruled against Bobb's request to dismiss the case.

John Clark, a special assistant state attorney general who is representing Bobb, said "DPS needs to lay out where they think there's been an encroachment on academic powers."

He declined to comment on whether Bobb has made decisions on curriculum development.

To address that issue, Baxter told both parties to return to court every Friday in January for evidentiary hearings to determine whether Bobb has actually made academic decisions and whether he has consulted with the board on finances.

Board members said Friday they plan to immediately exercise their academic policy-making powers by aligning the curriculum with the National Assessment of Educational Progress test.

Contact CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY: 313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com

Yin and Yan, Tit for Tat, All in a Lifetime

POSTED: 11:24 P.M. DEC. 18, 2009 | UPDATED: 4:45 A.M. TODAY

VOTE RESULTS

Detroit teachers union OKs contract deal with school district

BY CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY AND GINA DAMRON
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

The Detroit Federation of Teachers approved a controversial contract agreement with the Detroit Public Schools that requires most union members to defer $10,000 in pay.

The vote results -- 3,578 to 2,031 -- were released early today.

The contract promises to repay the $10,000 to the employees upon their departure from the district. The $10,000 concession will be deducted from paychecks over the next two years – but some hourly workers, such as substitute teachers, are exempt.

“This is the fairest contract we could’ve gotten in troubled times,” said Lenore Ellery, special education teacher at the Jerry L. White Center.

The contract also calls for a wide-range of school reforms including selecting a team of veteran teachers to evaluate teachers; the option to vote - by building - for shared decision-making with administrators; and an incentive program for staffs that reach agreed-upon goals.

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager released a statement via e-mail just before 1:30 a.m. saying the contract recognizes how important teachers are to improving performance in the schools.

"This is a new day for Detroit's school children," Bobb wrote. "We can now move forward together to implement in Detroit the educational reforms that have been beneficial elsewhere in ensuring student success. ... I applaud the teachers for taking the time to carefully review all of the details of the package, especially in an environment when so many parties sought to foster misinformation."

High-priority schools will be created, allowing the option for extended school hours for those struggling schools. The union members also will pay more in healthcare premiums and co-pays. They will receive a 1% pay raise in the third contract year, 2011-12.

The financially-struggling school district will be able to use the deferred wages to pay bills while the 3-year contract will save the district an estimated $62.8 million.

The contract passed after two weeks of controversy and in-fighting. Union members had responded to the deal with vehement, angry outcries when it was presented at a meeting at Cobo Hall on Dec. 6. Dissatisfaction with the contract offer sparked an effort to recall the DFT president Keith Johnson who called the agreement “the best” anyone could negotiate considering the district’s deficit is at least $219 million.

Steve Conn, a math teacher at Cass Technical High, said the recall effort has collected 800 of 1,000 needed signatures to force re-vote on Johnson’s presidency.

“We are going to fight tooth and nail, continue to fight for public education,” said Conn, a vocal opponent of the contract. “They will not be able to implement this anywhere in a real way.”

Some members accused Johnson of voting irregularities including wrongly placing information on the ballot about the dangers of a no vote.

At least two schools received ballots delivered late, some ballots were sent to closed schools and some rosters needed to be updated, all problems that Johnson said were resolved before the Dec. 18 voting deadline.

Some ballots were thrown out because they were defaced with extraneous writing, for example, scrawled with words such as “hell no.”

“These are veteran teachers and they’re professionals so they should have known not to deface a ballot,” Johnson said.

Johnson said Thursday he would accept the union’s decision if members decide to recall him. But he maintained that those who objected to the contract offer did not understand that the alternative was worse - an outright pay cut.

He said there is precedence for the $10,000 “loan” to the district – in the 1980s each teacher loaned the district 10 days’ pay that was repaid one day a year over the course of 10 years, he said.

Johnson said members passed the contract despite the “lies and rhetoric” of the dissidents.

“We as a school district have to move forward now,” he said.

Contact CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY at 313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com

Teachers threaten injunction over vote

By LORI HIGGINS and CHASTITY PRATT DA
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS

Some members of the De troit Federation of Teachers were threatening Thursday to file a court injunction to halt voting that is to end today on the Detroit teachers contract.

“This is not a fair vote,” said George Washington, a Detroit attorney who said he repre sents several members of the union’s election committee and some other union mem bers.

In a letter Washington sent to Keith Johnson, the union president, Washington cited a failure by Johnson to consult anyone before writing the bal lot and called the ballot biased because it details what will happen if members vote no. The letter also raises questions about the accuracy of the vote because of problems with vot ing lists.

Johnson said the argu ments were not grounds for suspending the ratification process. He denied the re quest, though he admitted there have been problems dur ing the voting. Two schools didn’t get ballots, but they eventually were delivered.

“Most of the teachers have already voted. Whatever hap pens tomorrow happens,” he said Thursday night, referring to the counting of the ballots today.

Johnson said putting that language on the ballot was not illegal. “I put that on there be cause … I wanted people to have a clear understanding,” he said.

Mark O’ Keefe, executive vice president of the DFT, said past ballot language has al ways spelled out that a “no” vote on a contract would mean members would withhold their services. The only difference this time is what the “no” vote will mean.

“It’s informative language, not coercive,” O’ Keefe said. “It’s the least coercive lan guage we’ve ever had.”

But Washington said telling voters that voting no means they will stop working is differ ent from telling them all the ramifications that the current ballot spells out.

“It lets one side use the bal lot for a propaganda tool, and that’s never been done before,” Washington said.

Meanwhile, union members are circulating petitions to re call Johnson, citing dissatis faction with the tentative agreement he negotiated.  

Hold the Drumroll.......and prepare for the Cymbal Crescendo! (These guy's are even bad-actors at theater-Film at Noon)

POSTED: 6:50 P.M. DEC. 18, 2009 | UPDATED: 4:29 A.M. TODAY

Legislature works past midnight, but no decision

BY DAWSON BELL
FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU

The Michigan Legislation departed the Capitol after midnight for the second straight day early Saturday, unable to complete work on school reforms aimed at qualifying Michigan for up to $400 million in federal stimulus funds.

Leaders from both the House and Senatepledged to be back at their desks this morning. But tempers flared near the end of Friday's session as Senate leaders accused House negotiators of trying to insert last minute changes into an agreement reached 24 hours earlier.

"They're starting to ask for changes," saidSenate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, "We're not going to re-negotiate the whole deal."

Rep. Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, denied those charges, describing modifications being made to the legislation as "tweaks."

"We still have a deal," he said.

Lawmakers arrived at the Capitol Friday evening, after having departed about 1 a.m., ostensibly to begin voting on so-called Race to the Top bills. Instead, they spent their time listlessly waiting, chatting and sleeping, in part because the actual legislation had yet to be printed.

The content of the bills - to expand charter schools, address chronically struggling schools and inject greater accountability for teachers and staff - had been agreed to in concept by House and Senate negotiators early Friday.

In theory, it would allow for the creation of about 30 new charters in areas where existing schools have under-performed, tie teacher evaluations, pay and job security to student performance and create the framework for state-appointed officials to takeover management of failing schools.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Friday afternoon that she endorsed the conceptual agreement and would sign it if it reached her desk.

That remained an open question early Saturday.

The complexity of the legislation, coupled with a myriad of side issues (such as raising the high school dropout age to 18 from 16 without parental consent), kept a small army of lobbyists at work along with the lawmakers and their staffs.

Bishop said Democratic House leaders "just got to tell us. Do you want to do it or not? We don't want to blow it up."

Melton, who said he had had three hours of sleep in the last 48, said not to worry. "We're going to get it done. This is about 20 years of reform packed into one year. But we're going to get there."

Contact DAWSON BELL: 517-372-8661 or dbell@freepress.com

Turning the Page (From the Money Conversation to a Fresh, Insighful, Introspective Message of Hope by merely DOING the RIGHT THING) A SEA CHANGE to SEE CHANGE!

HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN DETROIT’ S KIDS

One of the biggest problems facing the Detroit Public Schools is the lack of faith that some of its employees have in the children.

That is the word from Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the district’s chief academic and accountability auditor, who has spent months completing an extensive and not-yet-released analysis of how the district educates students.

There is nothing wrong with the city’s children or parents that cannot be remediated, she said. But there must be a sea change in the way district employees — from top to bottom — deal with their clients.

“Sometimes people revel in the despair,” she said in an interview where she gave a sneak preview of her findings. They include: 

■ Children in the same grade with vastly different and defi cient curricula.

■ A lack of progress reports to parents.

■ A total failure to evaluate and improve the performance of struggling teachers.

But the saddest thing Byrd Bennett discovered in conversa tions with hundreds of students, teachers, parents and principals? Some people just don’t believe in the kids.

“There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief that children can achieve,” she said.

What kids need: A dream and a chance

Barbara Byrd-Bennett recalls being a 19-year-old volunteer teaching reading to inmates with life sentences at the prison on Alcatraz off the coast of California.

“They were in there for life, and I could still see the hunger in their eyes,” she said. “They wanted to learn.”

Byrd-Bennett, chief academic and accountability auditor for the Detroit Public Schools, said she has seen that same hunger in the eyes of some DPS students. She also heard directly from ded icated teachers, heroes who work their butts off and still want to be even better, to reach kids more.

“You can’t move a district until you … change the culture of a district, and the culture doesn’t change until people begin to change,” she said.

For months, Byrd-Bennett has quietly guided the finan cial decisions of DPS emer gency financial manager Rob ert Bobb while examining all aspects of academics and teaching across the district.

Her extensive, not-yet-re leased audit shows that decades of poor administration, little communication with parents and inattention to students have left standing a district that is a monument to chaos, a district that will take years of innovation and a sea change in attitude to fix.

“There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief” in these children. “If you can get a group of people to believe in the children and their parents, you can change things.”

Where are the standards?

Among the problems Byrd Bennett outlines in her audit:

■ The district does not use the uniform, core curriculum system that was designed to keep all students on the same pace.

Students at one school learn more — and more effectively — than kids in the same grade at another school.

“As a parent, as a kid, I should know that in ninth grade, here are the core requirements. In order to move from freshman to sophomore, I need to complete this num ber of classes. And there’s something deeply wrong when you think foreign lan guage is an add-on.”

■ There is little regular communication between teachers and parents, and few progress reports on how students are doing.


■ There are no standard, uniform evaluation tools for teachers or principals.

“I don’t know any job that where you’re never evaluated, assessed or helped and supported,” she said. “That is obscene.”

■ Many teaching methods used in the district are out dated, some from the 1970s.

The good news, Byrd-Bennett said, is that “as I went into schools and talked with teachers, I found that people are hungry for the support.

People want to know how to do a good job. People want to know how to get out of the frozen ’60s and ’70s teaching methods.”

■ There is a belief among many employees that DPS children are inferior students. Rampant social promotion, a statewide problem, places students in classes where they are ill-equipped to learn and mainly mark time until they drop out. Teachers must deal with students who are years behind in reading and math, who have behavioral problems or, in the case of a teacher I recently reported about, had a class of 28 stu dents who were on 10 different reading levels. And I get heartbreaking e-mails from teachers who have to adapt their teaching plans to the arrival of students at different academic levels all through out the year.

“What I’ve learned is that the academics have been subordinate to finances here for longer than anyone could have imagined,” Byrd-Bennett said.

There is nothing wrong with the children or their parents that cannot be remediated, she said. But there must be a sea change in the way district employees — top to bottom — deal with their clients.

“Sometimes people revel in the despair,” she said in an exclusive interview. “I’ve said this over and over. There has got to be a suspension of their disbelief that children can achieve.”

Core course requirements should be the same at every high school, but students should have the chance to try different career paths without affecting their college prep.

“But people push back and say these kids won’t do that.

They don’t believe in these kids.” 

The gift of a dream

Byrd-Bennett has found what’s wrong. When she releases the final academic audit, we better pay attention. This time.

“Sometimes a superintendent, an associate sup has to stand for the kids. All the adults have their representation. We are the union for the kids. I’m the union rep,” she said. “Every kid I’ve met wants to learn. I’m the kid from the low-income projects of Harlem. The difference was: There was a group of significant adults who believed that I could be some thing better. … “Nobody has suspended their disbelief.”

I remember those dreams.

Every adult on my street in Tarboro, N.C., had that dream for me. They lived it.

They made me live it. I always saw beyond that street.

Now we must give that gift to Detroit kids.

■ CONTACT ROCHELLE RILEY: RRILEY99@FREEPRESS.COM 

“IF YOU CAN GET A GROUP OF PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN THE CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS, YOU CAN CHANGE THINGS.” 

BARBARA BYRD-BENNETT, chief academic and accountability auditor for the Detroit Public Schools 

Drumroll Please! Political Grandstanding 101 (Cue-up "Hail to the Victors" Film at 11)

Statewide

School reform talks to resume this afternoon

Gov. Jennifer Granholm and legislative leaders will resume negotiations this afternoon on school reform measures aimed at qualifying Michigan schools for up to $400 million in federal stimulus funding.

Progress on some issues, which negotiators for all sides declined to identify, was announced just after midnight. Still at issue are what kind of limits to place on the creation of new charter schools, differences over teacher tenure protection and how to deal with schools or districts in crisis, such as Detroit.

The Legislature had been scheduled to adjourn for the year Thursday night.

He said, She said: "A Case for the Criminally Inane"

---

December 17, 2009

http://detnews.com/article/20091217/POLITICS02/912170439

Education talks resume after showy press conference in Lansing

KAREN BOUFFARD
Detroit News Lansing Bureau


Lansing --Finger-pointing gave way to theatrics this afternoon in the turbulent battles under way in Lansing over education reforms needed to qualify for $400 million or more in federal Race to the Top funding.

About 40 House Democrats flanked Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, and Education Committee Chair Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, at a lunchtime press conference called to shame Republicans back to the negotiating table. Republicans stormed out of talks about 8 p.m. Wednesday night, led by Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, after negotiation stumbled over the issue of charter schools.

Asked if the Democrats had picked up a phone to ask Kuipers back to the table, Melton said, "As far as they know, we're still down in the conference room. We didn't walk out on them; they walked out on us."

After further prodding from reporters, Dillon whipped out his cell and dialed Kuipers directly: "We want you to come back to the table and negotiate," Dillon said. "I'll be in my office right now."

Dillon announced about an hour later that talks had resumed. "We're back in business," Dillon said.
Kuipers, in an interview with The Detroit News this morning, charged that the House and Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration aren't fully committed to winning the money -- and presented as evidence problems Michigan had meeting last week's deadline to file an optional letter of intent to apply for Race to the Top funding.

Jan Ellis, spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the problems were not on the state's end. When they tried to send the letter to Washington expressing their intent to apply for the money, the computers were down at the U.S. Department of Education, so the letter never was sent.

Melton said Kuipers' criticism of the Department of Education is meant to divert attention from Republicans' lack of cooperation.

"The department is fully engaged in this -- (State School Superintendent) Mike Flanagan has had his staff working around the clock on this," Melton said. "The real (issue) is the Senate walking away from negotiations.

"It's an optional letter, and the House and the governor are fully committed to this."

The letter was optional and won't jeopardize Michigan's chances of winning the money, Ellis said.

She said the purpose of the form was help the U.S. Department of Education prepare for an onslaught of state applications expected by the Jan. 19 deadline for the first wave of funding.

"This was not an application -- it was a letter of intent that was optional, and that we tried to file at least three times, and their system was down," Ellis said, referring to the U.S. Department of Education's computer system.

"There was no requirement and they know we are going to apply" for the money.
Ellis said the department has since sent in the letter.

Because Michigan's notice was not received by the U.S. Department of Education by the deadline, the state was not listed among states planning to apply for the first round of funding. Applications for Phase I funding are due by Jan. 19; states not ready to apply by then will have another opportunity later in 2010.

Senate Republicans walked out on negotiations on education reform legislation late Wednesday, bringing a halt -- for the moment -- to talks about education reforms linking teacher pay to student test scores, opening more charter schools and other measure the Obama administration has outlined as requirement for Race to the Top cash.

Conference committee meetings slated for 9 a.m. this morning were swiftly recessed since there were no deals for members to debate.

Melton said this morning that Republicans, led by Kuipers, walked out after House Democrats wouldn't budge on the Senate's plan to open 100 or more additional charter schools in the state.

"The Senate just wants to get a wish list to do as many charters as they want, and that's not what Race to the Top is all about," Melton said.

Kuipers said talks failed over a number of issues, not just charter schools.

"We have a number of outstanding issues, and we weren't making progress on any of them," Kuipers said. "I just said, 'We've been talking for six hours. We're not making progress. When you're willing to get serious, let us know.' "

Criminal Insanity: Something we know Something about (Dysfunctional Knee-Knocking to Head-Knocking)

Editorial

Detroiters can set a new DPS path

Two bills are sitting in conference between the House and Senate in Lansing that would stop a near-criminal insanity: the fact that Detroit Public Schools emergency fi­nancial manager Robert Bobb is not formally in control of the district’s academics.

The bills are stuck, even as legislators gather today, perhaps for the last time this year, apparently because the old saws about Lansing’s interference in Detroit business have been raised. Legislators have reportedly gotten cold feet about giving Bobb more con trol, for fear that it will inspire a backlash from Detroiters who’ll see it as a move to strip them of power over their schools.

So non-Detroit legislators — including bill sponsors Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, and Rep. Tim Melton, D-Au burn Hills — can’t get the votes to work out the differences between their two bills. And the Detroit delegation has yet to step forward to demand the changes that would help Bobb get control of the district’s mismanaged academics, much as he is working to rein in its financial problems.

Detroiters themselves can help resolve this knee-knocking trepidation. By contacting their legislators (whose phone numbers appear here) they can make it clear what they want. Should the school board remain in control of academics? Or should Bobb get a chance?

Here’s a bet on what they might say: Go for it with Bobb. Bobb’s work has been popular, as at least partially evidenced by the backing voters gave his bond proposal (a fairly risky financial proposition) in November. His arrival was greeted with cheers, not the anger that you still see direct ed at the school board during meetings. And his swift action has won him many allies among parents and other stakeholders.

This also isn’t just about De troit. The legislation at issue would give the state superintendent more power to inter vene in every struggling dis trict. And, by the way, that’s a key component of what the federal government will be looking for when it awards Race to the Top money (which could mean hundreds of mil lions to Michigan). How silly to let an old argument over “control” of Detroit’s schools interfere.

Moreover, conceding that Bobb needs emergency power over all the district’s activities doesn’t preclude the more se rious and much needed de bate over the district’s long term governance structure. This isn’t a takeover; it’s an in tervention to fix a serious problem.

What a shame it would be if legislators let a few empty threats keep them from delivering urgent help to the city’s children.

Great Advice for Successful Reading Corps!

Editorials 

How to make the most of Reading Corps volunteers

In the three days since Detroit Public Schools CEO Robert Bobb appealed for volunteers to help boost the reading skills of DPS students, nearly 900 would-be tutors from every corner of south east Michigan have responded.

So much for the cynical lament that Michigan’s largest school district is doomed by adult apa thy.

But making effective use of this volunteer army poses a critical challenge to Bobb and his subordinates. Other big city school districts have used volunteer tutors to move the literacy needle, and their successes illuminate some best practices DPS would be wise to embrace:

■ Establish clear goals: Bobb has asked De troiters to commit to assuring that every third grader is reading at grade-level or better by 2015. His school district’s task is to translate that ambitious objective into individualized plans for thousands of aspiring readers. Teach ers and volunteers need to understand each student’s capabilities and adopt realistic timeta bles for expanding them.

■ Train the trainers: Teachers and reading specialists must help volunteers acquire the skills needed to be effective tutors. Mike Casser ly, the executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, suggests that school administra tors begin by visualizing the volunteer’s experi ence from arriving at the school to checking out, then provide the training and materials neces sary to support each step.

■ Train the staff: Employees from principals to building custodians must learn how to recognize volunteers, make them welcome, and direct them to staff responsible for coordinating volun teer efforts. Each participating school should have designated coordinators (and backup coor dinators) to support volunteers and make sure that teachers and volunteers are sharing in formation about each student’s progress and needs.

■ Measure results: Atlanta Public Schools Su perintendent Beverly Hall, whose district’s vol unteer tutoring program has significantly boost ed reading scores there, says one corporate sponsor, Georgia-Pacific, assesses students at the beginning of the year and checks periodical ly to make sure students assigned to Georgia Pacific employees are making steady progress.

“That’s the gold standard of accountability,” Hall says. But everyone who invests in DPS’s Reading Corps — students, teachers, volunteers and sponsoring employers — deserves a means of measuring the return on their investment.

DPS will have to consider the practical needs of volunteers in making other decisions, such as when and where tutoring sessions should occur.

But most literacy experts favor making use of school facilities after schools hours and even on weekends to maximize the number of hours students can read with the support of trained adults.

There is abundant evidence that a volunteer campaign like the Reading Corps can help stu dents make dramatic strides in literacy. If man aged wisely, the time invested by volunteers can have an impact greater than any money-raising effort.

That must be the focus for Bobb and his staff, who are fully engaged in making Reading Corps the structured, coordinated program it needs to be. 

GAMBLING with our Student's Futures (Unwise at Any Odd's and a Fool's Game)

Editorials 

Governor’s reprieve for schools likely to be short

Certainly it’s embarrassing for Gov. Jennifer Granholm that she announced an emergency school aid cut in October and then rescinded it before it took effect. Critics got plenty of am munition to say she was gaming the numbers solely to press for a tax increase that lawmakers would not entertain.

So, yes, her timing was and is suspect. The overall trend — dwindling tax support for schools — is not.

Even if Michigan manages to limp by with only its already enacted cuts for the current school year, districts will almost surely take a bigger hit next year than the one Granholm backed away from last week. Smart districts, if they found any palatable cuts while under the gun, may want to proceed with them anyway.

The numbers look like this: Gran holm had called for an emergency cut of $127 per pupil, starting with this month’s state aid payment, because of continuing tax shortfalls. Meanwhile, the most optimistic pro jection for next year’s budget starts with a $200-per-pupil cut. That comes on top of the $165-per-pupil cut made by the Legislature for the current year.

Where has the improvement come since Oct. 22? There is a bit more money than expected left over from last year in the school aid fund, for one thing. More significant is the smaller than- expected decline in taxes due on non homestead property — generally businesses and vacation homes. State forecasters aren’t certain why commercial property tax rolls remain relatively healthy, but the likeliest ex planation is simply that they have yet to show the full impact of the recession. So policymak ers would be wise to regard this as a short re prieve, rather than a rebound.

The fiscal outlook for the next school year is not pretty: Besides de clining taxes, federal stimulus money will taper off and job losses are expect ed to continue until at least late 2011.

But just as school districts would be smart to start making deeper cuts now, legislators could mitigate the damage by making urgently needed changes in Michigan’s tax structure sooner rather than later. Unfortunate ly, Granholm’s decision to postpone cuts relieves some immediate pres sure for reform.

The governor did not play her cards well. But her clumsiness should not become an excuse to ignore the bigger problem: Without more funding, the education that Michigan offers its children will inevitably deteriorate. And those students, in turn, will be even less well prepared to deal with the chal lenges that await Michigan in the decades to come.

JUST DO the RIGHT THING!

Kids can’t read? Hundreds want to help 

Metro residents ready to aid DPS

By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

Detroit Public Schools put out a call to the region Sunday to recruit volunteers to do 100,000 service hours to help teach children to read and re tired mechanic Mark Durfee, 55, of Detroit didn’t hesitate.

The self-published poet read an article about the new DPS Reading Corps online at 2 a.m. He clicked on the link and became the first of more than 700 people to volunteer within 36 hours. An additional 140 people signed up by phone.

The volunteers include men and women from throughout the tri-county area from com munities such as Grosse Pointe and Grosse Ile to Southfield and Sterling Heights.

“I have to have faith that the coming generation can make Detroit, Michigan, the nation and the world a better place than the one we are leaving be hind,” Durfee said. “If the com ing generation of kids cannot read, they will fail in bringing that change. That is why I vol unteered.”

The DPS Reading Corps is being organized in the wake of last week’s release of the Na tional Assessment of Educa tional Progress math test. De troit’s fourth- and eighth-grad ers scored worse than any U.S. city in the 40-year history of the test.

Educators said students who had problems with read ing had trouble with the test. The math test is full of story problems and about 40% of it can include open-ended ques tions, according to the Nation al Center for Education Statis tics, which administers the test.

“Literacy is the fundamen tal key to all content areas,” Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief academic and account ability auditor for DPS, said at Monday’s news conference to kick off the Reading Corps.

Volunteers must get a back ground check, attend an orien tation and four to six hours of training on the district’s read ing recovery program that will be used in the tutoring ses sions.

Training for tutors is ex pected to begin in January. Tu tors will be asked to help a min imum of two students for 30 minutes a week each.

Durfee, author of “Stink: Poetry and Prose of Detroit 2005-2009,” said he wants the children of Detroit “know they are not forgotten, and they are thought about and cared for.”

To volunteer, go to www.detroitk12.org. 

WHY it is NOT ABOUT the MONEY!

School grants spur state lawmakers to action 

Big changes needed to secure millions

By DAWSON BELL

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative “education reform’s moon shot,” the larg est pot of discretionary school funding — $4 billion or so — in the nation’s history.

But the scramble set off to qualify for the federal govern ment’s competitive grants has been very much Earth-bound.

In Michigan and other states, legislators and educa tion officials have engaged in a frenzy of deal-making to win Race to the Top funding.

Whether the end result is real classroom change — especially in the chronically troubled schools that are the main target for reform — won’t be known for years.

In the meantime, the enor mous, green federal carrot is generating movement on long stalled measures aimed at at tracting better teachers, open ing more good schools, reward ing results and punishing fail ure. Detroit Public Schools, for instance, would qualify for as much as $70.5 million of a pool of cash up to $400 million.

Final action on Race to the Top could come this week on legislation in three major areas:

■ Expanding the teacher pool. So-called alternative cer tification for teachers, permit ting those trained in areas such as engineering or math to teach without formal training in edu cation, has been a top agenda item for would-be education re formers for decades.

In some states, the pipeline for teachers has been expanded significantly to include mid-ca reer professionals and college graduates with little or no edu cation experience. Michigan hasn’t changed but will have to in order to qualify for Race to the Top money.

State Rep. Tim Melton, D Auburn Hills, a key negotiator, said he expects a deal that would allow college grads with a grade point average of at least 3.0 to work in middle and high schools without a teaching cer tificate. The legislation would require non-traditionally trained teachers to work to ward formal certification after they are hired.

■ Teacher and principal eval uation.

Race to the Top re quires schools to collect data that will allow them to track students’ performance under specific teachers and princi pals. In theory, doing so will al low schools to reward educa tors whose students make mea surable progress and address the shortcomings of others.

Ariela Rozman, chief execu tive of the New Teacher Project in Brooklyn, said efforts to im prove teacher effectiveness are a high priority in Race to the Top and an important factor in snaring the grants. But there are no precise ways to achieve that goal, she said.

Rozman’s group scored Michigan as being only some what competitive overall for Race to the Top funding in an initial assessment this summer and found the state’s data sys tem and methods for identify ing successful teachers and leaders seriously lacking.

The state House and Senate have approved merit-pay legis lation. But significant sticking points remain, including a fun damental disagreement over whether ineffective teachers should be protected from firing by the state’s teacher tenure law. The House version would keep that protection for ten ured teachers. The Senate ver sion wouldn’t.

■ Failing or struggling schools. States are required to have clear guidelines to deal with the worst performing 5% of schools to qualify for Race to the Top funding. Options in clude replacing staff, hiring a management company or clos ing.

Again, the devil is in the de tails. And they are endless.

In Michigan, lawmakers ha ven’t agreed on whether the takeover of a failing school or district should be handled by the state superintendent or a local manager — someone like Robert Bobb, the Detroit schools’ emergency financial manager. Last week, he asked for authority over academics, as well.

Relaxing the cap on more charter schools — often cited as a key objective of Race to the Top — also is unfinished busi ness for the Legislature. Teach ers unions and local school offi cials have long opposed efforts to permit more charters.

Jeanne Allen, at the Center for Education Reform, based in Washington, D.C., said both the federal program and the states likely will fall short of what is needed to address failing schools — a way to quickly shut one down and provide students with a good alternative.

Allen said initial promises from Duncan that schools would be encouraged to re move barriers to charter schools were a smaller part of the final standards than prom ised.

“A lot of these reforms are good and nice; they’re not path breaking,” Allen said.

Making bigger change re quires taking on too many insti tutional interests, especially unions, she said.

Teachers unions, which have traditionally opposed charters, have been less ada mant in the Race to the Top de bate, in part because they say the new rules will create more oversight of charter schools, as well as of traditional schools.

Still, Michigan’s lawmakers and school leaders are eager to land the possible $400-million prize to ease the pain from de clining state revenue and local property tax collections. 

Narrows the Focus (From One of Money to Academic Performance)

Low scores not just a Detroit problem

Lost in the furor over some Detroit public schools making the lowest scores in history on a nationally recog nized math assessment was the fact that Michigan didn’t do so well either.

Fourth-graders in 30 states scored higher than Michigan fourth-graders on the Nation al Assessment of Educational Progress exam, and only eight states and the District of Columbia scored lower, ac cording to Arnold Goldstein, program director for design analysis and reporting in the assessment division at the National Center for Education Statistics. Twelve states scored at the same level as Michigan.

Eighth-graders in 32 states scored above Michigan in the 2009 test. Eight states and the District of Columbia ranked lower, while students in 10 states scored at the same level as Michigan.

It is Michigan’s academic crisis that should have the undivided attention of state leaders, including Gov. Jenni fer Granholm. They have to treat education as the equal right of every Michigan child. 

Look at the whole state

For years, the governor and Legislature, regardless of party lines, have treated the state and its largest city like neighboring countries, setting separate laws and standards for each. Relations between the state and Detroit have been at best contentious, at worst outright hostile.

But the entire state of Michigan is facing an educa tion, reading and jobs crisis that might force it to work as a unit, instead of making sep arate laws for its largest school district.

Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools, urged law makers last week to give him authority over DPS’s academ ics, as well as its finances, because the district also is in an academic crisis.

But since all Michigan is in an academic crisis, Lansing should consider some type of academic oversight of every failing school.

That means ending social promotion so that districts will stop graduating students who cannot read, and thus forcing colleges to spend enormous amounts of money on remedial learning.

That means raising the minimum dropout age to 18, so that 16-year-olds can stop making decisions that are costly to all taxpayers.

That means developing a plan to equalize education in 550 school districts so that no matter where a child goes to class, the level of learning is mandated.

That means creating a core curriculum and a core stan dard for every district so some students aren’t attend ing blue-ribbon, college prep schools while others go to schools without chemistry labs, gymnasiums or toilet paper.

It means, said state Rep.

Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, “basing teacher evaluation on student growth and perfor mance.

“If teachers aren’t rated on how the kids are learning or if the kids are learning, there’s no end game,” said Melton, sponsor of a bill that includes a provision requiring teacher evaluations to be based in part on student growth and achievement.

Imagine that.

“Now, you have some schools with 5% proficiency in something and all the teach ers rated exemplary. If I’m gong to be judged on kids learning, I’ve got a stake in these kids learning,” Melton said. 

Guard kids’ rights

Melton and Rep. Bert Johnson, D-Detroit, who have been working through a series of bills to reform Michigan education, want to place allfailing schools into a single district that could receive part of the $1 billion available in Race to the Top stimulus funds. This would mean as­signing one academic czar to save all those schools and all those children. It has been done in Louisiana and Chica go. It might work in Michigan. Legislators are meeting around the clock to pass the bills to create such a district before the holidays, because the stimulus money applica tion is due before they are back in session.

If successful, Detroit could have a superintendent with educational expertise over seeing academics the way Bobb, as financial manager, is cleaning up finances.

No, Bobb has done nothing wrong. In fact, DPS is on the right track for the first time in a long time because of the job he has done.

But he himself will tell you he is a financial manager, not an academician. DPS needs an academic leader with as much authority as Bobb.

As caring people across the state figure out how to help children, there should be one job for all leaders: ending violations of the civil, human and educational rights of children, no matter where they live. 

Race On to Get the Money (How about the Race to Capture the Student's Imagination, Creativity and Innovation?)

Rules on teachers, schools could change to snare aid

By DAWSON BELL

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER 

Determined not to leave up to $400 million in federal funds on the table, state lawmakers appear determined this week to resolve differences in House and Senate bills that mandate significant changes in public schools.

To qualify for the Race to the Top federal stimulus mon ey, Michigan would have to make changes to allow merit pay for teachers, lessen re­strictions on opening charter schools, plan for sanctions for underperforming schools and make it easier for people to be come teachers. Teachers unions and local school offi cials have fought the ideas in the past.

Rep. Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, said state and federal ini tiatives will produce “a sea change” in the way troubled schools operate and kids learn. “It’s a huge deal,” he said.

And it’s a lot of money for a state with big money prob lems. The Democrat-con trolled House and Republican controlled Senate have ap proved different versions of legislation that must be re solved before Gov. Jennifer Granholm can sign it.

Michigan’s Race to the Top application is due Jan. 19, with the first round of funding to be announced in April. 

LOCK the Barn Door (The Cows are in the Lower Forty)

Oakland Press

Fix public schools or else

Sunday, December 13, 2009

By TOM WATKINS
Special to The Oakland Press

Will Democrats and the state’s most powerful teachers union inadvertently bring school vouchers to Michigan? Could these historic protectors of Michigan public education ultimately drag it under?

Watching what is taking place in school districts across Oakland County and the state make the question quite relevant. How ironic and tragic would it be if the Michigan Education Association, Democratic lawmakers, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a dozen or so Republicans (backed by the MEA) and a busload of complacent school superintendents and school boards ultimately helped bring vouchers to Michigan’s public schools?

How could that happen? The answer is simple. Taxpayers are fed up. Michigan residents, who are experiencing the pain of disruptive and transformational change, expect high-quality education and sensible action by our governor and legislators to put teaching, learning and children ahead of power, control and politics. They also are quite aware how change is impacting them and how the system is protecting the status quo.

When I served as state superintendent of schools, I sounded the alarm in 2004 that our current system of funding schools was unsustainable in the face of the sharply rising costs of health care, pensions and the large number of small school districts.

Shortly thereafter, I was forced out of the position by Granholm, assisted by a major shove from the MEA. If action had been taken when I recommended change, Michigan schools could have saved an estimated $4.5 billion to be invested in 21st century education initiatives by now.

Now fast forward to 2009 and house Speaker Andy Dillon’s ambitious proposal to bundle all public employee health care plans into one, with the potential to save up to $1 billion per year. His bold plan prompted MEA officials to immediately “declare war” on his efforts.

Even if Dillon’s savings estimates are off by 50 percent, we are still talking about significant money that could and should be redirected to the classroom. There is a desperate need for sensible reforms in government at all levels and specifically in our schools.

The foundation on which our public infrastructure was built (the auto industry) has been eroding for two decades and has imploded in the last year.

What we once had is now gone. We have a new reality of less revenue to support what we have had in the past. Changes need to be made, and have been denied for too long, to adjust to this new reality. Our public schools cannot be, and are not, immune to these new realities.

We must control rising health care benefits and pensions, and share services and consolidate local districts.

The actions by the MEA, standing in the way of sensible reforms and browbeating and cajoling legislators, local school boards and superintendents in light of Michigan’s new economic realities, ultimately will be self defeating.

The MEA might win the battle — but it is at great risk of losing the war.

Michigan’s constitution prohibits using government tax support for private or religious schools. In 2000, a voucher initiative was put on the statewide ballot. Opponents, led by the MEA and local school boards and using the public school establishment as foot soldiers, defeated this assault by a margin of 69 to 31 percent. It was a sharp setback to pro-voucher forces, and many thought it was the final nail in its coffin. Not necessarily so.

In November 2010, Michigan voters will be asked if they wish to hold a constitutional convention and rewrite the existing state constitution. Polls show there is massive dissatisfaction and anger toward Lansing, and voters just might take the opportunity to force change.

A metro newspaper quoted Lt. Gov. John Cherry as saying, “People are not happy with the capacity of state government to solve problems right now. … I don’t think the votes are there” to enact reforms. Sadly, the lieutenant governor is right, and the taxpayers might take matters into their own hands — and that ought to concern all the special interests in the halls of the Capitol.

When the “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” crowd gets rolling, major change might be in store for Lansing. The public understands that education matters and is willing to invest in results.

However, when they see data from the national ACT college admission test that shows Michigan ranks 42nd among the 50 states on the composite score (49th on English, 44th on math, 49th on reading, 41st on science), they question whether the current system is taking us where we need to go to be competitive in the global economy. This, coupled with the resistance to sensible change, is a prescription for a revised voucher initiative or some other massive assault on public education.

The status quo is quickly disappearing as a sensible option.

Michigan is in stiff competition to receive an estimated $600 million from President Obama’s “Race to the Top” federal education funding initiative. It is one of the new president’s most innovative tools to spur states to overhaul the change-resistant school culture and prepare our children for a hypercompetitive economy.

Without serious structural changes that push more of Michigan’s existing resources to the classroom, our state will be hard pressed to demonstrate that it is committed to change and deserving of these new, targeted stimulus investments. Michigan has until the end of this year to submit its application to the feds. How do we stand out among the states when we are content to muddle along?

When other states are raising their innovative sails high, it appears, once again, that Michigan is content to drop anchor in the past.

Our students will confront a changing, disruptive, information-and-technologically driven global economy that requires innovation, creativity and talent. Are we investing our limited state resources in ways that will ensure that they are prepared for this future? The answer, under the current power structure in Michigan, is a resounding no!

The rest of the world is not sitting idly by waiting for us to get our act together. At a time when ideas and work can, and do, effortlessly move around the globe, the states and nations that get their system of education right will prosper in the 21st century. We are on the wrong track in Michigan.

Death spiral

Michigan is caught up in a perfect storm of losing people, businesses and the taxes they pay. Michigan gets less populated, less educated and poorer because of people and business fleeing our state. Since 2001, out-migration has cost Michigan 465,000 people, the equivalent of half the population of Detroit. The rate of exodus, one of the worst in the nation, is accelerating. Nearly 109,000 more people left Michigan last year than moved in. It is reported that our state loses a family every 12 minutes, and the families who are leaving are the people the state desperately needs to kick-start our economic rebound — young, well-educated, high-income earners. It is change-or-die time for Michigan schools.

Many school boards and administrators have been conspirators with the MEA to avoid change. As long as money could be extracted from taxpayers via local millage votes before Proposal A in 1994, and from the governor and state Legislature ever since, everyone has been content to maintain a virtual state of homeostasis.

Our state continues to lose jobs in roaring tsunamis and replace them in teardrops. Even if our economy improves dramatically, we simply cannot afford the cost structure under our current system of public education. Covering the rising cost of pensions and health care for our schools would require up to a half-billion-dollar investment per year ($300 per student times 1.7 million students) for the foreseeable future. This leaves no money for schools to invest in programs and services that will prepare our students for the future. Schools have not seen an increase of this magnitude for years; hence, superintendents and school boards have become “Pac-Man,” gobbling up or cutting other school functions to pay for escalating health care and pension costs. This is unsustainable.

The governor and Legislature should either have the political courage to adequately fund the status quo or make the necessary changes.

There have been countless studies and recommendations from distinguished organizations to address the structural funding crisis facing our schools, including: The Center For Michigan (www.thecenterformichigan.net); Business Leaders for Michigan (formerly Detroit Renaissance) (www.businessleadersformichigan.com); Citizens Research Council of Michigan (www.crcmich.org) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (www.mackinac.org).

In addition, Granholm appointed a bipartisan Emergency Financial Advisory Panel, co-chaired by former Govs. William Milliken and James Blanchard and stacked with knowledgeable Lansing insiders, that offered recommendations on how best to avoid ongoing budget crises like Michigan is experiencing now. Granholm never acted on her panel’s recommendations.

Each of these groups spells out ways for Michigan to make sensible changes while fairly supporting its teachers and public schools that are vital to our economic rebound and prosperity. The time for studies, delays, debates and talking is over. We need the governor and legislators to act.

The MEA has considerable clout in Lansing. It underwrites Democrats and Republicans alike and is calling in its chips to prevent change. As an example, newly elected state senator and former state Rep. Mike Nofs has been a longtime supporter of the MEA and was endorsed by the union in his recent successful special election Senate bid.

At a time when Michigan and the schools the taxpayers support demand adaptability, creativity, flexibility, innovation, problem-solving and versatility, what we have from the MEA and the politicians they have supported is rigidity, conformity, protectionism and standing pat for the status quo.

Those who profess to support public education should take notice: If you give people a choice … they may take it.

New three Rs

Historically, we spoke about the three Rs of education: Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. We need the new three Rs in Michigan education: Reform, Restructure and Reinvent. There should be no agreement on the fourth new R — Revenue/taxes — until these structural changes are well under way.

Suggesting such ideas has brought the wrath of the MEA down on my head, Dillon’s and others who dare to speak truth to power. Many public schools across the state are financially wobbly today due to the strain of inadequate state funding that has not, and cannot keep pace with rising health care and pension costs, especially when combined with limited or declining enrollment coupled with the inaction to consolidate school districts.

To make matters worse, the state continues to take in less sales tax revenue than projected, so dollars for the school aid fund will be hundreds of millions short as the new year begins. To add insult to injury, the current Democratic plan to slap a Band-Aid on the current school-funding crisis by tapping the federal stimulus money set aside for next fiscal year is simply postponing the day of reckoning.

In addition, Granholm’s plan to further tax tobacco, tax bottled water and close tax loopholes is anemic, at best, and will not raise enough revenue to stop the bleeding. It is the equivalent of plugging the hole in the Titanic with a wine cork. Even if these “revenue enhancements” are enacted, school funding will remain in crisis.

While some might doubt that our system of public education could topple, it is increasingly unstable, unbalanced and ultimately unsustainable unless bold structural changes are made to alter its present course. This will require the type of real change and leadership from the governor, Legislature and state school board that has been lacking to date.

The MEA is intent on not altering course and will attack change advocates as anti-Democrat, anti-teacher and anti-labor. I am none of the above. In fact, I was a youth advocate long before becoming a Democrat. I support these changes because doing nothing will bankrupt our schools and state, and drag our children under in the process.

As the health care, pension and school district consolidation (and other) reform issues are debated in the coming months, lawmakers need to ask themselves — and be asked by taxpayers — whose side are you on? Will they stand up for the teachers’ union and the status quo or take a stand for our children and the collective future of our state?

It would be sad as well as ironic if those professing to support our public schools and children ended up destroying both. Inaction has consequences, too. If backed into a corner, voters will choose change.

Tom Watkins of Northville served as Michigan superintendent of schools from 2001 to ‘05. Read other Watkins works at www.domemagazine.com.

Read, Write and SCREENED All-OVER! (A 21st Century "Transformative Green" Scenario)

Auto supplier turns trouble to triumph by venturing into turbines

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"We knew the downturn was coming. ... we knew we were going to run out of work by the end of the first quarter of 2009." John Holcomb, general manager of MasTech's Manistee facility, who had an idea to save the supplier. (ROMAIN BLANQUART/DFP)

BY KATHLEEN GRAY

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

John Holcomb felt the cold winds blowing through the auto industry as early as 2006. But it took him three years and a dream to come up with a survival plan in which wind would play a big part.

As general manager of the Manistee factory of Sterling Heights-based MasTech, Holcomb had made a good living for three years supervising the production of machines and assembly lines for auto manufacturers. But he saw trouble coming in September 2006, when Ford announced plans to close 16 plants, cut 44,000 jobs and revamp its product lines with an eye on becoming profitable again by 2009.

Why, Holcomb wondered, weren't the other struggling auto companies embarking on similar plans?

"I saw Ford go out and secure funding for new, more economical models, and the rest of them weren't doing that," Holcomb said. "Changes weren't being made that would make them competitive on a broad enough scale. That was my first inkling that something was going to happen to the automotive industry."

His plans began to take shape a year later -- during a dream-induced conversation with his father and grandfather, both long dead, as Holcomb lay hospitalized in critical condition with a ruptured colon.

"I asked my dad and grandpa if I could go fishing with them and they said, 'No, it's not your time,' " he recalled. "At that point, I decided I had to do something to make a difference in a positive way."

So Holcomb hit upon alternative energy as a way to make a contribution to cleaning up the environment and keep a thriving business going in Manistee.

He went to Manistee's newly formed Alliance for Economic Success and pitched his idea: It was time for the group to aggressively recruit alternative energy businesses to the Lake Michigan shoreline community as a way to stave off the devastation that would come from an implosion of the auto industry.

"We knew the downturn was coming because all of the quote requests dried up, and then all the purchase orders dried up," Holcomb said. "We knew we were going to run out of work by the end of the first quarter of 2009."

As the alliance was hunting for alternative energy companies that also needed the machining expertise available in Manistee, Mariah Power of Reno, Nev., was looking for a place to build Windspires, residential wind turbines that were smaller and more compact than traditional windmills.

In October 2008, as auto sales were plunging and the Detroit Three were shutting plants and shedding thousands of employees, MasTech's Manistee operation began transforming from an auto industry supplier into a wind turbine factory.

Last January, the plant sent out its last automotive job -- an assembly line for a BMW plant in Spartanburg, S.C.

"I've been doing automotive all my life, and there's a certain sadness in getting out of that business," Holcomb said. "But it's also been refreshing to step away from the unwritten rules and regulations of the auto industry. So often, they didn't reward innovation."

The joint venture between Mariah and MasTech shipped its first Windspire on April 20 and has since built hundreds. Optimistic initial estimates called for production of 75 to 100 units a week, but the overall economic downturn has forced Holcomb to scale back to 100 a month.

"We're trying to continue to get the American people to spend some money. And we've had a hard time getting traction for sales because of zoning issues," Holcomb said. "Right now, I'm talking to as many zoning boards as salespeople."

From a high of 43 employees, MasTech is down to 35, many of whom worked in the auto industry. That's a steady level of employment from about 40 as an auto supplier.

"I worked in the automotive industry for 15 years, and now I'm doing the complete turnaround," said Sean Jacobs, 39, a machinist from Manistee.

Adam Morris, 37, of Ludington had been working in an auto die stamping plant in Grand Rapids but jumped at the chance to move to MasTech.

"I wanted to be in a business that was more secure," he said.

The company has plans for expansion.

This fall, it began producing a Windspire that is large enough to store wind-created energy in a battery for future residential or vehicle use. MasTech expects to begin construction on another production facility in mid-2010 to meet expected demand from overseas.

"We have some really huge orders pending overseas. We thought we'd sell more domestically right off the bat," Holcomb said. "But it turns out there's more interest right now in Europe, Asia and north Africa than in Iowa."

And, thanks in part to a dream, MasTech's Manistee plant will deliver.
Contact KATHLEEN GRAY: 313-223-4407 or kgray99@freepress.com

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Mayor Bing CHANGES the educational discussion from one of conversation to an Actualized Imperative!

COMMENTARY 

Changing Detroit schools imperative

BY MAYOR DAVE BING 

The recent release of National Assessment of Edu cational Progress test scores revealed a long-known but largely overlooked fact: We are failing our students. Detroit public school students ranked the lowest in the country, with scores equal to what they would have been had they never stepped foot in the classroom.

Everyone has weighed in on how terrible this is, and of the broken and antiquated system the findings reflect. But the real discussion has yet to begin.

Where do we start to fix this?

To continue the discussion centered solely on finances is fruitless. While we know that funding is critical, it is not the only thing needed to ensure that our children are properly and adequately educated. We all share in the blame and in the responsibility to fix this catastrophic problem.

I am steadfastly committed to education in this city and have worked to support positive change for as much as my role allows. Supporting the return of Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, helping to pass Proposal S and creating Safe Routes to School are a few ways I have been able to participate.

Yet, the challenges of our educational system require more — from me and everyone who has a vested interest in the future of our city, its residents and students. The solution lies with being able to put performance based measures in place, with a central point of accountability.

Other cities have done away with outdated oversight models and ineffective practices, and are realizing their educational potential with academic success.

Detroiters find ourselves at the bottom of the barrel, yet we still have two choices: We can take the path of inaction, continue to place blame, discuss, plan and meet about the problems, or move forward with the difficult but necessary changes to rebuild an educational system that works for every student.

While change is never easy, it is now imperative. We cannot afford to lose another child to our ignorance, arrogance or fear of something new and better.

Dave Bing is the mayor of Detroit.

READING: The Gift that Just Keeps on Giving!

Reading is a thrill, not just a skill or task

I can remember the book, if not the exact year, that marked the transition from my mother reading stories to me each night to me taking over the page-turning alone, often huddled in corner of my room or planted, upside down in my bed, with my feet dangling over the headboard. It was “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first in Madeleine L’ Engle’s trilogy of sci-fi novels, which tracks the interplanetary quest of a quirky band of teenage ec centrics hunting for a miss ing parent. Their guides are Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, who transport the teens from place to place — each strange and magical in a different way — using a supernatural process that bends time and space.

I couldn’t get enough of that book. Or its characters.

Or its boundless appeal to my sense of adventure or imagination.

I read the sequels myself.

Then it was off to dozens of other novels, each of which introduced me to concepts I hadn’t considered, or to characters I still count as fantasy chums.

When I think about the thousands of Detroit children we aren’t teaching to read, as evidenced by the awful na tional test scores released last week, I think this is one of the most important things we’re stealing from them.

Reading is a skill. And yes, a task.

But isn’t it also a doorway to mystery and wonder, to thoughts, ideas and emotions that we wouldn’t have other wise experienced? It’s one of the first ways we learn about possibilities and differences, about the whole idea that there are lives to be lived that may be largely incompa rable to our own.

Think of how important that should be to children in Detroit, especially. Many live in real-life circumstances that offer very little of that healthy mystery or wonder.

The city’s deep poverty is a physical trap for so many.

Stories might be the only entrée to potential or un derstanding for lots of city children.

As a child in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s, I found kinship with the characters in the Great Brain series, written by John Dennis Fitz gerald, about life in the small, slow fictitious Utah town of Adenville. A biography of Abraham Lincoln convinced me that, like him, I could grow up to be president without attending school past the third grade. (Better story: My mother indulged it for a week.) I’m certainly not down playing the more grounded urgency in making sure every child learns to read.

Those who don’t, we all know, are more likely to drop out, more likely to become trapped in lives of little or no productivity, more likely to themselves bear children who won’t learn to read, either.

That was a siren that sounded last week, when test scores revealed that De troit’s children are sitting, alone, at the very bottom of a deep well of urban unde rachievement. We need to rally everyone and marshal every resource to rescue them.

I’m certain we will, but I think we also need to remember why.

It’s not just to produce self-sufficient cogs who’ll help make the machinery of our society go.

It’s to give them a gift with so much more significance.

When I was in the seventh grade at U of D Jesuit, we read “Lord of the Flies” in our reading class. (Yes, we had a distinct class, every day, focused entirely on reading novels. The Jesuits do not putter when it comes to literacy.) And how fitting was it for a class of 25 pre-teen boys in a prep school to be reading a book about a group of mostly pre-teen boys from a prep school stranded on an island after a plane crash?

We couldn’t help relating the divisions William Golding played out between his char acters to our own little class.

Who’d want to do work and keep order? Who’d want to indulge the freedom from adult oversight, and run wild? I remember it so viv idly.

This wasn’t just work.

It was fun.

Kids who never learn to read get cheated out of that fun.

It’s up to all of us to help end that swindle.

| STEPHEN HENDERSON IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR FOR THE FREE PRESS.

CONTACT HIM AT SHENDERSON600@FREEPRESS.COM, OR AT 313-222-6659. 

SURE, LITERACY IS FUNDAMENTAL. BUT TEACHING KIDS TO READ ISN’ T JUST ABOUT PRODUCING SELF-SUFFICIENT COGS THAT MAKE THE MACHINERY OF OUR SOCIETY GO.

LITERACY URGENCY EMERGENCY! (JUST DO the RIGHT THING)

RAISING A READING CORPS 

NEEDED: 100,000 HOURS OF TUTORING TO LIFT DPS STUDENTS TO LITERACY

In the 1960s, images of women and children being at tacked by dogs and sprayed with fire hoses spurred the nation to real action in the civil rights movement.

Detroit children’s rock-bottom scores on a national test are as shocking a reminder of the work that needs to be done fighting illiteracy, a key civil rights issue of this era.

The scores are dismal.

But from hardship grows strength for revival. From the depths of DPS’ current state, this community can help it rise up again.

Now it’s time to act, for the children.

Today the Free Press, in concert with the Detroit Public Schools, sounds an extraordinary call to this region: Build a Reading Corps of trained tutors to deploy in city schools. Give 100,000 hours over the next year to ensure that city children read on grade-level by the third grade.

The school district will coordinate the effort. The Free Press, the Detroit Media Partnership, the Detroit News, Ilitch Hold ings, Miller Canfield and ABC Warehouse have signed on as charter members who’ll donate time and other resources to meet the goal.

Others must now join the cause. The Free Press will chron icle the efforts and every pledge made.

For now, we begin with a promise, and a plea.

We will do this. We need your help to make sure it’s a success




EDITORIAL

Reading Corps wants YOU 

An appeal for tutors to help Detroit’s would-be readers

The crisis is clear in Detroit’s public schools. Now the challenge is, too.

To vanquish the illiteracy that produced worst-ever scores by Detroit students on a national test last week, emergency finan cial manager Robert Bobb needs an army — a Reading Corps composed of trained volunteers who’ll descend on city schools in the coming months to help young chil dren learn to read.

The goal: 100,000 hours of donated time, from all corners of this community, next year and every year going forward, so Detroit can be sure that ev ery child reads at grade-level by the time he or she reaches third grade.

This community can meet that goal, and will. It’s a high calling and a steep challenge, but this is a region with a history of licking tough problems with hard work. We’re also a people who understand the precious responsibility we all have for educating our children. And we know the connection it has to all of our success.

We know this isn’t just a city problem. The conse quences of Detroit’s failure to educate its children won’t be contained south of 8 Mile.

Let this 100,000-hour challenge be the rallying point for all of us to stand up, join together and beat back this threat to every part of our community. 

Stepping up

Today, the Free Press is stepping forward to help coordinate Bobb’s efforts and to pledge its support as a charter member of the Read ing Corps.

The Free Press will do nate 1,000 hours of its em ployees’ time over the next year to the Reading Corps.

The Detroit Media Part nership, which oversees op erations at the Free Press and the Detroit News, will match that donation with 1,000 hours of its employees’ time. The Detroit News will also participate.

Other charter members include Ilitch Holdings, the professional services arm of the many corporations owned by Mike and Marian Ilitch, the Miller Canfield law firm and ABC Warehouse.

Ilitch and Miller Canfield have pledged 1,000 hours of service each. ABC Ware house will donate computer equipment.

The challenge now falls to the rest of the community — corporations, civic groups, churches, nonprofits and individual citizens — to fill the rest of Bobb’s request.

This won’t be wasted time. Bobb and his team of aca demic advisers plan to train volunteers in the Reading Recovery program, a system atic and highly successful one-on-one program that’s already working on a small scale in the district.

With about four hours of training, anyone can become a tutor, qualified to work with students who are learn ing to read. It’s a more effec tive boost to classroom teaching than having volun teers simply read books to children, a common, laudable way many organizations help in schools. Reading Recovery has a 30-year track record of success, in this country and around the world.

Bobb says the district should be ready to begin training tutors in January, and could begin deploying them later this winter. The tutors’ efforts will dovetail with the intense reading instruction Bobb and his academic advisers are plan ning for the district’s curriculum.

At least initially, Bobb plans to deploy Reading Corps tutors across the dis trict’s 200 pre-kindergarten classes. But eventually, with enough tutors, the program could grow to encompass grades pre-K through third grade. 

Setting a target

Those are the critical years for reading instruction. After third grade, children are no longer being taught to read, but being asked to em ploy their reading skills to absorb and process other knowledge. The rate at which children fall behind with their entire education — in math, science and English — accelerates dramatically after the fourth grade if their reading skills aren’t properly developed.

This is hardly the Free Press’ first initiative to sup port K-12 education. The paper’s award-winning Newspapers in Education program provides newspa pers to 764 schools in Michi gan and publishes a mini newspaper for Detroit ele mentary students. The paper’s high school journalism program helps young jour nalists publish school news­papers. The annual Gift of Reading program has provided more than 700,000 books as gifts for needy children over the past 20 years.

And, of course, many oth er corporations and organi zations have made their own substantial contributions to schools. There are dozens of reading programs at work in Detroit’s public schools right now, representing thousands of hours of donated time by dedicated organizations and individuals.

But, as Bobb points out, the Reading Corps will be different — a focused, coor dinated program to leverage community resources against a singular problem, illiteracy among the city’s young.

It’s about this entire re gion accepting some respon sibility for the state of its largest city’s public schools and for the welfare of its most desperately needy population.

That’ll be a first around here, and a welcome one.

The crisis is real. The challenge is now spelled out.

Who will join the Free Press and other charter members in building the Reading Corps? 

LET THIS 100,000-HOUR CHALLENGE BE THE RALLYING POINT TO STAND UP, JOIN TOGETHER AND BEAT BACK THIS THREAT TO EVERY PART OF OUR COMMUNITY




How to volunteer

The Detroit Public Schools Reading Corps is ready to sign up groups and individu als to pledge time or other resources toward the goal of 100,000 hours tutoring children.

You can sign up via the Internet at www.detroitk12.org/ readingcorps/.

Or you can call the Read ing Corps hotline at 313-870-KNOW (313-870 5669). 

Waging a continuing crusade for literacy 

GIFT OF READING 

For over 20 years, Detroit Free Press Charities has collected new books and money to purchase books to give to children ages 0-12 around the holidays. Since we began, we’ve given over 700,000 books to at-risk children through Head Start programs, shelters, clinics, churches … anywhere there are children in need. Books can be donated to the pro gram at our office at 615 W. Lafayette, or donations can be made by check and on line. See www.freep.com/reading for more information.

NEWSPAPERS IN EDUCATION

Our award-winning De troit Newspapers in Educa tion program delivers Free Press print editions to 107 schools and e-Editions to 764 schools, and we deliver News print editions to 54 schools and e-editions to 240 schools across Michi gan. Related special pro grams and teacher supple ments are also provided, all aimed at improving literacy and test scores.

Third-, fourth- and fifth grade students in all Detroit public, private and charter schools receive the weekly Yaks Corner — a mini-news paper for young people focusing on local stories, people and current events — thanks to a grant from the Skillman Foundation. Digital editions of the News fea ture weekly “Breakfast Serials,” with weekly in­stallments of two stories each school year.

WWW.DNIE.COM

Our educational website — www.dnie.com — pro vides print and video fea tures to students and edu cators, including vocabulary and geography quizzes, cartoons for the classrooms, and front page talking points.

The site also invites read ers to get involved by mak ing a financial donation to the program, connecting with one of ten featured mentoring organizations, and supporting our “Reading is Fun” events.

JOURNALISM MENTORING

Since 1985, the Free Press has been mentoring journal ism classes at 15 Detroit high schools. Each of the classes visits the newsroom several times throughout the school year to get one on- one help from a Free Press journalist. The pro gram is funded by Ford Motor Co., including news paper production and dis tribution costs, laptops and cameras for the students, an end-of-year banquet and a $24,000 scholarship to the best senior journalist.

The program is run by copy editor Erin Hill, a DPS graduate who got her start in the Free Press program and who won the Ford scholarship in 2001.

To Detroit Teachers: "CHANGE the CONVERSATION!" (Or Suffer the Unintended Consequences)

Teachers warned not to strike

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb said Saturday he’s poised to impose a 10% pay cut if teachers walk off the job this week.

“To those teachers who are trying to force their members back to the table: The negotiations are over,” Bobb said out side the Detroit Parent Network breakfast, addressing ru mors of a strike Monday.

Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said he opposes the 10% cut, but does not support a work stoppage.

Thousands of DFT members railed last week against a contract proposal that defers $10,000 from each of their sal aries over the next two years. The 3-year tentative deal would save DPS $62.8 million. Voting on accepting the con tract ends next week.

Seminal Challenge! (Meet OUR Students Where THEY Are)

Bobb to parents: Help us help kids 

DPS needs volunteers to teach reading

By TAMMY STABLES BATTAGLIA

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER 

As parents decried the De troit Public Schools’ dismal test scores Saturday, the dis trict’s emergency financial manager called on volunteers to spend 100,000 hours teach ing students to read.

“Going forward, we have to create a situation where we create a reading revolution in the city of Detroit,” DPS Emer gency Financial Manager Rob ert Bobb told about 300 par ents at a breakfast meeting sponsored by a parents group. Bob talked to the parents about the district’s test results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, in which Detroit students ranked the lowest in the nation.

Detroit Parent Network Executive Director Sharlonda Buckman said parents should be irate that their tax dollars have had little effect on their children’s education.

“They can’t read; they can’t count!” she yelled to a standing ovation at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel. “It would not be acceptable in any other com munity! We need to get on board with changing this!”

Bobb said his attempts to rework operations at the school system should be mir rored in the community. Some of the issues contributing to the problem include children living in unsafe neighbor hoods, parents with mental health or drug abuse issues and unemployment, he said.

Celia Huerta said four of her five children attended DPS — and two didn’t get diplomas. Her fifth, age 6, is attending a Melvindale school until she sees improvement in DPS.

“They’re so organized at this other system,” said Huer ta. “I think the Detroit system could learn something at some of these other schools.” 

A VERY BRIGHT SPOT in an otherwise dismal educational Big Picture (To Bert Okma my Friend and Colleague "Your LEGACY of EXCELLENCE Continues!")

Bloomfield Hills academy named No. 2 in nation

Friday, December 11, 2009

By DIANA DILLABER MURRAY
Of The Oakland Press

U.S. News & World Report has placed the International Academy in Bloomfield Hills in the No. 2 spot of its top 100 Gold Medal schools across the nation.

The magazine looked at more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., was named No. 1.

The Gold Medal designation was nationally based on the College Readiness Index, which included scores on Advanced Placement tests or International Baccalaureate tests.

The school is at 1020 E. Square Lake Road in Bloomfield Hills and takes students in grades nine through 12 from several Oakland County districts.

Bloomfield Hills opened the first public International Baccalaureate school in Oakland County. More recently, other districts have started their own programs at various levels. Among them are Huron Valley, Troy and Berkley districts and Notre Dame Preparatory.

Enrollment includes 60.4 percent white students, 36.4 percent Asian, 1.9 percent black and 1.3 percent Hispanic.

It was the school’s longtime principal Bert Okma who presented the case for a new high school offering the International Baccalaureate program in the 1990s.

The program is a rigorous interdisciplinary program which has the same high standards globally. Students produce a portfolio of work that is evaluated by expert assessors throughout the world.

To earn the diploma, students’ work must meet the standards of the program and they must also pass exams in each subject area. Not every student who completes four years at the school and meets the standards that earn them a high school diploma in their district will earn the IB diploma.

Throughout the world, 80 percent of students earn the diploma while at the International Academy, about 97 percent have done so — 99 percent last year, Okma said earlier this year.  www.usnews.com. 

SHOCKED and AWED! (As in Awe Shucks it wasn't my fault...can I get a "Do-Over?")

Ex-CEO: DPS lost purchasing power on bond

By LORI HIGGINS

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER 

Detroit Public Schools lost at least $120 million in pur chasing power by not spending until 2004 any of the $1.5-bil lion bond money voters ap proved in 1994, the district’s former chief executive officer said during an investigative hearing Friday.

Kenneth Burnley, who was appointed CEO in 2000, said “it was much more expensive to do business in 2000 to 2005 dollars in an expanding econo my.” But Burnley testified Fri day that despite that, he and his administration “saved the taxpayers of Detroit millions.” Robert Bobb, the DPS emergency financial manager, has been holding the investiga tive hearings periodically since October amid questions about several high-profile real estate deals. He and other DPS offi cials have concluded the dis trict overpaid by millions for land to build the new Cass Technical High, Detroit School of Arts, a maintenance hub near Eastern Market, leased land from the city and space in the Fisher Building.

Burnley defended his ten ure, saying he wanted the best for students, par ents and taxpay ers. “I collective ly pursued that outcome with honesty, integri ty and urgency,”Burnley said. It was during his tenure that the district made the con troversial decision to move its central office to the Fisher Building and leased space in adjacent buildings.

Supporting documents Burnley provided included an analysis showing the total cost of moving the district head quarters for the first 10 years would be $55.3 million, while staying in the old location would have cost $57.3 million during the same time period.

A DPS analysis came up with a different conclusion — that the move will cost the dis trict more than if it had stayed put.

Burnley’s testimony came after Bobb and his investiga tors heard from Robert Fran cis, a former DPS official who oversaw construction projects funded by the 1994 bond, and Robert Moore, the district’s former senior deputy chief executive officer who was sec ond in command when the dis trict spent much of the bond money. Their testimonies came at separate hearings in the last week.

Steven Fishman, Burnley’s attorney, said that based on testimony from Burnley, Fran cis and Moore, he would be shocked “if anyone, including Mr. Bobb, believed that there was anything questionable about any of the transactions.” 

THE LITERACY URGENCY EMERGENCY! (RENEWED Call to Action)

Demand for literacy action echoes 2001

Margaret Williamson is not one to say “I told you so.” But had we treated her like Paul Revere instead of Chick en Little over the past decade, Detroit might be in better shape.

Williamson, executive di rector of Pro Literacy Detroit, sounded the alarm in 2001 after a congressional survey estimated that 47% of Detroit ers 16 and older were func­tionally illiterate. That esti mate is now 52%.

People chided her — and me — for publicizing Detroit’s dirty little secret — and its greatest challenge. But an illiteracy problem that large permeates the very fabric of the city, especially its schools, and puts the city at risk.

And nobody thought about the children. Parents who do not or cannot read cannot prepare their children to learn. So they are sending them to school to fail. Those children, many of whom even tually drop out, grow up to become people who have a hard time finding a job, or whose job becomes breaking the law. 

Declare an emergency

Nine years later, the state released a study showing that one out of three Michigan adults — 1.7 million people— lacks the basic literacy skills to get a family-sustaining job, and many were unable to participate in federally funded job-training programs be cause they could not meet a requirement to read at a sixth-grade level. Now comethe results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the news that Detroit’s fourth- and eighth graders’ scores were the low est in the test’s history.

One might think at this point that the state — and all of its counties and cities— would go into crisis mode, that Gov. Jennifer Granholm would declare a statewide emergency. One would be wrong.

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb this week asked the state to give him authority over the district’s academic as well as financial well-being. Armed with those heartbreaking test scores, he is making the case that edu cating the district’s children is as important as balancing its books.

He has pitched the idea of a Reading Corps, which, like the Peace Corps, would recruit volunteers to make a difference in people’s lives, in this city’s life.

He and Margaret William son should get together. 

Innovation and investment

Williamson was working feverishly in her office Tues day as Bobb announced the bad news. Pro Literacy, housed across the street from Comerica Park, has more clients than it can handle.

“We just signed up 180 people in the past 10 days, and 60 more are coming by Friday,” said Williamson, whose center teaches 1,200 adults a year to read. “Yesterday, we used every chair in this office, and thank God I wasn’t in here, because they used my chair in my office.”

Solving Detroit’s education crisis, she said, requires innovation and community-wide investiture.

Where do children who can’t read go? Many become adults who can’t read and have children who can’t read.

Williamson suggested establishing a citywide net work of literacy stations housed free at universities, community colleges, rec and community centers and li braries.

“You’re talking about 376,000 adults,” she said.

Can we create such a net work? We can’t afford not to.

In my head, I keep hearing Michael Casserly, president of the Council on Great City Schools, saying that the test scores were “barely above what one would expect by chance, as if the kids had never been to school at all and simply had guessed at the answers. … “It is now time,” he said, “now that we know what the results are, to focus on what this assessment has told us about how the kids in this city are doing. Otherwise, to our minds, this city really has no viable future.”

Enough talk. Now’s the time for action. 




Letters 

Everyone must invest in Detroit student success

The startling and sad news that Detroit students in fourth and eighth grades recorded the lowest math scores ever on nationwide tests should prompt us all to take action (“If you can read this, you can help,” Dec. 9). We, as a state, share the responsibility for their failure, and we will share the impact of their success.

This comes after the state Legislature and the governor made significant cuts to pro grams that ensure the health, safety and educational opportunities for our children. Continu ing this disinvestment in kids — especially by cutting early childhood programs that prepare kids for school — will make the situation worse.

No time should be wasted on blaming the parents, teachers and school administrators.

We all, especially our political leadership, should be ashamed for allowing this to happen.

Reading the “call to action” message signed by Paul Anger and Stephen Henderson was the best thing about Wednesday’s front page coverage. Michigan’s Children is thrilled that the Free Press has once again decided to engage in “advocacy journalism” on behalf of our vulnerable children, especially the kids in Detroit. Many positive public policy changes oc curred during your newspaper’s long-running Children First campaign of the 1990s and we need the Free Press to once again be a strong voice for children.

We can do better. We must do better. Our future depends on what we do today to help our vulnerable children succeed.

Jack Kresnak 

President/CEO Michigan’s Children Lansing

Unequal resources


I have been a high school science educator with the Detroit Public Schools for 16 years. I have dedicated my life to this district and to these children, and I work extremely hard to ensure the success of my students. If you want to be a voice, be a proactive voice that helps the teachers to help the students succeed. Class sizes need to be reduced to a maximum of 25 students. Our students deserve the same resources as the Birmingham and Bloomfield school systems.

When the playing field is leveled in terms of class size, parental involvement, stu dent attendance and re sources, it is then and only then should the feet of the educators be held to the fire.

Teneshia Moore 

Chesterfield Township

Generational neglect

The illiteracy has a core in the lack within the life that starts before the child enters the classroom. I see it in my neighborhood. I see the re sults of years of educational neglect passed from genera tion to generation. The “boom box before books” mentality has to change be fore progress has a chance.

DPS has failed in its core mission. If DPS wants to spend one more dime study ing the problem then count me out. If DPS want to stop playing games, is willing to accept me simply because I have raised three literate children regardless of having no college degree and get to work on the problem, then count me in.

Mark C. Durfee 

Detroit

Courage to face facts

Hope, that’s what I felt when I read the article of how poorly the fourth- and eighth-grade Detroit stu dents scored on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math tests. Facing a problem head-on with cour age is the first step in fixing it. To do this, Detroit par ents, teachers and leaders need to stop thinking of edu cation as a product provided by an institution for 7 hours a day, and begin viewing it as a component as vital as oxygen to a child’s life. Oxygen breathes life into our bodies; education breathes life into our hearts and minds. Goals need to be set early on by all the adults in our children’s life. College is not an option, but a destination. This is not a time for excuses or laying blame. It’s a time for identi fying the problems, setting new and loftier goals, and creating the infrastructure both citywide and statewide for change.

We absolutely can move this ball forward. Game on, Detroit!

Denise Neville 

Grosse Pointe Shores

Don’t blame teachers

No one is stating all the facts when presenting this negative data. Robert Bobb also is not alerting the media that he maintains classrooms with student limits above the contracted amount, which leaves 25-plus students in many classrooms, but he wants to blame teachers and other leaders for the stu dents’ shortcomings. I guess he is, in effect, also blaming himself now for not properly staffing the buildings so as to better educate Detroit’s children.

Stephanie Reed 

Hazel Park

Reinventing the wheel

In 1994 DPS contracted with Wilson Language Train ing to implement a reading program for middle and high school students who were reading below grade level.

Over 100 teachers were giv en the year-long training.

The results after yearly test ing showed that the program was having a positive impact. District trainers gave ongo ing support to the teachers and trained new teachers every year for about five years.

When a new administra tion took over the district, the Wilson Reading System was shelved and replaced by a series of reading programs over the years. As the new test results indicate, the reading skills of DPS stu dents are not improving.

Perhaps it is time to stop reinventing the wheel just to show the power that an ad ministrator has.

Kathy Jones 

West Bloomfield

DEPSA Green Team visits the William G. Milliken Urban State Park and Harbor

GIVE BOB BOBB THE JOB JOBB! (WHOM ELSE has EARNED IT?)

Bobb to Mich.

lawmakers: Let me take over DPS academics

By CHRIS CHRISTOFF

FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF 

LANSING — Detroit schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb urged lawmakers Wednesday to give him author ity over the troubled district’s academics, as well as its money. “It is crystal clear we have an academic emergency, in addi tion to a reading emergency and math emergency, in addi tion to a financial emergency,” Bobb told the House Education Committee.

His appearance came a day after the news that Detroit fourth- and eighth-graders had the worst scores on a nation wide test — the lowest in the United States in the 40-year history of the National Assess ment Education Progress test.

Michigan needs to adopt changes to qualify for about $400 million in federal grants. In Detroit, he said, $90 million is at stake.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday she supports giving Bobb authority over Detroit Public Schools’ academic programs. 




Bobb asks for state’s help to revive DPS 

Lawmakers join the discussion on how to improve academics

By CHRIS CHRISTOFF

FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF 

LANSING — Robert Bobb stunned House Education Committee members Wednesday when he said Detroit fourth- and eighth-graders as a group scored so low on a national test that they could have done just as well not going to school and guessing the answers.

Amid remarks by commit tee members of “outrageous” and “criminal,” Bobb said Detroit Public Schools administrators had failed students, and that he needs state help to turn the district around academically.

He said 69% of the Detroit fourth-graders and 77% of eighth-graders who took the test did not attain basic proficien cy, such as subtracting a two digit number from a three dig it number.

“You have no greater exam ple of how a school district can fail than that of the Detroit Board of Education,” Bobb said. “It is critical that those responsible for failure are held accountable and that the state have the ability to act and de mand accountability.”

Bobb, appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in March to repair the district’s finances, has tried to wrest control of the schools’ academic programs but was sued in court by the Detroit school board.

“It’s difficult for me to an swer how one can address the financial issues without ad dressing the academic issues,” Bobb told the House commit tee. “The academic plan drives the financial plan.”

But committee Chairman Tim Melton, D-Auburn Hills, disagrees with Bobb over how to take control of the district’s classrooms.

Melton said he favors giving that authority to a state level reform officer, who would work with the state superintendent of public instruction.

A Senate bill would allow the governor to directly ap point an emergency academic officer for a failing school dis trict. Bobb favors the Senate plan and has asked for lan­guage that would speed the process of appointing an academic overseer for Detroit and other districts under state financial control.

Afterward, Melton said de spite the Detroit district’s deep problems, “there’s a lot of hope.”

He added, “You can’t give excuses anymore that the reason kids aren’t successful is because of poverty. We need to get over that.”

The school takeover bills are among reforms the House and Senate are considering that would qualify Michigan for as much as $400 million in federal education grants, under President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

Bobb gave full support to those reforms, including alter native certification of teachers, evaluating teachers based on the academic progress of their students on standard­ized tests, and opening the door to more charter schools.

Bobb also said it was criti cal to appoint strong principals and other administrators to improve schools.

Asked whether the state needs fast-track certification for professionals who want to teach — with a glut of unemployed, certified teachers in the state — Bobb said those with rich life experiences should be welcomed in class rooms.

“In a 21st-Century creative economy, this needs to be a critical level of change and reform.”

Committee member Rep. Tom Mc Millin, R-Rochester Hills, said he was brought to tears when he read about the Detroit students’ poor show ing on the National Assess­ment Education Progress test. McMillin said it proves the need to give Detroit families more choices, particularly charter schools.

Bobb said he would support the eventual takeover of De troit schools by Mayor Dave Bing, provided he made a strong case for it to city resi dents. He said his appoint ment as emergency financial manager created resentment in the city and that a mayor could overcome that easier than a school board. 


Editorials

State must give Bobb full academic control

If you weren’t shocked to the point of horror by the news that Detroit public school students posted worst-ever scores on a national test, this might do the trick: As of right now, the district’s academic fortunes are still, technically, under the control of the Detroit Board of Education.

That’s the same board that so badly mismanaged the district’s finances that Robert Bobb had to be appointed as emergency financial manager. The same board that has run through superintendents and curriculum choices as if it were changing underwear. The same board whose meetings have often been like three-ring circuses — chaotic, confounding, clownish.

In short, the same board that helped get Detroit into this situation is still in charge of leading the school district out of the academic cellar.

It should go without saying, in the wake of Tuesday’s revelations, that just cannot stand. If the test scores don’t prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the school board is at least as incapable of managing the academic side of the dis trict as it proved unable to manage the financial side, it’s hard to imagine what would.

Bobb has argued almost since he got here in March that his financial control of the district can be leveraged to influence academics. Every decision in the district, after all, touches on money in some way. So he has hired a chief aca demic officer, and made other significant per sonnel and programmatic changes on the aca demic side.

But there’s a problem with Bobb’s approach. The school board has resisted his authority, ar guing in a lawsuit that he has overstepped his mandate. Board members have hired their own academic leader, whom Bobb has refused to pay. And now they’re all caught up in court-or dered mediation to resolve that dispute, steal ing valuable time from efforts to fix what’s wrong in the school district.

That impasse needs to be cleared soonest, if necessary by action at the state level, so every one can move on. The financial emergency that was declared in Detroit late last year is now clearly also an academic emergency, and Bobb is in a perfect position to address both simulta neously. There’s simply no time for power squabbles or other distractions.

Ideally the school board would play the grown-up here, back away from its challenge of Bobb’s authority and pledge its support for his plans to attack both the district’s financial and academic woes. That could be done without ced ing power permanently. A full-throated debate over how the district should be governed in the long term could take place at a later date, after the immediate crisis has passed.

Board members would solidify their credentials as public servants committed to solutions, rather than the aggrandize ment of their own power, by shelving their struggle for the academic reins until a later date.

But if the board doesn’t back down, it will fall to the state to intervene. One long shot possibility is legislation introduced last month as part of the federal Race to the Top legislation that would empower the state superintendent to declare academic emergencies in school districts, much the way a financial emergency was declared in Detroit’s schools this year.

It’s a good idea, and it has support already in the House. But enactment still might not launch the process fast enough to resolve the dispute between Bobb and the school board before a judge makes hash of it.

Both the Legislature and the governor should focus on giving Bobb clear authority, as soon as possible, to address Detroit’s academic prob lems. And they need to do that by whatever means exist. If the bill put forward already by State Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, won’t work, some other way must be found.

It’s unacceptable to leave Detroit’s school board in charge of academics at a time of such clear desperation. If state officials let that hap pen, the shock and horror around this state will also be directed at them.

Detroit teachers need to accept a tough but necessary contract offer

There’s not much for teachers to like in the contract that the Detroit Public Schools has of fered them.

It calls for financial sacrifice, more responsi bility and accountability for student perfor mance.

But here’s a thought: Maybe, given the enor mity of the problems the school district faces at the moment, this contract negotiation ought not to be about what teachers want or can wrangle out of the school system. Maybe this should be about what Detroit’s children need — both in fi nancial and academic terms — to claw their way from the depths of educational futility.

If enough teachers can find their way into that mental space, the contract on the table for the Detroit Federation of Teachers will pass. If they can’t (and the catcalls during a contract rally Sunday suggest an awful lot of city teachers won’t be able to), then the contract will fail, and emergency financial manager Robert Bobb will have to contend with unnecessary labor strife on top of the serious problems he faces trying to get the district back on track.

For the sake of the city, of the school district’s solvency, and of the children’s well-being, teach ers ought to accept the contract.

In many ways, it would mark the height of sad irony if the city’s teachers, who are voting build ing- by-building on the contract over the next few weeks, were to reject the deal on the heels of test scores that show Detroit at the very bottom of the troubled national pile of big-city urban school districts.

Scores on the National Assessment of Educa tional Progress were so low that the executive director of a national council of big-city school districts wondered aloud whether children who’d never been to school might score any worse.

Obviously, not all the responsibility for that falls on teachers. But certainly, if Detroit stu dents are performing as if they’d never been to school at all, a fair share of the burden must be shouldered by instructors.

The new contract attempts a few moves to ward holding more teachers accountable for their students’ performance, largely through peer review, incentive pay and increases in man dated professional development.

Really, these are baby steps, when you consid er the changes other big-city districts — some that have moved their scores on the NAEP test considerably — have embraced. But in Detroit, they’d be monumental given the union’s historic animosity toward any reforms of that kind.

Teachers seem most exercised about a provi sion of the new contract that would have them defer $5,000 in pay in each of the next two years. The money would come back to teachers when they quit or retire.

The deferment was an idea that DFT officials came up with as an alternative to outright pay cuts. And while no one wants to do with less pay in these tough times, nearly everyone in Michi gan is confronting that same reality. Detroit’s schools can’t afford to exempt teachers from that pain.

THREE LEGS on the STOOL (Scaling Excellence 2010)

TOTAL LACK of PREVIOUS HEAVY LIFTING (RESULTS in an UNACCEPTABLE REPORT CARD)

View the Report: http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/math_2009_tudareport/




10:00 am, December 8, 2009

Detroit's public schools post worst scores on record in national assessment

By Ryan Beene

The Detroit Public Schools posted the worst scores on record in the most recent test of students in large central U.S. cities. The scores came on the Trial Urban District Assessment, a national test developed by the Governing Board, the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education and the Council of the Great City Schools. The test for urban districts is part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test given to school districts nationwide. “There is no jurisdiction of any kind, at any level, at any time in the 30-year history of NAEP that has ever registered such low numbers,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council on Great City Schools, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of urban school districts. “They are barely above what one would expect simply by chance, as if the kids simply guessed at the answers,” he said. DPS fourth-graders scored in the 9th percentile and eight-graders were in the 12th percentile when compared with students in 17 other large, central U.S. cities. Detroit's fourth graders received an overall score of 200 on a scale of 0-500, putting the city dead last among the other 17 large central U.S. cities grouped together in the NAEP test. The national average of districts of all kinds was 239. Of the roughly 1,000 fourth-grade students from a random sampling of schools in the DPS, 69 percent scored at levels below partial mastery of the fundamentals needed for grade-level proficiency, 28 percent scored at the basic level, three percent scored at the proficient level while no students scored at the advanced level. In the eighth-grade testing group, a full 77 percent of the 1,000 students tested fell into the below-basic category, while 18 percent performed at the basic level, 4 percent scored at the proficient level and, again, zero scored at the advanced level. (For more details, see box at right.) “Only a complete overhaul of this school system and how these students are taught ought to be permitted at this point because the results, to our minds, represent a complete breakdown and failure of the grownups who have been running the schools in this city,” Casserly said. This is the first year the test has been given to DPS students. Scores are aggregated and not broken out by student. “What (this test) is telling us, more than anything else, is that, frankly, this city has no viable future if this is allowed to stand,” Casserly said. A failure in leadership  “It's been clear that the district has had a financial and operational emergency but these numbers underscore the fact that the district has an academic emergency,” Casserly said. DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb said last week that the test results were proof of failed DPS leadership. “From where I stand there's a lot of blame to go around, but with respect to DPS specifically, it's a failure of leadership,” he said. Bobb noted that the Detroit Board of Education had three key documents describing academic and financial shortcomings prior to his appointment by State Superintendent Mike Flanagan in March. The district had the internal audit outlining its financial woes, an educational report written by the governor's transition team and a report from Casserly's Council of Great City Schools, which were ignored or derided by school board members. “Largely, those reports went unnoticed or were given some tacit response,” with no or little action taken to address the district's shortcomings, Bobb said. Casserly said a community-wide conversation is needed about how expectations for Detroit's children have disintegrated. “You can't have results like this unless a community thinks rather poorly and expects not very much of its children, and itself in some ways,” he said. “It warrants some soul searching about how this happened in the first place, not as a finger-pointing exercise, but as a discussion about the community's expectations of itself.” Academic overhaul is underway Bobb says his academic team is working on implementing an overhauled academic plan, based on NAEP standards. “It seems to me that whatever we do, we're now aligning our curriculum to the NAEP standards,” Bobb said. But both Bobb and Casserly acknowledge it will take more than the DPS to fix the problem. “There's obviously lots of finger-pointing that could be done, but to my mind, everybody throughout the community bears some culpability in this situation,” Casserly said. “It's really going to require a community-wide effort that is much more intense and serious than anything this community has seen before, and it's got to be sustained for a long period of time.” That includes the business community, which can provide expertise and involvement, in addition to money, Bobb said. The focus needs to be on educating children, Bobb said, and not on the usual debates, such as the merits of charter schools versus public schools, that take the focus off the students. The reading and science portions of the test are slated to be released next year. Bobb and Casserly acknowledged that it would be easy to become paralyzed by the test results. But instead, they said the results should be a call to action. “As heartbreaking and discouraging as these scores are, I would use these results not as a paralyzing moment…but as a galvanizing moment in the community's history to compel it pull together in a way that it's never done before,” Casserly said. “It's going to take more than a school system to address this.” DETROIT Free Press Editorial  Rescue Detroit’s children Failing test scores must galvanize action Detroit has no future, if this is allowed to stand. Southeast Michigan has no future, if this is allowed to stand. Test results released Tues day by the National Assess ment of Educational Progress reveal a far worse picture of Detroit Public Schools than we’ve ever been led to imag­ine. These results should be an alarm of desperation, no different from the poor, bat tered souls who cried out from the ravaged Superdome after Hurricane Katrina: “We need help — now!” That’s the cry emanating from Detroit children whose schools have failed to equip them with the rudimentary skills necessary for even the most menial jobs. That cry is rising from kids who have watched as decade after de cade of educational failure has been met with excuses and the occasional assignment of blame, but never with con­certed remedial action. Detroit’s math NAEP scores are officially the worst ever in the 40-year history of the test. And there’s more bad news on the way. DPS officials expect that marks on the NAEP reading and science tests, to be released next spring, will be similarly pitiful. All of these deficiencies point to a similar problem: an epidemic of illiteracy that has plagued the district for years. Children who don’t read can’t perform the kind of problem solving computations that appear on the NAEP math test any better than they can answer the questions on the reading component. And be cause reading skills are so low in Detroit’s schools, many of the city’s kids never really had a chance on the national tests. Think of how remarkable that makes the achievements of those who do thrive in De troit’s schools — the many who go on to college, on to lives of great success. But also think of the lost opportunity, the children whose educations have prepared them for noth ing more than lives spent in pursuit of criminal aims or sponging off the state’s safety net. That’s why this is a region al and statewide problem, as potent to people in Bloomfield, Inkster or Ishpeming as it is in Detroit. The city is still this area’s core, and the state’s largest population center. It’s the cultural heart of South east Michigan, and one of the most important economic drivers statewide. As its schools mass-produce citizens who can’t contribute to the state’s fortunes, it will contin ue to be a drain on everyone’s resources. If Detroit, the heart of this region and state, is allowed to die, there’s no hope for the extremities that depend on its vitality. There is no future for De troit, if this is allowed to stand. There is no future for Southeast Michigan, if this is allowed to stand. The scenario is alarming, but we don’t have to let it be paralyzing. This can be a call to action, a clarion to marshal every available resource to defeat illiteracy in Detroit’s public schools, and right the wrongs that are being perpetrated against the city’s children. Already, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has assembled a team of strong academic advisers to devise a plan. They’ll have a curricu lum and support structure in place by the end of the school year. But they need help. Every one’s. Today, this newspaper calls upon the many employ ers, professional associations, civic groups, churches and nonprofits that have long done good deeds in our city torally around this single cause. The Free Press will commit to doing its part, including: ■ Enlisting the nation’s fore most experts on reading and literacy to help fashion a re gion- wide strategy for aiding Bobb in his efforts to ensure that every student in DPS is reading at or above grade level by 2015. Bobb has sug gested a local Reading Corps of trained volunteers, fash ioned along the lines of the Peace Corps, to fan out across the district to aid teachers in classrooms. ■ Spreading the word, sup porting and participating in any volunteer program that the district might fashion to help students read better. Bobb has suggested a local Reading Corps of trained volunteers, built along the lines of the Peace Corps, to fan out across the district to aid teachers in classrooms. ■ Reporting on what other large cities beset by poverty and shrinking resources have done to dramatically increase literacy in their own school districts, publishing the re­sults of that inquiry, and pressing this region’s elected leaders to emulate the best practices we discover. ■ Chronicling progress as it unfolds, and advocating strongly for the effort to maintain its focus, and fer vency, as it progresses. We can and should agree that Detroit is ground zero in this cause. Let our efforts begin here and now. But then let’s ask the corps to move out to where other help is needed, where other school districts struggle to produce the gener­ations of bright minds that Michigan needs now more than ever. Through these efforts, we can build a new base of hope in all our schools, a new stan dard of education, so that this region can be what it deserves to be, what it should be. A place of greatness. Test is a startling sign of DPS’s uphill fight  IF YOU CAN READ THIS,  YOU CAN HELP A call to action  WE’ LL DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN — AND OURSELVES The news that Detroit students posted the worst-ever scores on a respected, rigorous national assess ment is a challenge to everyone who spends their time working for, and worrying about, this region’s future. All of us — corporations, nonprof its, religious organizations, civic groups, the news media — need to marshal our resources to help beat illiteracy, the demon at the core of failure in Detroit schools. Even if we don’t know exactly how to do that right now, we can embrace Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb’s goal as our own: By 2015, Detroit must have a public school system that teaches every child to read at grade level by the third grade. We’ll all do that because Detroit is this region’s cultural center, the state’s most important economic driv er, the city whose success or misery is shared by all. We’ll do it because the future of city and region is knotted together. We’ll do it for the children. It’s not their failure. The Free Press is on board. Our efforts must start here, and now.  Getting at the heart of the matter  Experts: What’s missing on education Remedies are found in and out of school, they say is a value By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY and ROBIN ERB FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS  The devastating test scores earned by Detroit Pub lic Schools students on a nationally respected test signal a far-reaching problem stemming from a lack of value on education, educators, experts and ob servers said Tuesday. Detroit is not the only city with low scores on the Na tional Assessment of Educational Progress test, which was given in 18 large cities in the spring. But the city is alone in the fact that the numbers coincide with ex treme job and population losses, heralding a need for regionwide problem-solving. The results come just months after the U.S. Secre tary of Education Arne Dun can branded DPS “ground ze ro” for education and compa rable to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “Only a complete overhaul of the school system and how students are taught should be permitted at this point because the results signal a complete failure and breakdown of the grown-ups who have run this school system,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a group of urban schools that is based in Wash ington, D.C., and asked DPS to participate in the test. Casserly said Detroit’s solu tions must come from beyond school doors. If achievement doesn’t improve, “the city has no viable future,” he said. Many suggest the reading crisis in DPS is likely partly to blame for the poor math test scores, because students who can’t read well, can’t answer math story problems. “There’s nothing wrong with these children’s minds,” said Robert Bobb, the state-ap pointed emergency financial manager in DPS. “There’s a lot wrong with the adults that have been responsible for edu cating them. We have to work with kids and show them the value of education.” DPS’s fourth- and eighth grade students earned the worst scores in the 40-year his tory of the NAEP test. Consid ered a national benchmark for assessment, the test also has been criticized for being too demanding. Tuesday’s results are part of the Nation’s Report Card: Trial Urban District As sessment Mathematics 2009 report, released by the Nation al Center for Education Statis tics, a wing of the U.S. Depart ment of Education. As the nation suffers through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depres sion, and the state is hungry for jobs — with 29% unemploy ment in Detroit — these test results can send an economic shudder far beyond the city borders, said Carol Goss, pres ident and chief executive of the Skillman Foundation, which funds educational and social programs in the region. “The way you bring back the city is to have people that are well-educated and that have skills for the jobs that ex ist here. If we keep going the way we’re going, we’re not go ing to have that,” she said.  Improvements planned, again The NAEP test was taken last spring amid a storm of hard times in the city’s schools, including the third turnover in leadership in three years, a state takeover of the budget, school closures, declining en rollment and continued politi cal infighting. As the school board and Bobb fight in court for control, both sides said Tuesday that their educational plans will push the city forward. Teresa Gueyser, acting su perintendent for the district, said the plan adopted by the board — but not Bobb, who has hired his own academic team — includes extended day pro gramming, and early identifi cation of deficiencies and the crafting of individualized learning plans. It also man dates professional develop ment one week prior to the be ginning of the school year and during the holiday break. Bobb said this week that his team will retool the reading program, augmenting the cur rent program — called Open Court — with a new Harcourt program. Mandatory profes sional development for teach ers, as well as extended school day programs proposed under the new teachers contract, will address the problems, he said.  The issue of accountability In the wake of the NAEP re sults, parents blamed low aca demic expectations, and edu cators said parents need to be more accountable. Casserly said the city needs to be on the same chord. “One of the things we learned in De troit is that accountability is not clearly articulated in a way that holds everybody responsi ble for the nature of improve ment,” he said. Benjamin Harris, an eighth grade math teacher and dean of students at Spain Elementa ry School, agreed that reading problems can hinder math re sults. But he added that chang es need to start at home with parents. “If the upbringing at home is strong, solid, support ive, there’s reading at home, that makes it a little easier for everyone.” Veattris Edwards, who vol unteers in second-grade class rooms at Coleman Young Ele mentary, agreed that parents must do more. “The teacher does not have the time to do individual teach ing on a regular basis,” said Ed wards, whose children graduated from Detroit public schools and attend Oakland University and Baker College. “When you have 10 different reading levels, then you need more help from parents. There should be a mandatory work shop for the parents to attend.”  More about this national test Under the No Child Left Be hind law, each state must ad minister the NAEP, but dis tricts can do so voluntarily. Re sults were relatively un changed in most of the large cities between 2007 and 2009, though eight of the 10 districts that began participating in 2003 have made significant gains since then. Detroit was among seven districts to take it for the first time this year. Students are selected to take the test based on demo graphic and family income in order to get a representative sample. The 1,900 DPS stu dents were selected from 106 schools. Michigan fared well in 2009, when compared with the na tional averages indicating a wide disparity between De troit and the rest of the state. Michigan fourth-graders scored 236, compared with a national average of 239 on a scale of 0 to 500, with 78% scoring at basic levels, 35% at proficient and 5% advanced. The eighth-graders in Michi gan scored 278, compared with the national average of 282. Sixty-eight percent scored at basic levels, 31% proficient and 7% advanced. The NAEP is considered more rigorous than the MEAP because it tests students on layers of reasoning and calcu lations, whereas the MEAP is “not as detailed or process-ori ented,” said Karen Ridgeway, executive director of the Office of Research, Evaluation, As sessment and Accountability for DPS. A MEAP question, for ex ample, might ask for a perim eter or surface area in a room. The NAEP might ask a student to determine how much carpet and paint to buy for a room or adjacent rooms, she said. Detroit is so far behind oth er districts on the scale, offi cials with NCES could not esti mate how many years it would take for the city to catch up. Detroit’s scores were “just above what one would expect by chance alone — as if the kids simply guessed at the an swers,” Casserly said. Bobb said he worried that any community outrage will be short-lived. But he said results only steel the resolve of the dis trict’s leadership: “We see it. We understand it. We’re going to do something about it. And by God, it’s for the kids in the Detroit that we’re standing up to fight for,” he said. Reading and science NAEP scores will be released in the spring.  Bobb’s plan: Tougher curriculum, more teacher training By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER  Detroit school leaders declared the need for a crisis response Tues day after revealing that fourth- and eighth-grade students in the district recorded the worst math results ev er in the 40-year history of a respect ed nationwide test. Robert Bobb, emergency finan cial manager for the Detroit Public Schools, called the results a wake-up call for the community and outlined an action plan to boost after-school tutorials for students, toughen the curriculum and increase training for teachers and others. In an interview with the Free Press, he pitched the idea of creating a Reading Corps of volunteers to help students improve reading skills. If Detroit students and the city are to have a viable future, he and others said, adults will have to take a real stance on ensuring change. “There definitely has to be a cul tural change,’’ Bobb said. He said a reasonable goal would be to get all third-graders reading at grade-level by 2015.  Do something: Don’t let kids take the fall If 85,000 children were struggling in raging waters, CNN would air the story ev ery hour. Americans would travel from across the coun try to help. Angelina Jolie, children in tow, would hold a news conference. But in Michigan’s largest city, where children are caught up in an educational catastrophe, it’s hard to get anyone to pay attention. That’s because, for de cades, the Detroit Public Schools hasn’t been a school system. It has been a jobs factory. It has been a contracts machine. It has been a get-over mag net. It has been run by zealots who curry favor with poli ticians instead of fight for children, zealots who, to a person, would get wrong the number of Detroit fourth- and eighth-graders scoring at the advanced level on a recent national test. That’s because, on the National Assessment of Edu cational Progress, no fourth or eighth-graders from De troit scored at the advanced level, and more than two thirds scored below the basic level. Yes, that included stu dents at some of the city’s elite, better schools. The scores were the lowest in the test’s history. This has to stop.  The adults are failing Joe Baker, whose twins just graduated from DPS, still volunteers because he has nieces, nephews and grand children in the district. He gets it. The most important thing about this latest measure of how poorly Detroit children are doing educationally is this: It is not an indictment of our children. It is an indict ment of adults who saw chil dren only as dollar signs to get state and federal monies for pet projects, private busi nesses, corporations and politicians’ meal tickets. “One of the things that has been of concern to me is that the untapped intelligence and potential of young, urban African Americans is un derestimated,” said Baker, who is a member of the De troit Parent Network, an advocacy organization, and who learned of the results from the Free Press on Tues day morning. “I don’t want for a second to have people say that the scores are reflective of their innate ability and intelligence.” Michigan — and its gover nor and Legislature — and Wayne County — and its executive and commission— and the city’s mayor and City Council must stop failing these children. We must stop creating a permanent un derclass that all Michiganders care for, for decades. Detroit students have the potential to be the brightest in America, if given a chance equal to what their peers get elsewhere. Which brings us back to how grown-ups any­where in Michigan can watch while 85,000 children are drowning.  Shut ’em down — temporarily Here’s what Michigan— and Detroit — must do: We must shut down the school system and throw away all contracts. (If bankruptcy is the fastest way, declare it!) The district’s leaders must stop dog-paddling in a toilet bowl swirling with the excre ment of past crimes and mis demeanors and financial bag gage from years of disregard ing children. Emergency Fi nancial Manager Robert Bobb must be allowed to construct a new system that works educationally and financially. If he— and a team that rivals the one that planned the Super Bowl — begin their work in January, this commu nity can build the new system that Detroit needs, school-by-school, department by- department, by July. Bobb can hire employees, including strong, caring teachers of all ages who want, who really want, who truly want to teach. In this system, the schools will be where they need to be based on population; teachers will make what they are enti tled to because they are com petent; and most important, students, when they return in September 2010, will learn what they need to learn be cause nothing less will be acceptable. Remember the drowning children and the people in New Orleans who were ig nored while federal and state officials argued over responsi bility and priority and whose fault it was? Can America afford that again? Can Michigan? Of course not. And we know it. Detroit must cut itself off from its poisonous roots and plant new roots. Detroit must accept help from wherever it comes and put children first. “This is a 911 call,” said Terance Collier, father of three boys in the district. “This is the last inning of the game. We have a serious problem. If it’s ‘give it to the mayor,’ if it’s turn it all over to charters, whatever it is, let’s do it.” If we want to change the outcome, change the game. There are no more secrets. The only shame now is if we continue to do nothing. While the children drown.  Legislation offers a solution Calls for government help in school reform growing  Granholm may get more power to aid troubled districts By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY and DAWSON BELL FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS  After the announcement that Detroit students posted the worst results in the 40-year history of the National Assess ment of Educational Progress test, there was renewed sup port Tuesday for moves under way in Lansing to give the gov ernor expanded power to help failing school districts. Gov. Jennifer Granholm supports legislation to give her the authority to appoint an emergency academic manager for a failing school district, similar to the authority she has to appoint an emergency finan cial manager for a district run ning chronic budget deficits, spokeswoman Megan Brown said. State Sen. Wayne Kuipers, R-Holland, who sponsored leg islation approved by the Sen ate last week that would give the governor such authority, said it is much needed. The House approved legislation earlier this year to expand the state superintendent of schools’ oversight of academi cally troubled districts. Steve Wasko, spokesman for the Detroit Public Schools, said Robert Bobb, whom Gran holm appointed as the dis trict’s emergency financial manager this year, said the cri sis indicates a need to change state law to give his office more academic control. “That would recognize the … academic emergency that our children and families face, and that it must be treated in the same manner as Mr. Bobb is dealing with the fiscal cri sis,” Wasko said. Mayoral control and remov al of the school board should al so be discussed more urgently, he said. “We strongly encour age Mayor Bing to make the case to the community to bring the schools under the control of the mayor,” Wasko said. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has said he would take control if asked. “While progress is be ing made on the financial side, these scores demonstrate the immediate need for an aca demic overhaul,” Bing said Tuesday. “I will continue to take an active role in fighting for schools that work. We can’t afford to lose another child.” The DPS school board lost much of its power in March, when the governor appointed Bobb, a former deputy mayor of Washington, D.C., to dig DPS’s $1.2-billion budget out of the hole. The deficit is now $219 million. The board has sued Bobb, claiming he is illegally making academic decisions. Bobb is countersuing, claiming the board tried to make unau thorized hiring decisions. Board members, speaking at a news conference Tuesday, said the education plan the board approved this year is su perior. They also spoke against mounting pressures for may oral control. “We have done so much to counter those test scores that to say the board has lacked leadership, I think that’s un fair,” said board member Ty rone Winfrey, who heads the University of Michigan’s De troit admissions office. “Now is not the time for the blame game. We need to work togeth er.” Any change to allow Bobb to have academic and budgetary control likely will be met with hostility from Detroiters who saw the state remove the school board in 1999-2005, dur ing which time a budget sur plus turned into a $230-million deficit and student achieve ment remained mostly un changed. “We bring our kids to these schools,” said parent Chris White, a political consultant and a leader of the Coalition to Restore Hope to DPS. “We don’t need another czar that takes parents and citizens out of the process. We need com prehensive school reform.”  What scores don’t show  Schools do prepare some Detroit students for a successful future By ROBIN ERB FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER  Katila Howard, 20, is jug gling two majors at the Univer sity of Michigan while working in Washington, D.C., this se mester, helping research re ports that may circulate in the hallways at Capitol Hill. Then there’s the law school exam she’s prepping for, too. Don’t try to tell Howard — a graduate of Detroit public schools — that the district can’t adequately prepare stu dents for the future. “Sure, you always had the kids who were just kind of slid ing through,” said the 2007 graduate of Cass Technical High School. But Howard credits her family and “compassionate teachers” for pushing her into clubs, prodding her toward in ternships and sending her to U-M recruiters when they vis­ited Cass Tech. “They saw how ambitious I was, and they got it,” she said. Despite the bleak test re sults from the National Assess ment of Education Progress— results that contained no mea surable indication of advanced math students in the Detroit Public Schools — the district produces stellar students each year. “I’m surprised and I’m sad,” said David Bellomy, a 2008 Cass Tech graduate and soph omore at Michigan Technolog ical University in Houghton studying biomedical and me chanical engineering. A lack of funding undercuts too many of the most promis ing programs and the most de termined students, he said. “I can recall every year before we’d start, we’d have to start late because of … some prob lem,” he said. A lack of a support system at home can’t be underestimat ed, either, said Sher Aaron Hurt, who is to graduate from MTU this week with majors in political science and women’s studies. “I don’t think the students see their possibilities,” she said. “All they see is their envi ronment. When they go home, the parents probably are just barely making ends meet. They don’t see someone who’s making it in college who has the same background as they have.” Last year, Hurt, a Cass alum who often visits the school to tell students about MTU, said she stopped by her elementary school to say “hi.” In one class, she was stunned by some stu dents’ behavior. Worse, she said, some of the teachers were surprised she had been so suc cessful. “They were taken aback that ‘Wow, you really went to college?’ ” she said. Students pick up on those low expectations, she said. Concerned parents react Scores bring sighs and groans, but ‘we know the problem now’  Change must start at home, they say By ROCHELLE RILEY FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER  Wilbert Riser couldn’t stop shaking his head. Veattris Edwards let out a gasp, as if she’d just gotten news that someone had died. Joe Baker bowed his head, took off his glasses, cleaned them, then sat in silence. And Terance Collier groaned in disbelief. Over and over, he said, “Wow,” and “Oh my God.” The four parents, members of the Detroit Parent Network, an organization that uses work shops and seminars to improve parental involvement in chil dren’s education, watched from a Free Press conference room the news that Detroit Public Schools students’ math scores were lower than those of students in any other compara ble city in the nation on a 2009 assessment. Sixty-nine percent of the ci ty’s fourth-graders, for in stance, scored below the basic level on the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The parents listened as each set of scores announced was worse than the one before. “I’m appalled,” said Riser, the adoptive parent of a 14 year-old student at King High. “I’m appalled. I’m appalled. This has to change.” When Michael Casserly, head of the Council of Great Ci ty Schools, said on screen that not one of the Detroit fourth- or eighth-grade students who were tested had performed at the advanced level in math, Col lier groaned as if he had been hit. But when the presentation ended, something interesting happened. He began to clap, loudly. “I was saddened by the re sults, but I was happy at the same time to understand that we know the problem now,” said Collier, 48, father of three sons, a 16-year-old at Renais sance High and a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, who are stu dents at Ludington Magnet Middle School. “The problem has been unmasked so we can really get down to the issues at hand.” Collier said the solution lies with parents. “It’s all about parenting. The teachers can’t be the parents. The police can’t be the par ents. …All children should know their real name when they go to school, know their fa ther’s and mother’s name, know their telephone number, know their colors, shapes and how to count to 10. Then you make them prepared for the educa tional prog ress. “I’m so happy that these results are out. … be cause we know what it is. And what ever action it takes, it doesn’t matter. … I’m Terance Collier, and I’m in 100%. We have to save these children.” Baker, whose twins graduat ed from DPS last year and are attending Central State Uni versity and Howard University this year, said the test results did not surprise him. “I used to work for the edu cational testing service a long time ago, and the scores were low then,” he said. “My focus is not to place blame. Let’s not fo cus just on the children. That’s too limited in its scope. If you don’t help the parents, if you don’t help the neighborhood, if you don’t do a broad-based as sessment of the problem, you’re wasting your time.”  Officials’ reaction “AS A PRODUCT OF THE DPS, I’M DISAPPOINTED BECAUSE I KNOW OUR POTENTIAL. … IT UNDER SCORES THE IMPORTANCE OF EVERYONE GET TING INVOLVED.” CHARLES PUGH, Detroit City Council president-elect  “BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS IN THIS. THERE IS CLEAR AND PRESENT EVIDENCE OF WHERE WE ARE AND WHAT WE MUST DO. IT’ S NOT OPEN TO SPECULA TION OR CONJECTURE.” KEITH JOHNSON, president of Detroit Federation of Teachers  “WE DON’ T WANT ANYONE TO CARRY THE WEIGHT OF OUR CHILD REN. IT’ S NOT YOUR RESPON SIBILITY.” TERANCE COLLIER , 48, father of three DPS students  “THE TEACHERS ARE THE HELPERS. THEY’ RE NOT THERE TO DO THE WHOLE JOB.” COLLIER’ S WIFE, REGINIA, 41  “IT IS AN ACADEMIC CATASTROPHE FOR OUR CHILDREN AND FOR OUR COMMUNITY.” CAROL GOSS , president and chief executive of the Skillman Foundation, which aims to develop good schools and neigh borhoods for children

WHAT more then a DECADE of HEAVY LIFTING can ACHIEVE (GET in the ZONE!)

Some Serious Heavy Lifting!

DPS to tear down 14 vacant schools it calls the worst eyesores

By LORI HIGGINS

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER 

Detroit Public Schools is to tear down 14 vacant schools beginning in January, elimi nating maintenance costs and getting rid of buildings that have been a haven for graffiti artists, vandals and thieves.

“These are absolutely the worst of the worst,” said Rob ert Bobb, emergency financial manager for the district. The buildings, he said, “are hazard ous for kids in the neighbor hoods.”

Bobb made the announce ment Monday with Sherrard School as the backdrop. The former elementary school, which closed in 2007, is among those to be torn down. At Sher rard, and the adjacent former Foreign Language Immersion and Cultural Studies School, vandals have destroyed the buildings, removing windows, stealing copper and leaving a trail of glass and debris in and outside the building.

Bobb said the district will use $3.1 million left over from the 1994 bond and nearly $30 million from Proposal S, the bond proposal voters ap proved in November.

Proposal S called for the de molition of 29 vacant buildings. More schools are to be torn down in later phases, but those announced for demolition Monday were deemed the most dangerous.

“They have been a real blight,” Bobb said of the build ings.

Ray Litt, director of Histor ic Cass Technical High Preser vation Society, said he is still hoping his group can save the old Cass Tech building, but pointed out they have been un able to get into the building to assess its condition before a bid can be made to purchase. Litt said the group has a devel oper already who plans to turn the building into a mixture of retail, entertainment and of fice space for nonprofit groups. “It appears they’re deter mined to demolish” the build ing, Litt said. 

Facing wrecking ball

These vacant Detroit Public Schools buildings are to be demolished beginning in Janu ary:

| Ferry Elementary, 2920 E. Palmer

| Owen Elementary, 3033 Fif teenth

| Newberry Elementary, 4045 Twenty-ninth

| Woodward Elementary, 2900 Wreford

| Sherrard Elementary/Middle, 8300 Cameron

| Breitmeyer Elementary (and former Foreign Language Im mersion and Cultural Studies School), 8210 Cameron

| Detroit City High, 3500 Mc Graw

| Sanders Elementary, 8700 Byron

| Scripps Elementary, 2100 Hurlbut

| Angell Primary, 8858 Petoskey

| Cass Technical High, 2421 Second

| Finney High, 17200 Southamp ton

| Chadsey High, 5335 Martin

| Munger Middle, 5525 Martin 

Heavy Lifter Defines Rationale (Dollars and Sense)

Teacher loans can save DPS millions 

Bobb says no bankruptcy if they agree to deferral

By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER 

The $10,000 that each member of the Detroit Federation of Teachers is being asked to defer until departure from the school district would save Detroit Public Schools $25.4 million, school officials said Monday.

Robert Bobb, the DPS emergency financial manager, stopped short of guaranteeing that the money will be repaid if the district declared bankruptcy, but in sisted that he would not declare bankruptcy if the teachers approve the deal. “From all the legal advice we’ve been given, the money is protected if bankruptcy occurs,” he said.

David Martell, executive director of the Michigan School Business Officials, and officials of the Michigan Education Association said there’s no way to guarantee the money would be protected ina bankruptcy. But, Martell said, bankruptcy is unlikely.

“It’s extremely far-fetched for a school district to declare bankruptcy because the impact would be far-reaching.”

DPS ended the past school year with a $219-million deficit and is looking to cut jobs this school year in response to state budget cuts and rehires of counsel ors and other support staff.

Thousands of teachers at a meeting at Cobo Hall on Sunday booed the wage deferment proposal that is part of a 3 year tentative contract agreement. Teachers are to vote over the next two weeks on the contract.

If approved, the funds would be deducted from paychecks over two years and be placed in a Termination Incentive Plan account. The school district would be able to use the money to help pay bills and would repay the employees upon retirement, layoff, firing or resignation — with no interest.

Officials at the MEA, the largest teachers union in the state, and the parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, said they knew of no other unions locally or nationwide that adopt ed such a proposal. “This particular plan is something they came up with at the table — unique to Detroit,” said George Jackson, an AFT spokesman.

DFT members could choose to be repaid in a $10,000 payment — which is subject to taxes — in an annuity or could choose to use the funds to buy a year or so of time toward retirement.

Heavy Lifting (Meets with Objection)

DPS teachers decry $10,000 deferment

By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER 

Thousands of Detroit Feder ation of Teachers members railed Sunday against a tenta tive contract with the district that calls for radical changes, in cluding deferring $10,000 from each of their pay over the next two years.

The 3-year tentative agree ment, outlined during a heated 2-hour union meeting at Cobo Hall, would save the deficit-rid den district $62.8 million, Rob ert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, said after the meeting. It also would eliminate the need for DPS to file bankruptcy, he said.

Members will vote over the next two weeks.

Bobb said the deferred pay — the issue that raised the most hostility Sunday — is not a wage cut but will reduce DPS cash-flow problems while placing those wages in protected accounts. Money will be returned upon the employee’s departure. DFT President Keith Johnson urged teachers to consider that rejecting the contract could lead to bankruptcy, in which job protection could be disregarded.

“I suggest you go back to the negotiation table,” Kimberly Porter, a teacher at Cass Tech High, said amid cheers. 


Union, DPS hear anger, ask teachers to rethink 

Warnings of possible bankruptcy are met with some mistrust

By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER

Union and school officials are hoping that in the coming days before the contract vote, teachers will calm down and consider a 3-year tentative agreement with the Detroit Public Schools that, among other changes, would require them each to defer $10,000 in pay over the next 2 years to help offset the district’s finan cial troubles.

Under the deal, the Detroit Federation of Teachers would not get a pay cut, but $250 pre tax from most paychecks — or about $150 after taxes — would go into a Termination Incen tive Plan (TIP) account. The pretax $10,000 withdrawal would look like a $6,000 take home reduction. The full $10,000 would be returned when the employee leaves.

The proposed 3-year con tract would save the district $62.8 million and there would be no need to declare bank ruptcy, according to DPS. The district had a $219-million def icit as of June 30.

In a heated union meeting at Cobo Hall on Sunday, many teachers vowed to vote against the agreement. No one spoke in support of a strike — such as the one that lasted 16 days in 2006 after teachers verbally rejected a contract propos al — but there was clear op position to the notion of loan ing the district money in the short term from paychecks.

“I would make less than when I was a part-time em ployee,” said Russell Chessin, a teacher at Breithaupt Career and Technical Center who be came a full-time teacher two years ago.

But not everyone at Cobo opposed the deal.

“We didn’t get a pay cut. Yes, it does hurt, it’s going to hurt a lot of people, but your pension is intact,” said Valen cia Grier, a 25-year veteran and fourth-grade teacher at Webster Elementary. “We can’t do anything about the economy. If people with 30 years would retire, they’d make it easier for the younger people,” she added.

The average DPS teacher salary is about $65,000.

The tentative contract also calls for wide-ranging school reforms, including:

| A switch to a peer review pro cess to evaluate teachers’ work.

| Higher health care premium and prescription payments.

| A 1% raise in the 2011-12 school year.

However, it was the wage deferment that caused the backlash Sunday.

Some said that they did not trust the district, fearing DPS still would claim bankruptcy or fail to reimburse them.

“How do I know my money is going to be there when they’re not paying vendors now?” said Kimberley Murray, a teacher at Howe Elementary. Robert Bobb, emergency fi­nancial manager for the dis trict, said the wages that go in to the TIP accounts would be protected and would reduce DPS cash-flow costs.

Despite cries for an on-the spot vote on the contract at Co bo, DFT President Keith John son would not allow the union to conduct a voice vote — a past union tradition. Members will vote by secret ballot in schools this month.

DFT Executive Vice Presi dent Mark O’ Keefe said the true deficit in DPS is more than twice the $219 million that an outside auditor calculated at the end of June. Bobb said Sunday his team is calculating the up-to-date deficit, but he anticipates more job cuts this school year because of state funding cuts — whether the contract passes or not.

Johnson warned the union that rejecting the agreement could lead DPS into bankrupt cy, which would put the union in danger of losing 1,500 jobs, seniority, longevity pay, yearly increases and other benefits.

Cassandra Davis, a speech therapist, called his state ments scare tactics.

“It’s intimidation,” she said. “To get us to accept what they’re trying to ram down our throats.”

DFT represents about 7,000 members, including sup port personnel such as social workers, truancy officers, sub stitute teachers, and about 5,000 teachers. About 1,000 union members with the low est wages would be exempt from the wage deferment.

Patrick Faculson, the DFT official who counsels members on retirement, said 400 to 800 teachers need to consider re tirement.

If they submit retire ment paperwork by February, they could get up to $8,000 in benefits that will not be avail able after this year in the pro posed contract, he said.

Luciana Simpkins, a special education teacher at Howe El ementary, said DPS needs to expand class offerings to bring in more students and thereby more state funding.

“They can find the money,” she said. “Maybe Robert Bobb is not the one who can figure it out.”

Johnson said teachers de serve better, but DPS is broke. “I understand nobody ever likes to have to give up some thing, but, ladies and gentle men, here is the reality of ourexistence,” he said. 


Be a good teacher — or get out of the way

The most important thing about the tentative con tract agreement reached between the Detroit Public Schools and its teachers union is not that it would save the district $30 million in expenses.

It is not that it would save the district $28 million — and cost teachers more — in health care costs.

No, the most important thing is that it would require real teacher evaluations for the first time in decades.

For those of us with reg ular jobs and regular evalua tions, that might seem strange. But at DPS, many teachers have not been evalu ated for more than 10 years.

“We have some teachers who haven’t been evaluated since Moby Dick was a gup py,” Detroit Federation of Teachers President Keith Johnson said in an interview Friday.

Moreover, Johnson said, DPS has many substitute teachers who are not certified to teach at all and have not met the conditions they should have to keep their jobs. The condition of their employ ment was that, within 6 months of being hired, each had to enroll in a certification program and complete six credits to keep the job.

“We had some people who were (substitutes) for 18 years and are no closer to certifica tion in their 18th year than they were in their first year,” Johnson said. “And that is deplorable and unacceptable.” 

Professional pride needed

DPS is roiling with efforts to balance its budget, shrink its overhead and fight low academic achievement and high dropout rates. At a meet ing at Cobo Hall on Sunday afternoon, many teachers booed details of the new con tract that would force teach ers to: lend the district $10,000 each over two years, not get a raise until the third year of the contract and pay more for insurance costs.

Johnson told teachers, according to news reports, that the alternative to the contract would be for the district to declare bankrupt cy.

While the union grapples with many aspects of the agreement, one thing is clear: The district and union leader ship finally appear to be on the same page concerning a system of peer evaluations that might finally weed out bad teachers and salute good ones, taking the best teachers’ best strategies and emulating them district-wide.

“I’m very proud of my profession and want to re main proud of my profession and of my union,” Johnson said. “I go out to schools whenever I’m not at the bar gaining table. And I’m so proud of what I see in most instances. But I also have to acknowledge that I can go into some classrooms and know if this was my child in this classroom, I’d have a hissy fit.”

Johnson said that as a classroom teacher, he had been evaluated only once in 17 years. 

Step it up or quit

Johnson said the peer eval uations will lead to improved instruction. Previously, he said, many tenured teachers were evaluated by principals who would drop by class­rooms and use a checklist to mark 1) whether the teacher had a lesson plan, 2) whether students were seated and 3) whether students appeared to be engaged.

Johnson is pushing for peer evaluations that do more than identify what’s wrong.

The union wants to “identify what’s right and emulate it,” he said.

This will be a tough week for teachers with needs facing off against a district that can not afford to meet those needs. But one thing that shouldn’t be lost is the chance to rid the system of people who don’t want to be there, don’t care about kids or are just marking time.

Teachers who aren’t doing the job “will have a profes sional and lifelong decision to make,” Johnson said. “Either you are going to step up your game and deliver the level of instruction this community has the right to demand or you’re going to be out of a job. As a profession and a school district, we cannot have, nor do we need teachers who are not properly prepared, not properly engaged and not properly supported. We don’t need them teaching the chil dren of Detroit.”

Amen.

TEACH to THINK (The REST will follow) (DO the RIGHT THING Today for the Kids)

OUR EDITORIAL

Teaching for success

Success of new contract may depend on district’s authority to remove ineffective teachers

Today thousands of Detroit Federation of Teachers union members will pack Cobo Center to hear the details of what is supposed to be a transformational new bargaining agreement. Detroit’s students, trapped in a failing system, cannot wait for incremental changes that don’t change the status quo in the school district.

Detroit Public Schools’ Emergency Financial Manag er Robert Bobb is calling the new contract a “very aggres sive agreement with respect to reform.” We hope he’s right.

Certainly the teachers’ union president, Keith Johnson, deserves kudos for urging his members to embrace some accountability and a deeper commitment to professional development.

There is much to applaud in this proposed agreement. The union is asking its members to ratify a pact that includes teacher eval uations for the first time and a school-based bonus system to get incentives for improved educator performance.

On the cost side, the three-year proposed contract proposes savings of more than $30 million in expenses and $28 million in health care costs.

This is very good news for a school district on the brink of bankruptcy. However, the contract details disclosed suggest the pro posed reforms may not give the district enough authority to remove ineffective teach ers from the classroom in a timely way.

That would be tragic. Detroit’s children are among the nation’s lowest academic achiev ers. Other big cities struggle with high rates of poverty, yet they still produce on average higher-performing children and higher gradu ation rates.

One of Detroit’s greatest barriers to im proving student learning is teacher seniority, which has prevented the district from staffing classrooms with the most effective teachers, rather than those with the most time clocked.

Bobb has supported end ing reliance on seniority, but in a Friday statement by Bobb to The News, that goal ap peared to be watered down.

He laid out a murky process that may or may not rid the district of bad teachers and save another generation of children from losing out on high-quality classroom instruction.

Bobb said under the proposal Detroit will create a high priority school district within the overall district specifically for its chronically failing schools. Teachers who want to teach in such schools must be district-certified. Certifi cation would require a teacher to complete a new professional development program.

Over time, each certified teacher’s perform ance would be evaluated. Bobb says low-per forming educators eventually will become “teachers-at-large” who cannot teach in high priority schools or cannot be allowed to use their seniority to “bump” less senior teachers in other schools as they can do now.

Improving Detroit’s teacher quality — the No. 1 predictor of student achievement, re search shows — largely will depend upon the new contract’s evaluation process. Details of that process have not been released by the district or the union.

Parents, taxpayers and state leaders should ask: Will the school district have the legal power to fire below-average teachers who are cheating their students of a good education?

We hope details of the proposed contract will show that it can do just that.

GIGANTIC HEAVY LIFTER! (ALL HANDS on DECK)

Excerpts ■ Video and full transcript at freep.com

Obama sees incentives as key to lifting economic crisis

President Barack Obama met with Justin Hyde of the Free Press Washington Bureau and Richard Wolf of USA To day on Thursday at the White House. Here are excerpts from the interview. For the full tran script or to watch video of the interview, go to freep.com.

QUESTION: (Can you) start us off by telling us what’s your greatest fear and your greatest hope in terms of where the job situ ation goes from here, say, for the next six to 12 months.

OBAMA:  Well, let me pro vide a context for where we are. Because of the financial crisis we were hemorrhaging jobs at the beginning of the year — 700,000 jobs per month in the first quarter of this year.

Our first job was to make sure that you didn’t have a complete financial meltdown.

We’ve succeeded in that. Our second job was to limit the damage from the financial crisis on Main Street — and what that meant was a recov ery act that would help states not have to lay off police and firefighters and teachers, all of which would have a broad er effect on the economy. We passed a tax cut to put more money into people’s pockets, 95% of workers.

Those kinds of steps … all designed to keep demand up for basic consumer goods, help people and states. And as a consequence … we have been able to get lending flow ing again to some degree, and we’re starting to see econom ic growth for the first time in a year. … But frankly, the steep de cline in jobs was a lot worse than any economist modeled at the beginning of the year.

And so now you’ve got essen tially a 7 million to 8 million gap between where jobs should be for relatively full employment and where we are.

That is my greatest fear, is we don’t close that gap.

QUESTION: How can you craft a program large enough to help the millions of Americans who are un employed without … addi tional deficit spending?

OBAMA: Moving forward, it is not going to be possible for us to have a huge second stimulus because, frankly, we just don’t have the money. It is possible for us to, I think, be surgical and say, are there ways that public dollars can be leveraged into greater private spending? … We have been exploring the ways that we can use the need to retrofit and weather ize homes to drive down ener gy costs to create a version of — you know, similar to what we did with cash for clunkers, where we essentially say to the private sector — the Home Depots and the Lowe’s — let’s see if we can incentiv ize people to insulate their homes and get contractors working again, and suddenly generate more private activ ity.

… On the jobs front more directly, there are a range of ideas that are being looked at on tax credits that could tip an employer who is on the fence — they see that there’s some business to be had out there but they’re not quite sure yet whether they want to spend the money. It’s possible that a little bit of a nudge from a tax break could make the difference.

QUESTION: Are banks doing enough at this point to extend credit to small business, or should they be freeing up more credit? Is there anything the adminis tration can do along those lines, given that you don’t necessarily have the power that you had earlier this year?

OBAMA:  Well, we have taken a series of significant steps to try to increase small-business lending. We’ve increased, for example, the Small Business Administration loans by 73% since we came in. We’re ex ploring further ways that can loosen up credit. … Small businesses, mom and- pop businesses, often who are more reliant on small banks, they’re having some tough problems. And I think that there’s a perception that it was just the big banks that were in trouble, not the small banks. The truth is, the com munity banks, the local banks, they were very involved in commercial real estate. That is a problem that is actually still there, it has not bottomed out, and was in some ways just as significant, although not as large, as the housing market problem. … And so what we’re trying to figure is how do you, on the one hand, help make sure that the banks, both large and small, are engaging in pru dent practices, but on the other hand, that they’re not pulling back so much that businesses can’t get credit, and where can we strate gically fill the gaps? … And I’ll be very honest with you, the TARP funding, which could give beneficial rates to banks that they could then in turn lend, carries with it for a lot of banks the unattractive prospect of the government being involved in their com pensation. … You had a lot of banks saying we don’t want to take any TARP money or we want to pay it back as soon as possible. And that gives us less leverage over these banks than we might otherwise like.

But I am convinced that the banks can be doing more than they’re doing, and I think that it’s important for them to understand the American people stepped up when they made some very bad calls and pulled them out of a very, very bad situation. They have to feel some sense as well that it’s time for them to give back. And so we’re going to be pushing them pretty hard in the months to come.

QUESTION: Michigan has led the nation in unemploy ment for nearly four years now. In parts of Detroit, the unemployment rate is one in three workers. What do you say to people who are coming up now on a year without having work?

OBAMA:  Well, the first thing I’d say is I am painfully aware of how tough the situation is. … Michelle and I have family members who are out of work. It hasn’t been that long since I was in some of the neighborhoods that are going through these tough times.

And we know the desperation and difficulty that people are feeling, as well as the pride and dignity that work brings, and the fact that they don’t want a handout … they want to be given a chance to sup port their families and do better in their lives.

We have taken a series of steps that have made a bad situation somewhat better. I mean, had we not passed the Recovery Act, had we not stepped in on GM and Chrys­ler, things obviously would be a lot worse. But that’s not good enough. And so the steps that I’ve talked about, in terms of short-term job stimulus, is going to be im­portant.

I think the most important message I can deliver to the people in Michigan though is that we will get through this short-term transition, and what we have to be doing is taking advantage of the long term opportunities around areas like clean energy. And Gov. Granholm has done a very good job, I think, pro moting things like new bat tery technologies for the fu ture electric car, making sure that we are thinking cre atively about how to convert all this enormous capacity, manufacturing capacity, that existed because of the auto industry, into these new areas of clean energy.

QUESTION: Yesterday, the Congressional Black Cau cus held a protest in the House committee for what they said was an avoidance of the problems of black Americans who are facing the brunt of the recession, while policy has been, in their words, “defined by the world view of Wall Street.”

What’s your response to that criticism?

OBAMA:  I think the most important thing I can do for the African-American com munity is the same thing I can do for the American commu nity, period, and that is get the economy going again and get people hiring again. And I think it’s a mistake to start thinking in terms of partic ular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together and we’re all going to get out of it together.

QUESTION: A lot of people say we’re going to need to do something to fix the state budgets, which are going into 2011, whereas the stimulus money runs out in 2010. Can you put strings on the type of aid that might turn out to be part of this … so that you don’t have governors, perhaps Republican governors, cut ting taxes with that money or something like that?

OBAMA:  We are going to do everything we can to make sure that any federal aid that’s provided to the states is actually helping people in those states who are in des­perate straits. … Let me just make one last point. … We are going through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depres sion. I want people to un derstand that it is an extraor dinary feat — not just of gov ernment, but I think the en tire country — that as tough of a blow as this was, we’ve stayed on our feet. We have managed through this crisis in a way that a lot of people were fearful we couldn’t do.

And we should take confi dence from that. We should take pride in that. We’ve still got a long way to go, espe cially on the jobs front.

But the truth of the matter is, is that this economy is on the upswing.

We remain the most dy namic economy on Earth, the best universities on Earth, the best science and technology on Earth, the most productive workers around. And if we can get some key things right on energy, stop having health care be such a drag on our economy, make sure that our education system is working the way it needs to, get con trol of our federal budget as we recover — if we can take those key structural steps, I am absolutely confident that we will bounce back just like we always have before. But it’s going to take some work, and it’s going to take some time. And it’s going to require some patience on the part of the American people.

HEAVY LIFTER (HARD at WORK for SUCCESS with FULL-COURT PRESS!)

DPS, teachers union reach a tentative deal

By ERIC D. LAWRENCE

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

The Detroit Public Schools and its teachers union said Thursday night that they reached a tentative agreement on a contract that comes as the district strug gles with its finances and declining en rollment.

At a joint news conference, Robert Bobb, the district’s emergency financial manager, called it a “very aggressive agreement with respect to reform,” one that will save the district more than $30 million in expenses in addition to $28 mil lion in health care costs.

He said it will rule out the need for the district to pursue Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The three-year proposed pact calls for a 1% salary increase in the third year. It also allows for additional incentives. And it allows for teacher evaluations and a school-based bonus system.

Members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers are to meet Sunday at Cobo Hall to learn details. Union President Keith Johnson said the goal is to have teachers ratify the pact before they leave for break Dec. 18.

Johnson said negotiations were diffi cult but necessary. “What was happen ing was not sustainable, nor should it have been,” he said.


DPS paid a high cost to move so quickly 

But a former official says the price was expected

By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY

FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER 

The Detroit Public Schools had to pay higher costs to construct and remodel fa cilities under the $1.5-billion bond pro gram because deteriorating buildings re quired the district to move quickly, a for mer official testified Thursday.

Robert Moore, the former senior dep uty chief executive officer who was sec ond in command in 2000-05 when the district spent most of the bond that vot ers approved in 1994, testified at a hear ing called by DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb.

Additional staff and acceleration costs were factored into the contracts, said Moore, who is now deputy superin tendent for finance operations at the Oakland Intermediate School District.

“Of course, there was a premium to pay for such an accelerated deployment of bond funds which was an unfortunate result of the failure during the prior six years to implement meaningful capital improvement programs,” Moore said.

Since the hearings began in October, Bobb and other DPS officials concluded the district had overpaid by millions — sometimes double appraised values — for land to build the new Cass Tech High, Detroit School of Arts, a maintenance hub near Eastern Market, leased land from the city and space in the Fisher Building.

“We’re going to continue to seek the truth in terms of how these decisions were made,” Bobb said. 

Heavy Lifing (Change: Rules of the Road)

Early school-year start back in play

By TIM MARTIN

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LANSING — Michigan’s efforts to win more federal cash for schools could result in changes that would cause some angst beyond educa tion circles.

Among them is a propos al that would eliminate the requirement that Michigan schools wait to start classes until after Labor Day. It’s one of several changes pro posed in legislation that sup porters said would give Michigan a shot at winning up to $400 million in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competi tion.

A state law passed in 2005 requires public schools to start classes after Labor Day so families can extend summer vacations and tourism-related busi nesses can have teen work ers available into early Sep tember.

It was a provision sought mainly by Michigan tourism interests, along with the ag riculture industry. 

Goal is flexibility

Some lawmakers said that eliminating that re quirement may improve the state’s chances of securing more federal cash for schools.

State Rep. Tim Melton, an Auburn Hills Democrat who sponsors key Race to the Top-oriented legisla tion, said the provision is in tended to meet the federal program’s goals of provid ing schools flexibility to boost time spent on instruc tion.

“It’s a provision that we believe, in Race to the Top, makes us more competi tive,” Melton said.

But some lawmakers said eliminating the post-Labor Day requirement has noth ing to do with satisfying the goals of the federal competi tion aimed at giving states incentives to improve schools.

Rep. Kevin Elsenheimer, the Michigan House’s top ranking Republican, said the Melton measure would undermine one of the Legis lature’s most pro-business achievements of the decade. “It’s a direct assault against tourism in Michi gan,” said Elsenheimer, who lives in the tourism-depen dent region of Michigan’s northwest Lower Peninsula. 

Is change necessary?

Doug Luciani, president of the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce, agreed.

He said the Legislature needs to “just keep it simple and do its job” on school re form without making un necessary changes.

The Race to the Top grant program is funded by more than $4 billion from the federal stimulus pack age.

The Obama administra tion will grant the money to the states that most aggres sively implement ideas such as expanding charter schools or judging teachers based on test scores. Appli cations for the cash are due from states in January.

Senate OKs bills aimed at education

The Michigan Senate ap proved bills Wednesday that would provide alternative paths to teacher certification, allow the expansion of char ter schools and give the state schools chief more power over failing schools. The measures now go to the state House.

The bills are part of efforts to give Michigan a chance at winning up to $400 million in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.

The money will be awarded to states that aggressively move to improve their schools.

Bills related to failing schools and expanding char ter schools passed 23-13, with some Democrats joining most Republicans in support.

Other bills in the package passed without opposition.

- ASSOCIATED PRESS 

HEAVY LIFTING 101 (Preparations Underway on Way Forward to Acquiring the Loot)

Public schools 

Granholm pushes reform, aims for U.S. grants 

By CHRIS CHRISTOFF

FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF

LANSING — Gov. Jennifer Granholm gave strong support Tuesday for measures she said will both improve public schools and qualify Michigan for up to $400 million in federal grants next year.

She called on lawmakers to approve legislation to give the state more power to intervene in academically failing school dis tricts, increase the number of high-quality charter schools, merit pay for teachers and alternative certification for teachers without education degrees.

Those changes are among the criteria the feder al government will use to award $4.3 billion in grants to states to improve schools academically.

Earlier Tuesday, the Senate Education Committee ap proved legislation that would create more charter schools, enable state takeover of failing schools and allow alternative certification of teachers.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said his caucus supports the changes Granholm endorsed. The House plans to consider similar legislation, which must be completed this month to allow the state to apply for the federal money.

Granholm’s remarks were her most forceful public en dorsement of changes that have long been opposed by teachers unions, which have been her po litical allies and a powerful influ ence in Democratic politics.

“We have to transform education in Michigan; we have to be fearless about it,” Granholm told educators.

Michigan Education Associ ation spokesman Doug Pratt said compromise is possible. But he questioned the need for recruiting non-certified teach ers “when there are thousands of unemployed teachers out there now.” 

Brutal Heavy Lifting (DO the RIGHT Thing)

Editorial

En route to the ‘Top’

The carrot is tantalizing: a share of $4.3 bil lion set aside in federal stimulus money to help a handful of states revamp failing schools.

But some in Michigan’s educational estab lishment are balking at the stick: more charter schools, expanded alternative teacher certifi cation, and teacher reviews tied to student performance.

If Michigan is going to win, or even compete for, the federal Race to the Top dollars that are being dangled in front of states, it will need to embrace reforms that have confounded the state in the past.

It’s well worth doing, no matter whose hide gets a little tanned in the process.

In a way, Race to the Top is a shrewd fol low- up to the No Child Left Behind reforms rolled out by former President George W.

Bush. He believed his landmark education act would incentivize states to embrace reforms through the enforcement of tough standards.

He learned pretty quickly that the education establishment could be bullheaded in its recal citrance.

Enter President Barack Obama and his administration, which puts the proposition more bluntly: Enact reforms, or be left out of key federal funding.

Race to the Top requires states who even apply for funds to align their schools with fed eral guidelines. It’s an attempt to change pol icy in a lot of states in a short time.

In Michigan, as in most states, the primary opposition is expected to come from teachers’ unions, which have opposed most such re forms in the past.

But Michigan Education Association presi dent Iris Salters says her organization hasn’t decided whether, or how, it might oppose changes to help the state qualify for the federal money. Her union, Michigan’s biggest for teachers, is working with the governor and the Department of Education to figure out what the state needs to change to compete.

Some of Salters’ concerns are reasonable and ought to help shape the state’s efforts. But if MEA leaders are primarily interested in preserving the status quo, state policymakers will have to move forward without them.

Salters, for example, points out that open ing up broader alternative certification might make it even harder for the 9,000 teachers the state graduates each year to land jobs here.

That may be so for teachers in some fields, but many districts have trouble recruiting good math and science teachers, and alternative certification might help there. Salters cautions that those who’ve mastered specialized con tent areas can’t be presumed to have mastered teaching them, as well. But no one proposes putting wholly untrained instructors in class rooms; reformers simply want to rethink the requirement that every teacher have an educa tion degree.

Salters also says the Race to the Top re quirement to tie teacher performance to stu dent performance is limited to a single test (in Michigan, probably the MEAP), and she ques tions whether that would serve educational purposes. But nothing in Race to the Top pre vents the state from going further. Michigan could create more sophisticated ways to mea sure student achievement. The MEA would do better to help shape those measures than it would to oppose the idea.

The MEA has historically opposed the ex pansion of charter schools. One of its objec tions has been lax oversight. Race to the Top could be seen as an opportunity to tighten that oversight, a long overdue reform, so the expan sion does not come with a downside.

If the MEA is savvy, it could use Race to the Top as a way to help put its own mark on re form.

If it doesn’t, state officials should stiffen their spines to oppose union obstruction. The federal money, and the reforms that are tied to it, are too important to Michigan’s future.