Connie Calloway
Schools matter most
July 22, 2007
Support for the war in Iraq continues to wane within the GOP and among the military ranks.
Detroit just sent home thousands of people who visited the area on behalf of the NAACP and the National Organization for Women. We just watched five Detroit Tigers make baseball's All-Star team while we still debate what to do with the team's old stadium.
But one of the most monumental things that happened here is that we welcomed a new city schools superintendent, now in the middle of her first month on the job. And I have a suggestion for Dr. Connie Calloway, who admittedly has come to put out a fire that someone else started: Help us keep our eye on the ball.
Job No. 1 for city
Nothing -- I repeat, nothing -- matters with Detroit's renaissance if we can't fix the schools. The mayor knows it, and he is so committed to change that he's making plans to reinvent education for city kids. Corporate executives and foundation leaders know it; they are busy visiting successful schools around the country and meeting with prominent Detroiters to garner support to offer parents more options.
But while we continue to talk about what else we can do for children outside the schools, the most important conversation, the most important work, must go on within DPS, where Calloway can either clean house and change the old way of doing business or beat her head against the wall waiting out a smart and lucrative contract. She doesn't strike me as one who beats her head against walls.
My suggestion and my hope are that Calloway will tell us, the taxpayers and the renaissance warriors who know the city is already turning around, everything that is going on.
Skip the secrecy
Part of the lingering problem with DPS is the secretive way the administration has dealt with problems, which always erupt and always look worse when they've been discovered than when they've been announced.
I hope that Calloway will hold weekly press conferences to update us, the taxpayers who are funding the hope, about plans to improve graduation rates, beef up curriculum, balance the budget and cut executive ranks so she can spend more on teachers in classrooms and make the schools so vibrant that parents are enticed by them instead of guilted into staying with them.
With every piece of bad news, Reaction One is to be defensive, to complain about how much everyone picks on Detroit. From Calloway, I want the good news -- and much more of it -- about schools that work and children who excel. But I also want the bad news about the problems -- and what we're doing to solve them.
Yes, the Tigers are playing, and it's the 40th anniversary of a Detroit uprising born of frustration that still walks the streets, still survives a gap between the haves and have-nots that is worse today than in 1967.
But even as we watch everything else, we must not take our eyes off the prize, the children, and the schools.
Contact ROCHELLE RILEY at 313-223-4473 or rriley99@freepress.com.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
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