AIM for SMARTER SCHOOLS!

Right-size for smarter schools

August 5, 2007

BY ROCHELLE RILEY

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

This is the second of Rochelle Riley's last five columns before she leaves for an eight-month sabbatical. She is writing about what she hopes will happen while she is away. Today: education.

We know what we need to do in Detroit.

But we've been so angry for so long, and we've been so desperate to prove our side of the argument, that we can't focus on what's important.

The argument: People of color are just as qualified to be principals, managers, superintendents, City Council members and mayors as anyone else. We seemed not to have noticed that we won the argument long ago. Now we just let some people have jobs based solely on their race because we're afraid not to.

The city school system is no different than any other company facing change. It is the only company in Michigan that I know of whose staff has grown while its clientele and budget have shrunk. The number of students dropped from 180,000 in 1987 to 177,000 in 1997 to 116,000 last year, school spokeswoman Mattie Majors said. The number of DPS administrators at the level of assistant principal and above last year was 990, Majors said, or one administrator for every 117 students.

Majors was unable to tell me last week how many administrators DPS now employs, and how many the district employed in 1987 and 1997.

I don't know if the district can't find the numbers or has never counted the people -- or can't figure out how to release the figures and not be marched on. Personally, I think it has been as high as 2,000, including some administrators who did not even live in Michigan. But that's just me, somebody who can't help wondering how many human resource directors it takes to count executive paychecks?

The city schools cannot operate as a jobs factory anymore. The district must lose employees as it loses students.

There it sits in print; said out loud. Sure, it is harsh. There are families attached to those lost jobs. But what is true of DPS has been true at Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, by whatever name it goes. When a company loses money, it must downsize.

The only thing the DPS has been downsizing is its student population. Detroiters can continue to make DPS a place where black folks can be in charge, or it can be a place where smart folks, regardless of color, are in charge and doing right by children.

Focus on children

Detroit and its schools can no longer ask parents to sacrifice their children on the altar of progress when that progress does not apply to the children, their dropout rates or their graduation rates.

Dr. Connie Calloway, the new superintendent of the city schools, has laid down the gauntlet. The last time someone did that, and was in a position to make real progress with the school district, she didn't last two years. Her name was Deborah McGriff. Calloway has been blunt and candid about the lack of process, the lack of accountability, and the lack of rules in the district. I bet she can come up with a standard curriculum for the entire district, instead of the district having one level of excellence at Cass and a different one at Mumford.

If Calloway's cleaning up, that's great; but only when she cleans house will we finally be able to focus on children.

We know what we need to do in Michigan. But we're too afraid of people stuck in time that we stay stuck in time with them. We balance the state budget on the back of change while continuing to cater to manufacturing, which, while not a dying industry, is a changing and shrinking industry. We balance school budgets on the backs of children, because nobody wants to lose their jobs.

We declare that we want more students to attend college in Michigan and work and raise families in Michigan. But we approve curriculum standards decades after other states. We watch our colleges announce double-digit increases in tuition. We ignore double-digit illiteracy rates that are the result of years of double-digit dropping out. And we expect our best and brightest to stay?

Over the next eight months, Michigan's schools must lower tuition rates so Michigan students might attend a Michigan college. And the state's Department of Labor and Economic Growth, an oxymoronic amalgam of people with duplicative jobs, must assess the skill level of the state's current workforce, both employed and unemployed.

Just as Detroit cannot lure businesses that believe they won't find qualified workers, the state cannot lure businesses that feel they won't find qualified workers.

The blame game

Here's the irony: Michigan is doing exactly what Detroit does -- not really balancing budgets, losing its youngest constituents at an alarming rate, keeping people in jobs who should have left years ago, and ignoring that families and companies avoid us because they know our problems.

Nobody blames Lansing's problems on the race of its leaders. That's a popular game played only in Detroit.

But the game is being played, and it is costing the state and the city their futures. If we can't educate our own children, why should anyone in America, whether they own a business or their own home, think we could educate theirs?

In the next eight months, DPS must downsize its staff as it downsizes its schools. It has announced the closing of 33 schools but has made no plans to lay off corresponding staff.

Huh? What kind of math is that?

Michigan needs to downsize to meet its actual needs. Raising taxes won't make irrelevant jobs relevant. And all three entities must make themselves, the district, the state's largest city, and the state itself, places that are inviting, not places where people are made to feel disloyal for seeking something else and new people feel stupid for believing in dreams.

We can do those things, or, come next May, watch twice as many high school graduates leave the state, twice as many middle-class residents leave the city, and twice as many companies tell Detroit and Michigan, sorry, but we're just not that.

There, the gauntlet is laid.

Detroit Free Press columnist ROCHELLE RILEY is one of 13 journalists named as Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan for the 2007-2008 academic year. She will be on sabbatical from Sept. 4 through May 1. She will take classes, attend seminars, travel abroad and study media, television, public policy and the Internet. You may send letters to her at Rochelle Riley, 615 W. Lafayette, Detroit, MI 48226. She will occasionally pick up mail.