AIM is TRANSFORMATIVE!

ROCHELLE RILEY

Woes, expectations mount for DPS chief

BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 7, 2008

The Detroit Public Schools budget deficit has grown from $45 million to $65 million -- and could grow higher, Superintendent Connie Calloway said.

In a wide-ranging interview she outlined a plethora of problems, including an ongoing FBI investigation, a continuing inability to evaluate teachers and a majority of high schools not meeting standards, thus failing in their duties to students.

Calloway, ending her first year as superintendent, also confirmed, once and for all, that the DPS graduation rate is 38% -- a figure her staff members demanded that she call attention to after national media reported that the rate was 25%.

"Why would I embroil myself in a discussion about whether it's Type A failure or Type B failure?" she said she told them. "It's unacceptable."

In a two-hour interview, the first in a series about how to fix the city schools, Calloway was quick to point out that the district celebrated some high points this year, including sending the only high school band from Michigan to the Beijing Olympics.

But those kinds of achievements, dotted here and there, are buried under a mountain of incompetence, ineffectiveness and insanity that has kept her -- and the six superintendents before her -- from effectively tackling the district's two largest problems: improving learning and stanching an enrollment bleed that, by this fall, should send the district below 100,000 students for the first time since the 1917-18 school year.

Calloway says, to the ire of critics, that she has to shovel out all the muck before she can create a new district and new way of thinking, restructuring the schools to match the number of students and the needs of the region.

She also has to bring the district's budget and employee numbers in line. That's no easy task. The public schools have been a jobs factory for decades. The district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the $1.2-billion budget paid for 21,203 employees and 154,648 students. Last school year the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students.

Calloway wants to conquer problems by raising standards and changing the school system from one that has no direction to one that trains the kinds of workers Michigan needs. But first, she must solve problems that include:

• A $65-million deficit on a billion-dollar budget. That amount may seem small, but it becomes important when it represents missed enrollment projections and a special account to keep teachers employed who, in other years, would have been laid off in keeping with enrollment decline. And Calloway neither closed schools nor laid off teachers this year.

• An FBI investigation into risk management that did not end with a guilty plea by former interim Superintendent Bill Coleman. She declined to release details.

• An instructional department that hasn't ordered textbooks for the start of the school year for 19 years, forcing students and teachers to work without books in the weeks before state standardized tests.

"Philadelphia has 229,000 students and 100 people in its curriculum, instruction and textbooks division," Calloway said. "Detroit has 105,000 students and 238 people in ours, and I couldn't find the one person in that department whose job it was to order the textbooks for children to have on the first day of school. Let's just say we have a new director of curriculum and instruction."

Twenty-two of the city's 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress, which means the district must make drastic changes in how those schools operate -- or lose money and students.

With those kinds of problems, the first question is: Can the school district be fixed? The second question is: Can Connie Calloway do it?

Calloway, her hair in a ponytail, her face devoid of makeup, said that the cleanup will soon be over and she can begin to change a system of 220 similar schools into a network of schools that principals run to meet different student needs.

"We're really looking forward to site-based management where the principal is responsible for the building, ordering supplies, having input as to who is in the building and choosing how to use their Title I money, whether they want to use money for an additional math teacher, or two parent internships, or an English as a Second Language class."

But just as important, Calloway wants the high schools to graduate instant workers.
"We're going to turn out a class of graduates who are relevant to what this community needs immediately," she said. "They will be employable.

"Why couldn't we be a site for an alternative energy school? Why wouldn't we be a training school to support the rail industry? Why wouldn't we have a design school to look at mass transportation? Why couldn't we train students in demographics?" she said. "Whatever the relevant needs are for the employment market, we are uniquely qualified to provide workers for those needs."

She has already planned a health curriculum that will help DPS turn out nurses to deal with a massive shortage.

Watching Calloway is like watching the president of a bank in Mayberry, N.C., moving to Detroit to fix an ailing financial center. She may be overwhelmed. She may be seeing things she never saw in her old district, whose student population is about one-fourth the size of Detroit's high school population.

But don't underestimate small-town wisdom, or the wherewithal of a veteran whose smile belies a tough constitution and who seems unbothered by critics.

She has the support of the federal and state government. Both have shown leniency in releasing funds without appropriate paperwork or extending deadlines to use funds.

She has the support of the mayor, who has put on hold plans to support charter schools across the city while she tries to transform the district.

She has the support of a business community weary of a failing school district, and informed parents who like hearing a superintendent talk as much about students as contracts.

But Calloway faces impatience from detractors, including some school board members who say that, after a year, she can no longer complain about the district she inherited and instead needs to present concrete plans to fix problems.

"I've lost patience with the excuse that 'it was on fire before I came,' " said the Rev. Jimmy Womack, the board member who asked about the deficit before it was announced and was told there was none.

Womack, for instance, reminds that the school district laid off teachers and closed schools three years in a row before Calloway's arrival. In her first year, Calloway did neither and did not cut spending. So even with the avalanche of staggering problems, Womack said, she should have known the numbers would not add up.

"She may be a consummate educator, but she is not a good superintendent," Womack said. "Yes, you inherited a district in crisis. Yes, you inherited a district in bad need of repair. But at some point, you have to come up with solutions and take responsibility for those things that were created under your watch."

Calloway said she has decided to fix the district slowly -- the same way that it fell into such bad shape. She plans to do it by raising standards and creating something that those who want to buy into can celebrate and those who don't can leave.

"I haven't fired anyone -- yet. But many people have left voluntarily," she said.

If Connie Calloway can transform the schools, it will be nothing short of the miracle that Detroit parents and business leaders have sought for years.

She says she's up to the job. She has to be, she said, or the state will fail.

"We have virtually shaped the city and the state," she said. "We are the second largest employer in the state of Michigan and have a direct impact on shaping the future of Detroit and of Michigan. Every year, we graduate a cohort of students who will either add to our economic well-being or, if we don't do our jobs well, we will be responsible for supporting.

"Detroit has to do something," she said. "If we don't, we will continue to lose jobs, continue to lose enrollment, and we will fail our commitment to the city and state. We will fail our children."