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Sunday, December 28, 2008
Nolan Finley

Detroit blew chance for school rescue

With the Detroit Public Schools near disintegration, it ought to be noted that it's been five years since Plymouth philanthropist Bob Thompson was told to take his $200 million and get back to the suburbs.

Thompson, a retired road builder obsessed with spending his fortune to get urban children a high-quality education, ran into a political buzz saw when he offered to open 15 charter high schools in the city that would guarantee to graduate 90 percent of their students and send 90 percent of those graduates on to college.

Community activists denounced Thompson as a white meddler out to steal their children. They were joined in their absurdity by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who threw their lot in with the teacher union.

The rejection of Thompson's millions became a national story of a city so seized by racial divisions it couldn't set them aside even to save its children.

So instead of a network of alternative schools that would have rescued roughly 5,000 students from the sinking DPS, look what Detroit has today: A school district that fails to graduate 70 percent of its students; a school board that's fired two superintendents and an interim superintendent in four years; 18 of its 19 high schools on the failure list; and a fiscal meltdown.

Five years after Thompson was given the boot, Detroit is officially the worst big city school district in the nation and still sends more children to welfare and prison than it does to college.

Think about how different things might have been. Had the Thompson schools been built, they would be preparing to graduate their first class in the spring. Two thousand Detroit seniors would be making college plans. And Detroit's fast-fleeing middle class would have a reason to stay.

Yet no one has dialed up Thompson to apologize, to say they were wrong, to beg him for a second chance.

In fact, the governor and Democratic lawmakers are stubbornly blocking other Bob Thompsons from saving Detroit's children.

High-quality national charter school operators are lined up to get into the city. A group of Detroit teachers are pleading for the chance to remake a school under the successful Green Dot model.

But state law still traps students in hopeless public schools. Granholm refuses to lift the cap on charter schools, and the state House just passed a law protecting DPS from competition.
Nothing's changed in Detroit.

To his credit, Thompson didn't sulk back to Plymouth. He already had his University Prep Academy up and running, and thanks to a loophole engineered by Republican lawmakers, he's at work on two more schools, a math and science school at the Detroit Science Center and an art school in the Argonaut building.

The pace is less aggressive than he hoped -- he once believed other national foundations would match his funds and make even more schools possible -- but it's a lot better than nothing.

If Detroit families are lucky, the public school system will collapse in the coming year, and in the rubble, someone will come across Thompson's phone number.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The News. Reach him at nfinley@detnews.com or (313) 222-2064. Watch him at 8:30 p.m. Fridays on "Am I Right?" on Detroit Public TV, Channel 56.