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.
No comments:
Post a Comment