Margaret Williamson is not one to say “I told you so.” But had we treated her like Paul Revere instead of Chick en Little over the past decade, Detroit might be in better shape.
Williamson, executive di rector of Pro Literacy Detroit, sounded the alarm in 2001 after a congressional survey estimated that 47% of Detroit ers 16 and older were functionally illiterate. That esti mate is now 52%.
People chided her — and me — for publicizing Detroit’s dirty little secret — and its greatest challenge. But an illiteracy problem that large permeates the very fabric of the city, especially its schools, and puts the city at risk.
And nobody thought about the children. Parents who do not or cannot read cannot prepare their children to learn. So they are sending them to school to fail. Those children, many of whom even tually drop out, grow up to become people who have a hard time finding a job, or whose job becomes breaking the law.
Declare an emergency
Nine years later, the state released a study showing that one out of three Michigan adults — 1.7 million people— lacks the basic literacy skills to get a family-sustaining job, and many were unable to participate in federally funded job-training programs be cause they could not meet a requirement to read at a sixth-grade level. Now comethe results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the news that Detroit’s fourth- and eighth graders’ scores were the low est in the test’s history.
One might think at this point that the state — and all of its counties and cities— would go into crisis mode, that Gov. Jennifer Granholm would declare a statewide emergency. One would be wrong.
Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb this week asked the state to give him authority over the district’s academic as well as financial well-being. Armed with those heartbreaking test scores, he is making the case that edu cating the district’s children is as important as balancing its books.
He has pitched the idea of a Reading Corps, which, like the Peace Corps, would recruit volunteers to make a difference in people’s lives, in this city’s life.
He and Margaret William son should get together.
Innovation and investment
Williamson was working feverishly in her office Tues day as Bobb announced the bad news. Pro Literacy, housed across the street from Comerica Park, has more clients than it can handle.
“We just signed up 180 people in the past 10 days, and 60 more are coming by Friday,” said Williamson, whose center teaches 1,200 adults a year to read. “Yesterday, we used every chair in this office, and thank God I wasn’t in here, because they used my chair in my office.”
Solving Detroit’s education crisis, she said, requires innovation and community-wide investiture.
Where do children who can’t read go? Many become adults who can’t read and have children who can’t read.
Williamson suggested establishing a citywide net work of literacy stations housed free at universities, community colleges, rec and community centers and li braries.
“You’re talking about 376,000 adults,” she said.
Can we create such a net work? We can’t afford not to.
In my head, I keep hearing Michael Casserly, president of the Council on Great City Schools, saying that the test scores were “barely above what one would expect by chance, as if the kids had never been to school at all and simply had guessed at the answers. … “It is now time,” he said, “now that we know what the results are, to focus on what this assessment has told us about how the kids in this city are doing. Otherwise, to our minds, this city really has no viable future.”
Enough talk. Now’s the time for action.
Letters
Everyone must invest in Detroit student success
The startling and sad news that Detroit students in fourth and eighth grades recorded the lowest math scores ever on nationwide tests should prompt us all to take action (“If you can read this, you can help,” Dec. 9). We, as a state, share the responsibility for their failure, and we will share the impact of their success.
This comes after the state Legislature and the governor made significant cuts to pro grams that ensure the health, safety and educational opportunities for our children. Continu ing this disinvestment in kids — especially by cutting early childhood programs that prepare kids for school — will make the situation worse.
No time should be wasted on blaming the parents, teachers and school administrators.
We all, especially our political leadership, should be ashamed for allowing this to happen.
Reading the “call to action” message signed by Paul Anger and Stephen Henderson was the best thing about Wednesday’s front page coverage. Michigan’s Children is thrilled that the Free Press has once again decided to engage in “advocacy journalism” on behalf of our vulnerable children, especially the kids in Detroit. Many positive public policy changes oc curred during your newspaper’s long-running Children First campaign of the 1990s and we need the Free Press to once again be a strong voice for children.
We can do better. We must do better. Our future depends on what we do today to help our vulnerable children succeed.
Jack Kresnak
President/CEO Michigan’s Children Lansing
Unequal resources
I have been a high school science educator with the Detroit Public Schools for 16 years. I have dedicated my life to this district and to these children, and I work extremely hard to ensure the success of my students. If you want to be a voice, be a proactive voice that helps the teachers to help the students succeed. Class sizes need to be reduced to a maximum of 25 students. Our students deserve the same resources as the Birmingham and Bloomfield school systems.
When the playing field is leveled in terms of class size, parental involvement, stu dent attendance and re sources, it is then and only then should the feet of the educators be held to the fire.
Teneshia Moore
Chesterfield Township
Generational neglect
The illiteracy has a core in the lack within the life that starts before the child enters the classroom. I see it in my neighborhood. I see the re sults of years of educational neglect passed from genera tion to generation. The “boom box before books” mentality has to change be fore progress has a chance.
DPS has failed in its core mission. If DPS wants to spend one more dime study ing the problem then count me out. If DPS want to stop playing games, is willing to accept me simply because I have raised three literate children regardless of having no college degree and get to work on the problem, then count me in.
Mark C. Durfee
Detroit
Courage to face facts
Hope, that’s what I felt when I read the article of how poorly the fourth- and eighth-grade Detroit stu dents scored on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math tests. Facing a problem head-on with cour age is the first step in fixing it. To do this, Detroit par ents, teachers and leaders need to stop thinking of edu cation as a product provided by an institution for 7 hours a day, and begin viewing it as a component as vital as oxygen to a child’s life. Oxygen breathes life into our bodies; education breathes life into our hearts and minds. Goals need to be set early on by all the adults in our children’s life. College is not an option, but a destination. This is not a time for excuses or laying blame. It’s a time for identi fying the problems, setting new and loftier goals, and creating the infrastructure both citywide and statewide for change.
We absolutely can move this ball forward. Game on, Detroit!
Denise Neville
Grosse Pointe Shores
Don’t blame teachers
No one is stating all the facts when presenting this negative data. Robert Bobb also is not alerting the media that he maintains classrooms with student limits above the contracted amount, which leaves 25-plus students in many classrooms, but he wants to blame teachers and other leaders for the stu dents’ shortcomings. I guess he is, in effect, also blaming himself now for not properly staffing the buildings so as to better educate Detroit’s children.
Stephanie Reed
Hazel Park
Reinventing the wheel
In 1994 DPS contracted with Wilson Language Train ing to implement a reading program for middle and high school students who were reading below grade level.
Over 100 teachers were giv en the year-long training.
The results after yearly test ing showed that the program was having a positive impact. District trainers gave ongo ing support to the teachers and trained new teachers every year for about five years.
When a new administra tion took over the district, the Wilson Reading System was shelved and replaced by a series of reading programs over the years. As the new test results indicate, the reading skills of DPS stu dents are not improving.
Perhaps it is time to stop reinventing the wheel just to show the power that an ad ministrator has.
Kathy Jones
West Bloomfield
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