Education Reform and the Limits of Policy: Lessons from Michigan

7. The Detroit Public Schools: A Failure of Policy and Politics

195 7 The Detroit Public Schools A Failure of Policy and Politics As the fall of 2011 and a new school year approached, observers of DPS wondered if this once exemplary district had yet hit bottom. The district’s problems had never been more daunting: its budget deficit at the end of school year 2010–11 was $327 million, ballooning $108 million (49 percent) above the 2009–10 deficit level. Moreover, this debt explosion occurred during the two-year stewardship of emergency financial manager Robert Bobb, appointed by Governor Granholm to staunch the flow of red ink in the district. But the district’s problems that year went far beyond financial strains: emergency manager Bobb and the elected school board sued each other over control over DPS, Bobb fired the superintendent whom the board hired, the board president was forced to resign in the wake of sexual misconduct charges, and a debate raged over a mayoral takeover of the schools (Schultz 2010). Academic performance in the district was just as dire. Both math and reading achievement scores by DPS 4th and 8th graders on the 2009 NAEP were not only the lowest in the nation, but the lowest in the 40-year history of this national testing program.1 Bobb, whose term ended in mid-2011, was replaced by Roy Roberts, appointed to the emergency financial manager position by newly elected governor Rick Snyder. Yet, the path forward is far from clear. Roberts, while joining with the governor and the superintendent to launch yet another wide-ranging education reform plan, still faces a serious deficit problem coupled with the added prospect of severe revenue shortages for the 2011–12 school year and beyond (see MDE [2011]). 196 Addonizio and Kearney A LOOK bACK: 1964–81 To fully understand and appreciate the current troubles in which DPS finds itself, it will help to describe briefly the roots of these troubles —roots that stretch back at least 45 years to the early 1960s, if not further. Thus, in this section we set the stage for what will follow in the body of the chapter by first recounting a series of significant events that took place and circumstances that prevailed in the 17-year period from 1964 through 1981. In our brief review of that 17-year history, we draw heavily on Jeffrey Mirel’s (1993) excellent and definitive history of DPS 1907–81, and particularly on Chapter 7, in which Mirel covers the period 1964–81. Mirel introduces what he saw as the impending breakdown that began in the early 1960s with a 1975 quote from political analyst William Serrin (1975): “ . . . nowhere in America can the nation’s disregard of its cities and the failure of the nation’s economic policies be seen so clearly as in Detroit.” And, as Mirel notes, Serrin could have said much the same about DPS, which had “ . . . slipped to the very edge of financial and educational bankruptcy.” In November 1972, staggered by five years of conflict over decentralization, desegregation, and repeated defeats of crucial millage proposals, the school board prepared to shut the system down” (p. 293). This period of the early 1960s marked the onset of a series of social, economic, financial, legal, and educational forces that over the next several years impinged mightily on DPS and, in so many ways, marked the beginnings of the demise of a once proud and highly respected urban school district. These forces included major shifts in the city and student populations, as well as the racial and economic makeup of both. These same shifts, coupled with growing discontent in the black community , further fed by the devastating 1967 Detroit riots, led to rising demands for community control and decentralization. At the same time, there also arose growing dissension in the citizenry among those arguing for decentralization and community control, and those supporting efforts to integrate the schools and the community—and decentralization won out, for a time. Concurrently, a mounting set of financial woes assailed the school district, which found itself being forced to embark on what Mirel (1993) describes as the “road to financial ruin” (p. 313). Detroit Public Schools: A Failure of Policy and Politics 197 It was during this same time that Detroit’s reform school board took steps to initiate a financial equity suit against the state of Michigan, an effort that predated the famous Serrano I case in California (Serrano v...