Detroit public schools are the worst in the nation when it comes to getting the job done, as in, teaching kids.
Michigan as a whole is pretty abysmal when it comes to fourth grade reading and math scores, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress test.
We score way under the national average, thank you very much. But Detroit takes the prize, with the lowest test scores in the nation. Only five percent of all the fourth graders in Detroit Public Schools Community District were proficient in reading.
They were even worse in math – four percent. Eighth-grade scores were similar. It is not fair to blame new Superintendent Nikolai Vitti for this; he’s been on the job for barely a year, and has vowed things will change.
He took over a district that has buildings with inadequate heat and supplies, and inherited the children whose parents are among the minority who haven’t fled the system.
Detroit is a special case. Teaching children is challenging enough. Teaching children who are sick or cold or hungry and have little caregiver support for learning is nearly impossible.
But the city is not alone. Barely a third of students in all Michigan schools had scores that counted as proficient.
There are many reasons for the decline of this state’s public schools. But the way they are funded is one. We have a system in which it is ridiculously easy for anyone to get permission to open a “charter” school, and drain revenue from the public schools, which have fixed costs they can’t escape.
The system is badly in need of reform, but first, it may be useful to review just how we got there. It began with a name everybody knows, but very few can explain: Proposal A.
Twenty-four years ago, Michigan voters went to the polls one cold March day and overwhelmingly adopted “Proposal A” which revolutionized how public education would be funded.
For years, the main source of school funding had been property tax millages approved and periodically renewed or increased by the voters. What that meant that schools in affluent areas, or where parents were deeply committed to education, usually provided an excellent education.
Those in poorer areas often did not; one father in Utica once said he didn’t support more money for schools “because my boy is going to be a shop rat like me.”
You have to wonder what they both did when the shop vanished in the Great Recession. Anyway, by the early 1990s, it was clear that the funding model was broken. Kalkaska, for example, would often run out of money and close down early.
That wasn’t what the doctor, or the Michigan Constitution, ordered. That system was blown up in July 1993, when the legislature bizarrely voted to completely abolish property taxes.
Apparently, led by then-state senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrats were attempting to play a dangerous game of chicken, trying to get Gov. John Engler to walk back a big property tax cut he wanted. They were dancing with a cobra, and he pounced. Engler signed the bill abolishing taxes.
That meant essentially no funding for the schools. Engler then got a statewide referendum on the ballot that would, no matter how people voted, radically change the way education was funded in Michigan. Proposal A was designed to raise the sales tax from 4 to 6 percent. The schools would then be funded largely by a per-pupil grant from the state.
Millage revenue would be allowed, up to a point. But voters in, say, Birmingham would no longer be able to vote to appropriate as much new money as they wanted.
That was a prescription for long-term mediocrity. But voters had little choice, because the referendum came with a poison pill. The referendum was structured so that if Proposal A were rejected, much the same would happen to the schools, except the income tax would be raised instead of the sales tax.
The voters chose the sales tax option. The day after it was passed, I was working for the New York Times, and went to see a top administrator in the Bloomfield Hills schools.
“I’m taking early retirement,” the man said. “Until now we could keep these schools competitive with private schools – the citizens would pass the millages we need. Now, they won’t be allowed to do that, and the schools will decline.”
He didn’t want to stick around for that. “This will be good for the Kalkaskas of this state for ten years or so,” he told me.
After that, he said, everything would gradually go to hell. The going-to-hell phase has been greatly accelerated by the explosion of “charter” schools, which allows pretty much anyone to open a school and suck up revenue.
For example: Let’s say I got a charter to open Jack’s House of Pain High across the street from Ferndale High, and I could bamboozle the parents of 100 students and enroll them.
That would mean, if Ferndale gets the average per-pupil grant, that high school would lose $763,100, which I would get instead. Detroit public schools have less than a third of the number of students they did in 2000; do the math.
Reform is badly needed. The idea that Detroit could attract major investment from Amazon, or indeed any new employer, is ridiculous when you consider that the vast majority of young people are on their way to dysfunctional illiteracy.
There is a blueprint for hope: The School Finance Research Collaborative released a report last month (easily found online) that offers some ideas.
Most of all, it suggests the “one size fits all” model of funding doesn’t make sense. We need to figure out how to get the job done, and fund students accordingly.
Yes, it may well cost more to educate a disadvantaged or hungry or emotionally challenged student. Maybe much more.
But not nearly as much as an unskilled, sullen, unemployed adult costs society in the long run. And our current model is creating thousands and thousands of them.
Common sense is a very rare thing.
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Meanwhile, back in the Pleistocene … Much has been made of Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson’s comment last week, in which he said “I’d rather join the Klan,” than work with a group of regional CEOs who are trying to encourage businesses to come to Southeast Michigan. Nobody should pay much attention.
Patterson has made a career of Detroit-bashing since he burst on the scene as a lawyer for a Pontiac anti-busing group in 1971. He has been shocking the media with outrageous, thinly veiled racist comments longer than most people have been alive.
These days, almost 79, largely in a wheelchair from a near-fatal auto accident six years ago, his career is nearly over; his dreams of statewide or national office long gone. But when he blows his dog whistle, and repeats his same ‘ol outrages, the media come running.
But Coleman Young is decades dead, and Oakland County is now a bustling and increasingly liberal place. We are probably stuck with Brooks until January 2021, unless he is called to that great whites-only bar and grill in the sky before then.
Until then, the media could do us all a favor and treat LBP like the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, frown at his rantings, ignore him as much as possible, and then forget about him for another year. Granted, that’s a bit harder to do when Uncle’s clone is in the White House. But we need to try, just the same.
