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Shut down Detroit's dropout factories

Bulldozers ought to be rolling across Detroit, leveling public schools that are trapping children in poverty and ignorance. An army of civil rights lawyers ought to be marching up the steps of the federal courthouse on behalf of students being denied their basic right to a decent education by a chronically incompetent school system. No other response is adequate to the report that Detroit Public Schools graduates just 25 percent of its students. That news last week should have rocked this city with outrage. It isn't just a cold statistic -- its thousands of children each year who are washed out of the game before they even reach adulthood. Most will end up either in prison or on welfare. The link between the dropout rate and the crime and poverty rates is indisputable. Seventy percent of Michigan prison inmates are high school dropouts, as are 40 percent of the state's welfare recipients. And most will be supported by taxpayers their entire lives.

Detroit School Superintendent Connie Calloway has a plan to dismantle five of Detroit's worst schools and replace them with smaller, more responsive schools staffed by new administrators and teachers. Good for her. But Calloway is counting on those responsible for the current failure to implement her new strategy. Maybe she has enough dedicated, student-minded educators on staff to make the five chosen schools work. But what about the rest?

No additional evidence is needed to conclude the Detroit Public Schools can't be fixed. Three decades of one reform effort after another have produced a district with the worst big-city dropout rate in America. Detroit Public Schools should cease to exist as a teaching body. Calloway has the power under the federal No Child Left Behind Act to close any school that hasn't met performance standards for six years. Nearly every school in Detroit falls into that category. She should shut down those schools and fire everyone in them. She should replace the DPS schools with highly accountable schools run by private vendors screened, hired and monitored by the district, and free to hire teachers and principals whose jobs depend on producing better results.

The Detroit school system could still operate the handful of schools that are meeting federal standards, but even those would benefit from being spun off. The corrupt contractors, parasitic preachers and union do-nothings who have sucked the district dry will try to make shutting down any school district building into a racial issue, as they always do. But I can't think of anything more racist than denying Detroit's predominately African-American students the same education that their white, suburban counterparts take for granted. Not another dime of taxpayer money should go to subsidize this failure. Nor should the future of another Detroit child be destroyed by a school system that will never get it right.

If a 25 percent graduation rate doesn't make Detroit parents angry enough to demand radical change from the education system, nothing will.

car7858det2ghp's Blog

Detroit's "Dropout Factories"

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