Stronger medicine for sick schools

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Detroiters inevitably experience a sense of déjà vu whenever elected officials, business leaders, philanthropists and clergymen unveil yet another initiative to save the state's largest school district -- a sense, as state Schools Superintendant Mike Flanagan, a principal in the latest such initiative, acknowledged Monday, that "we have seen this movie before."

So what is different this time? More specifically, what do the plans Gov. Rick Snyder and DPS Emergency Manager Roy Roberts outlined Monday offer to the families that have been leaving DPS like beach dwellers fleeing an approaching tsunami?

In December 2009, long before Snyder won election as governor, the Legislature authorized his office to create a new, statewide school district to which the state's 200 or so lowest-performing schools could be dispatched, like trauma patients facing imminent death, for intensive care.

Although fewer than a quarter of those failing schools are DPS buildings, Snyder's decision to make those 39 schools the nucleus of Michigan's new Educational Achievement System (and his decision to make Roberts its acting CEO) recognizes that DPS is the epicenter of educational failure, not just in Michigan, but nationwide.

Or, as Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama's secretary of education put it bluntly in a live TV message to those gathered for Snyder's press conference Monday: "Detroit is, frankly, the bottom of the barrel."

Snyder and Roberts propose to quarantine Detroit's sickest schools from the financial and administrative dysfunction that plagues the entire DPS system and exploit Roberts' powers under Michigan's supercharged emergency manager statute to impose dramatic change -- longer school days and school years, more autonomy for building principals, and the suspension or abolition of any union work rules that Roberts regards as obstacles to his turnaround prescription.

Schools assigned to the failing schools district would remain under Roberts' or his successor's supervision (and, ultimately, the state's) for at least five years, at the end of which time those schools demonstrating improved student performance would be allowed to rejoin DPS, remain in the statewide system, or reorganize as independent charter schools.

Roberts proposes to support the 80 or so schools that would remain in DPS by giving principals and teachers in those buildings greater autonomy and underwriting a sort of Kalamazoo Promise Light -- covering two years of community college or technical training -- for students who graduate from any Detroit-based school. Snyder and Roberts say the philanthropic support for the so-called Detroit Promise is already in place, and that they look forward to expanding it to the sort of four-year tuition guarantee high school graduates in Kalamazoo enjoy.

Snyder and Roberts say they've given themselves until the beginning of the 2012-13 school year to address such fundamental questions as which Detroit schools will be part of the new state system, what curricular guidelines and work rules will prevail there, and how the interests of Detroit taxpayers who've authorized bonding for new construction and improvements in the DPS plant will be protected when failing DPS schools join the new state system. Failure to overcome any one of these challenges could, of course, doom the new district and its mission aborning.

"This is the same thing that General Motors and Chrysler went though," Roberts told a group of Free Press reporters and editors Monday afternoon. "Fifty years of crap -- that's what we're fighting."

What Roberts and Snyder are fighting for, both men insist, is not the solvency of a school district but the survival of a city and its young. Whatever legitimate questions Detroiters may have about their strategy and tactics, no one can dispute that that is the right objective.