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Detroit, Detroit, It’s a Helluva Town!

Article by Gene Lalor

Detroit, Detroit, It’s a Helluva Town! – Education – Public Schools

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It’s not many school districts that require an emergency financial manager. Detroit does. It’s not many school districts that boast of an illiterate school board president. Detroit does.

The mostly black city, a status only dreamed of by its long-time mayor Coleman Young, has lost 50% of its school population in a decade, the same percentage loss suffered by the city over those ten years. Detroit is filled with vast areas resembling Berlin in 1945 but without the German will to overcome severe adversity.

Instead, Detroit’s city fathers are considering bulldozing vast tracts of dead tenement and broken factory land and converting them into farm land. That, at least, could make it more productive than its current decimated tax base.

Certainly Detroit’s plight is not fully the responsibility of municipal mismanagement. The United Auto Workers, the UAW, is also responsible for demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages and perks with no quality improvement in their product, demands which drove America’s auto industry into the ground and the Motor City into a concrete wall.

Most UAW members live and lived outside the innercity walls and thus have little voice or interest in determining the fate of Detroit and the fate and future of that one institution that could turn around Detroit’s sad destiny, its school system.

No such turnaround is expected soon even with the intervention of Mr. Robert Bobb, that governor-appointed emergency financial manager whose chief function so far has been centered on stemming the tide of computers stolen from schools, some 500 valued at $ 600,000.

In a cash-strapped district and city, twelve hundred dollar computers seem an extravagance anyway but just one of the many extravagances and instances of corruption that Bobb has uncovered: http://bit.ly/5te6pW

As a financial overseer, Bobb would have little influence on the day-to-day activities in Detroit’s 94 elementary and secondary schools.

That influence would and should be the domain of the people in charge of those schools, the principals, assistant principals, and department heads who, in turn, are under the scrutiny of the elected school board president who would be expected to provide direction and inspiration.

Aside from his impressive name and title, the President of the Detroit Board of Education, Otis Mathis III, neither inspires nor seems capable of directing anything.

Now waging a legal battle to determine the future of the nation’s lowest-performing, big city school district, Mathis is a bad caricature of an educational leader.

Polipundit.com featured a March 16th article on Mathis entitled, “Is Our School Board Presidents Reading?”

That nonsensical and ungrammatical title illustrates its focus on the nonsensical and ungrammatical Otis Mathis III who seems proud of his background as a Detroit student during who “earned” an average of.98, not 98% but 2 points below a 1%.

A product of affirmative action for both black and inept students, he later fought to end Detroit’s English proficiency graduation requisite because it made him “feel stupid.” After winning that battle and after his election as school board president, Mathis finally graduated high school in 2008 with a GED.

In that capacity, he now sends out mass emailings such as this: “If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.”

And this gem: “Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?: http://bit.ly/dejIku

I don’t know who controls the DPS but I do know who controls Detroit’s public schools and it’s not Albert Einstein.

Mathis is more like Alfred E. Neuman and he explains a great deal about why Detroit and its schools are in such a sorry mess.

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http://genelalor.com

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Gene Lalor

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