Detroit school 'sickouts' measure system's dysfunction
If there's any measure of just how bad things are in Detroit Public Schools, it's surely a series of "sickouts" — a coordinated mass absence under the guise of sick leave — which forced seven schools to close Thursday.
Think about that for a minute: Seven schools closed without warning, not because of hazardous weather or some other unavoidable cause, but because tensions between the school district and the teachers it employs are so high.
Seven schools, where 3,989 students expect to learn. Nearly four thousand students, whose parents have jobs, family obligations or other responsibilities, and whose lives are structured around the school day. Thousands of parents, in a city with a 38% poverty rate, in a school district in which 81% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch — and that means parents with jobs less likely to offer paid time off, or the kind of flexibility that allows easy accommodation of an unexpected school closing.
At the same time, it's easy to understand teachers' frustrations. The district's decline has been well-chronicled, and during the last 15 years of state oversight, its prospects have not improved. Gov. Rick Snyder has proposed a plan to split the district in two, stashing its burdensome debt, its operating millage and its elected school board with DPS, and creating a new district to educate kids, funded by the state-distributed per-pupil allowance and an additional appropriation to compensate for the loss of millage-generated dollars. There is no certainty that this plan will remedy the district's financial, much less academic, failings. And yet it is the only DPS reform plan that's even theoretically viable.
Sickout teachers are rumored to be those allied with former Detroit Federation of Teachers president Steve Conn, ousted by the union's executive board in August. Conn won his post pledging to fight the state's reform efforts and lost it because he violated the union's bylaws and was working to ally the union with the social justice justice group By Any Means Necessary, among other charges. Conn had the support of hundreds of DFT members and still commands respect from many.
And how can you reasonably ask teachers who have taught through DPS's decline — who have, over the last five years, seen four emergency managers try and fail to improve the district's finances and by extension, teachers' ability to provide the same quality and quantity of textbooks, classroom materials, instructional aides and sheer manpower that students in wealthier districts enjoy — to have faith in yet another reform plan?
Teachers have seen layoffs and pay and benefit cuts and rightly fear that there is more pain ahead.
And yet it is hard to understand what end a sickout serves. The protesting teachers haven’t articulated any immediate goals or immediately actionable requests.
It's the second this month. The first, on Dec. 2, closed three schools. This time, emergency manager Darnell Earley is promising retribution, warning that the district can review sick-leave abuses and that any teacher connected to the sick-out would be "subject to a review" and "appropriate discipline."
It is a snapshot of the DPS status quo, and I can't imagine Detroit school 'sickouts' measure system's dysfunction:
