Friday, January 29, 2016

Detroit's troubled schools fight to write a new chapter - Yahoo News

Detroit's troubled schools fight to write a new chapter - Yahoo News:

Detroit's troubled schools fight to write a new chapter

Teachers and parents filed a lawsuit Thursday over the state of the schools. They're seeking local control after years under a state-appointed emergency manager.



The pictures of Detroit schools infested with patches of mold and dead rodents, with crumbling buildings sporting leaky roofs and buckling floors, have horrified from parents nationwide.

Those conditions, plus overcrowded classrooms, classes taught by uncertified teachers, and declining pay, have long been a concern for teachers. But because of the outrage over children in nearby Flint, Mich., being poisoned by lead-tainted water, the cries from Detroit are suddenly resonating with a wider, more responsive audience.
After more than a decade of losing enrollment and amassing debt largely under state-appointed emergency managers, the Detroit public school district could be on the verge of writing a new chapter for itself – one in which educators, students, and parents insist on taking back control of their destiny.
Through a series of “sickouts” that forced more than half of schools  to close in recent weeks, teachers “have effectively made the argument that we’re seeing a lack of accountability,” says Thomas Pedroni, a professor at Wayne State University in Michigan who has studied the impact of education policies in Detroit and the state. “There are a lot of signs ... that a lot of this could have been prevented if [the schools] had democratic oversight.”
The Motor City isn’t the only urban district where years of state takeover have failed to bring about promised improvements. From Chicago, to Newark, N.J., parents and teachers have been mobilizing to restore power to elected school boards. The era of “accountability” reforms, they say, has reduced their children to test scores and dollar figures and taken away the democratic notion of schools being accountable to what the community values in education.
The same emergency manager in charge of Detroit Public Schools (DPS), Darnell Earley, was the emergency manager over the city of Flint when it switched its water source. Whether or not he was at fault in that situation, Professor Pedroni says, it has helped people “connect the dots” and rebel against GOP Gov. Rick Snyder and his appointees.
The Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), the teachers' state and national unions, and several parents filed a lawsuit Thursday to try to force Mr. Earley’s resignation, restore local control, and accelerate fixes of health and safety-code violations in the schools.
One judge had earlier drawn a connection to Flint, when Earley sought to save $3 million a year by cutting down the number of engineers responsible for overseeing school boilers. Codes require at least one boiler operator at each school building, but the change would have reduced it to one for every five schools. “[Flint] has taught us that when we place financial expediency over basic and critical public health needs, we reap what we sow.... Let us not have the next headline to go national be: ‘Detroit Schoolchildren Injured and Killed in Unattended Boiler Explosion,' " Judge David Allen wrote in his ruling.
Governor Snyder has acknowledged that the current school system isn’t meeting the needs of Detroit’s families. With many parents opting for charter or private schools for their kids, enrollment has dropped from 150,000 in 2004 to about 46,000. The district’s long-term debt now tops $3.5 billion. The percent of funding that goes to the classroom has dropped from 58 percent to just under 47 percent since 2009. That compares with a 61 percent average in the state during the Detroit's troubled schools fight to write a new chapter - Yahoo News:

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