Emergency Managers Burden Detroit Public Schools with Staggering Deficit
What is happening most notably in Detroit but also in Philadelphia and Chicago would not be possible in your public schools if you live in a prosperous community or a middle income suburb, or a small city or town with a mix of rich and middle income and poor families. The plight of the public schools and their teachers and their students in these big cities and others scattered across the states is the result of structural poverty and powerlessness and the unwillingness of local and state officials to find a way fairly to serve the children. As is happening right now in Detroit and Chicago, everybody is blaming the teachers’ pension funds and by extension blaming the teachers.
Here is what has actually been happening. In Chicago the school district pays into the state teachers’ pension when required to do so, but then the school district borrows the money right back out. In Detroit, the school district has pretty often over the years failed to pay in what is required. It has not only withheld its own contributions, but according to a recent report from the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, it has sometimes missed contributing each teacher’s own share—the part withheld from each teacher’s paycheck. The financial morass is so convoluted and arcane that nobody can really understand the details. The fact is that these school districts—and in Detroit the state emergency managers who were supposedly appointed to deal with the district’s financial crisis—have put the school districts so far in debt that nobody knows how to dig them out.
This week Detroit’s teachers have been staging a sick-out to bring attention to the problems in the schools where they work. The Associated Press reports that on Tuesday the mayor of Detroit (whose city, by Michigan law, is a separate jurisdiction from the school district) visited some of the schools across the city. He found a dead mouse in one school; in others he found Emergency Managers Burden Detroit Public Schools with Staggering Deficit | janresseger:
