Essay: Taking Responsibility - 4.7.09

It was learned in the last week that the Detroit Public Schools' deficit is $100 million larger than originally estimated. Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what's at the root of the problem.

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In the early years of our nation and our state, our politicians spent a lot of time debating actual political philosophy. Should we have a strong central government, or a weak one? Should we tax goods from foreign countries extra, and if not, why not?

Now these guys -- and back then, they were mostly all guys -- were still politicians. In the middle of debating whose philosophy was best suited to creating the best possible democracy in America, they were apt to fire personal insults.

Alexander Hamilton was charged with stealing money from the treasury (he wasn't) and of having an affair with a would-be embezzler's pretty young wife (which he was). Thomas Jefferson was charged with selling out to France (false) and of fathering children with a slave girl (true). Still, there was a lot of high-minded stuff, and actual debate, at the bottom of which lay two core ideas:

First, the goal was to create a government that did the best job possible of preserving freedom and servicing the citizens.

Second, whatever we stood for, we all ought to be personally and professionally responsible for our actions.

Those two ideas are critically important, and, I think, a large part of the reason we've gotten so far off track in this country, and maybe especially so in Michigan, and in some of our larger cities.

Which brings me to the unbelievable mess politicians have made of the Detroit Public Schools. They've undoubtedly behaved badly elsewhere, but Detroit is the biggest and worst example.

For years, top administrators and the members of the elected school board failed to exercise any financial discipline or oversight whatsoever Four months ago, the state superintendent of schools warned that a state of financial emergency existed. The schools had a large and improper deficit, and like General Motors today, had failed to file an adequate plan for dealing with it.

So the state took control, and appointed Robert Bobb, a very distinguished public servant, to clean up the mess. He's been on the job just a few weeks, and has already discovered that the deficit was three times as large as first feared.

With students fleeing by the tens of thousands and revenues dropping, school administrators padded the payroll, threw parties, and traveled at the expense of poor taxpayers. When they learned how bad things were, board members still elected to fly to California to attend a conference. I'm against capital punishment, but feel like somebody needs to be shot. What are these people thinking?

I got a clue from a posting on our website the other day. A man said, "I draw the line at (paying to educate) everyone else's children. I got enough to think about with my own daughter."

That's not a conservative attitude. That's an attitude of selfishness that has created the mess we're in, and which threatens the survival of our state and way of life. We all hang together or we all hang separately, they used to say during the American Revolution.

We need to see that this is even more true now.

Comments

[Matt]

Detroit/Wayne County has been a big government, big labor, Democrat party wonderland at least since Bill Milliken’s time and probably before that, sucking up a disproportionate share of the state’s resources the whole time. As you like to say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The simple fact is the state’s Democrat party knows where its bread is buttered, so we will never see any real reforms with real demands and real consequences. Until this changes … Just say no!

[Mora]

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