Ironically, this comes at a time when both have their best leadership in years. Mayor Dave Bing has turned out to be an honest, forthright, and competent public servant.
Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit public schools, seems entirely focused on the task of taking a system riddled with incompetence and corruption, and trying to make it work for the benefit of its remaining eighty-five thousand students.
Yet it is not clear how much either can do. Both are haunted by the shadows of the past. It would be hard to make up a plot as bizarre as what happened recently with Detroit’s Public Schools, which were taken over by the state after years of failure by an elected school board. For starters, this really was déjà vu.
The state had taken over the schools a dozen years ago and handed them to an emergency financial manager who did his best to clean up the mess. Eventually Detroit returned to an elected board, and things slipped back into corruption and chaos.
As a result, they once again have an emergency financial manager, now in his second year. This year, school board members took bitter exception to the financial manager’s wish to have oversight over academic matters, not just financial.
They began a legal war. The fallout from that war, however, seems likely to lead to the abolition of the board itself. Last March we learned that Otis Mathis, the president of the school board, can barely read and cannot write a coherent sentence.
He cheerfully admitted this was true. Then, this month, Mathis president resigned after the superintendent complained that he inappropriately touched himself during a meeting with her.
What’s worse, another board member excused his conduct on the grounds that the offender was a young man. Otis Mathis is, in fact, fifty-six. Now, Mayor Dave Bing is finally pushing for mayoral control of the schools. Several months ago, he indicated to me that he wasn’t opposed to the idea, but had his hands full with Detroit’s chaotic finances.
That’s still the case.
But Emergency Financial Manager Bobb probably won’t stay on beyond his current contract, and the schools desperately need one strong person who is directly responsible.
The risk, of course, is that the next mayor may not be as responsible as Bing. This week, the government filed a 19-count federal indictment on tax and fraud charges against the former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who is already sitting in a jail cell.
You may find it easy to roll your eyes at all this, if you are living in Grand Rapids or Birmingham. But the fact is that this reflects on all Michigan. We allowed people to essentially loot Detroit; make vast fortunes, pollute the land, and depart.
Which reminds me that twenty years ago this fall, East and West Germany reunited. The east was poorer than Detroit is now; the west, as well off as we. But they immediately went to work, spending hundreds of billions to get their nation up to speed.
Today, the entire country is prosperous and bustling. There’s a lesson there. It would be nice if Michigan was wise enough to take it.
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