Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Rays of Hope 12.10.10

Many people have been disillusioned by our political polarization and lack of cooperation. But Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry sees some hope in those still too young to vote.

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We‘re in the middle of the holiday season, and in many ways, these aren’t terribly festive or inspiring times. We haven’t shaken off the effects of the Great Recession. Most of us know people who are out of work, in a time when there are too few jobs to be had.

We haven’t seen a lot of cooperation or willingness to work together from either our state or national governments. However, I was inspired by something this week. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan ran a high school essay contest.

Students were asked to read Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, the one that includes the famous line, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free.”

Then, they were to write about how their experiences as a part of this melting pot had defined their American identity.

The contest was sponsored by a friend of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, a humanist and community leader in the Detroit area who was tragically killed in a car accident in Morocco three years ago.

I was a friend of the rabbi, and since I supposedly know something about writing, I was asked to be the final judge. Frankly, I wasn’t too optimistic. This is a busy time of year, and for many students, reading and writing aren’t top priorities.

But I have to say, I was blown away. The ACLU asked me to pick the best two. But four were so good I insisted they honor all their authors. When I judged them, I didn’t know who the writers were. But when I met the students, I had a pleasant surprise.

The winners included a girl of Irish ancestry named Oona, and an African-American star basketball player. Plus a Muslim girl from Pakistan who intends to become a brain surgeon, and a Hindu girl who wants to be an attorney fighting for civil rights.

That young woman wrote “My differences have not made me feel like I don’t belong to this nation -- they have made me feel like an important addition to this melting pot. I think my differences make me feel even more American than I would feel if I were not an immigrant.”

Her Pakistani counterpart wrote about third grade classmates who told her September 11 “was caused by your kind.” Gradually, she realized that she could still be a proud and open Muslim because this was America: “Islam has made me who I am today, and the Bill of Rights helps protect that identity.”

The African-American young man wrote candidly that he still lives in a nation where all is still far from equal -- but added “my American identity is diverse, frustrated, proud -- and still evolving.

The most lyrical essay was that of the girl named Oona, who attends a high school with students whose native languages include Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and German.

She wrote: “We are America’s melting pot, the true national treasure. Who would have supposed this “wretched refuse would become the ones who would shape our past and dictate our future?”

“But they have.” This nation will belong to her generation before long. And I think that they just may do a better job with it than those of us who came before.

Essay: When the Law is an Ass - 12.8.10

A Wayne County circuit judge this week ruled that the Detroit Schools’ Emergency Financial Manager had no authority to set academic standards. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about that decision.

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This is the season when Charles Dickens is again in style, or at least his Christmas Carol. We’ve all been grappling with our own versions of Mr. Scrooge all year, and we all need a happy ending.

But I’ve been thinking of a different Dickens character this week: Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, who said in response to some idiotic legal ruling: “If the law supposes that, then the law is an ass.”

What made me think of that was the Wayne County Circuit Court ruling Monday. Judge Wendy Baxter ruled that Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Schools, had no right or power to make academic decisions.

She ruled that those decisions can only be made by the elected school board, and that Bobb had no business creating an academic plan and putting it into place. Legally, there may be a basis for her decision, but she also seemed to personally attack Bobb. She virtually sneered that his vision comes “from a person chosen solely based on his finance credentials and who has no … education or counseling background,” except from “unvetted sources.”

That seems to ignore the fact that Bobb was the elected president of the board of education in Washington, D.C schools, and that many of the Detroit school board members aren’t former teachers either, including current board president Anthony Adams.

More importantly, under them, the district compiled a stunning record of both financial mismanagement and academic failure. Students were fleeing in droves, test scores and graduation rates were abysmal, and the system was running huge deficits.

Robert Bobb, a nationally respected turnaround expert, was then brought in by the governor as the schools’ emergency financial manager. He maintains that you can’t separate financial from academic decisions in a context like Detroit’s, and he’s clearly right.

More than ten years ago, Detroit’s schools were in a similar state and former Wayne State University President David Adamany was put in charge of them, in a similar role to that Bobb has today.

What had happened then, Adamany told me, was that the schools had been largely ruined by an elected board which picked superintendents for political reasons and demanded that the schools appoint cronies to jobs for which many were unqualified.

Much the same thing happened under the current board.

Robert Bobb, whose term expires this year, has stabilized the schools’ finances, won approval of a half-billion dollar bond issue, and has put some sound academic reforms in place.

Democracy is a wonderful thing. But we the people don’t attempt to elect the board that certifies brain surgeons.

Making sure children get the education they so desperately need is as important as brain surgery. Detroit Public School kids have been the victim of political football for far too long. This decision should be speedily reversed, and Bobb’s academic reforms need to be given a chance to work. For if we don’t restore public schools that parents can have confidence in, Detroit hasn’t got a chance.

Essay: Rebuilding Education - 11.29.10

There’s going to be a debate in the legislature next year over the cost and future of education. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wonders if we’ve been asking the wrong questions.

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We’re going to see a huge and overdue debate next year about the future of public education in Michigan. We’ve already seen battles over teacher pensions and health care.

This year, this discussion is bound to get louder, with a state budget deficit approaching two billion dollars and no federal stimulus money anywhere in sight. Traditionally, so-called conservatives want to start by going after teacher pensions and benefits.

So-called liberals, led by the teachers’ unions, rally to protect these bennies, and say we need to raise taxes and spend more on education instead. However, there’s a compelling new argument.

It says that we’ve have been asking the wrong questions and fighting over the wrong issues. Its major proponent is former state superintendent of schools Tom Watkins, now a business and education consultant both here and in China.

Watkins says public education is collapsing in this state, that the current model is failing students academically and is unsustainable financially. He’d spend more on education if it made sense to do so. But right now, he says that would be crazy. “We need to promote the three R‘s of education,“ he said in a recent newspaper column:

“Restructure, reform, and reinvent.”

Otherwise, he says investing new money in the schools “would be the equivalent of pouring water into a glass with a hole in the bottom and wondering why the glass never fills.”

Fixing the schools may be the single most important long-term challenge Michigan faces. Nobody disputes that the state is going to have to do more with less. But it is also true that unless we have a better educated workforce, and public schools that get the job done, the high-tech, good-paying jobs of the future aren’t coming to Michigan, even if our tax rate were to drop to zero.

Nearly everyone in the state is aware of the wretchedly dysfunctional condition of Detroit’s schools. But Watkins thinks that Detroit is just the canary in the coal mine warning what’s to come.

His argument is that it is time to stop tinkering with our current 19th century model for education, and “do a tear-down and start over.“

So where do we start? Watkins doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Nobody does. But he knows we need to start by building an education system designed around the students.

Sadly, that’s too often not the case now. That doesn’t mean there aren’t islands of excellence out there. There are.

But study after study has indicated we need to totally reinvent the wheel. While we worry about the smart kids fleeing the state, we ought to be equally worried about the undereducated ones who stay behind, people for whom there are no longer any good jobs.

“We can either get smarter and wealthier or we can became dumber and poorer,” Watkins says; it’s up to us, and our leaders.

He’s hoping Governor-elect Rick Snyder is willing to think outside the box and take on the entrenched education establishment. Watkins wrote “Our world is changing in dramatic ways, and our system of education must embrace these changes or be engulfed by them.” Those words ring true. But what’s telling, significant and sad is that he wrote them nine years ago.

Now, there’s no more time left to waste.

Essay: Gotta Have Art - 11.11.10

Republicans in the Michigan Senate have been adamantly opposed to even discussing new taxes -- except when it comes to the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Zoo. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry explains.

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For the last several years, the Republicans in the Michigan Legislature have been remarkably consistent about one thing:

No new taxes. Not for schools, not for foster kids, not to fix our roads and bridges, balance the budget, nor for any reason whatsoever. No new taxes. Period.

They have trumpeted that theme over and over again. Until the last couple days, when the Republican majority in the Michigan State Senate did something that completely startled me.

State Senator Buzz Thomas, a Democrat, proposed a bill to allow Wayne, Oakland, Washtenaw and Macomb counties to ask their citizens to approve extra taxes to support the Detroit Institute of Arts. A companion bill, sponsored by Democrat Gilda Jacobs, would do the same for the Detroit Zoo.

Knowing the Republican attitude toward taxes, I figured these bills had about as much chance as a bill to collectivize agriculture. But to my surprise, the same Republicans who wouldn’t spend a time to save the Michigan Promise Scholarships looked at these bills that would make new taxes possible and said ….

“Hey! Good idea!”

And then they voted to pass them, overwhelmingly. The House has yet to act on these bills, but is expected to ratify them this month as well. Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop was quoted as saying: “I think all of us agree that our cultural entities have got to be supported or they’re going to go away. The DIA and the zoo are cultural gems that I think speak volumes to the quality of life in our state.“

If I were a religious man, I might have concluded that the rapture had arrived. Well, not completely. The Republicans still profess their anti-tax ideology, but found this face-saving way to get around it: They said they support these bills because they don’t raise taxes directly. They leave that up to the people.

All the legislature is doing is creating an authority which would put two small requests for one fifth of a mill each for the Zoo and the DIA before the voters two years from now.

This isn’t a tax imposed from Lansing, in other words. This allows the voters to decide if these institutions are something they want to pay for. There is no doubt both need money.

The DIA has a huge structural deficit and is hemorrhaging money even after big staff reductions. The Detroit Zoo, already partly supported by a regional tax, is getting less than expected because of the collapse of property values.

They are also both important cultural institutions, as a spokesman for the majority leader said. True enough. But aren’t our schools and parks and children’s futures important too?

I suspect one reason the mostly male Republican delegation supported this taxing authority is because their kids love the zoo, and, as one of them indicated, their wives like the DIA.

Don’t get me wrong -- I approve of this too. And I wonder if this might set a precedent for passing the revenue increases the state is going to need next year. Put them on the ballot, and let the people decide. It might just be worth a try, before Michigan goes down the drain.

Essay: MSU's Mission - 10.7.2010

Michigan and Michigan State clash on the football field this Saturday… but, off the gridiron, the two schools share a lot of the same goals. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked with MSU President Lou Anna Simon about the future of higher education...

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When you’re driving in Spartan country, those areas of our state most loyal to MSU, you sometimes see bumper stickers that say “Michigan State is the university of Michigan.”

Most people would read that as a not-so-subtle dig at the slightly older and slightly larger university in Ann Arbor. And this week, that’s probably exactly what that means.

Both schools have undefeated football teams, which smash into each other Saturday in Ann Arbor. For the next three days nobody’s going to be talking about collaboration between universities. Yet off the football field, both schools have a great deal more in common than most of their screaming fans may recognize. They are each led by brilliant, driven women who know that these two schools are essential to Michigan’s hope for a better future, and who have to wrestle with politicians who would sacrifice the future to the present.

Lou Anna Simon, president of Michigan State since the beginning of 2005, is almost unique among modern university presidents. She’s spent her entire adult career at MSU, from the time she arrived as a new graduate student in 1970.

President Simon knows the school, its faculty and mission as perhaps no one ever has since the legendary John Hannah, who ran the place for almost thirty years and turned a small agricultural college into a vast modern university. She also knows the idea that “MSU is the university of Michigan” has nothing to do with Ann Arbor.

It has to do with MSU’s unique outreach role as the nation’s pioneering land-grant university. From the start, the idea was that Michigan State would not only educate people, but a do research and outreach directly aimed at improving people’s lives and livelihoods.

Originally that meant agriculture, and to an extent still does. But it means a lot more than that. State beat out every other school in the nation to win the half-a-billion dollar Facility for Rare Isotope Beams a few years ago. MSU reaches out world-wide, and has more students and programs abroad than any other university. “We were global before global was cool,” President Simon says. But she is concerned about the future. Higher education took a minor cut in the current state budget.

But next year looks like a ticking time bomb. Vast deficits are looming, and university presidents are worried about what that might mean. Last year Simon had to fight to save MSU‘s agricultural extension stations, which share the benefits of modern, high-tech research with the state‘s growing agribusiness sector.

In a real sense, MSU is now itself serving as the seed of what hopefully will be a better economic tomorrow.

“If you believe that creativity and knowledge will be needed to make a better tomorrow, that’s really universities,” President Simon says. “We think that the studies we produce, research people think about today as not having a purpose, tomorrow may be the basis for a new plant, perhaps a new industry.”

Yet there is a mentality that says that “everything can be cut.” That, she knows, isn’t so. Michigan State “has become much better academically, and even truer to our land-grant mission, in a modern sense,” she says. The farmers MSU was created in 1855 to help knew enough not to destroy their seed crops. She hopes that the Michigan Legislature is smart enough to understand that too.

Essay: Cheating the Children - 9.9.10

The state senate voted yesterday to take money out of the school aid fund and give it to community colleges, Michigan Radio’s Jack Lssenberry has been thinking about what that really meant.

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State Senator Bruce Patterson’s political career is winding down. He’ll be term-limited out of his job in a few months, and tells me he‘s unlikely to run for anything again. He’s a large and colorful mustachioed man whose colleagues regard him as eccentric.

And sometimes he is. For example, yesterday he said that the Legislature ought to take the state Constitution seriously. He angrily opposed taking money -- $208 million dollars -- out of the school aid fund and giving it to state community colleges.

Patterson, who is a lawyer, says that as he understands the law, this isn’t constitutional. He has nothing against community colleges, but as he reads the document, they aren’t legally eligible for school aid money. Patterson urged his colleagues not to violate the law. “We’re known for quick fixes,” he said. “We’re known for playing games with the language,” he said.

However, as has been so often the case, a majority of his Senate colleagues couldn’t have cared less about the letter of the law. They were interested only in cobbling together a budget, so they can go home and campaign for re-election.

Those voting no weren’t trying to hurt community colleges. In fact, money had been set aside for them. But by doing it this way, the legislature can take away the money originally supposed to go to community colleges, and throw it into the usual vast deficit hole.

So elementary and high schools, which thought for a brief second that they had a little financial cushion, are being robbed, essentially. This infuriated a common sense non-profit group called Better Michigan Future, whose legislative coordinator said: “This budget agreement fails to even address the most modest reforms, and is failing Michigan families.” Well, of course it is.

What’s more, it is failing our future. If this state has a future that is better than our woeful present, it will come from today’s students.

But we let them down, time and again. In Detroit there are schools without proper textbooks and, sometimes, toilet paper.

Two kids got shot outside Mumford High School on the first day of class. That same morning, Robert Bobb, the Detroit schools’ Emergency Financial Manager, decided to ride a bus to school with a group of elementary school children. It showed up half an hour late.

Children are not our top priority, whatever lip service politicians may give to the idea. Five years ago, our lawmakers told the schools they couldn’t start classes till after Labor Day. Why?

To provide what Governor Jennifer Granholm called “a great economic tool” for the tourism industry. At the same time, she also says kids should be in school more days a year than now.

Things you say don’t have to add up in the political world. Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano says he is in favor of kids, too.

However, he is now proposing a huge cut in what have been widely recognized as excellent and highly effective juvenile justice services that have cut crime and saved both money and lives.

Why? To save money in the very short-term. Increasingly, we are becoming at all levels a people who live exclusively for now, and who couldn’t care less about our children or our society’s future.

And if that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what would.

Essay: Back to the Future - 8.23.10

Ever wonder what the underground railroad or Detroit’s gangster era were really like? There’s a man in Detroit who specializes in taking people there.

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Ever wonder what it would have been like to have been around during Prohibition, when rum-runners in speedboats crossed the Detroit River in the dead of night, trying to keep their precious illegal cargo from federal agents? How about during slavery, when Michigan and Canada were the final stops on the underground railroad?

Well, we can’t time-travel, at least not yet. But Stewart McMillin, a retired high school teacher, tries to offer the next best thing. For a fee that barely covers his costs, he leads a near-constant stream of tours of Michigan’s fascinating and mostly forgotten past.

Last week, for example, he led one of his most popular excursions, his African-American History and Culture Tour of Detroit. I personally loathe most tours, but his are different. He knows what to see and where to go, and manages to fit an almost unbelievable amount into a very full day.

He has what seems like inexhaustible energy. His business card says simply, Stewart McMillan: Since 1940. That’s not when his tours (www.McMillintours.com) began; that’s the year he was born.

However, he seems younger, in part because of his puckish wit. I am a good bit younger than he, and his schedule could certainly exhaust me. This week, he’s leading an all-day tour of Detroit’s historic churches on Thursday. Two days later, he is running his Canada Prohibition Tour, which will visit many of the famous smuggling sites and end up in a still-functioning tavern of the day.

And yes, those old enough will be able to sample the stuff. For those who want an even bigger taste of the gangster era, there is his Hootch, Hoodlums and Hoods tour on November.

He also does day-long tours of Muslim and Arab sites in the Detroit area and in October, is leading an ambitious four-day excursion to underground railroad sites in Ohio and Kentucky.

I have met black activists and historians who have gone along. Many were skeptical that he knew very much about what he was talking about. Later, they told me they were the ones who learned they didn’t know as much as they’d thought.

Sometimes, to be fair, they say it’s a little hard to get him to stop talking. He loves this stuff. But it’s all fascinating.

By the way, this guy is officially retired. So -- where does all this come from? He says it started because over a twenty-nine year career as a teacher in the suburbs, he had only one black student. He found himself taking his charges to visit mostly black high-schools in Detroit, and to learn about the city.

Now, he does the same for adults. He actually makes little distinction between his professional and personal life; many of the tours end up with a pizza party at his home, which, as you might suspect, is crammed with historical souvenirs.

When McMillin takes time off, his idea of a way to relax is travel. He‘s visited more than a hundred and twenty countries, and all fifty states. Africa has, in fact become his favorite place. Yet he says he’s devoting the rest of his life to helping Detroit and Michigan discover its heritage. He thinks we can’t possibly figure out where we should go until we understand where we’ve been.

Which makes a lot of sense to me.

Essay: U of M and the Future - 8.12.10

The state of Michigan has severe money problems… and this could, eventually, impact higher education. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry spoke to Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan.

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It’s no secret that Lansing has budget problems, and that sooner or later, this may have a significant impact on how much money colleges and universities get from the state.

A few days ago, I talked to University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman about all this, for a project I am doing for the alumni magazine on the school’s future.

The U of M is the oldest and, most people would agree, the most important university in the state, as well as the best endowed. Generations of admiring and grateful alumni have given generously to the school. But that doesn’t mean Michigan has enough money to do everything it wants or believes it needs to do.

When I asked President Coleman about the financial challenges, she said when people asked what kept her up at night “it isn’t really very sexy to say money - but it does.”

Essentially, she added, the university is in good shape, except that “We are in a state that is going through a very tough economic transition. And what is on my mind is how we are going to secure the resources we need and get the best faculty.”

All that “costs money. And that’s what I am worried about,” she said. People may think of Michigan as an elite place, but she reminded me “We’ve had a guarantee for Michigan residents for a long time that if they can get into the university, we will find a way to make it affordable for families -- regardless of income.“

Students “may have to do some work-study,” but there are many financial aid programs to help get them through.

That’s not a guarantee, however, that the U of M can extend to students from out of state. And Ann Arbor has a higher percentage of these than our other public universities. A third of the undergrads and slightly more than forty percent of all students are classified as non-Michigan residents. And they pay higher tuition.

Which means they provide more revenue for the university. President Coleman told me while that no decision has been made, the university has been giving some thought to admitting more out-of-state students, partly because of money, and partly because the number of high school graduates is declining.

That’s because the overall state population is aging. Taking more out-of-state students would be controversial - but she believes that if the U of M did decide to do this, it would help other state universities, “because if we edge up our out-of-state enrollment, then other institutions within the state will get more in-state students.“

President Coleman has been running Michigan now for eight years - longer than most university presidents last.

“The state has a huge investment in this university that it has made over almost two centuries,” she noted. She believes it has been more than worth it, and that the university is well-positioned to adapt and to help Michigan adapt to changing times.

In another eight years, she hopes people would look at the U of M and, “say that we‘ve brought the spirit of entrepreneurialism into the classroom and into opportunities for students in a way that nobody else has been able to do.”

You’d think that was an ideal we’d find worthy of investing in.

Essay: Saving the Schools - 7.1.10

The state legislature agreed on a deal that actually gives the schools a little more money next year. But Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry says the schools aren't out of the woods yet.

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Michigan schools seem to have been spared any further cuts in next year's budget -- for now, anyway. The state legislature reached an agreement yesterday that would actually give the schools a little more money -- eleven dollars a student -- starting Oct. 1.

That, by the way, is when Michigan's fiscal year begins. Most institutions start their fiscal year today, July first. Michigan pushed their date three months later to deal with an earlier budget crisis many years ago. Well, at least some things never change.

The deal giving the schools a little more money was welcome news, but few educators are breaking out the Dixie cups and celebrating just yet. An eleven-dollar increase is far less than inflation, even in these relatively deflationary times.

And it comes after the schools took a terrific cut this year of at least $165 dollars a student, with some districts losing much more.

Plus, every savvy superintendent knows that Yogi Berra was right: It ain't over till it is over, and when it comes to politics, it's never really over. This deal may have been struck, but the complete budget isn't balanced yet. Once it is balanced, something that legally has to happen by September 30th, Michigan budgets have a historic tendency to become unbalanced a few months later.

Which usually means more cuts have to be made. There may be an additional ticking time bomb as well. Congress has turned down an extension of extra Medicaid assistance to the states -- all states, not just Michigan. If they don't change their minds, this will blow another half-billion dollar hole in the budget.

The governor says that could come out of health funding and possibly aid to higher education. She didn't say elementary and high school funding would be hurt -- but you never know.

By the way, the reason the legislature was able to agree on this school funding deal was that House Speaker Andy Dillon said he would try to pass a bill Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop wants, to push thousands of state employees into early retirement, a bill similar to one enacted for teachers in May.

If the new bill becomes law, it could save the state close to a hundred million dollars, by getting thousands of higher-paid workers off the payrolls and making the ones left pay more for their insurance.

That may help the state, but may hurt Dillon, who wants to be the Democratic nominee for governor. He's already been denounced by the head of the state AFL-CIO, as 'practically a Republican.'

There's another problem the school aid deal didn't address. A few weeks ago, an unexpected surplus of $230 million dollars popped up in this year's school aid fund.

Republicans want to use it to balance the current year's budget, which, once again, has a deficit. Most Democrats say no. Look this to come up again. Meanwhile, next year's budget is a long way from done, and we don't know yet how higher education will fare.

Michigan students understand how important advanced education is. The University of Michigan got a record number of applications for this fall. What remains to be seen is how big a priority our students? futures are for those who represent them.

Unfortunately, we're unlikely to know until after the legislature takes another two-week vacation break.

Isn't public service grand?

Essay: The Tragedy of Detroit - 6.29.10

It’s been a rough year for Detroit and its troubled school system. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes us for a look behind the headlines.

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This has been a tough and bruising year for the battered city of Detroit and its equally battered school system.

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.