"the district celebrated some high points this year, including sending the only high school band from Michigan to the Beijing Olympics."
It's the only cause of celebration.
June 7, 2008 - The Detroit Free Press interviewed Connie Calloway in a story that began with this dire news.
Detroit public Schools budget deficit has grown from $45 million to $65 million -- and could grow higher, Superintendent Connie Calloway said.The graduation rate in the district is, her staff says, 38%.
In a wide-ranging interview she outlined a plethora of problems, including an ongoing FBI investigation, a continuing inability to evaluate teachers and a majority of high schools not meeting standards, thus failing in their duties to students.
Calloway is in her first year as Superintendent and she knows the problems she faces.
She also has to bring the district's budget and employee numbers in line. That's no easy task. The public schools have been a jobs factory for decades. The district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third.-----------------------
In 2000, the $1.2-billion budget paid for 21,203 employees and 154,648 students. Last school year the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students.
TT - Detroit is in danger of the school population dropping to below 100,000 which will trigger massive loss of funding, a prospect that doesn't worry the unions, according to an editorial in the Detroit News.
The charts at the Detroit Free Press article illustrate the problems she faces. As for the graduation rate, the numbers are varied and debatable. At best, Detroit could be described as dysfunctional. Education Week called Detroit "The nation's fastest-shrinking major urban school system." The district has lost 60,000 students since the late 1990s. Test scores are abysmal.
And while the schools burn, the mayor and his chief of staff, "lied about their sexual relationship last summer at a police whistle-blower trial that cost the cash-strapped city more than $9 million."
Happily for the mayor's political future, only 32% of 11th grade students in Detroit schools are able to read at or above grade level. The illiterate future voters will never learn of the scandal and taxpayers will never notice the high cost of the failure.
They paid $10,576 per student. Only 14% of 11th grade students in Detroit public schools were functioning at or above grade level in math.
