This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters
Ten years ago, the Detroit Public Schools Community District was in its infancy and charting a path for students that promised to be different than the traumatic and chaotic one that had become the norm for decades.
It would be debt free, after years in which Detroit Public Schools, the district that used to educate students, was mired in so much debt that bankruptcy seemed a certainty. The focus would be on academics instead of paying off debt. And it would be overseen by a new elected and empowered school board, after years in which the DPS board had little to no say.
After a decade of DPSCD, there are some encouraging signs. While overall achievement is still low and well below statewide averages, the district has seen steady improvement, and researchers have said that growth is a sign academic reforms are having an effect. The district’s board has adopted balanced budgets in each year of its existence. The district has had consistent leadership since Superintendent Nikolai Vitti was hired in 2017, unlike the revolving door of the previous district.
But there have also been challenges. Some board members and community members increasingly are criticizing academic performance, saying students aren’t improving fast enough. Vitti has frequently raised concerns that the district isn’t receiving funding from the state that is equitable to suburban districts. And while the district has invested $700 million (from federal COVID relief funds provided during the pandemic) into a facility master plan for upgrades and rebuilds across DPSCD, it covers just a fraction of the facility needs.
In the race for five open seats in the Nov. 3 election — four seats with four-year terms and one seat with a partial two-year term — 34 names will appear on the ballot. Three of them — Natalie Bien-Aime, Henrietta Ivey, and Darious Morris — have indicated they are no longer running.
The candidates weighed in on the 10-year anniversary, answering questions in a Chalkbeat questionnaire about what the district has done well, what it’s gotten wrong, and whether schools are better off.
Here’s what they told us.
It is absolutely amazing that none of these comments mention what an actual DPSCD classroom looks like these days. That leads me to believe that these candidates are grifters, nuzzling their way up to the trough of public funds, or (potentially) well-meaning folks spectacularly ignorant of the realities that teachers face with the students. In either case, these candidates show themselves to be unqualified.
If no one, anywhere, ever will mention classroom behavior, the atrocious abuse that teachers have to put up with from a small, but significant percentage of the student body which disrupts any and all attempts at teaching, knowing that nothing will be done to them, nothing can be done to them, there isnt much of a conversation to be had. ALL of the other problems mentioned by the candidates are downstream from the fact that even the best, most well funded classrooms are at the mercy of the most disruptive student. The policy enacted by Vitti et al. that effectively prohibits the expulsion of the perpetrators, regardless of their behavior, renders any attempt at improving scores or any other metric to be useless.
There are many, many, many problems with Detroit public schools, but the biggest one is that in a classroom environment that teachers are contractually forbidden to make any meaningful efforts to control, all the other huffing and puffing about funding, equity, justice, stakeholder and so on is just a bunch of empty rhetoric from professional grievance vendors.
Give the teachers the power to suspend, expel, and discipline and see what the classrooms look like 30 days later, before the whine for more money reaches a fever pitch.