It Takes A Hurricane To Teach A Child

The bad news comes daily in Michigan's current leadership crisis.

Detroit's mayor is tethered --- facing multiple felony counts based on his lies and his abuse of both the public trust and a police officer.

The Detroit City Council is in the sights of an FBI probe for allegations of offering votes for money.

Michigan's unemployment rate leads the nation --- 8.5 percent --- and our state's elected leaders lack the experience, political courage and willingness to do anything meaningful to change it.

For most states, any one of these items alone would be enough to make good people stand up, take notice and demand change. In Michigan, these crises don't even rank #1. In reality, they all pale in comparison to the human tragedy that is the Detroit Public School system.

DPS is also facing scrutiny from the FBI. It was reported this week that students will be without 40 percent of their textbooks because the district's book vendor is sick of not being paid. And, in probably the most powerful description of the crisis, long-time Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley this week declared the district dead.

And then there is this, the simple academic failures of the district, from a recent Detroit News column:

In the fall of 2005, 811 freshmen walked in the doors of Osborn in northeast Detroit. By this spring, only 245 of those students were around for graduation. Some of the lost children may have transferred to other Detroit schools. Some may have switched to charter, private or suburban schools. But most of the missing likely dropped out.

Of the 245 survivors, only seven graduated proficient in math. That means that just 1 percent of the class that started at Osborn as freshmen was able to pass the state administered math test.

The human tragedy that is this district is made all the more painful to think about when one reads the courageous, ambitious and lengthy account [Read it. It is amazing.] in today's New York Times Magazine of efforts in New Orleans to rebuild that city's school system after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Pre-Katrina:

The dysfunction in the city’s school system extended well beyond the classroom: a revolving door for superintendents, whose average tenure lasted no more than a year; school officials indicted for bribery and theft; unexplained budget deficits; decaying buildings; almost three-quarters of the city’s schools slapped with an “academically unacceptable” rating from the state.

You don't even have to close your eyes to imagine if these same problems applied to Detroit. Anyone who cares to look can see them plain as day.

Out of the death and devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina, leaders in New Orleans are now looking to save lives --- the lives of the kids entrusted to the city's public schools.

For kids in Detroit, you would hope it wouldn't take a natural disaster for someone to stand up and try to save them.