Today Governor Snyder unveiled his plan for failing schools in the Detroit Public School system. This announcement was made with the Emergency Financial Manager for DPS, Roy Roberts. Snyder is looking at the bottom five percent of schools in Detroit and created a new "authority" he calls the Education Achievement System (EAS) to take control of forty-five failing schools in Detroit. This acronym is funny to me because when my husband worked in retail, he had an EAS system in his store. This system alerted security when shoppers try to leave the store without paying. Maybe an EAS system is exactly what DPS needs?
Snyder's plan involves using Eastern Michigan University as a resource to help train teachers who need it, and it also relies on "philanthropic" investment by members of the business community to offer scholarships and job training to Detroit students. He also promises a balanced budget for DPS in five years.
Is this what will "fix" DPS? I doubt it. What I would really like to know is how much the appointees (11 of them) will make being on the EAS Board? Can I get on that board because I'm pretty sure that those people will make more than I do. And, I bet the people the governor appoints don't currently work in DPS or are familiar at all with its unique problems. The board is going to give administrators in these failing schools more authority to hire and fire teachers (quickly), so the state may be looking at some lawsuits from fired teachers. Maybe Snyder is really banking on the anti-teacher tenure laws going through so he won't have to worry about that one? One thing's for sure, I would not want to be a teacher in one of those failing schools right now.
I predict that in five years DPS will have a balanced budget, but test scores and graduation rates will not have improved much. The one thing that Snyder is really missing is dealing with the violence and poverty in Detroit. No EAS Board is going to solve that...
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