When the news broke yesterday that retired General Motors vice president Roy Roberts would be the new Detroit Public Schools czar, the first thing I thought of was Henry Ford.
This is not because I have attention deficit disorder. No, I thought of something brilliant Hank the First once observed about his own career. Ford said if he had asked about transportation needs in the 1890's, nobody would have said they needed an automobile.
They would have said they wanted a faster horse. For years, various people have been trying in various ways to beat life into a dying horse called the Detroit Public Schools.
They’ve tried appointed boards and elected boards; emergency managers, all sorts of superintendents and infusions of cash.
Nothing has worked very well. Sometimes they identify a particular problem, but the overall health of the system has remained poor. Now if you are not from Detroit, you may not think this matters much to you. Except that it does.
We as a state will all suffer, economically and otherwise, if kids can’t get a functional education in our largest city. Plus, the seeds of many of the problems that have ruined Detroit’s schools are present and growing in other school systems, urban, suburban and rural school systems across the state.
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