Detroit, Detroit, It's a Helluva Town!

Detroit, Detroit, It's a Helluva Town!

It’s not many school districts that require an emergency financial manager. Detroit does. It’s not many school districts that boast of an illiterate school board president. Detroit does.

The mostly black city, a status only dreamed of by its long-time mayor Coleman Young, has lost 50% of its school population in a decade, the same percentage loss suffered by the city over those ten years. Detroit is filled with vast areas resembling Berlin in 1945 but without the German will to overcome severe adversity.

Instead, Detroit’s city fathers are considering bulldozing vast tracts of dead tenement and broken factory land and converting them into farm land. That, at least, could make it more productive than its current decimated tax base.

Certainly Detroit’s plight is not fully the responsibility of municipal mismanagement. The United Auto Workers, the UAW, is also responsible for demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages and perks with no quality improvement in their product, demands which drove America’s auto industry into the ground and the Motor City into a concrete wall.

Most UAW members live and lived outside the innercity walls and thus have little voice or interest in determining the fate of Detroit and the fate and future of that one institution that could turn around Detroit’s sad destiny, its school system.

No such turnaround is expected soon even with the intervention of Mr. Robert Bobb, that governor-appointed emergency financial manager whose chief function so far has been centered on stemming the tide of computers stolen from schools, some 500 valued at $600,000.

In a cash-strapped district and city, twelve hundred dollar computers seem an extravagance anyway but . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1570)