Seventeen years ago, David Adamany, the retired president of Wayne State University, was the first-ever emergency manager of the Detroit Public Schools, but compared to today, the schools were doing well, according to commentary posted today by The (Toledo, Ohio) Blade. There were still about 170,000 students, and voters had approved a $1.5 billion bond issue to fix physically crumbling buildings. But when I met with him one afternoon for lunch, he spoke unhappily about his frustrations, about inefficiency, waste, recalcitrant unions, and bureaucracy. Adamany was rightly regarded as a wizard at getting the most out of a budget, and at making systems work. He had built Wayne State into a fiscally solvent top-level research university, while lowering tuition. But he wasn’t having that kind of success with Detroit’s schools. That was 1999. Fast forward to 2016. Earlier this month, with Detroit Public Schools on the brink of bankruptcy and total collapse, the legislature has passed a package that in theory enables them to start over and have a chance for success. But critics and educational experts say what the lawmakers passed is, in fact, a cynical dodge guaranteed to finally destroy the public schools — and maybe torpedo Detroit’s fragile comeback in the process. The decline has been long in coming, starting with the flight to the suburbs in the 1950s. But it moved with warp speed after the state switched to a per-pupil funding system and the proliferation of publicly funded “charter” schools in the 1990s.
